Will windy planets only give a boost to wind power or would they also be able to blow projectile "off course"? ie change unit ranges asymmetrically; instead of range circles have range ellipses?
Eeh... it propably goes already on peoples nerves but It may sound like a cool and fancy feature, but on a second thought I don't see how can it add anything to the game than frustration. Cause you can't influence the wind as a player or forsee (I dont want weather reports in the game lol) it. If your enemy just got lucky wind and his tanks have suddenly more range, you can't do anything against it. Of course they could implement weatherstations, but imo that could make the game overly complicated, because you can fight on several planets at once, which will already be hard (and totally cool) to manage.
I'm gonna go with karottenrambo here. Also, I doubt wind is going to have much effect on heavy weapons shells or energy weapons... the effects it would have on a limited number of other weapons would probably [realistically] be fairly minimal with exclusion to some pretty extreme planets. That said, it would be nice if certain planets had environments that affected unit performance etc... Cold planets might allow for slightly faster cycle rates for certain weaponry, rain might affect cloaks, swampy terrain would make land units suck for speed, and maybe corrosive planets would slowly damage units that weren't constantly being repaired by base support units/buildings, or shielded (something which looks unlikely to be in vanilla PA at this point)... Etc.
I will not support anything random that effects the player in any way, random elements like that are NEVER good for gameplay. think of it this way, imagine if in Starcraft 2 the Gold Mineral patches were randomly assigned to a different base every match, wouldn't be much fun if the odds favored your opponent and he got an easily defended Gold expand while you couldn't hmmm? Mike
I'm not familiar with Starcraft 2... and I'm not sure to whom you are replying to exactly... but if it was to me: 1) Planets are already procedurally generated, so by extension, resources will be randomly placed (presumably there will be some attempt to either enforce, or probabilistically enforce 'fair' starting points) 2) I would presume that you would always [at least, by default] start on 'non-hostile' planets. So that way you don't get spawned into an acid bath while the other player lands on section of a metal-rich world that always faced the star...
I don't like this idea because battles would be won based on the current wind direction. A bit of extra range for one side is really important.
Basically Gold Minerals(Also Called Rich Mineral Fields) can be harvested by workers twice as fast(might not be this exactly, but the basic idea is the same) so by having the "gold Expand change randomly every match you are creating situations where one player can have an advantage over another player simply by chance. As you said, Procedurally generated doesn't mean the same as 100% random, chances are there will be algorithms that point out where starting points are best placed and that there should be X amount of Mass points within Y area around the starting point......or something like that. Yeah, that keeps the starting portion of the game even, but what if player B happens to have 2 metal worlds right next to him? What if they're the only 2? No matter how well controlled or directed a random system is, the fact of the matter is that it's still random, and Random just isn't good for game mechanics like this. Mike
I posted in the other thread regarding this, but I'll just quote and post again: I think symmetric games would make for good tournament/ladder matches, but for more casual games, balanced should be sufficient.
