Hey guys, I got these questions from Bastilean through the grapevine and wanted to share so everyone can see. -Elijah ---------------------------------------- 1. Commanders pushing major experimentals? A: Whatever design wants we will do here. 2. units in siege mode allowing pushing? (commander pushing sieged jack hammer) A: I am assuming you cannot move a sieged jack hammer, but again its what design wants here. 3. squadron bounce when you ctrl click a location a lot (the group selected to move to the point squeeze together and then after a moment expand) A: I'm assuming you are asking about formation movement vs. non formation movement? Formation movement has selected units work/move together toward a goal, sometimes causing units to slow down or speed up to stay together while moving. While non formation movement has all selected units move to goal as soon as possible. 4. squadron bounce when they teleport to a location? A: Teleporting in formation could result in units teleporting 'around' the same time to the same place, while teleporting when not in formation results in units teleporting as soon as possible. (note: design is still making decisions here) 5. I personally like how commanders and super units can walk through smaller units. It can be extremely helpful early game. Imagine if you had a tank in the way of your commander's escape from deadly force... no good. I know half of this could be adjusted with the basic SC2 engine, and I know the pushing could have easily been fixed via blue prints and scripts. I haven't bothered in my mod, because it doesn't bother me, but maybe I should for people it does. Hope that was a helpful list. PS. Oh yeah, technically you could force your units to move through a higher cost field by queuing on it right? I am not saying you would want to, but self determination is something gamers highly value. There may be tactical implications. A: Yes you can put a way point in a high 'path cost' area and units will move through that point despite the higher path cost. I liked Elijah's example of how AI could use damage cost information to get out of the way of incoming damages. However, I have the impression it will mostly be used by the computer controlled unit AI. Still cool. Good luck making an even better AI. A: Yes the Flow Field tech helps movement in a powerful way. Sorian and I will work together to ensure AI makes good decisions, how that actually is going to work is still in production. Thanks for your questions Bastilean, - Elijah
I think these are self explanatory. We want to design for these things not to happen. Addressed above, these things should have probably been addressed in the blue prints and script files (individual unit design). Who on the Uber team will be building the blue prints and unit scripts? Side Discussion: Actually, no although I am glad you brought this up! Formation move in Supreme Commander 2 gave units increased speed to reach their formations. Let me provide my opinion to you and the design folks: do not provide formations compensation speeds for units to catch up to their formations. Slow the formations down to retain coherency. In Supreme Commander 2 this was abused to avoid taking losses and provide unintended acceleration and velocities. With air units it was highly noticeable and could mean the difference between losing a squadron or a couple fighter/bombers. Also, formations slowing their march to regain coherency is realistic. Side Discussion Cont'd: You might think that this might make formations relatively undesirable. Not necessarily. The biggest problem with the formation in Supreme Commander 2 was that there was only one and it wasn't really designed to accomplish anything other than looking good. I know this mostly because this formation doesn't hold any strategic value. Side Discussion Cont'd: In Eternal Conflict DLC mod, I increased the size of the formation about double or triple the original size by expanding unit coherency. This is in some ways less noticeable because I added larger non-experimental units, but it's there and it affects all units in formations. What this does is it gives you a quick macro command for a lot of units to reach a certain spread of coherency that reduces losses to AOE weapons such as bombers and commander overcharge and they can keep this spread which ever direction you want them to go while moving! This is extremely valuable to players who don't have high apm like myself and even to ones that do. I would be even happier if Uber could provide a command to increase or shrink the size of the formation as much as the player wants, because this would help formations search or even spread across the map uniformally. There are other uses for more complex formations, but a simple formation like Supreme Commander 2 could be vastly improved with relative ease. Sadly, I just don't have the mod tools or savvy to do the extra stuff I just described, but Uber does. Side Discussion Final Thoughts: Formations should be tools to serve a purpose. They should not be standard; Non-formation move should be what every beginning player starts with and should be the fastest and best way to get around the map like in TA. Units should not be in formation until ordered to do so by their commander for an express purpose (mitigating AOE, searching LOS, searching radar, or combat formations). Let me return to my original thoughts on squad bounce. When you move (land) units in non-formation move in Supreme Commander 2, they have the ability to scrunch up. Go ahead and try it if you have a copy available. Non-formation move click the same position repeatedly with 50+ units. The units scrunch up a lot! I think their hit boxes are overlapping. When you stop clicking, the units decompress moving apart a significant amount (not into formation - they just spread out noticeably) like their hit boxes were compressed while they were attempting to execute their move orders. Metal doesn't compress. Also, this made non-formation move the ultimate move to concentrate your fire power. It would have been that way anyway, but the scrunching concentrated the fire power significantly more. One example Knight made earlier in another thread was that if units are close enough together they should be impassable. A lot of people made a big deal out of the video of the two formations moving through one another, but that was never a valuable goal to have. If they are both in a formal spread formation yes. If they are non-formation or tight-formation moving they should probably react more like oil and water. Wow, this is really good news. In Supreme Commander 2 units always waited for every unit before teleporting and I have a bad habit of hitting cntrl Z a lot. I didn't realize players could even teleport 100+ guys across Isis mountains until Sorian explained that players could que teleports together. Then I worked out how to do it and realized it was a powerful tool. Here are the current issues in the Supreme Commander 2 game with accomplishing this smoothly: 1. to move a significant amount of units via teleport or jump jet while making use of maximum range one must que the move out of a standard move to provide a position from which all the units teleport from, because even non-formation groups of units take up space and the ones at the back can't teleport across what the ones at the front can. This is important when cross impassable terrain (gaps, chasms, mountains, walls, enemies, asteroids, etc.) 2. Queing can be somewhat tricky, because this is an RTS not a turn based game, and units start completing orders the moment they are given. So if units are already at 'the door' so to speak and you que right next to them and then shift click to teleport the group from that location to the other side they may finish your original move order before you complete the next one (teleport), so they don't all teleport and you might even be slightly aggravated. To solve this dilema, I would recommend allowing the last completed que to stick around at least as long as the units are currently selected. It's just a point on the ground after they reach it, but it is also the future launch location from which you want to teleport (or jump jet) all (not just some), I repeat all, your units to their destination. What is really cool is you can actually que multiple jumps together. I always intended to make a video of this. Lazy me. Theoretically, it would be easy to design factory ques for unbuilt units to do the same assuming they had jump jet technology and the factory command understood or allowed for this fact. Oh yeah, in Supreme Commander 2 teleportation is always to 1 location (singularity if you will) and the units just kind of explode out of that point. Remember what I was saying earlier about how it seems like units can overlap like their hit boxes are compressed? A lot of people would like to see them in formation when they get there, if they were in formation when they started. I know someo of this gets into the UI, but I think its helpful. Elitron, thank you for reading and responding. By the way, who is working on the UI? TLDR: Unit Push, Unit Formations and Unit Compression were the chief discussion points.
I find all the talk about flow fields very interesting. I especially liked the March 22nd livestream which discussed the tech behind the work in progress. It seems to me the flow field concept just utilizes potential fields then performs a relaxation method to create the cost gradient. Elijah Emerson mentioned some difficulty getting the air units to move and turn properly in the curved world map. Why isn't there a 3 dimensional cost field for the air, or undersea, environments? Then the path would automatically follow the planet's curvature and could respond to differences in terrain elevation. I'm not sure if that is already in place or if its inclusion would only further complicate matters.
I would like to know if the cost of movement is related purely to static elements of the terrain or if it accounts for the presence of dynamic difficulties (such as the presence of a slow moving traffic at a pinch point, which would otherwise be the cheapest route). If so does it make this calculation initially via looking at the route ahead as it is at the time the command is given, or does it look ahead in any way to calculate how it will likely be by the time it arrives there? And if it doesn’t look ahead, will it recalculate cost repeatedly-enroute in a series of snapshots, recalculate it only upon reaching an unexpected difficulty, or not at all (just struggle through)?
Ahhh, probably too late to get my questions answered but I'll take a shot anyway: 1: How will the cost fields of Orbital units be handled? Or will they be on a different system that you mentioned planets would be utilizing? 2: Has there been any thought put into more customized waypoint locations? Say I want to make my units form up on a line the moment they reach their target, would the function of drawing a line as their final destination be possible? 3: I keep getting confused about movement on things like Auto-kiting (not that such a thing would be implemented), but the question it raises is: How will non-waypoint based movement be handled? Assuming there is any reason to include it.
Actually.. formations help strategically when moving a large number of units toward an enemy base. Let me explain. When you don't have a formation, units will move as fast as possible to the goal, or move along the cheapest path. This can result in a somewhat straight line, especially if you move around a corner. The cheapest path to the goal is moving to that single corner position, in this case your units will be in a somewhat single file line. Now imagine that straight line going toward the enemy base full of enemy turret defenses. One at a time each unit will come within the enemy turret's firing range. The first unit would receive massive damage, then the second, then the third. They are basically being led to slaughter. With formation movement units will not desire the cheapest path but instead their formation position, resulting in many units coming within the base's weapon range at roughly the same time. In this scenario the turret's damage is spread over many targets, instead of one at a time. Making your units live longer and thus able to do more damage to the enemy base. PA will not have scrunch up behavior. If units are close enough together then you would have that. The cushion space between units in a formation is there so an individual unit has some room to turn or speed up/slow down to reach their formation position. If there were no cushion space then a unit within the formation would have a very hard time moving. Just think of being in a packed crowd at a concert vs walking with your friends in the mall. Point being, formations will have cushion space between units so the formation as a whole can move and not struggle with itself. It sounds like what you are asking for is something like Spartans in a 'Turtle Formation'. Where they move very close together and hunker down creating a impassible wall. This is possible with our technology. However design will make the decision on this of course. You bring up good points on teleportation. I haven't started working on teleportation yet and after talking with design about this, the answer here is: "its still in discussion." Design will look at everything and make decisions here when we cross that bridge. In other words I am not sure if you will be able to teleport an entire formation at once or if we will have units teleport one at a time or maybe something else. So tech wise we can do that and that's what I want to communicate here. Design wise is still up in the air. The UI is brought to you by... The Johnson brothers.
Before I go on I just want to say what a pleasure this is discussing the game design elements of formations with you. Technically, the tower will kill them one at a time (unless Uber has vastly changed auto-targeting), but technicality aside you are correct. They will have more fire power to bear to return fire if they don't file in single file and multiple towers may target multiple soldiers. I get that. That's true basically, and it is especially so if you are not microing your group and the group degenerates to single file. I just played FA all day yesterday against Sorian AI with a buddy and I admit this would have been very valuable. Take home: I can live with a formation move being the stock move function especially if it is helpful. However, Supreme Commander 2 had a lot of advantages for cntrl clicking if and when a player was microing his units, especially when engaging enemy units. This was mostly because concentrating units was so easy with a cntrl click and painless. There were a lot of blue print programming decisions that arguably had a great deal of effect on this Star Craft like feel to unit motion in Supreme Commander 2 which may have lead to a cntrl click's strength(more on this further on). I hope that doesn't dissuade you from any of my other formation concerns or desires. In particular I hope we have an adjustable formation coherency, better formation formation*, and no formation speed boost. *formation formation is how a formation assembles and distributes its members. The Supreme Commander 2 formation was designed around the smallest units in the game and their center of mass. The Adapter (which was just a large basic unit) did not fit properly within the coherency designed for Supreme Commander 2 formations and therefor made the entire formation look and act oddly. This was exasperated by experimental units, because these units were supposed to be 2 clicks apart on center of mass (the formation coherency) but were 10 clicks or more wide (where a click is an arbitrary unit of measurement for this example). In general coherency should be a hit box to hit box minimum (possibly with a little float) instead of center of mass to center of mass. Take Home: I am not asking Uber to over design formations despite these being highly popular , however I think having adjustable spread sizes and designing for different unit sizes to fit together more appropriately would be more than enough to make me feel like I have a solidly designed formation. To Exceed Expectations: I think if Uber does the above Uber will have taken a few strides forward in fun and cool. A subjective goal would be to see top level players use/retain unit formations more (and use them in more ways for more reasons) in the aggressive thrusts and defenses of combat to best address his opponents forces. Sounds like Uber is considering placing noticeably low acceleration values back into the Annihilation game. I welcome this. Supreme Commander 2 units were not highly affected by crowding because the acceleration and turn speed of units was so high (like Star Craft). BulletMagnet mentioned this more than once to GPG. Here's to you BulletMagnet. I look forward to this change back to noticeable accelerations, and I hope enough development time is planned for this element, because it will probably want some tuning. In particular, I hope what you are saying is acceleration advantages of formation spacing (coherency) appropriately take the place of speed buffs we saw in Supreme Commander 2. That is super consistent and awesome. Using less responsive accelerations and turn rates will certainly test flow field pathing quite a bit more. I imagine you are actually looking forward to these elements, because they will show off and test your work far more impressively than auto turn and extreme acceleration. That sounds exciting! I am hoping we have extremely cool units and fun interactions to play with on the ground. Have you been watching the TV show Vikings? They form a shield wall in one of the latest episodes to block some arrows before cutting apart their Saxon enemies. It's a little violent and totally engrossing. Highly recommend it. Well I look forward to seeing and operating the UI. TLDR: discussed formations; for short specifics take a look at the take homes.
It would annoy me if tightly packing units is deemed bad for gameplay. Some of the most intense moments in Balanced Annihilation come from how units interact with eachother through moving and blocking, as much as the actual gunfire. Tightly packing rocket kbots together so no fire can penetrate and hit the vulnerable repair kbots supporting from behind is a common tactic.
But you can only make a single file of units in BA because otherwise the units behind would not be able to fire whereas in SupCom 2 the units can fire through eachother. I remember seeing a replay of SupCom 2 where a player fired his own artillery among the middle of his units. His own units didn't take any damage but then his opponent teleported right in among his units and they took massive damage from the artillery because they were so bunched up.
