MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrades

In many RTS games a unit achieves elite status if it gains enough experience/kills. This makes the unit stronger, more powerful, perhaps with the ability to slowly self repair.

For some of us, those units become part of the spearhead for our attacks and we grow rather attached to them. However, those units you painstakingly nursed through the battle ceased to exist when the battle was over.

In SupCom you could upgrade your commander with a variety of upgrades. However, those upgrades, that often took ages to complete, ceased to exist when the battle was over.

Why?

Why not have your commander maintain persistent experience/skill/upgrades? Nothing completely game changing, but something to work towards?

Likewise, why not grant elite units some manner of experience/skill/upgrades, and allow your factories to build that elite unit (with a corresponding resource increase perhaps) in future games?

Having persistent units that you worked hard to level up would add a sliver of MMORPG elements that I think would be fantastic.

These ideas are already in RTS games - they are just not persistent.

Thoughts?

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Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

I think it has been confirmed that there will be no effects for veteran status, though I think there will be a kill counter.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

No, same as the last 4 times this was brought up.

Mike

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

No to persistence, unless it's within the galactic war metagame, where it makes sense. Anything else just prioritises players who have been around a long time.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

We will definitely be tracking your stats on a lot of different things but it's not going to change anything in game.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAnpvysqFdE

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

The Commander not keeping upgrades is never explained lore-wise, which is quite jarring. It's so simple : only the Commander can be teleported/survive FTL/keep working long enough for the STL travel between the stars, the upgrades are temporary and have to be discarded.

If you want some persistence in the Galactic War, keep a few units that you can begin with (like, say, a bunch of Peewee or Monkeylords - nothing overpowered). (Lore-wise, they were especially prepared to survive one jump, for example. Or they are 'hero' units with a slightly different skin that you can keep from one game to the other if they survive, but I guess people may not like this option.)
Or begin with fully developed battlestations. But then you need a gamemode where you attack fully developed systems.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

oho more than just the killing units, i am interested, still will be there archievments as reward?

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Actually for his fanfic Epic DotsWarlock gave a very plausible explaination in the SupCom Context;

Basically In the Supcom universe you get around between solar systems by using Quantum gates, and Gating is expensive energy wise, and that rises exponentially based on Complexity, even between 2 gates, but when your sending an ACU(Commander) to a planet without a gate(basically like you want at the start of a skirmish game type thing.) the cost is HUGE, not only is there no gate on the receiving end, but ACUs are just naturally complex to start with, so sending an ACU somewhere far away(and the distance between solar systems is huuuuuuuuge) with Upgrades was just not worthwhile when the ACU could just upgrade itself on site AFTER being gated in.

Pretty neat all around.

Mike

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Not bad, but it still doesn't explain why you don't send a (comparatively) simpler giant nuke and blow the enemy stronghold/factories/capital up.

In SupCom, it would have been far more logical to have ACUs having a role similar to paratroopers (instead of the main/only weapon they were implied to be) : not sent in the most heavily fortified positions, but they can be sent anywhere in short notice, accomplish their objective, fortify enough to deal with whatever can be sent to them, and leave before the main garrison and its nuke gatlings arrive. The best answer against ACUs would be to send another ACU, who can arrive at the exact same time thanks to gateless quantum jump. It's making the ACU jump-able who would make it so expensive. Comparatively, the SCUs just have to go through gates, still expensive but less so.
It would have opened the way for new game modes too, where the attacker arrives earlier, but the defender has some troops scattered across the map. The defending ACU would arrive late, but more and more reinforcements would arrive from outside of the map.
Why no nuke telefrags, then? You can explain that they generally try to capture the planets instead of blowing them up. That their strongholds have anti-teleportation generators, so you can't send them nukes, and jump-able nukes are too expensive to be wasted on the countryside.
Add to that starships to occupy the orbital defences and explain why you don't take killsats and ICBMs on the head, and you can even add timed mods where one side has only so much time before enemy starships arrive and rain death from above. Or calls for punctual orbital support, when a starship is passing by.
The planets themselves wouldn't have been covered with nuke launchers because all ACU constructions aren't made to last and fall apart after a handful of hours or days. And no planet is resource-rich to sustain permanent reconstructions for a long time (even mass points would be depleted after a few weeks, for example).
The problem with all that would have been, of course, that you would have needed twice the amount of units, and art asset, unit coding and balance aren't exactly cheap, let alone the extra scripting for the campaign.
Which is a shame, because the SupCom campaign had a great synopsis, who could have made the campaign as memorable as, say, the Starcraft one. (The first one, anyway. It was still far better than the second one as it was.)
But I digress.


Having teleport jumps working only for Commanders (and building anything to be jump-able being incredibly difficult), instead of simply making the jump itself expensive, would explain nicely why it's sent alone and why there are no nuke telefrags. And having jump opportunities being limited would explain why the Commanders arrive in a contested system at the same time.
And as we're speaking of entire galaxies, with hundreds of billions of systems, there are always empty systems left that can be contested, for the victor to turn it into a giant machine factory.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Definitely not, if you want a persistent leveling up experience them go play an mmorpg. This is an RTS.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

This is a terrifically bad idea (and I already shot it down in some other thread).

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Well I never said it was perfect or leak proof, just that it's much better justification than you normally get in games/movies nowadays.

To anyone interested in SupCom and just good Sci-fi should check out his work, he has his SupCom Story and a new original story hes releasing a new chapter on weekly available on his Blog.

Mike

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Oh yes, it is better than most games, unfortunately, care to explain. And those who care to explain end up too often by creating more plotholes than they try to close. (I'm looking at you, EVE Online.)


Still, I'm more interested by what SupCom could (should) have been. In addition to the "paratrooper" Commanders, the lore and the campaign of the story could have been so much better. For example :

The factions are too one-dimensional. The UEF are generic Eagleland-flavoured imperialists. The Cybrans are generic freedom fighters. The Aeon are the generic religious/psychic guys, with one bloodthirsty jihadist side and one moderate side. So much could have been done with it.
The UEF should be shown as the heirs of the Empire before the decadence, trying to keep unity and stability, and fighting to defend their values, who aren't so different from ours. They should be shown as idealists, their darker side being authoritarianism and a "the end justifies the means" mindset. They should be shown as desperate, as the UEF, despite being by far the biggest faction, is out of breadth and near its fall.
The Cybran should be shown as a varied, heterogeneous bunch of quite independent cells and nodes, who recognise the moral authority of Brackman but have varied mentalities and methods, from heroic resistance groups to darkest terrorists and outright pirates. Their culture should be shown as almost entirely shaped by their fight and the need to hide. They should be shown as desperate, as they are outgunned by the other factions, the UEF wanting to enslave them all and the Aeon wanting to exterminate them all.
The Aeon should be shown as a peaceful, spiritual culture who had to turn into an implacable war machine. This internal conflict, and all the divisions should be shown by the characters as well as the political factions. They should be shown as locked into a conflict no-one can stop anymore, some choosing extermination by fanaticism, other to just end the war. They should be shown as desperate, as their internal divisions menace civil war, and even if they can crush the other factions, they would loose their soul doing so.
The Symbiote enslavement isn't even really shown in the campaign, despite being the sole reason why two of the factions are at war. In the lore, it's simply said that the UEF enslave them with a program, and pretend that it's the Cybran who use this program to turn them into terrorists. It would be far better if many Cybran indeed used this program as well, and that both sides use it to indoctrinate the Symbiotes with their own ideals. Even better, the UEF would want to stop using it, but they can't afford to loose the Symbiote manpower because of the war, and an Aeon victory would mean the death of all Symbiotes anyway.
And the reason why the Aeon see the Symbiotes as an abomination is never touched upon either. We can guess that it's because their way is incompatible with them, but that's all. Again, how their peaceful way went to this, and how both imperatives conflict, would be fascinating to show.
Same thing for the UEF-Aeon conflict. Both want the same thing : peace through unity. But the Aeon way is probably incompatible with the UEF ideals (like, say, freedom of religion, and probably the existence of the Symbiotes). And the Aeon can't accept that something else that their way can work. Which can be defended, just look at history, and at the peaceful aliens who actually taught them said way.
But none of this is treated, be it in the campaign or even in the lore.

Then, there's the Black Sun. The last UEF mission is probably the only videogame that I couldn't finish for ethical reasons.
The last mission asks you to defend, and then fire, a weapon destined to destroy all the main worlds of the opposite factions. And no one bat an eyelid. **** that.
They should have demanded their surrender before firing. They should have shown at least some emotion about it.
What I would have done, for example, would be to have the hero (player characters would have been better with some character) calling the other factions for surrender against orders, when the Black Sun is near ready. (It wouldn't have worked, of course.) Then, when ordered to fire, answer something like : "With all due respect, Ma'am, if you want to kill four hundred billion civilians, do it yourself. Ma'am." (I think that that's what I would have done. Then I would have launched the self-destruction sequence of the ACU, because the world wouldn't have need warriors anymore, and I sure couldn't live with that many deaths on my mind.) Well, that's how I would have written anyway.

But then, there's the twist : the Black Sun opens a portal for the Seraphim to come back with a vengeance. Talk about a Diabolous Ex Machina.
What they should have done, was to hint that it was a long, long term plan of the Seraphim.
The Black Sun being based on ancient Seraphim artifacts found across the galaxy. That's why the UEF president was so fierce about not giving any ground, to keep the secret installation in UEF space (even if doing so overextended the UEF and accelerated its fall - it was a gamble). But the Seraphim (who can, let's remember it, foresee the future) voluntarily gave false infos so the Black Sun is in fact a super-gate, and not a planet buster.
IIRC, QAI was also based on Seraphim technology, this would explain its hidden instruction and reprogramming. Hinting a regret when it turns against them, or inserting a few lines showing that he tried to warn Brackman despite its hidden instructions. That would have actually given them character development. Also, showing that it had managed to hack the Black Sun to open it fully (and jump-project Seraphims in all the target planets, in addition to the Earth super-portal) would explain better why the Seraphim planned it in the first place.

Then, there's missed opportunities. We have the Aeon who learned, among other things, some foreseeing from the Seraphim (we see that the Princess have it). In the backstory, the Seraphim met by the Aeon were exterminated by the garrison commander, who turned mad (presumably by xenophobia).
A good twist would have been to have the Aeon heroin also being a foreseer, and beginning to have visions of that. At first, she would see that the Commander was xenophobic and close-minded, while the scientists approached the Seraphim without fear. But slowly, she would see the Commander accepting to meet the Seraphim, learn their way, and finally accepting them fully.
Then she would see him mad, launching an all-out attack against the Seraphim. The twist would have been revealed when Bruke (who is said to have killed him personally), trying to stop him at gun-point in his command room, learn herself the reason of his madness. He had learned foreseeing. He had seen the future. He had seen the Seraphim annihilating mankind. So he had chosen to cut himself from the way (not knowing that the Seraphim warriors do the same sacrifice), to be able to exert violence again, and kill them all first to save mankind.
Then, back in present time, she would see the super-portal wide open and the Seraphim war machines emerging, destroying everything in their path.
The tragedy would be that the Seraphim attack was driven for the same motives : they had seen their brethren exterminated by mankind, and they chose to exterminate mankind while they still could.
But war was probably inevitable, as this commander had seen the future before his act, where all of mankind had been destroyed.

Also, why the hell is this cut between SupCom and Forged Alliance? Major characters die between them, and the losing war where mankind is divided and badly outgunned. You have the hopeless battles, the old enemies still divided, the UEF seeing only that both Aeon and Cybran allied the Seraphim agianst them, the free Cybran isolated and circled, the loyalist Aeon disorganised without the princess.
This time, culminating with the last stand at Fort Clarke, where the last UEF forces would be saved at the last minute by the unexpected reinforcement of a loyalist Aeon group, and a sneak attack from a free Cybran cell in the back of the Seraphim, should have been the greatest moment of the campaign, not a fast cut-scene.


And that's in a a few hours on top of my head. As I said, I'm more interested by what SupCom story could (should) have been than what it ended up being.
In fact, if I have enough free time some day, I'll probably try to mod the SupCom campaign in with PA or Spring.


So, actually on subject : Commander-only jump-teleporting, without upgrades. Even something like allowing a few units to jump with it, or having upgrades or equivalent, may end up unbalancing things, I'd fear. Imagine if you could begin with a handful of raiders?

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Read the damn books!

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

You shouldn't be able to play better simply because you have played longer than everyone else. That's what persistent upgrades do.

It's not an RPG where your character gets better at the game independent of yourself.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

noobstomp is gonna be enough of a problem as it is without giving vets more toys to play with.

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

OMG! I just posted that pics, sans captions, and in the very next thread I open I see this!

Re: MMORPG Elements - Persistent commander/elite unit upgrad

Nah, we already had a 10 pages thread.