Unit-Creator to pre-create units to load into game for innovative experimental units.

Code:

Short version for TL;DR people:

A unit-builder system (note: units do NOT get designed in the middle of combat).
1. Pre-build system like map-making instead of ingame. Units load with game similar to way custom maps are.
2. Kerbal Space / Spore Creature creator type modular building. (More more freedom that RTSs with in-combat modular building like Warzone 2100. Less fast, but more power.... which is okay since its all prebuilding.)
3. Get other player's designs by capturing unit and winning match with one in tact.

This makes metagame more interesting, more adaptation required in matches, more reasons for personal pride in team, and more fun in general.

This idea was originally posted in the modular parts thread, and I decided it needed its own post so it could get voted on. (The differences were significant enough.)

Basically, the idea is this:
One of the most fun parts of an RTS (for me, at least) is discovering new units, fighting new units, trying to quickly adapt to them, and building new units and seeing what they can do.

The game, in addition to its standard units, could include slots for experimental units and/or buildings. These would be designed in a unit creator, accessible in a similar way to how the map creator is. (NOT in-game with games like Warzone). This would allow people to take time to build units how they like, and allow a more robust unit building system (think more Kerbal Space Program or Spore Creature Creator than Warzone's limited builder.)

You'd assign your creations to experimental slots in your build order. This makes it so that instead of just one side that most people use, you have a unique side for each user.

To top it off, if you want to take apart an opposing player's build to see how it ticks (and learn a few of their building tricks) you have to capture one of their experimental units and then win the round.

This also means the unit variety skyrockets with each new addition.

For example:
Scenario 1: The guys at Uber decide burrowing would be fun. They release a new burrowing combat unit. People play around with it, some use it, some don't.

Scenario 2: The guys at Uber decide that burrowing would be fun. They release a drill piece for the unit creator. Some people attach it to shock troops, allowing for small armies that pop out from the sides of mountains. Some people attach it to tanks, and tunnel under enemies bases and pop out laying waste to infrastructure. Some people attach it to builders, allowing them to hide from onslaughts, allowing forward bases to be rebuilt when the enemy thought they were defeated. Some "completists" attach it to a submersible amphibious unit that had vtol attachments, making for a truly "all terrain" vehicle that can show up anywhere. Some people attach it to their buildings, causing heavier levels of bombardment to be necessary to stop their unit production. Yet others attach it to superweapons that pop up unexpected in the middle of an enemy base, while still others decide that tunnelling walls could be funny, and slowly build a shifting labyrinth on their base's world, playing havoc with the enemy's ground unit pathfinding. And then there's the pro player... he won the past twelve tournaments in a row. His creative experimental unit design is the reason for his victory, which he closely guards, almost exclusively using the unit in the higher tiers of tournaments or VERY rarely in a pub server to show off. Instead of being avoided due to his impressive nature, everyone swarms his servers, trying to capture his unit. Everyone going for that "golden trophy" of his design instead of trying to preserve their win/loss ratio. All the while the pro is racking up points.

In Scenario 1, Uber does a fair amount of work, and gameplay in improved incrementally.
In Scenario 2, Uber only designs a apart, and gameplay improves exponentially.

Further, new parts could add to the metagame TF2 style. Capturing units with the part gives you access to newly released parts, or you can get them via random drop, or you can go all cheaty face and buy them in the market or store (also meaning players can make a little extra by selling extra copys of the part blueprint in the steam market). It'd make releases of new parts much more fun and encourage fuller servers. In addition, free (in game unit builder resource cost) parts could be on the market for expensive (out of game) prices, to allow customizing your army, and those purely cosmetic parts aren't included as part of a capture. It'd allow you to customize your army to stand out (a popular thing among warhammer fans and irl war games). I have to admit, it'd be amusing to be crushed by an army of pink kitten-hat-wearing robots.

Pre-created user units has several advantages over in-game modular units...

1. You can take time on your design, and it doesn't matter.
2. It adds unique character to your side, instead of everyone adapting the same way.
3. It makes games feel more realistic. In real warfare, you rarely get the chance to innovate new technologies on the battlefield (only do various preps that allow access to already existing technologies, like clearing land so military choppers can land), but often it's innovation and technology ahead of time that decides who wins.
4. Customization without the system lag. Custom creations can be optimized before battle instead of perpetually rendering new data, allowing them to have system drain similar to stock units.
5. Pre-created allows for more robust creation systems, allowing for truly unique creations with disinct appearances. Instead of choosing "top, middle, bottom", you can attach parts in various locations, balance resource use, take the time to make little tweaks, etc. AND if you don't like that kind of thing, just capture copies of other people's hard work.
6. Allows teams to match user's playstyle. One may prefer adapting unit build-outs to opponent's strategy (Okay, two rocket laucher unts, the riflemen, etc.), others may prefer a more expensive jack-of-all-trades and focus on the larger conflict (all units are a flying-submersible-rocket-laser-gun-weilding that can make structures) and that's fine. Games become more about combating original playstyles and creativity rather than just who can crunch the system's optimum build order better.

Before we even get into whether this is a good idea or not, Uber clearly do not have the development resources to do this. Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars you're willing to fork over, this just isn't happening in the core game. Especially this close to 'release'.

I think that if this were to be a thing it would need to be closely monitored. I was going to say that people should always explain that they have a self made unit but people are not trustworthy, so I would have to say that there would need to be some kind of icon in the pregame lobby that allows people who are joining to know that someone isn't using all vanilla units and possibly a voting system so people are able to make the slightly less trustworthy players use only vanilla units.

I guess my main concern is that some people will make an extremely overpowered unit and posibly find a way to get them into vanilla matches.

@jurgenvonjurgensen
That may be true, but these forums are for pitching ideas. And the earlier a likable idea is being thought about, the easier it is to implement. Take a look at TF2 for example. It didn't include a system like that initially, but in later iterations, it began to include muliple customization features, until it became the game's bread & butter.

@quigibo
I was thinking that any units designed using the game's unit-designing system would be considered an "experimental" unit. Allowing vs disallowing them could be as easy as a lobby checkbox, and you could easily distinguish lobbies. I'm not talking mods, just units designed using an in-game system (different parts would adjust the cost of the unit and such.)

Say, for example, I like tanks, but I want them to hop over barriers. Before I join ANY game, I go into some kind of army customizer, and attach a vtol engine to them. This ups the cost of my tank by 250 metal a pop. Any lobby that allows experimental units, I'd have access to them in that game, produces from an approrpriate experimental factory. (So starting out, you'd have a sea, land, air, and experimental factory.) To offset the advantage due to the customization factor, anything that would be available via experimental would be more expensive than it's stock counterpart. So "design" a bot identical to the stock for your experimental factory? It costs 50% more.

An uber-powered unit would similarly be uber-pricey.

This suggestion has come up before.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/modular-units.53577/

The conclusion is that its not what this game is aiming to be. You also run into the problem where only a small number of units are used because they are optimal designs.

And this suggestions is basically as old as PA is, I'd say it's probably the second most common suggestions right after spaceships. It's just not within the scope of PA because stuff like this needs to have the game be designed around it because it results in such a drastic shift in the Game's workings.

Mike

@liquius I actually referenced that thread in my opening post... obviously you didn't read through what made this suggestion different. No offense meant, sometimes people don't take the time to dicipher a wall of text. I understand, been there.

The difference is that most suggestions are for game-in-progress modular design. Game in progress modular designs usually go like this: "You can choose between Chassis 1, 2 or 3. You have one head slot. You can choose head A, B, C, or D." I specifically mentioned, however, more of a Kerbal or Spore style creation. This is more, "Okay, before I even start searching for matches, I'm have some time to kill, I'll open up the unit creator. Okay, I have a sphere here... I could add a head on the top... or the bottom... or twelve heads stacked on top of eachother! Or you know what? Forget heads, it'll be headless wtih feet that have treads on the bottom of the feet! Okay, that looks good. I'll save it. Maybe I'll use it as one of my experimentals next time I feel like playing a match." .... and any thing you build will be slightly more expensive than it's stock counterpart.

The difference is that with an open-ended building system, you completely steer away from the "one or two optimal build" scenario. If you wanted optimal, you'd go stock. The point of going experimental is to do something more versitile or creative at the expense of optimization. (If it's found a tournament winner makes something that IS optimal somehow, make the next update include it as a stock and rebalance the costs of the of experimental to be more expensive.)

@KNight Working towards something like this can be incremental. You can start off with simply a tool that lets you customize the appearance of your units. Merely change between a selection of skin colors. After that, an upgrade that lets you upload your own skin. After that, something that lets you choose between different designs of the arm of your command unit. Next update, have those arms include stat changes. After that, introduce an experimental unit that does the exact same thing, produced by the experimental factory, but stat changes are a bit pricey on resources. After that, allow ability to change the chassis of the experimental unit with stat changes. Next update, arms, legs, feet, etc. Next update, additional optional hardpoints that can have legs OR feet OR heads. Next, update, introduce legs/feet/heads that have stat changes that ALSO have their own hardpoints for attaching whatever.

At this point, you're practically there.

Sorry for not fully reading your first post. However you should have posted this suggestion in the other thread.

My points still stand. You will always get optimal combinations and stagnation over time. Re-balancing will only break the optimal designs and create new optimal designs.

Anything can be implemented incrementally, that isn't the problem I was talking about. What I'm talking about is that these kinds of things change the way the game is played so if you don't account for it it can have a domino effect.

Mike

Sound like you are looking for the 'Earth' Series of games 2140-50-60 and the moon project. Thank me later.

This should be left to the Mod community to make, that way we can get everything we ever dreamed of into it.

@liquius I did post this on the other thread.

And I don't think your point stands, because optimal (cost to benefit) will remain what is stock. The whole point of going experimental would be to get a particular combination suited to your play style that you can't get otherwise. Optimals only happen when you have a controlled constraint of possibilities. Basically, if you were to graph cost/benefits, it's the peak of the curve. However, not all graphs have peaks. There's asymptotic, logarithmic, and linear graphs as well. With those, there IS no optimum. You could keep designing something stronger/better/faster but it'd keep pushing it later and later game (until super weapons are early game by comparison) and pushing earlier will mean weaker and weaker. For example, in any situation like that, once you reach your "optimum" advantage, it's is lost the moment you switch from defense to attack, because the next person may have an "optimum" build that's reached once your troops reach their base... their build identical to yours, but they have 1 more attack power but a second long build time. Alternatively, no matter how cheap your optimum is, some player may have a build that's slightly cheaper and they get to you before you can finish building. It is mathematically impossible to have an optimum in specifically an open-ended design system that uses a logarithmic or asymptotic approach.

@KNight I agree, and that's kind of the positive thing about it. The one thing that most RTSs fall short on is they become too predictable, but they're supposed to be about a war, and in reality, war is all about innovation instead of adaptation(one of my fondest RTS memories is in Tiberium Sun, defeating an opponent with walls as an offensive weapon, a completely unconventional tactic, noone saw it coming or was prepared. It didn't work twice, however). If you have "no experimental" options for servers, so they can allow them or not, you can have both the "perfect number" players happy, while also pleasing the innovators and strategists. I for one would include at least one new unit every match just to see what it did. (A submarine with treads? A builder with tank armor? A Rocket tower/powerplant/metal extractor combo? Would the last be a prime target and I'd keep losing resources, or would it be a gold mine? Don't know till I make it and test it!)

@SleepWarz To my knowlege, if I recall correctly, those are in in-game builder, not an out-of-game builder. The difference is significant, and why this is a different thread from the other modular design. Although feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

@mafoon I wish that were possible, mods can do amazing things, but something like that (especially capturing other people's designs and maintaining the community necessary) is beyond the bounds of most mods.

Well this is my other point. Uber made a kickstarter. We gave Uber money with a promise that they will make a game that's roughly what they outlined in the kickstarter. What you are suggesting is hugely different from the kickstarter, its pretty much a different game. It would be very selfish to pursue this and make Uber break there promise (not that it would happen).

Your idea will only be possible with mods.

I'm not sure if this really fits in to PA but I'm gonna say maybe.. with limits.

What I really like about it is how it actually makes the name Experimental relevant. Earlier they didn't really feel like experimental units, since they always worked perfectly fine and just had a bunch of extra guns on them.

With modular units, they would actually be experimental because people are experimenting with new combinations.
This could also work well with the advanced-unit idea with how these robots would probably be highly specialized in something, with clear weaknesses but very powerful. Or - if badly designed - only a waste of resources... it's an experiment after all.

@liquius Don't get me wrong, I like PA's original idea. I just think it could be better. Part of what the deal was to help give people the RTS they want, and part of being early and on these boards is to suggest ideas. I'm not suggesting a complete end of PA's original view, but just an optional branch. One of the problems with RTS's in the current market (and why the bigger boys don't invest in them as much) is because they seem to believe that they don't have staying power. Most RTS's, if they're lucky, get one dlc. And like I said, it should totally be an optional thing. Don't like the wildcard experimentals bring to the table? Just join/host a server that disallows them.

However... if instead of a mod, Uber would allow a free 3rd party DLC... THAT could work, as kind of a good middle ground.

@Tankh You seem to have said what I've been trying to say soooo much better. You awesome.