Projectile velocity and combat range

First let me preface this by saying I'm in no way experienced in game design or balancing games and I understand that fun is more important that realism, but these are just some thoughts I've had about what I'd like to see more in RTS games.

One of the things I really liked in the concept video was the speed of the lasers (or whatever they were) being fired by those little mech things. Many RTS games have very slow projectiles, especially when you compare to how fast the projectile from say a modern tank moves.

I realize that in a game it's more visually exciting to be able to actually track the shots but there has to be a happy middle ground between a projectile moving barely faster than the unit shooting it and something that is so fast you can't even track it. One of the things I've done for my own personal enjoyment in both TA and SupCom is double, triple (or even quadruple) the default projectile speeds for when I played skirmishes against the AI and I think it makes the combat look more exciting.

This kind of brings me to my second thought. Most RTS games have mobile units with very short engagement ranges, especially if they are that game's equivalent to a tank or infantry. Yes there are sometimes longer ranged artillery style units, but even these would be considered short range to their real life counterparts. If this game is going to have very large maps (and from what I've read it will ) it would be nice to longer ranges for combat. This kind of depends on faster projectiles because if your basic tank is shooting a projectile that moves not much faster than the tank itself it's going to miss against a moving target more often than not at a long range.

Again, I realize that there is a need to adjust these things for gameplay, you can't have a basic tank that can shoot 1/2 across very small map, but maybe there is a happy medium that can be reached. (I really liked the double range mutator for TA: Mutation , which doubled the range of all weapons) Ideally you also don't want to fall into a situation where your units are engaging enemies so far outside their view you can't even see what is going on (though maybe you combat this with an inaccuracy when shooting at radar dots vs having line of sight (either shared from another unit like a scout, or line of sight from the unit itself doing the firing) TA and SupCom already had the really long range fixed guns (Bertha, timmy, mavor etc), but it would be nice to see even greater ranges on mobile units as well. If you can line up 10-20 tanks and the tank on one end of the line can't reach the tank on the other end, there is a problem

One final note, if ranges are increased for mobile units, fixed defenses really need a boost also. In my own opinion fixed defenses should (almost) always be able to hit longer and harder than their mobile counterparts, they need some sort of advantage over mobile units since they are fixed and can be bypassed.

Anyway sorry for the wall of text, the tl;dr version is: Faster projectiles look cool (at least to me) and I'd love to see longer engagement ranges (especially on mobile units) than are typically seen in an RTS.

Compared to real life even Supreme Commander is a pretty short-ranged affair. Real-life main-battle tanks have maximum ranges around 5-6km, mobile artillery 30-60km and mobile rocket artillery 100km+. You'd have to greatly increase the ranges of SC to get close to RL. And that is with real-life using super outdated tech compared to what is being used in SC.

If they can make longer ranges viable from a gameplay standpoint, that'd be really cool.

That's where you need to find a good balance, obviously we can't do them super realistic, as lasers travel at the speed of light after all.

SupCom:FA had a pretty good balance, but I think Bulletmagnet messed with Muzzle Velocities at one point and had them looking really good, and of course depends on teh weapon/projectile too, sometimes a slower projectile can make sense.

So in the end, it's about finding a good balance, but Uber still has a fair way to go before they start wrestling with that I imagine.

Mike

I don't think 5-6km range for all tanks is something that we need specifically, but I'd like to see a mix of close-range to long range units (and units armed with weapons that can fit in different categories)... I'm more interested in balance.

Would also be interesting to see how horizons/curvature and gravity affect projectiles on different types of planets/planetoids.

Re: Lasers, I hope they will be hitscan weapons, since that gives them unique properties and benefits (and negatives) that projectile weapons would lack.

So yeah I definitely agree that you can't go flat out realistic, you want to be able to see the projectiles but I still do think faster than you find in most games looks cool. Same thing with range... if you give a basic tank 5k range... well in SupCom for example that could shoot clear across some of the smaller maps. But on the other hand if this game will be at a large scale we can probably afford to have longer ranges.

I did a quick mockup of different velocity / 2x normal MaxRadius and threw it up on youtube. I figured showing this as an example is good for people who want to see it in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9hrEE1E9nQ&feature=youtu.be

Sorry for the low quality and lack of info in the video, i created this youtube account just to get the video up there and didn't really have any editing software

1st part of the video is normal FA
2nd part, 3rd part and 4th part all have double the max radius and the UEF units (the blue ones for people who haven't played SupCom) have 4x MuzzleVelocity , the Cybran units (red) have the same thing except for the mantis which I gave 10x the MuzzleVelocity because it shoots what looks like a laser so I figured make it REALLY fast

Interestingly enough the shots from the mantis (those little units that attack the monkey lord (quite unsuccessfully) in the last part of the video are much longer with the higher muzzle velocity than they are in base FA. I assume the engine draws the beam based on a unit of time and because I raised the velocity by 10 it is 10 times as long because it can go 10 times as far in that unit of time. I'm not really sure, my modding knowledge is pretty much limited to easy to change things like range, unit health etc.

Thnx for the video. In my opinion it does look way better already with just 2x range. Even though at 2x range they still need to get within like 200 meters of each other. It feels more like infantry then tanks really.