[REL]Energy Wars

Heya thanks for giving it a go and leaving some feedback phil

-The fabber pushing is on my list of things to try fix. It does indeed look weird
-The AI I'll try get working only once i really solidify how players play the game, otherwise i might end up doubling up on work
-I wish they could have different texture and model too, but I am totally clueless when it comes to making models, textures, and such. The initial idea was infact to use the upscaled bomber for big spaceships, but that idea got abandoned when i found out it only had one bone (points at which weapons can be attached). So you'd have all the weapons shooting from the same point on the model, which would be pretty boring looking.
- The super bot is my favourite

You might try teaming up with @emraldis who is working on some nice new models for orbital battleships. He's focused more on refining orbital specifically whereas I see this as more of a conversion mod.

A few thoughts:

I am not 100% convinced about the fabbers = metal. Pretty quickly I just queue up infinite fabbers from 3-4 seeders and never worry about eco again. I think the eco balancing needs some rethinking.

I agree that the single bone on the bomber is unfortunate. It looks really weird with the high ROF missle spamming out of one spot only. What about instead of a big bomber, a very tiny cheap bomber. Like you could build up swarms of super tiny 'wasps' that when massed up do big damage, but are very susceptible to AOE? Also I think the large t2 tank should be tweaked as it takes away from the huge bot. What if it was moved to another factory and the bot factory was just a krogoth factory?

Is it possible to get a visual effect for cloaking?

edit: in general I think this mod would benefit from a clear kind of organizing thought. What are the playstyles this mod supports?

Yea, this mod was always about creating an rts based on a very different economic model to PA - it's not a balance mod, but then nor is it a total conversion because I'm not using my own art assets. The idea was simply to allow interesting tech progression while retaining the viability of basic tier units.

I actually don't mind the battleships, although it seems i might be the only one . Might talk to emraldis, but concept art, modelling, texturing etc. seems quite time intensive and I don't want to pull him away from his own project. We'll see!

About the eco thing, you should be able to raid and kill your enemies fabbers, especially with hellfire tanks or the new 'boombots' i'm putting in. The other thing is I want the mod to be entirely about player interaction. So if your opponent gets +1 seed over you, he will obviously be able to afford more basic tier units and such, so i don't think there is really any eco cap. There is a comfort zone of 3-4 which is good for new player accessibility, but i think you will always want more.

What do you mean by the tank takes away from the huge bot? Do you mean build time? I kinda wanted there to be the tradeoff decision on all advanced factories to have 2 or more units, while keeping the tech tree path simple to understand instead of adding more factories. Maybe if i think of another unit or two to add to the adv vehicle factory, i'll look to making the orbital launcher a krogoth factory instead.

The cloaking effect would unfortunately require a shader or something for transparency and i don't believe you can add those in. Or atleast if you can, that is most likely beyond me. I'm not an art person haha.

What did you mean by playstyles? Do you mean unit choices and compositions? It should already be quite diverse and you ideally need a composition of many different units as they all fulfill some unique function. You can also choose what kind of economy you want to spam out. Whether you want to focus on metal unit spam, or energy/tech units and map control. Defensive play is pretty viable too due to lower unit speeds.

If you mean pacing, it is just about where i want it I think. Expansion is possible and very much required, yet rushes are also possible but not so overpowered as to be undefendable. Ideally gameplay should see two equally skilled players getting to the orbital stage most of the time. I think it's pretty close to that right now, but without alot of people playing it's hard to say for sure.

The bomber indeed looked pretty crap and i always wanted to try and do something about that, so i spent some time on it tonight. It'll basically now fire 8 aoe missiles every 2.5 seconds at long range so you can break tank turtles and push away dox. It's still slow though so you'll still want to protect it with other units. It should force players to not completely ignore the air game or just spam out pelican/dox.

That looks awesome! Yeah I wouldn't put too much stock into anything I said about economy as I have yet to actually play an opponent that fights back, was just messing around with builds. I'm going to see if I can host some games with this mod once the new PTE goes live.

Version 7 (1/11/2014)
- Reworked Flying Fortress. Now shoots 8 longe range aoe missiles for breaking defensive tank lines and turtles.
- Reworked Boom-9000. Now leaps toward target (thanks @burntcustard ). Does not self destruct, but instead has a 40 second cd.
- Bot Fabricators now have a melee attack. Beware the swarm!
- Fixed anti orbital cannons. They should now properly shoot orbital targets
- Descriptions now show energy costs
- Metal income per bot fabricator decreased from 1.25 to 1.15
- Some model changes to reduce confusion like air factory to adv air factory model
- Some other balance number changes

@elodea in the previous big-explosion screenshot there.. that was the yamato cannon correct? I'm curious what weapon you based the effect off of... annihilaser?

Also.. have you tried getting cratering working correctly? Aka, after some big explosions miniature craters (the craters that usually come from planet smashing) start being created?

yes the yamato cannon/bomb effect is based off the annihilaser effect.

I havn't tried adding cratering to weapons. Don't believe it's possible and that the planet physics is all handled by the engine or something.

*It looks like cratering is possible, but the size of the crater cannot be controlled. So unfortunately this unit property is useless.

You can create craters but you can't make them pathed properly.

Something I've been working on to round out the advanced vehicle units to 3, inline with 3 advanced bot units.

It'll be good against structures and single targets, unlike the bullant which is more for aoe against swarms of basic unit spam.

Had some great playtests with K1s3l tonight. Really quite happy with how the gameplay, pacing, balance, and unit roster seems to be coming along. Just need to do some polish (mainly effects and lights), nerf battleships, and the mod will be ready for 'released' status quite soon.

Invasion skirmish. Lights are way too big, but the 'uber' slammer does look interesting like that.


Orbital slugfests


K1s3l's Doom fleet in orbit. He cleared like 80% of the planet with that..


The Doom fleet lies smote against the mountainside


Dropship Invasion!


Pretty lights and anti-orbital missile trails


About to finish the game and kill K1s3l's commander. Oh wait, whats that in the sky...


Rageface.jpg

As of version 8 I consider this mod essentially feature/unit complete and released. Won't be spending as much time on energy wars from now on except for balance or bugs. As a reminder, you'll also need colin's rescale textures client mod for textures to display correctly. Enjoy

Version 8- 4/11/2014
- Added new unit. The vaporizer is a fast assault tank good at quickly melting high value single targets with it's strong energy beam cannon. It has slower turret yaw rate however, so be careful against swarms of spread out units.
- Improved weapon effects for Assault bot, Terminator, Bull ant
- Terminator, Bull ant, and battleship now leave wreckage when they die. The huge battleship wreckage will fall down onto the land sphere, blocking pathing.
- Battleship can now create craters with the yamato bomb. However, you need to be s-moved onto the ground for it to work unfortunately
- Battleships now have 15 second orbital arrival cooldown
- Yamato bomb now does only 47% damage to structures so that it will no longer 1 hit kill advanced factories but leave ~100hp.
- Refinery cost increased to 250
- Orbital factory cost increased to 900
- Rof reduced on anti-orbital railgun to minimise lags
- Fabricator bot metal income further reduced from 1.15 to 1
- Other balance and pacing changes inline with metal income reduction
- Other stuff i probably forgot

*If a moderator could move this over to Released, that would be very much appreciated!

Did you get variable size cratering working then?

yes

Elodea just tested the latest version and my yamato cannons were not creating the craters that you usually get from planet smashing... instead I just got a basic (nuke?) explosion decal. Is this a bug or did you mean by cratering just a black "explosion" decal on the ground?

You pneed to special move the battleship onto the ground first for it to work. The game is finnicky like that. Don't ask me why

How do we install the standalone? I'd like to play this with Randoms but they obviously wont have the retexture mod.

You can get it on pamm

Hi, found a bug, Diremachine Commander can't build anything.

That ain't a surprise. Any new commanders will have to be added to the unitlist.json. @elodea @zx0 @emraldis I'd advise that all of ya'll make sure that all of y'all's unitlist.jsons have the same commanders as vanilla.

Yeah, we keep ours up-to-date as best we can, and are aware of this.