Why design units?

I never understood the need to design units in RTS games. Why not make us design our own units to become a "faction"? Bit like what happend in Spore. You select a base chasis to define its speed and movement options. Next select the utility mods and/or weapons for that chasis.. Select size, give the whole thing a name et voila.. a new unit is born!

This way we all can create our own unique army and clash it with others :mrgreen:

Much, much more work than making one balanced unit roster. You're asking them to make a large many-dimensional space of possible units that are all balanced. And it would be hard to tell what the other guy's units actually are.

That said, this sounds like a job for a mod.

Because it would be fantastically imbalanced and pointless.

The big reason you don't want to have a unified unit editor is that people will just optimize for the best unit they can make. In the later stages of spore you just made one super critter, tank, space ship, whatever. And then sent it out into the world.

If units are just constructed out of a compilation of stats then the whole game just boils down to one big liner equation. You need a roster of units with different strengths and weaknesses to keep the game play interesting.


Oh yeah and the spore creature creator took so much money and development time that they didn't have enough time or money left over to make an actual game for it. Spore was at best, a compilation of mini games, a stripped down minimalist RTS, and a wandering about simulator.

I sorta liked the unit designer in Alpha Centauri and with a stretch of imagination I could see it working in a game like PA. Will it? no course not unless uber for some reason really likes the idea a lot which I doubt they would. Not saying it wouldn't be cool but the feel of the game I think doesn't allow for this type of feature.

Nothing like taking the slow colony vessel and slapping some rockets on it, course made it hell expensive to make....

I swear the more I read through the posts on this forum the more I find myself playing all these older games more. I miss them thanks guys :cry:

Noooo, i want to know what im dealing with before i send my army to crush the enemy, i don't like walking in blind to a units capabilities!

I must agree, even though almost everything you see was created by yourself, the gameplay wasn't really the best. I would like to see some kind of minimal unit customization in the game itself, but creating entire armies, meh

This sounds like a perfectly valid type of game, it's just not the type of game that we're actually building.

Impossible Creatures had this kind of idea turned into a game structure if I recall correctly.

Thanks for the reply
It's just that as a software developer myself I try to gather data, analyse it and make it abstract and design my software from there. If I look at RTS units I see that they are basicly all the same: a movement part combined with shooting parts and/or utility parts.. Some space strategy games use the same principle, use a base hull and slap stuff on it.. I just never saw this on a RTS game and I wonder why?

Such an underrated game, and so much potential too.

I heavily recommend giving it a go for any RTS gamer.

The technical design of the unit system is separate from the game design though. It would be completely possible to make a unit editor of the type you are describing. It's more a question of what kind of game you are making and whether it's a good idea.

Anyway there will be mod tools so make whatever units make you happy

I suspect the main reason modular unit design hasn't surfaced in a RTS is a question of pacing, and balance.

If you have to take the time to "design" all the units in your army, when does that happen? Do players have to pre-design all of their units before a battle? Or do they have the option to do so during a battle? If they can design units during a battle how does that work for pacing since designing units is usually a somewhat time consuming process. How long do you want your battles to actually last? How many players are going to have the patience to design their entire army one unit at a time?

Next is the question of balance. Modular unit design has been used in other titles, like GalCiv, MOO, it's somewhat standard in a 4X game really to have a feature like this. With the slower pacing, it makes sense. But it's also a major balancing issue. You need to balance not a set of units, but a set of technologies with infinitely more possible combinations. How do you do that? And how do you design a RTS based around technologies rather than units?

There's so many questions you have to ask yourself before trying to make a game like that. It would be a brand new genre like nothing else before it. While I might find such ideas interesting, they are far beyond the scope of what is reasonable to expect in PA.

When it comes to units the base criteria are generally gonna be attack, attack speed, speed, range, health and armor + spells and mana ( if the unit is a caster ).
Those can be much easily "customized" via an upgrade system.

Its not like spore where you build 1 type of unit for ground, 1 for sea and 1 for air. Thus you don't need to be able to customize to get something around the lines of " an army that is centered around doing damage at long range but very unmovable " ( aka a siege army ), you build that kind of army via the synergy of different units.

Customizing looks could be done trough mods and having a unit look editor in game so that everyone can see your custom unit might confuse people on the type of units they are facing and might take the developer precious time to implement.

You mean aside from all the stuff already mentioned in the thread?

Mike

Competitive online multiplayer + unit design mechanic = system optimised within a week of release, people netdecking the hell out of the system.

Because Warzone 2100 didn't exist.

This isn't Warcraft III, you know. Turret Turn Rate, Collision Box Dimensions, Maximum Turret Elevation, Maximum Turret Traverse, Projectile Speed, Projectile Acceleration, AoE, Unit Turn Rate, Unit Acceleration, Unit Breaking and Minimum Airspeed are all pretty much necessary for a unit stat block.

Still awesome however http://wz2100.net/

Turret turn rate, collision box dimension, maximum turret elevation are pretty much what you would call range and attack speed. Only with added gimmicks.

If a turret has to turn in 2 sec to attack a target at a 80 angle that is pretty much attack speed modified by position of target vis-à-vis the "front" of the attacker ( or wherever said turret/s happens to be placed ).

Collision box, which is basically a hit box, again affects pretty much by what said target gets hit ( aka rocket is launched in general direction, if target hit box is 5 foot tall and 5 wide than it gets hit, if its only 4 tall than it doesn't... or it does with less damage, pretty much how a non-hit detection aka projectile spell affect a hit box only in 3d )

My stats where not example from any particular game, Warcraft 3 for example will tend to have a lot more "stats" involved ( regen, diminishing returns, experience when killed, food occupied... etc ). I gave the stats as an example since planetside doesn't even have a list of stats that will 100% be in game and most of the existing stats, as i said, can be seen as those "basic" stats only with a gimmick, a twist, or combined with another.

The earth games did this.

One thing I did like from those games was having effects like heat - lasers would heat up a unit until it exploded over doing direct damage. At least in The Moon Project.

Way to miss the point. What you call "gimmicks" are actually the minimum necessary statistics required to specify a unit in a game which uses kinematic simulation to resolve combat. It shows that you're thinking of this like an extension of an RPG full of high levels of abstraction ('Armour'? 'Spells'? 'Mana'? Seriously? Question marks?), and not how TA and SC actually played.

I agree, if any game represented the concept more with a cool design it was Impossible creatures.