[WIP][Server] Imperial Legion (Faction)

isn´t it examphase right now?

You mean in the five days since the last update?

Sure I can give you guys an update with how things are rolling within the Legion team.

@nicb1 has created some interesting models that are going to get textured by kiwi so thats still going. Basically the Legion has a nice complement of units at the moment. In my opinion there still needs to be some work done in the orbital layer but its not like its unplayable at the moment. Land, air and sea feels pretty solid unit choice wise.

The biggest news that I have is that @elodea has joined to team to give Legion a more defining role in how it'll play and ofcourse balancing it out along vanilla. The first idea I kinda had was to define unit roles and then put it into beta and from there get results and balance it out. However nicb insisted that it should be playable when it goes into beta which is kinda what I also wanted but unfortunately I had no idea where to start. Thats where I asked elodea in.

Elodea has done some testing and re-balancing and basically the core units should fit good. There are also some units that need to get defined/differentiated a bit more before they'll get added to the balance. I'm hoping we can solve this somewhere this week. Anyways elodea already has done some good progress on the Legion mod which should give you guys a solid gameplay experience when you play it for the first time. Those moment are always the most important (in my opinion).

and me? I've been working on adding in some effects that were needed after Elodea's balance pass. One of the issues the Legion had was that it had a lot artillery units so Elodea decided to spice things up by giving a unit a gun that shoots timed bombs so I had a go and gave the bombs a charge up and explosion effect. See the vid below.



Remember the colouring still needs to be done (once we know how much damage its going to do) and I might tone down the effect to give it more visual clarity.

Also we have had an emotional @Quitch




I'll be working in the future on some extra polish on effects in the air and some charge up effects in naval. So yeah a lot of work still is being done!

Lovely.

Are you planing on doing a faction logo? Something to see on the main UI or ehaever? Thanks for the update alph. Reallyy goo work

Yes @Crembels has been cooking on a sweet faction logo which you'll see sometime somewhere eventually (bet on release).

And nicb has been working on a change of the main menu background which is still a wip. he got some good feedback on the posts so he'll change it here and there. see quote below

See, these guys get to do sexy modelling and FX, and I'm stuck trying to figure out why the AI doesn't want to upgrade its metal extractors.

Its because you already get emotional from very solid word documents. Imagine what you'll do when you're creating some FX. I'm guessing a trip to the hospital.

First of all, awesome sauce!

(Puts on his helpful critic hat.)
That commander was getting knocked around a lot. So it seems like you are spawning a unit in order to do the timer, which seems to match up because the commander was shooting at the timed bombs. If it stays that way, this could cause issues because the initial shots could land in front of or behind the front line of units and stop the rear units from getting close enough to fire. While this could be a cool feature, it could also be abused because of the pathing issues they could cause. Is it possible to make them incorporeal so units can walk through them?

Will the timed bombs be completely invisible so that the enemy doesn't shoot at them even when skitters are around?

Even a half second timer is a long time. The artillery could be largely useless when firing at retreating units unless it has a huge AoE, but insanely powerful against advancing ones as they walk more units to be within the AoE only fired at the front unit...

Very cool, and great work, but it sounds like it could be very hard to balance.

Thanks glad you like the work. Yeah balance is tough, but really helps that we have @elodea and @xankar helping out with that.

In regards to the projectile it is still very much WIP. We are trying to work out a method to make it so units wont shoot at them and that they are fully pathable so other units don't get pushed around by them. But yeah you pretty much have it right, when the green projectile impacts it spawns that blue orb which has a timed lifespan and explodes in the same manner as a jig upon death.

Just thinking out loud here, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary work when you have an air layer to work with that does not have collision enabled... Could you not spawn a flying unit and then have it explode down, maybe like in a radius similarly to how the Aeon T1 artillery does it?

Edit: Oh, and have you thought about mines? I'm thinking Nano-Swarm mines that reclaim!

Why don't you make it to be some kind of mine?
Problem solved. Now you have a mine thrower bot, no path find issue and no exploit

Also didn't read the comment before

Wish it was that easy. Mentioned it to Kiwi earlier and there was something preventing us from doing that.

I suspect that what is holding up. Is something like having to difficulty to spawn structure. But be creative, just make a mobile unit, with a 0 movement velocity. Use the mine model but create your own code

@KillerKiwiJuice What's the problem here?

I don't really know. I didn't make that bomb thing and I haven't had a chance to make it as good as possible. Alpha spawned a unit when the projectile dies which makes things shoot at it; I told him to just make it a projectile with a delayed explosion like the nuke.

Can i give you some feedback? I've seen the strat icons and overall looks good BUT, a subbtle but important detail is missing. Most of them if not all lack the distinct sadow behind the icon that makes vanilla icons look so good.I recommend to give it to those, it will make the gameplay much more pleasantly looking. As you know, nost of the time is spent looking at those icons.

Pd: also there is some asymtry weirdnees to some of them, and I recommend take a look at it. Also I think some icons, needs some more thought put into them, as for example the turret ones, doesn't match with the actual model.

Indeed, crembels has made the icons

Lol

Had some fun on making some of the UI red, when Legion units selected and stuff.

What does it do in shared armies?