Anyone here who plays Eve Online knows instantly what I'm talking about. Would it perhaps be good to implement such a thing in an RTS game? In Eve, there are four damage types. EM, Thermal, Kinetic and Explosive. Every weapon is made up of a certain level of each of these. Things like beam weapons would be mostly EM with Thermal, where bullets would be mostly Kinetic and bombs and such would be primarily Explosive. Every armor type has a certain amount of resistance to each of these 4 damage types, which can introduce a vast amount of strategy. Shields could be highly resistant to kinetic but weak to EM. Tank armor could reflect EM but be vulnerable to Explosive. Etc etc. This increases the complexity and strategic possibilities immensely. Eve has used this damage model for many years with great success. Thoughts?
PKC do you have anything intelligent to say, or are you just trolling? This idea works fabulously in an insanely complex and highly popular gaming environment. Nothing wrong with giving it a good shakedown discussion with actual facts to back up your *cough* opinion.
I would suggest that while there's nothing inherently wrong with damage types, it's difficult to easily display to the player, and as such becomes more complexity with little reward. Eve works because players spend hours looking at their single unit. PA players won't have that luxury.
On the topic of damage types though, I would like to make sure that projectile effects are completely supported in the engine. I would like to see the capability to fire weapons that transfer health from the target to the unit, to drain energy, to slow the enemy down, to paralyze the enemy, and so on. Plus or minus to damage dealt based on some kind of armor rating is a bad idea. Unique effects for different weapon types is a much better one.
Damage types allow for more fine tuning of balance and are somewhat realistic. I could see them be implemented very well, and even if they were mostly an afterthought, they would be useful for mods.
This. You would not believe how many times I redesign my thermal and kinetic tanks, and how much time I've spent doing that. Also, reactive armour hardeners are amazing. Finer tuning yes, but it's a large step up in complexity and it's very important that the player is given information about the damage types. It'll result in UI clutter.
I do not see why the basic UI needs to display the damage every unit does to every other unit. There could be a built in encyclopedia that displays this (all the stats of all the units and weapons). The encyclopedia could even be generated automatically.
Armour types (which is all that this suggestion is) are a crutch for game balance. They do not add to gameplay, indeed what they do is minimise the possible unit interactions. They in fact have the exact opposite effect you claim in the OP. granted, armour types do make balance tweaking much easier though. Next time I encounter a “lets copy ideas from THIS unrelated game because I suck at game design” I will try and post more than just “yuk”. Sorry.
Two pieces of information are required: the profile/flavour of damage that your tank does, and the profile/flavour of the resistances that your targets have. It's doubly complex if you consider that most targets shoot back. Raw numbers can do this, but aren't strictly needed. A tiny bar chart for each will do. I think a player should be able to, at a glance, guestimate how effective his tanks will be in an engagement without having to experimentally get data first. Otherwise, it comes down to committing these things to memory. It's unfair to design a game that favours Chinese students and doctors.
It doesn't have to be damage types per se. It can be any mechanism which permits you to make a unit resistant to a certain type of attack, while vulnerable to another. Damage types is one way of accomplishing this. If there's a better way, so be it, but I am very strongly against the idea of attrition-only models, where all you need is 10% more resources than your enemy and you automatically win. I'd like to have a bit more thinking involved in the game, with the option of outsmarting your opponent who has out-produced you. Come up with a good solution to that, and I'll shut up about damage types.
Isn't this rock paper scissors thing in every rts ever except TA and Supcom? This kind of system makes for fake strategy as people try to see what one side is building and just build the counter to win. It's the pinnacle of blizz strategy and any rts with the word empire in it. To simplify it, it just plain doesn't belong in a game where units actually do different things instead of having a unit type that says they are good at something.
Oh I wouldn't suggest super-hard counters like that... Its great that TA and Supcom simulated their warfare instead of making contrived results based on hard counters that existed for no practical reason. However... Rock/Papper/Scissors is actually a critical element in RTS games to prevent it turning into a one-dimentional war of attrition. A properly implemented "class" or "role" based RTS game uses R/P/S style domination, but with a complex enough web that there are always multiple routes to victory and there is no class that is not dominated. Without this model, an RTS game becomes a game of attrition only, where the better economist wins because most units have homogenized roles and abilities, and 1.2x amount of resources will win over 1x almost every time. The danger here is that this effort could be neutralized by the player who simply includes all types in his blob of units. In a game design, one of my primary efforts would be to prevent the ability for a person to just mass up a blob of units, and then wave it around the map erasing whatever he comes across. To succeed in that style, should require immense mistakes and neglect on the part of his opponent - not merely expanding faster to gather a resource edge.
The existence of RPS is independent of whether armour types are used. As in you can have both, either or neither. Sure you can implement RPS with armour types, that is not what I meant. I know because I have made a complex RTS with RPS and no armour types. The trick is to use unit attributes. For example a unit with range is good against a slow unit, dps is good vs hp, low reload is good vs small units, aoe is good vs small units, high burst is bad vs small units. This is just by using basic stats such as hp, speed, cost. damage, reload time and range. There are a lot of innovative things and/or things involving more physics which can differentiate units.
Oh, absolutely. Using physics to define your R/P/S relationships between the units is by far a better option than contrived superiority. Sometimes you can't get around it, like I remember special damage tables being important for AA weapons especially when you consider certain units which can both fly, and fight on the ground. Suddenly the AA damage model went out the window and special damage tables were necessary. There's exceptions but in general, I'm in favor of natural physics defining unit superiority to one another. But the point is that it IS important that some units be superior to others, but perhaps with their own weakness that doesn't necessarily involve a more expensive unit.
It works in EvE because those players expect to have to play the game with a spreadsheet. Damage types should only be used for special considerations- Commanders, Nukes, and such. The regular Joe units should not have damage types.
VISUAL effects. Yes always cool. Damage types? no. I will always fondly remember the UEF tier 1 bomber. one of the best effects in the game for me which why it was a shame it became obsolete so quickly.
