Ingame Unit creator..

Before i say this i know this will be resource intensive when it comes to how much time it will take to do... But in the long run i think it will be more than worth it if they got enough time..

Why don't we have a ingame Unit creator that will allow us to choose the basic building blocks of a unit along with the pre designed units we have right now.. Think warzone 2100.. That game was well known for how customizable it was when it came to choosing how you want your tanks to be or cyborgs ect.. I mean you could have something in the region of 2000 tank combo's to choose or something stupid.

But Uber like to push things beyond so why don't we do it with buildings or defence structures too? You choose the type of building/unit its going to be like a resource production unit, factory, defence, of a custom nuke launcher. Then you spend a good 1-30 mins choosing how the unit is going to look then. You choose the weapons or mode of propulsion.. I know that this thing is KINDA in the works when it comes to commanders but i think it should be spread to any unit.

Not sure if this explains what i mean but what i'm basically saying is why don't Uber implement a unit creator like warzone 2100 to make units to use ingame. Think Eve online but smaller. and for one it will allow anyone who has no idea how to mod a game to make a database of units for everyone to use.. But what i will say is 1000 percent no to anything research related..

For those who play supreme commander forged alliance.. Think of the black ops mod with all them crazy battleships. But with a PA feel to it

Again.. ill say this for those who fail at reading.. I KNOW this will be resource intensive but i think it would be worth it in the long run and will help keep this game being played for as long as warzone 2100 (1999) is being played.

I have a game designed just for you:


Spherical maps as well.

But... but... but... if you haven't played that one yet... please, save yourself the time and the disappointment... That game was published by EA (it should tell you everything).

No one likes clowns mate..

I thought that was another joke thread?

Earth 2160 did it well - where you could design a tank to have say this body, and this gun, and this engine, and this type of armour - each part having its own cost etc. So a T1 tank could have a vanguard gun, or create an AA tank with a vanguards' body?

It was a cool concept but its complicated, and the game was based primarily around that feature - its so key you have to make it integral from the start, which PA has not done. The game is complicated enough already, and this would require people to zoom in and see how the enemy has configured their force before deciding on how to counter. counter the whole WYSIWYG thing uber has going on.

As a mod, at a scaled down version it could work, but not in vanilla.

Aye i never said it would be easy to do nor quick.. But the rewards of it would be amazing. Warzone 2100 did it really well because there were alot of all round weapons so you never had a issue of being worried by a counter although there were some specialized weapons of course.. I think uber should do it in the future though some how.

nah, an rts game like this would never do well with some weird units shaped as penises @BradNicholson

I don't think that designing your own units works well in such a large scale RTS as is PA. It works when you have just a few dozens units where it is beneficial for them to be somehow unique. I am afraid that custom unit creation would only add unnecessary micro into this game and I don't think that that is what PA needs.
This post is of course only relevant if you mean unit creation during the match. If it was before matches it could lead to unbalanced games with your enemies having unit(s) that you just can't counter.

Personally I had a bunch of fun with it, cell, creature, space, and galactic adventure stages were fun. Civ was alright. And that last one: meh.

The problem is that it goes against what you see is what you get. I don't know how to counter a unit I've never seen before. I should know what beats what and what is inifective. You wouldent want to see a couple skitters and only find out that they have the vanguards weapon once they are by your comm would you?

Warzone 2100 solved the problem. Each weapon type had a visually distinct turret so that it was easy to tell at a glance what type of weapons that the units you were facing were carrying.

I'm sorry. just. could. not. resist.

This is something that would need to be planned from the initial concept phase. Love the idea and agreed with this in other threads about the same topic.

Spore was fun. But it's more like "5 games" than "A game"

I know of a game that was a masterpiece in this regard. I have played many hours of it and it was much fun and quite surprisingly well balanced once you knew the pieces.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Creatures

Ugh excuse me again while i just pick my freaking jaw off the floor. This is why i believe PA should have better atmosphere effects and clouds. I mean tell me THAT AINT WORK THE EFFORT AND TIME. it looks so amazing.

But yeah on youtube there is a video of the real spore, before it got destroyed by EA and dumbed down for kiddies. Its a real shame, because it looked brilliant, you were actually supposed to walk on to land originally.

A unit is defined by more than just it's weapon.

Readability applies to everything, not just the weapon. For Example I've been messing around with Gear Up, a fun tank shooter that lets you make a tank out of assorted parts(Hull, Turret, Propulsion, Weapon, Support), the gameplay is fun but half the time I can't figure out what specific parts an opponent has built his tank out of unless he's killed me and I see in in the killcam(just focuses on your killer in a 3/4 top-down from behind viewpoint for a few seconds) or close enough to be "Trading Paint"(my second Favorite 'Burnout' term), that might be excusable to a degree in Gear Up, because it's pretty small scale(16 player max average) and doesn't have that many different part types(a handful of main types with each having a few variations) but it's also a completely different game, my focus is always on my tank and those of my opponents I'm engaging, I'm not worrying about economy or building my base or scout or anything but the combat I'm engaged in. Heck, I'm not even having to worry about more than a few enemy players at any given time to boot!

PA is a game where you can have hundreds of units in a single army, and within that army you could have many distinct units, how are you supposed to be able to process all that variety on top of everything else you need to do?

In the end the complexity of a unit creator just doesn't match the scope of PA, it is something that needs to be a core mechanic and have the rest of the game build around it and not just the kind of thing you can slap on to anything without creating huge amount of extra work outside of simply creating the unit creator.

Mike

I guess I'm with the nay sayers on this one.
It just seems like too much work.
You just can't produce a counter fast enough, everyone would end up using premade unit anyways, cause you cant take 3 minutes to design a new unit in the middle of the game, by the time you came back to watching what was going on on the map your base would be history.
This is one of those concepts that looks good on paper but in the reality of a competitive RTS just doesn't work.

Also, the tactical icons might screw up, as there is no specific icon for all aspects of a unit/weapon, such as health and speed. Also, someone (or mutliple) is going to sit there calculating the "perfect" unit.