Hey, In Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Kanes' Wrath in my opinion there was a great feature. This was the intelligence database. While playing through the campaign you could unlock intelligence in this database, which gave information about units but also backstory and lore. I think something like this could be a great idea. But as we don't have a campaign probaliby we need new ways to get intelligence unlocked if this feature will be added. Here are a few ideas of myself.. • Using units/structures/.. will unlock a intelligence file with information (and backstory) of the unit and how it is best used and how not. • Reclaiming wreckages of certain units and structures will give intelligence of the unit/structure the wreckage belongs too. • When playing on certain types of maps there could be information given about the nature, structure and more. What do you guys think?
Sounds fun, but really doesn't enhance gameplay at all. On this budget they're really not going to bother. That's the sort of campaign junk that nobody ends up caring about.
A quite interesting Idea, but I don't think it is very needed. If the devs plan on creating backstory for all units anyways, then maybe . In theory, they won't need someone with a game dev background to write this lore, so they could let basically anyone who can write coherent stories could do it. Maybe beta's could do it as well, later on.
Hey, maybe they could even let the community write descriptions, and then include such descriptions that are the best in the game in the "intelligence database." Saves some development and cost. And I'm one of the ones that likes this kind of fluff
Thanks for your replies guys! Well as it seems we are not getting any campaign at the moment, this could be an option to give us at least some story/background/lore/etc what can be discussed. And while busy on this when made, the unit information idea is also pretty nice to do.
Somewhat related; I really liked the short unit descriptions in Supreme Commander (unit A is the pinnacle of B's C technology; sporting the latest D armour, A may be slow, but its huge E cannons more than make up for its speed). Will we have something like that too? And, also, why not expand the information you get when hovering over an unit icon; speed, range, armour, what kind of weapons it has, what they can hit, damage per shot, damage per second... Could be useful, right?
This is the sort of thing that can go on a fan made wiki, which maybe the devs could eventually integrate back into the game if it ever became polished enough and they were asked nicely? I wouldn't have thought it'd be a major priority for developer time. Don't forget this game is being made to a relatively short timeframe and not a huge budget. Anything that can safely be outsourced to the userbase should be.
That information was just really good from a new players perspective, or if you forgot which ones of your ships had tac missile defence, it was all layed out there instead of you having to define it from the unit role. But be weary of presenting too much information with the tootips. Things become a lot more like maths when the actual numbers are presented in game. Although i remember that diablo 3 had all the numbers in its descriptions turned off by default but you could enable them in options, which is best of both worlds.
What was particularly nice about the tooltips for SupCom (and not 2) was the info it provided on the side saying what it could do. For example, one word descriptions for if a land unit had AA, anti-missile defence, torpedoes, depth charges, if it could construct, if it could repair. Those were particularly handy, and I hope they include a system like that. In terms of unit descriptions, they could do something like the help page on Starcraft 2: unit descriptions and tech pages. But that's probably secondary. Tooltips are a must, to an extent
This is the kind of feature that can make a single player campaign mode so expensive. Seems like a simple feature, it's just text right? It's also a LOT of text that requires someone sit down and write and ensure continuity. It also needs to mesh with the actual campaign, and may need to change if game play requirements are altered. Basically this one feature becomes a single person's full time job. However, a purely systemic system is a lot easier and usually provides 90% of the feedback. By that I mean a system that just shows the balance numbers for a unit like how fast it moves, how much damage it does, etc. This wouldn't include any lore, but also wouldn't require someone working on it full time as it would just need to be implemented once and it would naturally get updated. Sadly a purely systemic system is something of a pipe dream in today's international world. There's always some amount of text that requires translation; weapon damage types, traversal types, etc.
To that regard, you could instead code the space in for these descriptions, but leave them empty of any actual text, and instead wait until something like alpha release and let players come up with their own descriptions that are then sent to Uber. Would that be easier to do?
While i am in favor of the over all idea and would like to see it, having worked with databases a fair bit i dred having to update 200 entries because of a minor patch somewhere. Although i would like to see the return of at least tags (the anti-air, tac missile defence). They were simple and easy to modify when changing a unit.
