Sure but the trucks can still be of different kinds and with different characteristics, no?

Completely off topic: Studying at KTH?

transports will prob have different stats, but i doubt they will be airborne.

Studying at Uppsala University (energisystem)

Quote:

I dont get where you wanna go with this? When i said there will be a counter for tactics like tank-rush you say that will screw up the balance. If the attacker lost a lot of money he might be in a bad spot yes, but how are you suppose to win if a terrible plan is not punished?

Yes, countering a strategy should give you an advantage, but it shouldn't be a game winner. A game winner should be from implementing your own attack strategies and fending off or causing your opponent to misread your strategy.

If you make it so that defending can win the game, then this makes it a better strategy because you don't have to do anything and just turtle in. If you want players to do this, then you can include it, but most RTS's work by forcing the players into conflict (if both players turtle, then you end in a stalemate and the first to attack looses - considering equally matched players)

There is a maxim in war: You can't win the war with a defensive strategy.

In other words, if you only react to your enemy, then you can't defeat them.

So a defensive strategy (countering your opponents strategies) should not put you in a position to win the game.

As I showed, if you have units left over from a battle, and your game has territory control (or even resource control and you need units to claim and defend those resources), then this will lead to a positive feedback loop.

If this positive feedback loop exists for a defensive strategy (just countering your opponents attacks), then this will lead to a defensive posture for both players and cause a stalemate effect. Neither side will feel it is worth attacking.

However, if you have a counter strategy to counter strategies (you can probably see where this will lead), then this does not resolve anything. The players just end up in a cycle of counter strategies until one breaks off, or one side wears down the other.

This is not the exciting battles that you seem to be wanting to create.

Such a system, if carefully done, might lead to such gameplay. But the real problem is that it is a very fine line to walk (every strategy and counter strategy must have a counter strategy).

BUt it does not solve the problem of the game just being countering the countering of the countering of the first attack.

To make more exciting battles, you need to have the counter strategies as expensive (or almost as expensive) as the strategies being played. This puts a risk for the counter strategist as if they screw up the counter strategy then they will likely loose the game. However, you most definitely don't want this to occur in the opening minuets of the game.

If the game is won or lost on the first encounter, and this occurs in the opening minutes of the game, the rest of the game is just trying to fight a loosing battle. And if the game last for half an hour (or even just 10 minutes), then the player who is definitely going to lose will not be having much fun (the winner might be, but you don't only design for the winner or you will likely loose at least half your player base).

For the game to be fun for all players, there should only be one battle that is important: The last one.

Again, another maxim from war: It doesn't matter how many battle you win or lose, so long as you win the important ones.

In terms of games, this means that the important battle should not be in the opening minutes of the game, but as the last skirmish between the players. This way, up until the end, all players have a chance at winning (assuming near equal skill).

However, if you have a tank rush counter (and allow tank rushes - and I think it should be a valid strategy), and then from this you will be in a far better position than your opponent (having more units) which means you can now capture territory/resources faster than your opponent, and these resources can be put back into units that can further expand your territory, and so on.

This might not mean you can just storm into their bas with the remaining units, but that those units allow you to capture territory/resources faster than your opponent now can. This will then lead to your victory (considering equal skill) because you hold more resources and can just overwhelm your opponent. This will mean that you opponent, who has already lost the game, will have to endure the time you take to consolidate your territories and gain enough of an advantage that the enemies defeat is assured (which could be a long time depending on the game)

And, for the record: I never said that the player, upon successfully countering the tank rush should then proceed with a tank-counter rush into the enemies base (I assumed the whole discussion on using units for territory gaining was sufficient to explain what the player would do - but I was apparently wrong).

The whole Rush/Counter is not a problem if the winning player can defeat the enemy straight away. SO in fact, if the player was about to use the Bazooka troops to immediately rush the enemy base and defeat them, this would not actually be a problem. The problem arises because the player can't counter rush them and the player who did the initial tank rush now has to sit and wait while their opponent build up their army.

I have played many games where the initial tank rush was countered, but the rusher ends up quitting the game because they know that their defeat is inevitable. The game developers then struggle to make sure that player can't just quit so the stats of the winner are not misrepresented (do you give the victor a "Win" and the loser a "loss" if a player quits, and how do you do differentiate between a quit and a loss of connection as a quit might just be a yanking of the network/phone cable).

The solution is not to become draconian, enforce rules on the players and give players a bad reputation. Theya re after all playing the game for fun and they want to have fun. If you take that away form them, then they will just stop playing your game.

The solution is to remove the reason for that behaviour in the first place and gie them a fighting chance until they are actually defeated in a climactic battle.

And beside, a Rush/Rush-Counter does not ahve to be a binary Success/Fail. A rush might be partially successful and cause the rushee to have to delay their other strategies. There exists a continuum between success and failure and if a player who counters is left with an exploitable resource (units) then any properly countered, rush ends up being a binary success/failure.

Edtharan, your arguments are very speculative and theoretical. Yes i will not try to make it so a sucsessful counter will lead to a definitive win. Why would any designer do that?

But the game is not mainly about rushes/rushcounters. Also, doing a single-unit attack, running into a not-scouted base should in most situations be a very bad descision.

I agree that if attacks are too easy to defend against, it makes for slow games where everybody sits back at base waiting for the enemy to waste money on futile attacks, but why i intentionally design the game like this? I will have most resources out of bases and also the supply-lines must be protected. So a player might destroy another player without assault the main base head-on.

Factions are definatly a place where an RTS can really shine.

No offence but yours have that "been there done that feel", although I suppose it's kinda hard to inovate for an era thats been done so many times.

Idk what the story for your game is or really anything about it except for the faction types.

So basicaly what i'm getting at is try something different with the factions as much as your games lore/story will allow.

But once again I dont enough about your game to critisize it