Wall Functionality?

Dragon's teeth ARE walls. Their added utility came from TA's pathing engine, which had a hard time dealing with it. A strong pathing engine defeats it, slipping through walls very easily.

There are over a hundred units capable of being a box. Walls are not unique for this role. Adding some ensnaring utility would be pretty neat, and make walls a bit more useful for land control than just spamming tons of cheap boxes.

Total Annihilation had this feature. It was good in my opinion, because it made unit roles functionally more important. Peewees could roam around destroying undefended extractors, but they weren't much good at attacking fortified bases. Fortified bases had dragon's teeth around their towers which required thuds to destroy effectively. Peewees could go around to the back and go after unfortified things.

Dragons teeth in TA could do all that you want, but if it obstructs short ranged fire but not much else then it will work well as a ring around a tower. There is nothing wrong with a ring around a tower or a tower behind a wall. It's up to the player to decide what his walls look like and how he defends them.

Why can' they do both? Rather than talking in the subjective lets look at what TA already has. I think TA's existing walls cover all the bases here. It's up to the player to build them so that they perform effectively. By putting small gaps in your walls you effectively allow small troops to travel through.

Because there's a vastly improved pathing engine. Tanks won't be herp derping around the first thing that gets in their way. They'll just slip on through.

Indeed, even if there was an ensnaring structure that added pathing cost to an area it would be calculated in the flow field and would minimally delay your opponent - if they don't just reclaim the snare for metal.

walls should function as defensive fire barriers as well as movement obstruction

Tank traps were actually a very significant type of defensive fortification in WWII to block an area for vehicles, while allowing infantry to pass. In fact German tank traps are actually called "dragon's teeth." Rather than functioning like a continuous wall, dragons' teeth are spaced apart. Littering them across a road or field makes it impassable for vehicles too wide to fit between the pegs. However they aren't an impediment to infantry, and they don't block shots.

It does not matter how good your pathing engine is if you physically cannot fit a vehicle between the pegs. Your pathing engine would force you to go around. Smaller units, or units with legs' additional maneuverability, can walk between the pegs, or even step over them if they are much larger.

Furthermore, you won't always have an engineer on hand. Bringing engineering units for purposes of clearing tank traps and perhaps performing other tasks is an investment, and may impose other limitations, such as limiting the group's speed. It also takes time even if they are undefended and you can clear them freely.

A wall is self-explanatory. It's a solid barrier to movement that needs to be either bypassed or removed. I think walls should be intended for players to form base shapes to control movement in and out of the base, and act as a hard perimeter against harassment and assault. You can't walk through it, and you can't shoot through it. Simple as that.

Walls and tank traps function differently. Although if you really wanted to button up a base you would probably use both, with tank traps a good distance away from your perimeter wall, and maybe scattered around out of your range just to impede an attacker's movement unless they bring engineering units, and to buy time.

If PA goes with the "huge structures, little units" idea, and I hope they do, then they might even be justified in having two different sizes of wall. One little wall which is more on the unit scale, and a second much larger wall more on the scale of large buildings (i.e. "Bertha Shelter" wall). The small walls block all unit movement, and can be used in perimeter defenses for towers to fire over. The larger walls would be much taller, thicker, and more durable, but would be much too large for towers to fire over. They would be especially useful for providing limited shelter against long range shell-based artillery bombardment (flat arc). Indirect fire from closer in is going to be easily lobbed over such walls, however.

Excelent pathing also doesn't stop critical mass points where you can no longer shove more units down a limited physical space. Dragon's teeth then have an hourglass effect on enemy movement.

In the Spring engine, the most effective charge is with all units in a single line, and breaking up that line can have a devastating effect on the attacker.

At the minimum, we need;

Barricades(AKA Dragon's Teath from TA or Walls From SupCom) that can be quickly and cheaply emplaced to direct enemy units, but could be easily removed by engineers.

Walls, as is like Age of Empires style walls that are big(requireing High-Arc weapons to get behind them) and tough but much more costly to build(in terms of resources and time). I dunno, honestly I'm not sure they're conducive to the gamestyle PA seems to be aiming for(or at least what I want them to be aiming for).

I'll admit that Unarmed Walls could be interesting in that they give protection only, you'd need you're own High Arc Long range units/defenses to "protect" the walls, but so long as they're behind the walls it's possible for the walls to be taken down by the same units on the opponent's side without engaging your defending units, so you need units/structures, outside the walls' protection to in turn protect the walls.

Honestly thought, I think the game would be better without 'Walls' as I described.

Mike

Knight: Barricades as T1 SupCom-esque walls/dragonteeth are good - they impede enemy movement and that's it. The problem with SupCom walls was two fold: they forced the use of certain specific templates and more importantly they were inconsistent across tech level. Let me elaborate, there was a ubiquitous T1Tower-Wall template that every player used because it was the optimal way to place defense towers. This forced players to place their defense towers in a certain way. This effective use of walls also did not carry across higher tech levels. Indeed, walls lost all of their synergy with defense towers after T1. In the higher tech levels defense towers were more self explanatory - there was no analogous T2PD-Wall template, however walls would still be used to impede movement. I am not opposed to walls that towers can shoot over but the entire dynamic should be consistent across tech levels.

I do think a different type of "wall" could function as defensive entrenchment or "Bertha-Shelter". Assault units (or low arc units) could not shoot over such walls while high arc mortar/missile/artillery units could. This would function similarly to the defensive entrenchment and mortar/artillery shelling that occurred in the world wars. In such a case towers could still shoot over walls but because of the increased functionality and therefore cost of walls such optimal ubiquitous templates like what existed on SupCom would no longer be necessary. Or if such ubiquitous templates did exist they could be consistent across tech levels.

So I'm not exactly sure about 'age of empire' walls. But I am sure that the pd-wall template in SupCom forced the use of structures in a specific fashion and was not intuitively consistent over tech levels.

Summary:
Barriers would be cheap, function like dragons teeth, provide little to no fire protection, impede enemy movement and quickly reclaimed
Walls would be less cheap, function like entrenchment, provide fire shelter, impede enemy movement and less quickly reclaimed

I'm perfectly aware of that, but it's essentially a Bug, without the "Bug Feature" SupCom Walls would have functions exactly the same as my 'Barricades'.

Also note that if you ignore T2 and T3(for which the SupCom Walls were NOT balanced for) they preform very well, they are easy to emplace, and take a long time to shoot down(obviously depending on army size, but if you stick to T1 units there will be a point when more units just can't get into range), but easily removed by enemy engineers.

So.....just like how I described my 'Walls'?

Mike

I'd like walls to cost less, be very small and unobtrusive in terms of unit pathing (or just slow units, not stop them), but die after a very short time i.e. after just a few shots. Their goal could be to act more like a temporary "targeting distraction" to buy the defender time, i.e. enemy units shooting at wall parts to get at turrets or speed up the route etc, which is annoying, but not the 'end of the world' for an attacker.

Ledarsi, Sounds like TA to me.

Anyone remember the wall/doors with the lazer gates? Having automated doors like Age of Kings would be really cool.

I want to talk about why the meta of towers with rings around them is actually kind of profound.

1. You don't want towers to be too good on their own.
2. You don't have shields to protect them.
3. You want towers to be a good defensive structure that if foritified can take a beating but can also be countered and isn't something that will be used to push on your base (t1 tower pushing is one of my greatest loathes of Blizzard-craft).

Putting low walls around the towers accomplishes these things, but it leaves some doors open.

Sure, you could just put in an armor system for towers to take less damage against certain unit types and still have most of the strategy of towers with walls around them, but it is less profound. Why is that?

1. Towers provide the player with the option of no walls saving resources and space. Also, the walls are built separately which means you can get fully invested in an expensive tower before you have not even walled it yet creating more strategic element and decision making.
2. Elevations make a difference. If a player builds his walled towers at the bottom of a ravine there is a chance that peewees on a higher elevation have a trajectory to hit the towers behind low walls. Terrain becomes connected to the action when trajectories can change.
3. Jump Jetting (or peewee cannon) in peewees can do a lot of damage while they are above the trajectory of the low walls allowing them to get shots in and possibly removing the obstacle if they have enough fire power.
4. The player gets to see the physics engine at work. He is seeing the 3D game come alive in ways that competing games have never performed or operated. Units such as thuds, which are as small as peewees, lobbing shells in archs can hit towers behind low walls even with a low arch of fire thanks to gravity and the physics engine.

I really think this aversion to high walls is unfounded. TA had them and they were highly valuable. Without shields high walls will be as important as they were in TA.



I think my only concern with all of this is how many interactions we are going to see.

In TA, Lobbing units never had to deal with zero gravity, but in PA there are possibilities of near zero-G space such as asteroids and varying degrees of gravity which could affect the interactions between walls and lobbing units. Will land units be able to traverse asteroids? Will they lob shells directly at one another in these near zero gravity places? Will their projectiles travel outside their target range as they float through space? Will their range rings increase as gravity is decreased? Will we be required to employ missiles primarily to crack fortified positions on near zero-gravity installations?

What happens if two players build engines on the same asteroid and pick two totally different locations to send the asteriod?

knight: yah pretty much what you said, i suspect there will ultimately be two types of fortification. barricades and then something that takes the role of the bubble shield - what exactly that role is is a different discussion.

oh dear I wonder how they will make artillery units work on low gravity

I like how every one shares this photo when they never consider the physics based TA for also being 'Hurr' like for not using a proper angle to hit it's target.

Star-craft doesn't use physics, but its units are much more dependable for what they do, making it a lot easier to play and understand.

They'll just have to settle for being a SPACE CANNON.

That's true, but some of that hurr creates strategic depth that Starcraft doesn't have.

Arguably, the bots should aim at angels that will circumvent walls, but that's not as fun because then the walls never block any shots, because none are ever fired that would hit them. In general, I don't want my automation to be too fancy. Guns target center of mass with few exceptions. You change your trajectory by changing the position of your guns.

Generally speaking, in these kinds of games low arch lobbers shoot between 0 and 45 degrees depending on the enemy distance and gravity. Mortar style tend to shoot between 90 and 45.

Mortars are kind of boring, because they are easy to dodge and they rarely have trouble with walls. I was very disappointed with how few lobbers were in Supreme Commander and how many Mortars were.

Would it make sense for Thuds to shoot almost straight up to hit something behind a 'wall'... yeah. Do I wan them to? No. Is that hurr? You bet. It's also less automation and less work for Uber with more stragetic depth.

In TA you had the following elements:
T1 Peewee could not shoot behind dragons teeth.
T1 Thuds could lob over dragons teeth with low arch.
T1 Peewees were more cost efficient in small open battles than Thuds.
T1 Thuds could not lob over walls with much success.
T2 Missile units could hit structures behind dragonsteeth or walls.
T2 Missile units were easily dodged and not much use against mobile enemies.
T2 Artillery could hit structures behind walls sometimes and generally decent at hitting large groups of enemies with their scattered fire, so were better combat support than Missile Units.

All of this comes out of the physical projectile being dodge-able, the basic automation and the targetting of center of mass. You can get rid of it, but I see it as some of the best use of the physics engine, because it provides a clear progression. The biggest issue I see is getting the numbers right so the T1s feel good into T2.

Also, looking at this image, it looks like we still need Dragonsteeth, because the wall unit is pretty tall.

Here's a TA dragons tooth: http://totalannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon's_Teeth

Here's a TA fortification wall: http://totalannihilation.wikia.com/wiki ... ation_Wall

Did anyone notice the tree underneath the adv. airpad? Ninja tree.

Best walls in any game where in Warzone 2100. They where strong and durable, you had the option of mounting turrets on top of them. Cannons and laser type weapons couldnt shoot over them but rocket and ballistic type weapons could. Additionally there where bunker buster weapons that where designed to take down walls...they were a seperate unit you could build into your army.

Lots of fun..see attached pic

The pic is just a random one I got off google, not my own, though it sums up how walls where used in the game beautifully.

It would be useful to be able to stack on top of walls. Walls on top of walls with a turret on top of that. Would be interesting.

bastilean/nazya: totally agree, being able to mount turrets on walls is interesting as well i wonder if Uber would consider doing that, itd be preferable to turrets on tall sticks