Reactive buildings

I don't have a problem with stuff like this, obviously ideas can still be implemented and/or balanced poorly, but we really shouldn't make that assumption.

I think there are enough arguments for things like the solar collectors already, so I'll move on to pop up turrets.

These can work, and work pretty well if you ask me. This was tried in FA with Aeon turrets(and based on the unit models it was planned for units as well) but it did not turn out that great, mainly because the base of the turret was locked in it's orientation, so the animation was slaved to that orientation, meaning the turret would 'pop' to the orientation it had before folding up.

Now that can be fixed(I think, I actually kinda want to test this in FA cause it might fix it) be making sure that all the folding parts aren't locked to a specific orientation, so as the turret Yaws all the folding bits would yaw as well, so it could always fold up/unfold in the proper orientation(pitch might offer more trouble to get right) and would even allow it to yaw as it's unfolding.

Now as to the actual animation(s) for folding/unfolding, they need to be Concise. They can be as detailed and complex as you want, but they need to happen fast, 1-1.5 seconds tops for most cases(longer can work if it's a core element to the unit/structure).

Actually I like this as a feature for turrets because it helps play into "raiding"/Fast units, as they could potentially get closer to than a slower unit to an enemy turret line as it folds up. If you don't like that and are worried about the folding being abused by a canny opponent, there are still a few things that can be done to offset that. First is giving weapons(in addition to the regular weapon max range) is an 'Alert' Range, which extends past the weapon max range and is used to get the weapon to start unfolding before a unit gets in actual range. The idea is that this would give the turret time to pop up as or before the units get in range. In addition making sure that the animation can be stopped and reversed at any point(as opposed to being forced to fold up before it can unfold) can stop it from being 'baited' into folding, then closing then having to open again to fire on advancing units.

Now for something like a turret the folding is easily tied to shooting, but for a "defensive" fold like for Solar Collectors there are a few other ways it can be triggered;

1] UI Toggle, much like StarCraft II's Terran Supply Depots, the problem is that unlike TSD's is that in the case of Solar Collectors being closed actually has an effect on your Eco, so you'd have to be very careful and use some micro to make sure you don't shut off too many and to make sure you turn them back on afterwards.

2] Multiple hits, having a setup where it takes X number if hits in Y amount of time. This would help prevent 'accidental' triggers like aircraft wreckage and also introduces a neat elements where front loaded units have a neat advantage compared to high RoF units.

3] Damage Threshold, where a unit has to take X amount(or X%) of HP damage before folding up. In this case the front loaded units only have an advantage if they do more damage than the threshold.

4] Some/All of the above, I think having a toggle is fine for special cases where you do want them 'locked down', but they still need some way of doing it on their own, Threshold would be my first choice, but Threshold/Hits combo could work too.

The last element that would need to be figured out is how long do they stay folded up? Well it really depends on the unit and it's function.

If solar Collects are such that you only have fewer more more energy production each shorter is 'better'(less impact on your eco) but if they're balanced so that you have lots(but lower Energy Income each) then longer might be 'better' because each individual one contributes less overall. We just don't know enough yet to say what will be best.

TL;DR - It can work, just needs to be balanced/implemented well.

Mike

I don't get it. Why add feature to my turret that gives advantage to my enemy? To make me asking "Why? Why??!! Why that crap turret is always folded?? Why I can't permanently lock it into unfolded state??". Or the Perfect Tech™ is so perfect that it has special flaws to give opponents a chance?

Nuke protection is cool, but I rather prefer old conventional way of not being nuked.

That's most ridiculous use of that feature. I mean - post ridiculous argumentation for that. Much better argumentation is possibility of ambush turrets or blocking turrets (a lot like underground flamethrowers from StarCraft2), but that's just not for that scale.

It's all just not for that scale. It may create difference for very early game - maybe, yes. But only if it's not balanced. If it's balanced it's more just fancy effect without great impact.

Well it's an option, changing the 'Alert Range' allows for easily adjusting in that regard.

No one said Folding was supposed to be "perfect"(you seem to be the only one with that assumption), rather think that every advantage isn't without it's down sides, an Artillery resistant fold up turret should have a weakness to help offset that balance wise, using a fast/raiding to take advantage of the small amount of time the turret takes to unfold seems fair to me.

Folding wouldn't have to be a feature for all things either, I do think however that it might make for an interesting element with the lack of shields for PA.

Mike

Also note that not all turrets need to fold. Since PA is following similar design concepts as TA, this means there will be a large variety of units, which means there will be a large variety of turrets.

In FA, (ignoring tier differences, which were largely based on damage output) turrets tended to be limited to direct damage, artillery, and anti air (with flak and missile AA being the only real variety).

In TA, (and I'm going to focus on the Twilight mod again, because it did balance very well) you had the option of a several types of laser turrets (llt, sentinel, beamer), close ranged lightning gun, several direct fire plasma cannons, several arcing artillery plasma cannons, a couple of fold-up cannons, etc. (And that doesn't even include the AA weapons.) They all had their uses, but unless a player was porcing up, only a subset was used.

So sure, a foldup turret may have disadvantages in PA, such as a slightly longer shot time, but it would have advantages to balance it out, such as better defense against artillery fire that outranges it, or stealth features for ambushing enemy units. If this isn't part of your strategy, then use a vanilla turret instead.

If it always pop-up fast enough (and it does not irritate me), than why you are talking about disadvantage?

It was a reference to some people here who believe that PA is about perfect tech battling perfect tech.

Why not just make it switchable? Not as "fold/unfold", but "fold/unfold/auto-unfold"?

I was saying that they might not always pop up in time, particularly if a fast unit tried to rush up to the turret, the fact that it just moves plain faster would mean it could be closer before being shot, whether or not getting closer actually makes a difference to the outcome is dependent on many more balance variables than just the turret unfold time.

Then tell it to those people then, not me.

I'm not sure what the relation is between my comment and your reply, but lets give this a go on the assumption you mean to reply to this because it actually makes sense then;

So anyways, as I said, I do feel it should be some combination of available options, individually they don't get the job done all that well, Toggle is good for those more obscure/special situations you might be planning for(like letting an enemy force walk paste you folded up stealth turrets until they pass so you can trap them between the turrets and your army) while the allowing them to act on thier own(within the requirements) to protect themselves(in say the case of solar collectors) from attack. The Toggle could have 3 states, with the 'Open' and 'Closed' states being 100% manual.

Mike

I agree on your stance. It can be done, but if it's done, it should be done properly. No orientation-slaved turret, no unfold baiting.

For unfold baiting: i would actually add a wait time betweent the turret being unfolded and the turret folding in again. So it's not "pop up, no enemy so pop down" but "pop up, wait, no enemy so pop down "

But that kinda leads to just a different type of baiting, particularly in the context of an "ambush" or "arty resistant" types, where the turret is baited to unfold revealing/weakening it respectively, for a more "mainline" type turret something like this could work, but so long as the animation length is both concise and Interruptible(aka not forcing it to completely fold up before unfolding again) it might not be needed, it comes down to being dependant on other details.

Mike

One solution is to make the "alert range" to be shorter than the weapon range. In this case, any unit that is close enough to activate the turret is going to get shot at a decent amount before it can get out of the fire range. This means that light, fast units are very likely to be destroyed in a couple hits, while heavier units will take a bit of time to turn around and trundle back out of range, meaning they take a good number of shots as well. In either case, the attacker will pay a price, even if they get off a couple of damaging shots before the turret folds back up.

Of course, that still means that they'll get a few shots off on the unfolded turret with artillery, but isn't that the point? The turret can't be invincible all the time, and this would be a method of taking it out, although there is a cost associated in the form of the loss/damage of spotting units.

Also, this just assumes one defending turret. Realistically there will be more turrets defending (some of which are likely to be longer-range, non-folding artillery turrets), along with repair turrets/units that will likely be out of range of enemy fire. Add to that the fact that all of this dancing in and out, baiting, taking potshots will take time, which the defending player can use to mount a counter attack. (Which is generally what the defense turrets are for.)

Note that this was essentially how the system worked in TA: Twilight, although instead of an "alert range" it was just the fact that units could shoot further than they could see, and defenders generally had radar and Dragon's Eyes (cloaked vision turrets) to spot. Attackers were harder pressed to get the vision advantage they needed. Supcom was similar, except it cut out the vision requirement by the ability to shoot at targets on radar.

Pop-up turrets made excellent ambush weapons, because you could stash them amongst the outcroppings of rocks and hills, and when hidden were almost impossible to kill with artillery and even nukes.

The point of pop-up defenses is not to defend your base from attack by the average army, but to be whats left after massive bombardment by the enemy via shells and missiles, to be able to survive the un-survivable and be ready to kill an unsuspecting enemy who drifts into their range.

They could be considered to be like land mines, not good at holding ground, but at slowing enemy forces down.

Of course an nuclear resistant defense base isn't bad either.

Often those unintended gameplay repercussions wind up making the game better. They add depth or (forgive the horrible cliche) emergent gameplay.

Off the top of my head, a couple examples of that would be wavedashing in SSBM, or the minecart booster 'glitch' in Minecraft.

Animations in reaction to the current environment is always a nice addition.

In terms of gameplay I can imagine in might end up being annoying unless you are purposefully putting your resource extractors or factories into hunker mode.

And that last point, that sparks the thought of resource allocation. Is there any interest in having a way to temporarily reduce factory production and intensify defences for example? And vice versa. You then have Balanced/Production/Defensive Modes. You could even have an extra option in Production mode where it either results in more units generated over time or more powerful units generated over time. Applying this to energy results in stronger weapons, metal/mass results in more armour.
I guess the way to implement this would be via the resource extractors or a resource strategy centre (one for energy, one for metal/mass), simply flicking to Balanced or Production or Defense. Without oversimplifying of course, perhaps different units benefit differently from each strategy etc...

Any comments?

Units with different stats should be different units. If a player is looking for more efficiency, or faster production, or more armor, then why not just have units suited to the task?

This can be accomplished with a limited energy resource. If virtually everything demands energy, then a brownout will force players to choose between production or defenses.

I understand that having many different types of units is nice. Although I have always felt RTS players in general don't want hundreds of different unit types to do similar things with different stats. I think this has been addressed to an extent with upgrades.
I believe these different strategic modes could add an extra level of depth to the overall game.
The goal is not to reduce the number of different units but to add more roles to the same units.
10 units with 3 strategic modes who all react differently to the 3 modes produces 30 units with different stats (and if needed some minor decals) however switching from one mode to the other does not benefit/disadvantage (depending on reaction to mode) a single unit but all 10 and that has to be taken into account.
With an upgrade tree (SupCom2), units are permanently modified for the rest of the game so you're actually stuck with the same 10 units, they just change over time as does the opponent's. So not much difference really. Anybody see what I'm getting at?

Agreed, however this is only if you are reaching the limit. Usually that limit is pretty high, so what happens in between? The optimal build/production ratio goes from about 50:50 (to gain more terrain) to maybe 30:70 later on as you fight it out. The different modes might influence that dynamic in more than one way thinking about it.

Even worse than slightly different units is having one unit with multiple different stats. Changing unit stats at the click of a button can cause all sorts of issues. The big one is creating a micro headache, where abuse of the modes is more important for winning battles than anything else.

If spending money in a different way is that important, a new unit is more than capable of taking the role.

Or are you thinking of units that transform into different modes? That might be good for a handful of things, (Supcom2's hunker is pretty much a transform) but it'd be a huge mess to do it for every single piece of the army.

I'm curious to know where this information that unit folding animations would be such a hefty drain on the budget comes from. Didn't the ARM Solar Collector have a total of four moving parts?

And pop up turrets just moved out of the ground once the door opened.

And with no real fancy animation.

Time to animate TA power generator model = 10 minutes, IF I didn't know what I was doing and had to refer to the help file continuously.

Reactive buildings is more about game logic (you need to make reactive buildings hm... reactive). That means additional callbacks, additional checks, more code per building. In other words, it's just suddenly makes a lot of (trivial) code, but overall you got more complexity just for some fancy effect.

Don't get unit AI confused with unit mechanics. Solar collector armour is a good example of the difference. Consider two slightly different but important implementations of an armour mechanic:

• 1. If a solar collector takes damage it closes for 4 seconds.
• 2. Solar collectors have a state toggle which lets you set if they are open or closed.

In both implementations closed solar collectors do not produce energy and have damage reduction.

Firstly a solar collector 2 is strictly better than a solar collector with no armour mechanic. I hope this is clear to everyone, you can just never enable armour and both units act the same. On the other hand a collector with 1 is not strictly better or worse. Stray shots or weak explosions could cause a lot of collectors to close at once which would let a weak raider deprive you of a lot of energy without ever killing a collector. My point is that there is absolutely nothing the defending player can do about this, if a raider pokes their collectors they will lose that energy. The pokablility of mechanic 1 solars is a weakness in this situation.

In other words when you produce a 1 solar you should take this into account. Their forced closing mechanic is purely a balance concern, there is no stupid unit AI because it is something they are forced to do. You may as well say "I don't want my units to die when they are damaged" because that is just as much a balance concern.

Mechanic 2 is significantly affected by unit AI because players have direct control over the solar collectors act. I will assume we are trying to remove trivial micro so with scripting people would be able to write unit AI. A stupid unit AI would either never close the solar or close when it is hit. A smarter unit AI would close when the solar is about to take damage and it judges that an alive solar in the future is more important than energy income for the next few seconds. It would also let the player toggle between "always stay open", "close when in danger" and "closed".


In TA the solar collector mechanic is more complex than 1 or 2. It lets players manually close solars but they will always close when they damaged.


In short units can have mechanics which are different to unit AI in that they are fixed. These mechanics contribute to the balance of the unit so in many situations opening up control does not make any sense. Of course the mechanic can still be a bad mechanic, just don't confuse it with AI.


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Not in this situation but in general I think it is fine. In this situation retracting armoured parts are well known from TA so it would be reasonable for players to assume there is some gameplay effect (there is an exception in TA for constructors which we overlook but probably confused someone). In general things like idle animations and somersaulting jumpjet bots adds nice flavour.