The original TA has wreckage in it. As in, if you destroy a unit, it remains there in a ruined manner, blocking the path, being a resource, and can even be resurrected. Apart from being the only game I know of that does that, this has a huge effect on the play style. Also, it makes the world feel even more destroyed, with wreckage everywhere. In fact, the lack of this is what really ruined SupCom for me (and the fact that it felt like your units size meant nothing, unlike TA where a big unit could block a whole path). So my question is, are you going to have usable wreckage from units in this game? The only downside of it I ever saw was how TA units tend to struggle shoot/walk around it, but that is more due to the old engine than any difficulty in coding.
SupCom does have wreckage. It is one of the reasons I just lost a game an hour ago, so I am pretty sure of it xD Well wrecks dont block your path, they have no collisionmodel. It might be a very fun idea to crash wrecks with tanks rolling over them, but hard to implement I guess.
You also have to consider the change in scale between TA and SupCom, SupCom is just so much bigger in several regards, Map area, unit numbers being the most relevant here. even if SupCom wreckage did block pathfinding, most of the time you would have no trouble going around until a considerable number of units died. Frankly I hope they go with the SupCom wreckage style, managing the wreckage buildup around your base when you should be build giant rocket engines on asteroids in not my idea of fun. Mike
If they consider making wreckages blocking units, they should be really sure that their pathfinding is badass. If wreckages would block units in supcom, it would be horrible, you wouldn't be able to move units at all.
My bad, seems I'd forgotten about it. Didn't play the game for too long. Really should research it a bit more to refresh my memory before saying too much about it. That's the whole problem, while SupCom was on a much larger scale than TA, it never felt anywhere NEAR as epic. Might be because you spent most of the game zoomed out I guess :/ The maps are too empty for a supposedly massive battle. On the other hand, you could have giant maps in TA that took 5 minutes to fly across, and you would still be annoyed by rubble. Especially when you tend to end up with far more rubble than living units by endgame if you didn't deal with them (which you should, or you would probably fall behind in resources). Don't know about SupCom, but TA allows you to set workers to patrol an area and automatically reclaim all wreckages. There's no need to manage it apart from a couple clicks at the start. Not as bad as you might think. It would simply make the rubble more noticeable, and as a result convince you to deal with it instead of ignoring it. For some reason that really reminds me of how the world deals with trash these days.
How about certain rubble can hinder troop movement in one of many ways. You can have multiple rubble types for example, based on what was destroyed A) Impassible B) Small unit movement speed reduction, impassible for vehicles C) Movement speed reduction for all D) Movement speed reduction for vehicles, no small unit movement speed reduction. By small unit I mean infantry-esque units. Slow-moving artillery vehicles/units can have more trouble with rubble then any other unit type, but can also use it as a defense.
It just really depends, I've had some games of FA where over the course of the game I'd build 2000+ units, others where I'd only build a few hundred, it's all situational, but big maps =/= empty maps. Yes, that can be done in SupCom too, but having the capacity to do something shouldn't force you to do it. It needs to be a choice; I Want to reclaim the wrecks around my base so so I have more resources to rebuild my army. I Want to reclaim wrecks so I have an Advantage over my opponent. Thats just too complex, wrecks already take more thought to properly identify because of how they look wrecked, and it gets worse when wrecks start building up and get clustered together. Also there won't be "units" as you describe them, tanks and tank sized bots. The closest I'd get to this idea is having a small selection of units having the ability to traverse terrain other units couldn't, like cliffs, steep hills or wreckage if they blocked movement, and of course it'd have to come at a cost. Mike
The question is; should wrecks block unit traffic or not? Total Annihilation has wrecks as impassible obstacles that had to be either blown up or reclaimed before you could walk pass, whereas Supcom wrecks can be walked straight through. On one hand you have the argument from the simulation side of things: these objects should impede progress because this sort of game is defined by its realism within the context of its own simulation. Generally TA had no arbitrary limiters, everything acted in the way it looked like it should. Supcom changed a few things arbitrarily for the sake of gameplay. On balance then is it better that wrecks act in the way the game says they should, or should they be arbitrarily altered to make the game flow better? Do we want "realistic" wrecks that could slow the game down and be frustrating, or do we want "unrealistic" wrecks that have no capacity to be used as strategic items but which allow our units to move in a way that is not frustrating?
I definitely liked that wreckage was impassible in TA... it made for interesting tactics / effects when the primary entrance to a base was littered with corpses... encouraging both alternative entry points, as well as providing a natural boost to defenses along that route.
Well, I know that big maps =/= empty maps, as I said, TA had huge maps that where absolutely littered. I just mean that no matter how many units I built on the average map in a realistic SupCom game (not just sitting around building units and not attacking for hours), it never felt crowded anywhere. Even though I had lots of units, it felt like I had an army of ants instead of an army of tanks (apart from the top tier units). I'm not saying this is bad in anyway, but it just didn't feel as grand as it claimed to be. Just like big maps =/= empty maps, big maps/lots of units =/= more epic. Even though the units may have been bigger, and had a larger difference in size relative to each other, I felt like TA was far more epic in scale than SupCom. I didn't mean that this is something that had to be done, I was just replying to someone else about how managing debris doesn't have to be a hassle (they said they didn't want to be distracted by it while focusing on asteroids), even if there is a lot of it. It just depends on whether the devs put a good way to deal with it in (like in TA and apparently SupCom). EDIT: Thanks to the thread that has a list of all confirmed features I found this: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3 It seems to imply that wreckage that actually blocks is in (at the very least, there is wreckage). This pretty much does it for me. I'm really anti-electronic money, but I do have a 50$ gift card lying around somewhere that someone gave me on my last birthday. I'll pay it up at kickstarter as soon as I find it.
I don't think I'd be a fan of wreckage fully blocking unit movement. But what about slowing down unit movement? Then pathfinding doesn't HAVE to take it into account, but it would be nice if it did. Also we could then have those special unit types that could travel through wrecks unhindered. Something like a second wave army.
Planes/satellites? Anyway, the net result of blocking movement is really more of slowing down travel than stopping it anyway. After all, you can walk around the wreck, but the more units destroyed, the longer it would take to get around. Plus, I'm sure there will be easy ways to remove it, especially considering you can make whole craters with a nuke. I doubt they will have things that can destroy planets easy, but not debris.
Well I've had and seen many a game in TA where armies would start clashing and wrecks would start building up and before either player knew it, we had to stop using land armies for awhile until we were able to clear some of the wrecks. It was cool, but it slowed the game down. Heck I remember in a LAN game a friend defended his base with Sumos. Well they died and none of us were able to get land past that stupid wall of wrecks from then on. Engineers would die to arty or PD before reclaiming it. So yes, at first with only a few wrecks on the battlefield it just slows army movement a bit. But before long it can grind movement to a complete halt. And you can't always just go around either as the maps would be the greatest judge of that. Even if you could, eventually you could fill up all of your routes to your enemy.
Well, I still play the occasional game on warzone (always somebody on there), and wrecks never gather up. Everyone has construction planes (or maybe farks) that patrol the area and gather up the metal before it gets to clogged. Actually, sometimes there are huge fights to gain control of the area just because of how useful the metal is. Think of it as limited resources from other games like Starcraft or Age of Empires, except the players are the ones who create the deposit. Though it's limited, it gives you far more than what you can gather through metal extractors. Watch a replay of a match, and you will see nobody ever leaves trees or wrecks around for long. Still, this has to do with TA, not PA. Not sure how they plan on using wreckages there at all. All thats really been confirmed is that they will be there, everything else (like whether they will block paths, which I assume yes because of the context of message replied to when they said there will be wreckages) are just assumptions. Actually, maybe they can even make an option that lets you choose whether they will block the way or not? That would be cool, though very hard to balance I guess.
Awesome! And yeah, to confirm, in TA, you could command your army to blast wreckage to smithereens to clear paths... I've done this many times to clear a path for a land-army mounting an attack on an enemy base (where a previous attack failed)
Please have wreckage blocking unit movement in. It was one of the great innovations of TA, and makes for very interesting emergent gameplay. Everyone for passable wreckage is obviously not a real fan.
