Natural events that hamper your strategy

We're not talking about war. We're talking about a game.

War is a terrible, horrible thing I hope that none of us ever has the misfortune of having to deal with. A "war simulation" would never be fun, because war is never fun.

Besides, haven't you heard? We're going for awesome.

I disagree with having something that can end the game right then and there or can suddenly unpredictably give you or the enemy an advantage that they didn't get from doing it themselves. I do agree there should be enviornmental factors as mentioned above snow on ice worlds rain on water worlds. Things that you know will happen on that type of planet so you your enemy isn't about to crush you then randomly he finds that there's a meteor and it's about to nail his transports, forward base etc. as opposed to you're on a water world and you choose lighter aircraft that get torn apart if they fly through a storm somewhere on the planet. The enviornment should affect you because you arn't paying attention not because you just got unlucky and are now going to die because of it. On the other hand I would like the ability to enable epic disasters, even having a map where you have to adapt your warfare because epic disasters happen fairly often encouraging blitz warfare, or I guess you could put engines onto the planet if you really want to..

It is only on specific maps. I forget which ones.

I do believe you won that argument.

NO. random stuff the player has no control over is not a good concept in an RTS game.

tell that to players of the Sims 3. Suddenly having a meteor land on your character causing him to die instantly is NOT fun. It is possibly the most ranted about feature in the entire game. And this is also a game that has no shortage of unpleasant behaviors that annoy it's players. Hilarious as it may be to watch a meteor kill a Sim on you tube, it's pretty unpleasant to have it actually happen to you.

This is a strategy game. Random unfair elements are going to piss people off something fierce.

I think that map creators should be able to script random events into the map but in most cases I think that there should be some form of forewarning.

There was an expansion that had "meteor shower" maps. And the frequency and severity depended on the map afaik. It was a random amount of time between strikes, at a random location, for a random duration. And they could devastate a player if they hit energy farms.

These were not the popular maps.

This worked in Tropico 3/4 but that was a singleplayer game, random odds in a MP game are always unfair.

I found the meteor showers in TA always a little annoying. Not because of the damage they did, but because their impact sound was the same as large projectiles (from the Guardian for example). Which always made me think I am under a sneaky attack by the enemy somewhere.

Some maps, like Rougpelt and one or two of the Ice maps had it.

They were not very popular (because you could get massively screwed by the showers and your opponent could be lucky.

There is probably no way to properly balance this, so it should be low-intensity (even lower than in TA).

But before you put an unpopular feature IN, you should really keep it out (or make it cosmetic).

No thanks for me too.

I mean maybe if it was a toggleable feature that was always off by default it wouldn't be a terrible thing... but considering that it'd require budgetary resources that could be used to make extra units or more planet types or something... well no thanks.

What's the point of having more planet types if they don't have dynamic features that actually make them different? Apparently people want a bunch of different planet types but only if the differences are cosmetic. Every planet should just be a static barren rock in terms of gameplay with a different random texture.

I think so far there has been the assumption that these events, particuarly meteor showers would roam the solar system until they impacted the planet, and possibly your base/army.

Like them being disabled by default and turned off, making them on non starting location planets to create high risk/ high reward situations is nice. Like a lava planet or something. I stay away from storms due to the inehrant need to include cloud cover on planets which would make it hard to see things.

That's not remotely true.

There is plenty of room for differentiation of planets without random events.

From what we've been told already, land, water, and gas planets will play very differently.

Potentially factors such as gravity, distance from the sun, type of orbit, wind speed, surface texture, hilliness/craters/forestation, ground hardness, atmosphere density, number of suns, number of moons, tidal strength, water depth, geothermal activity, presence of indigenous creatures, and resource abundance can be employed to affect gameplay for all players on a planet, without games coming down to who has a volcanic eruption or meteor strike in their base first.

Please also see the thread I started about rare resources specific to different planet types http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35111

Random events are just bad in general, if it was for a singleplayer campaign then yes it would work perfectly but in online multiplayer it is just annoying and it gives unfair advantage to the one who didn't get crushed by a random meteorite. Just like random crits.

I don't like it. Natural events sound like they would hamper strategy.

What if these events were only tied to specific planets. Either something that would occur at all times all over the planet or it would be random but with a high chance of occurring. These planets would have to be more resource rich to balance the want to fight over them.

I am against random events on just any regular world though. But if you had the option to avoid them, and that option was still viable, then it could all work out.

I'd still want to take the randomness out if you wanted worlds like that.

So off the top of my head, say it was a world with a corrosive atmosphere, you would make all units and buildings consume extra resources over time to highlight to need to rpair the constant damage.

An asteroid hitting a planet is a natural event! The engines strapped to the back are all made of natural materials!

This reminds me of the earthquakes that struck on the cloud maps in TA. Earthquake generator device? Or is that a nuke? :twisted: