Hi, this is what i think would help the game be more AWESOME.. The game should have Experimental or Player made units which can be cusmized with existing weaponry, armor and mobility. This will put more thrill and AWESOMENESS to the game.. What do you guys think?
It's a cool idea, and definitely worth a mod, but it goes against Uber's principle of "What you see is what you get", and the principle of not having experimental units. The closest we will get in vanilla PA is commanders, who will eventually get a choice of three weapons for their uber weapon. And even that is just barely acceptable, because custom stuff is really hard to balance properly.
Supreme Commander 2 had a similar model to this. It should be super cheap right now so try it and report back. My bet is that you won't like it; few people did including myself. Due to this game's failure GPG went broke and has now been acquired by world of tanks.
That would be really cool of course, but people like me would have trouble knowing what we're up against if we run into a unit that we've never seen before. Instead, we'll be able to use mods than change the game and add units that everyone in the game can play with.
The best RTS that has done custom units is Warzone 2100. Grab the full game here for free (legally): http://wz2100.net/ It's a really great classic RTS from the 90's. Very underrated.
For vanilla? No. However, adding something like a factory for custom units could be a great mod IMO. After official release, I plan on at least trying an idea like that myself, although not with experimental units (and of course, I still don't know if I'll actually go through with it yet, since I'm probably getting way ahead of myself here). The basics of my idea is that this factory (a land factory which would probably sit around T1.5 or T2) would be able to build a set of 1 to 4 custom units. Having units that utilize similar 'technology' (stealth units, high mobility units, high health units, long range, AoE, etc. being examples of 'technology') would mean a more cost efficient factory, while trying to cover every strength and weakness (either on a single unit or in the roster for the factory) would be far less efficient (to those individual units and/or to the factory as a whole). Another result of this would be that the fewer units the factory can build, the more efficient it is (in general). Having it build nothing but a single unit with very few special abilities would be very cost efficient, effectively filling another role of its own through potential strength in numbers (at the cost of missing out on other potential units and abilities). I'm probably nuts though.
I'm not really a fan of the way custom units were handled in GalCiv. I like the way it was done in Earth 2150/Earth 2160. I think for maximum benefit it really should be something that you can save to your profile. It's a bit jarring to come away from the actual game screen.
If it's not implemented in vanilla, it might not necessarily be possible to implement via modding. We're not going to have source access, are we?
I'm almost certain it's possible. All you need to do is make a system to generate the files needed to define a custom unit, and I would be very surprised if this wasn't possible. You'll probably also need to have some way of re-checking the mods folder (or at least the folder of a specific mod) while in-game (I haven't bothered with mods yet, since I'm waiting for official mod support on release, but I suspect mods are loaded when the game is loaded).
How would that work? If you have a cannon bot, and change its file to be a missile bot, what happens to the units already in the game? Do they ALL turn into missile bots? What happens to the cannons in mid-air, or the cannon bots you view via chrono-cam, or your opponent's cannon bots?
according to the structure of the client side unit files, both players would preferably need the file for it to be more than a cosmetic change or a version mismatch. Assuming both players and the server load that file, it should work. Furthermore, Uber insists they will assist modding along with release. That is fairly openly accessible to tinker with, at the very least in singleplayer on release when you have server and client yourself on same machine, but even by classic rts standards its as good or better.
I had playing that game like for a year and it's really really hard because of customed units but it makes me think more on how to overcome it. pretty good.. about the customed units factory.. that would be fun correct and i think some people will also like the idea. custom units will be defined by PA team in the first place. soo there is a defined combination within a server for a certain units. meaning that customizeable units will have limitation on how many customizeable units can be created. like.. for example.. if you choose bots to customize, you'll have your bots customized. if you choose tanks then it will be customized.. much like a selection on the tech tree
When I say "while in game", I mean while the game is running, but not while you're in the middle of a match. Thetrophysystem posted a good explanation of what would be necessary. Before the match starts, send the parameters of each player's custom units to each other and the server, then generate the files based on those parameters (similar to how the solar system is generated based on several parameters).
I said no only cuz if i want one, i want everything. commander is fine. i acaully think the commander shoulde be fully Customize-able, like everything. off-topick
There's no way to communicate files to other players, or the server. There's also no way to recheck unit .json files. I don't believe it would be possible for mods to implement either in a practical way, if the server doesn't allow source access. This has actually been somewhat of a sore point for me, since I've had to reload the entire game repeatedly while testing mods that change anything other than the UI (the UI, being browser-based, can be refreshed with F5).
You just need to communicate parameters for the units' attributes. Things like that will pretty much have to be possible if modding is going to be a thing at all. We'll have to wait and see. Even if it isn't, I remember one of the devs (I think it was Neutrino) said they wanted it to be possible to mod the game into a DoTA style game. Editing unit attributes during runtime would surely be necessary for something like that, so there will have to be some way of allowing for custom units.
Asteroids will basically be customizable super units. Want an interplanetary carrier? Put some rocket engines, factories and unit cannons on that thing and send it orbiting an enemy planet and launch units from the new moon to the planet. Want a interplanetary atomic missile ship? Build a bunch of nuclear launchers and you'll be able to drift around space thanks to you Halleys and bombard any planet of your choice with nukes along the way. Want a really big kinetic energy weapon? Just send that asteroid smashing into the enemy planet.
Waahahha that's a bunch of cool ideas.. still.. i want to see how many of us want's or don't want customize-able units. Well.. that depends on how you build things.. off course it's trash in trash out..
