Check some of the uber weapons in Total Annihilation and the CC expansion pack.

Thanks for your thoughts guys. The possibility of shortening the end game/avoiding stalemates is one definite advantage of a weapon of mass destruction.

I agree that the RA implementation sucked - I remember playing a game against a friend, and discovering that he was massing a huge army in the middle of the map. I had a nuke all ready and waiting, so I dropped it right in the middle of his forces. It didn't do a damned thing, since apparently tanks and infantry are completely immune to direct attacks from nuclear weapons, unlike buildings. My reaction to this discovery was a very loud "WTF??". I don't think I have ever played RA since.

Correctly used, these weapons should really be battle winners, at least if we want the game to bear any resemblance to reality and maintain suspension of disbelief. If we are going to bother including these weapons we might as well do it properly. The trick to stopping them from dominating the game is to make them sufficiently hard to use well as to make it difficult to use them effectively unless the opponent is either a) an idiot or b) already defeated.

For example, for my giant orbital railgun, you need to build three triangulation beacons around the target in order to be able to attack it. These beacons are easily destroyed or jammed, and if any of them are stopped from working then the attack is called off. The time taken to orient the weapon should give a smart player a chance to launch some sort of counter offensive, and the fact that the beacons cause massive blips on his radar gives him no excuse for not being able to find them. However, a heavily walled in/defeated player will have trouble mounting any sort of defense, and will therefore end up getting completely demolished - this weapon will not leave *any* survivors in its area effect. Think 'Satellite Rain' from Syndicate Wars (I loved that weapon)

Of course, it is still a big maybe. It could just turn out to be annoying. Also, they may be of limited utility in certain scenarios, where the objective is to capture areas, not destroy them.


Edited by - Sandman on March 7, 2002 3:29:15 PM

The railgun idea seems like a good one but it''s not really a stalemate breaker, as it sounds as though it would be very difficult (if not impossible) to use against a good opponent of equal strength . It''s more the sort of weapon you''d use to finnish a game off in spectacular fashion against an opponent who''s already dead.

An idea for a stalemate breaker would be a type of EMP cannon, which while not destroying buildings could bring the enemy defences offline temporarily. If executed correctly this type of weapon would give you a small window in which your enemy would be vulnerable but not totally helpless , so it''d still take a certain amount of skill to pull off a successful assault.

---- People are strange.

I think RA2 handled it quite well, actually. The super-weapons (IMHO) were well-balanced (does not mean "realistic", BTW). Also, they added the option to turn them off, so you can''t really complain, can you?

---------------

I finally got it all together...
...and then forgot where I put it.

What if one were to up the scale of the whole game, so that you aren''t controlling marines, tanks and airplanes. Instead the playing field is several solar systems and you fight by placing offensive and defensive sattelites in strategic orbits around the right planets/moons. What''s simple gun powder on that scale? You''ll *need* nukes to blast hostile sattelites out of orbit, wide-spread biological bombs to halt production one continent at a time and really powerful EMP shocks to break a planet''s ground based defences, etc. Still, since the playing field is not a single planet, one nuke won''t end the game. It would just be a spectacular scale and we''d get to nuke eachother like crazy!

I've thought alot about having very destructive forces in sci-fi games. Consider the following scenario:

You have two interstellar powers, each with naval warships capable of obliterating cities back into the stone age, and with the precision of smart bombs. So what's the point of having ground forces? As soon as one side gains naval superiority, game over for the defending unit.

So there are only a couple of possibilities.

1) Ground armies will be very small and will only go on the ground once naval superiority has been gained. They will be used to actually hold territory and root out any guerrila or partisan factions. In effect, there will be no more massive ground conflagrations, just lots of vietnam size scale ground wars

2) Fighting could be between naval vessels ala boarding party actions. However, this too is small scale combat.

3) Civil Wars. Since the enemy resides within your own people, blasting cities is not an option. Fielding large armed forces in open ground is still dangerous though and needs to be done very rapidly. Ground forces will be the ultimate form of blitzkreig...to storm an objective and seize it as quickly as possible. This is my own personal situation with my game background. The war is actually set within a Civil War.

http://home.sprintmail.com/~imamutt/index.html for some basics

4) Electronic Warfare and Defensive Countermeasures. Take away the effectiveness of naval bombardment by having "stealth" armies or by having extremely effective defenses (think Patriot defense systems but hundreds of times better). If you can literally shoot incoming projectiles out of the sky, then you eliminate much of the threat of bombing.

5) Modern day "flak". As WWII bombers had to fight through flak, there could be modern day versions of missle anti-warship missle silos. Even just damaging warships may be enough to deter them from continued bombardment.

So there are a couple of options available. I personally like the Civil War concept because it introduces a style of fighting never really seen before in human history. Again, imagine a sci-fi scenario where you can drop off your troops anywhere in the world in an incredibly short amount of time. The introduction of Airborne troops in the mid 30's made many commanders have to rethink their defenses. The invasion of Malta, the near capture of the bridges in Holland into Germany in Operation Market Garden, the disruption of enemy lines at D-Day, and the crossing of the Rhine by airborne troops was an amazing new tool that changed strategic thinking in WWII. With the ability to orbitally drop or land troops anywhere on a planet's surface in a very short amount of time would have the same effect as Airborne troops had in WWII...even more so.

Since armies would no longer be very static, defenses would have to learn to be very mobile. Having a Civil War in which troops may reside amongst your own populace would also cause a very different style of warfare. I think anonymous is right in that you also need to have a very large scale of combat on the order of several solar systems, or at least truly worldlike in scale. There are essentially two options, reduce the effectiveness of mass destruction weapons by introducing countermeasures (I coin this the parry method), or limit the timing involved so that the Mass destructions weapons can not be brought to bear (what I call the dodge method). The trouble really only happens when one side gains a true naval superiority however. If each side stays in balance of each other, then the navies themselves will balance each other out. You can't really bomb ground targets when another warship has you in his sights.

By the way, the same holds true for artillery and CAS really. The only really good way to stop artillery is with other artillery or with good AA defenses. If you don't have counter battery artillery, you're going to take lots of damage. Ditto if you don't have air superiority, and you have limited AA defenses.

Hopefully some of these suggestions can give you some ideas to use.



Edited by - Dauntless on March 7, 2002 6:10:17 PM

quote: Original post by Sandman
Inspired by a thread from the Lounge, of all places

Uh oh, wait, lemme get my chistle and tablet. "This day in history..."

quote:
1. What effect do you think such weapons might have on a game?

I think these devices shouldn't be able to make an appearance until late or mid-late game. I also think that there should be trade-offs and advantages to conventional warfare vs. mass destruction warfare, with the two complimenting each other.

quote:
2. How do you stop them dominating?

You could do what Total Annihilation did with the Can units: Basically, so many friggin' hitpoints that it takes a couple of nukes. IOW, you give the player the ability to scale conventional forces so that artillery is ineffective and nuclear artillery becomes a necessity. If the build time scales are roughly the same, then it becomes a matter of tactics and style. (I remember the TA expansion had a unit like this, a massive walking robot called "Korgoth" (?), but wasn't quite balanced time-wise)

quote:
3. What defence is there against them? Obviously 'Mutually assured destruction' doesn't work well in an RTS environment, although it might work for more of a civ style game.

Is there anything worth saving? Let's say your game map has you fighting in and in the outskirts of a city. Your goal is to limit either casualties or loss of territory; OR, the territory is so valuable (conscripts, say, or raw materials) that progressive degradation COSTS both sides.




--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on March 7, 2002 10:17:44 PM

quote: Original post by Dauntless
I''ve thought alot about having very destructive forces in sci-fi games. Consider the following scenario:

You have two interstellar powers, each with naval warships capable of obliterating cities back into the stone age, and with the precision of smart bombs. So what''s the point of having ground forces? As soon as one side gains naval superiority, game over for the defending unit.

I like your scenario, Dauntless, but keep in mind the constant spiral of arms and armor.

If there are naval warships capable of taking out cities, why couldn''t there be fast moving powered suits of battle armor capable of launching surface to orbit missiles? You could still have ground forces, because they have the BEST defense in the galaxy-- the very planet they occupy!!!

Imagine deeply imbedded warrens of tunnels networked by maglev subways that run through the planet. The attackers can pop out of the ground, attack, and fade back into the earth. However, the orbiting defenders have NO terrain to hide behind, and even worse are restricted pathwise to orbiting the planet (technology depending, of course).

In the scenario you mention, habitable planets with dead cores would literally become solar fortresses. Remember, planets are HUGE. You could even keep your population under the crust in mile long cities that criss-cross and interlace the planet.

The Navy is then reduced to developing weapons that dig their way into the planet. Unless they have planet destroying weaponry (that''s a LOT of energy), they''d need to expend enormous amounts of ordinance chasing after electronic ghosts, moving targets, and deeply fortified positions.

Just a thought...


--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Wavinator

Well, I suppose you could have underground armies or better yet underseas armies. There are a couple of other potential possibilities. Not all worlds will be 100% earthlike. There might be worlds with incredibly strong magnetic fields and constant rain, barring both visual and electronic surveillance methods (although Forward observers could still rain orbital bombardments down on the other sides head). But the problem I see with subterranean warfare is the logistics of it. First off, getting enough drilling equipment to tunnel your way to the enemy is incredibly expensive and time consuming even with extraordinary technology at your disposal, it would be many times slower and more expensive than orbital or airborne drops. It can be done, as the Vietnamese proved with their extensive tunnel networks, but these tunnels were often claustrophobic, designed to fit one man at a time crawling so they could infiltrate enemy lines.

Also, with seismic sensors, while you could hide from the Warships, you wouldn''t be able to hide from the other sides ground forces. Also, equipping all of your infantry in battle armor would again be prohibitively expensive. Alot of this also depends on your level of technological development.

In my own game idea, my setting is only about 150 years into the future, but also after a major setback. So technological is on one hand pretty familiar, but there are also some extraordinary achievements. I think the availability of technology is oft more important than when technology was first developed. For example, microwave ovens have been around since the early 60''s, and cellular phones since the late 60''s, but it took several more decades for each to catch on. I see the same with technology. Look at the possibility of FTL drives. We can send men to the moon since the late 60''s, but we haven''t done it in nearly two decades. The economies of scale simply take a long time to develop to make such products commonplace enough to have them in the game world. I find game backgrounds where you have the discovery of a new technology and it being commonplace 5 years later to be preposterous. Sound silly?

Look at superconductor technologies and cold fusion. Or how about quantum computing? Genetic engineering? All of these are within our grasp even now, but they aren''t going anywhere very fast. It''s sad to say, but necessity truly is the mother of innovation and invention, and we just haven''t had the impetus of a war or disaster to spur humanity''s creative juices.

So depending on your level of technology, I can think of even more possibilities. And your suggestion of underground warfare is possible, if a bit diffucult, though undersea combat is a very real possibility, as designing a submarine to plow the seas is more easy to implement. The reason submarines are still so hard to detect is that they run virtually silent. Unless someone else actively pings the seas, submarines are for all intents invisible up to a certain range...until you get hunter killer subs like the 688''s and Akullas with their hyper sensitive sound detection and magnetic anomaly detection units to try to hunt it down. With undergound warfare, unless someone came up with a way to drill through the earth with no noise or movement, they''d still have to find a way to mask the vibrations caused my an army marching underground, something seismic sensors could do with ease. The other problems is that if the forces actually develop subways with maglev rails....well, it''s kind of obvious where they can head to, just follow the tunnels.

There''s one more problem. Developing tunnels assumes that both sides occupy the same planet. What if one side is invading the other sides planet on which they have no native forces? In that case, developing an entire infrastructure of subway trains is virtually impossible.

When you really think about, future wars will be fought VERY differently than the way they are fought now or in the past. While it''s nice to envision WWII style battles, I just don''t think its going to happen anymore. With devestating weaponry outpacing our technology to create defenses, battles are going to be quick and very ugly. The advances in communications and electronics will also vastly change the face of warfare. The possibility of holographic war rooms, Microwave direct link communications, and electronic warfare teams will become increasingly important.

Here''s an example I thought of. Look at how incredibly powerful the American armed forces are. This is in large part do the the incredible electronics that virtually all of our armed forces use. Now imagine for a second if an enemy was able to come up with EMP bombs that could take out sophisticated electronics and disrupt communications? Tell you what, our forces would now be at a significant disadvantage, and the threat is more real than you think. The DoD has already given some researh money to a DARPA funded team that has already created an EMP bomb that can take out computers from 100ft away.....using equipment that only cost a few thousand dollars. Scary.

Electronics warfare, intelligence and communications will probably as important if not more important than the actual fighting forces themselves. I hope to introduce a lot of that flavor into my game...partially as a way to stave off the possibility of weapons of mass destruction and partially to introduce a different style of warfare that most people are used to seeing. Thinking of a way to counter massively destructive weapons is another aspect of making the gameplay and game design unique. I don''t want just another wargae, but one that feels different and yet is logically consistent and believable.

/me scribbles notes furiously.

On the EMP bomb thing - I think that''s an excellent idea! For particular types of electrical equipment, an electromagnetic pulse actually starts fires. If an EMP bomb is developed that has a constrained range, then it could serve as a countermeasure against electricity-driven WMDs (carpet bomb the installation/control locations). If some of your units are in range, then they should switch off their electronic equipment as a protective measure (the radio/emissive silence will also guard against surveillance detection).

[ GDNet Start Here | GDNet Search Tool | GDNet FAQ | MS RTFM [MSDN] | SGI STL Docs | Google! ]
Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!