Basic unit types?

[Degraine]

I recall reading somewhere on this board about the various types of basic vehicle/unit frames that were going to be available in the game for customisation. IIRC, they were:

Light & heavy wheeled
Light & heavy tracked
Small & large airframe
Infantry

Obviously, with the introduction of the Talos, this has changed a bit. Come to think of it, we haven't even seen the wheeled vehicles at all. So, is there going to be a 'small' mech variant to match the Talos? A quadruped 'all terrain' style mech for negotiating otherwise impassable areas, for example?

And what of APCs? Are they a third variant of wheeled vehicles, or just the vanilla version of light (or heavy!) tracked vehicles? I'm wondering if the former option would make it easier to attach an APC to a squad for transport purposes, but I don't know if you're even far along enough yet to be experimenting with intelligent automation like that.

[Poo Bear]

So far the list is still the same with the addition of the single mech "frame".

All squads are mechanised i.e. infantry always have some kind of vehicle to get in and out of.

Getting in and out of vehicles is handled automatically.

APC's are just tank or truck frames with most of the armour and weapons stripped out to make room for troops.

[Degraine]

Ahhh! Thank you for the prompt reply. That answers my questions, mostly, although now I have another one about APCs. You say those're automatically assigned to infantry squads, which is simpler than what I was envisioning. Are the APCs customisable at all? Or will there be preset configurations you can assign to a squad (first level, minimal armour and speed, with increasing values - and cost - for either/both as you go up [and other possible upgrades like gun ports])? Of course, if you're just going to have one APC type only for simplicity's sake, I can see the sense in that too. :)

[Poo Bear]

Hopefully all units will be customisable, so for example, you decide you want some infantry in your army so you select a specific squad type i.e. scouts. The people and equipment are drawn into your current army from the reserves, they will automatically have an initial setup and be reasonably constrained in the options and upgrades avaialble (so they always look/feel like scouts). When you go on a mission they will be waiting and available for assignment.

So you would automatically get something like 6 guys, a light wheeled jeep and they would be outfitted with rifles, binocs and no body armour. So you are getting a large initial cover bonus, range and speed. If you can rack up some XP with them then a reasonable selection of options would be available i.e. things like body armour, sniper rifles, camo gear, weapons for the jeep, maybe an upgrade to a light tank. With a bare vehicle you might be able to increase the size of the squad to 8, or if you max out the vehicle mods you might only have room for 4 soldiers.

It should all be about choice and appropriate consequences with everything ballanced by the cost of the squad. So it isn't the case that the longer you play the harder your units get the more of an advantage you get. That happens in a lot of games and it either means your units become god like and it is a walk over or the enemies become ridiculously hard forcing you to use super units. In our case enhanced XP results in more options in your customisation of squads, but if you choose to make them harder then they will cost more and you get to take less of them with you. So do you want 15 cheap squads or 5 squads of well equipped veteran superheroes, hopefully either choice is valid.

[icarus]

does light wieled mean jeep?

[Poo Bear]

yes, though it might not end up looking like any jeep you would recognize, it really just means something with 4 wheels capable of holding ~6 people I suppose.

[icarus]

i was hoping for a warthog ish jeep

[Ixian]

What would be good, would system a bit like Impossible creatures (a horrible horrible game) where you could select different parts (well genes in IC's case) combining them on a chassis, and haing more info about your creation than StarScape (speed, firepower at different distances, armour, sensor range, speed and health) This would mean if you have a mech with a railgun ( or something like a sniper rifle) and no sensor unit, it either cant fire at long range, or is more innacurate.

Speed would be made more important by having "bullets" not just firing and hit animations. This would mean a fast vehicle would be able to dodge slow moving rockets, but the tradeoff would be that (hopefully) the warthogesque gun on the back would be horribly inaccurate.

For certain chassis types passenger modules would also be cool.

Edit: The ability to save the unit types you create would very usefull

[icarus]

you should be able to have non mechanized squads (cheeper)

also you nead a small mech

whatever happened to this

[Fost]

[Ixian]

Even for humans you should still be able to use different armours etc. If anyone has played Alpha Centauri, you could chose the chassiss and weapons and armour along with a genarator and any other objects which gave special abilities. You still need non-mechanized troops, to maintain a balance and to be representative of militia or the like. Also if terrain does get used actively (higher up units get a bonus) Infantry should be able to either hide or get a defense bonus from hiding in trees. Huge Battle mechs, should be slowed down in cover, but be able to walk over rocks or small cliffs, which infantry can't move over, this would mean infantry is still a viable choice, with unarmoured, heavy anti-tank armed infantry springing an ambush on a tank convoy.

[icarus]

[Fost]

[OvermindDL1]

Have you all heard of WarZone 2100? The company went under shortly after its release, as did the games' production, but it is one of the finest RTS's I've seen. You can customize your units, weapons, chassis, motion, etc... all in real-time and done in a very easy and simple to use manner. You havn't been able to buy it in years from what I've seen, might be able to get it at underdog. I have one of the original cd prints. Just get all the patches and go, might want to model after its design.

[Fost]