Planetary Annihilation Core Rules (More like guidelines)

Planetary Annihilation Core Technobabble Technology Rules (There more like guidelines)

Total Annihilation was a game designed around rules (Real Life as we know it being designed around the laws of physics)

Should all units and buildings be designed to conform to a rule set or should stats be free and have no relation to rules?

We already know of a few core game rules. The first is no damage modifiers. Ten damage is 10 damage no matter where it hits. The other rule is bullets hit what they hit. There are still many ways to create an "elemental" system of strengths and weaknesses despite these restrictions, by changing overall health, weapon properties, or even blacklisting targets if needed.

The desired gameplay between various theaters is best laid out before throwing around a bunch of numbers and units. Every major unit/weapon archetype needs a list of both pros and cons, which helps determine baseline attributes and how simple or complex these interactions will be.

Everything so far points to PA using a physics engine with very few arbitrary rules to simulate combat. This demands good fundamental choices for how units behave, the tradeoffs they make, and the ways they fight. Then the fun stuff begins.

OK so having unified physics is great, and a bit of realism here and there is nice, but game balance and "being fun" has to come first.

So as an example in a few previous threads we were talking about planetary orbits, and how everything should move around in space. Now you could have completely realistic orbits with everything being really far apart and moving with vastly different orbital speeds. but it would look a lot nicer, and probably be more fun, if all the planets were unrealistically close to one another, and if their orbits and day night cycles were all more or less on the same time scale.

Hello, well, thats not a problem in nature, you have plenty of examples with really packed systems, but this shouldn´t be the rule tho:

http://www.space.com/18073-tiny-alien-s ... anets.html

Being the maps rendered in a procedural way i spect it to give various outcomes with planets far away, or packed, that will really give a different aproach in each game, for example:

-A system with highly packed worlds, here you have an easy way to jump between planets as soon as you get orbital capabilities, so that you can go to any of those planets to get resources or use them as a base to make orbital bombardment to your own planet (where your enemy also resides)

-Another system where you have a planet with no moons and no near celestial bodies besides an asteroid belt in a midway position to a gas giant that is far away and has like 6 moons to inhabit (besides getting the energy from the GG), that planet is so far away that you need first a base in the asteroid belt, this means that it will be a card only in the very late game, if the game turns to that, not before.

that makes the nature of each game sustantialy different, thats one of the reasons that this game is REALLY awesome, you don´t know what to spect in each map, dont ruin that just by saying that planets have to necessarily be really packed...

regards.

This is just a matter of scaling, if we use the videos as an example, the planets are REALLY tiny compared to real life.