Dawn of War vs. Battlescape

[Sorrow]

Ok so im back, after a bit of a prolonged absense from these forums...

Ive been playing Dawn of War, and i must say i love it....also it seems to be one of the closest games too how you guys are trying to make "battlescape"...so a few questions/comparisions

DoW Features:
pro's
Shooting while moving
Squads
Hand to hand combat [Meele]
Cover bonuses
Unit types / weapon bonus's [not 100% happy about they way they have done this i'll explain after the cons]
con's
No real LOS
No random maps [like AoE/AoM]
No real Flying units
No fast attack [bikes ect] meele combat [drive by and give em a whack on your way past]
No Flying unit meele attacks

Shooting while moving:
In a game that has meele combat running and shooting becomes a must this is one of the things DoW has done exseptionly well and IMO is a must anyway.

Squads:
Squads is just a good idea, although they did take the idea from the TT game

Hand to hand combat [Meele]:
Hand to hand combat is somthing thats ushaly neglected in RTS games [all units should be able to do it wether they are carrying a gun or a sword]

Cover bonuses:
I know you guys are already going to inclue this one in battle scape and probly better then DoW has done it so i'll save my breath

Unit types / weapon bonus:
Although this feature serves it's perpous i think they should done it in a more traditional way..Make it have better armor pericing and stronger but way way slower, i think the TT has it done the right way Wep stregth vrs armor + unit strength [i think?].

No real LOS:
This is one of those features that everyone wanted and no-one got....aswell as LOS Freidnly fire should be added aftr all 2 carfully placed squads are worth far more then 10 poorly placed ones [think 2 squads on oppisite sides of a valley fireing down into 10 squads...oh the massacure from the crossfire would be beautifull ]

No random maps:
One of my alltime favorate features from the Age of * series was there random maps.....what can i say

No real flying units:
All units in DoW if they want to fly have to use the same thing that the assult marines use.....i hate it.

No fast attack [bikes ect] meele combat:
Another feature that is realy missing from DoW is bike units the only real reson for this is that there is no support for the kind of Meele a bike dose, passingby and taking a big swing...or rubbing them up aganst spikes.....

No Flying unit meele attacks:
This is much the same story as the last little comment i made... There needs to be support for "Dive bombing" if you are going to have real flying units...

Thats it for now. i have lots of ideas for all of these things but i don't like making 100 page posts without knowing if people are realy intereted or not....so yea

DoW is the only game that even comes close to what you guys are wanting to make Battlescape...you should aim to beat DoW which wont be hard for you guys

[Doom III]

what is tt?

i think friendly fire would be a bad idea. it happens unfortunatly in real life but so what? this is a game. if your own troops start to kill each other it will get annoying real quick.

some of dows features sound cool, and i would love to see them in battlescape. i dont think they should be too obsessed with feature lists (like every other developer out there). does any know the size of warhammer dows team vs moonpod? the important things for me are the gameplay itself - line of sight, cover bonusses and lots of time to balance the units are the thing i pick from your list. also realize moonpod are able to make updates (well, they do many with starscape, so maybe i am assuming too much here, but i hope they will) so if they get the basic gameplay perfect (or even just good) to start with, they will have the best foundation to build on.

random maps are nice, but no use unless the game is fun, and a lot of rts games these days have just become a game to drag your army around the map (why else would so many people still play total annihilation). my best hope for battlescape is a game that does not work in such.

i keep saying i play dawn of war again but never get a chance. the demo sucked and lots of the times i tried it the troopers were always running around like headless chickens when they found an enemy they attack but they keep running past it.

i know - it will be my problem and i need to spend more time with it. i should probably just buy it

[Weeble]

[smerles]

Friendly fire would be a bad idea, I can imagine that this would steal a lot of the gameplay dynamic. Also I've never seen a game with friendly fire
Give us a link to "Dawn of War"

[Fost]

[icarus]

i was born on 2/26/1980 making me 24years old </scarcasim>

[Sorrow]

TT is Table top, Dawn of War is a Warhammer 40,000 game..

DoW has certain weapons doing better aganst one unit type then the other EG a LASCannon will do alot of damage to a tank but takes about 2 shots to kill an infantry unit....in the TT version a LASCannon will have a haredtime NOT killing a heavily armored spacemarine while it has a decent chance to do damage to a tank.

Adding in alot of these things isnt all that difficult, Close combat is granted....but friendlyfire is easy, all moonpod has to do it make each bullet/projectile an Object[struct/class] and have a collision check for all units, this would also be eaily dissabled for people who don't want to play with FF

IMO DoW has set a new standard or what i consider a new standard for RTS, it will always be the one i will hold up and compair the new RTS's too, much the same as i do with RPG's and Morrowind

Battlescape will be a good game even if it dosn't have more /better done features then DoW, so don't get me wrong i still look forward to it , i would just love to see it become one of the greats [not that im saying it can't without these features]

[Fost]

I have to say: I'm with everyone else on the friendly fire thing - what exactly be the benefit (gameplay-wise I mean) of having it?

Perhaps it's best if you explained a situation where it would arise, or where special tactics would need to be employed to avoid it happening?

Although - I could see something along similar lines working - some kind of Jacob's Ladder style killcrazy drug, administered to squads so they have heightened battle awareness - but are then best kept away from other squads because they pretty much kill anything in their path.

EDIT - Actually - I've been thinking along the lines of squads of troopers with friendly fire (which seemed to me a little pointless), but of course, area effect weapons fired into melee combat could have friendly fire issues that might be interesting.

The big problem, is not making your own weapons kill your own team, but putting that under any kind of sensible control. Rts units are of course, semi-autonomous, and so (under most orders) if artillery units see things, they will fire. If you've got units nearby and ff is enabled - it would be pretty nasty, I would imagine people would then tell us that the AI in the game sucked

[Sorrow]

FF would add another element to stradegy, you wouldn't just be able to march 20 squads stright in from one direction youd have to fan them out and think a bit more about it first

it's an easyly added feature if you have things like "crossfire" in the game [bullets been more then just pretty effects , they acctuly travel through the air and make contact with enemy units] ...

Crossfire
Good LOS
Cover bonus
High map

are the 4 things that i would absultly love to see in an RTS [some of them have had one or the other but noones put them all in before]

[smerles]

[Darth Dallas]

For artillery units, especially once you knew how they performed, I think it would be cool where (if you wanted to avoid suffering friendly casualties), when you click on the unit and you target a spot to send a barrage (yet before you actually fire), you see a circle represented on the map reflecting the expected blast radius to be for your form of artillery round being used.

Thing is, maybe you have units barely holding their ground, and you feel the sacrafice of them for that position is warranted if you had like...a backup squad to advance in their place afterward.

[Fost]

We will have different orders you can give units, although I forget what we had decided on last. We actually went through a similar internal discussion when thinking about nukes (or equivalent, high power, one shot missiles). You wouldn't want them released just because a single trooper moved into view . So they might actually be best off being targeted by the user. However, you just can't do that with every unit, the unit AI has to take care of it, and your role should be about giving orders and positioning units where they can be most effective.

It's a pretty big issue that adding certain things that some people might consider make sense, actually just result in many people complaining about AI - usually as soon as something negative happens through no fault of the end user (like units taking the slowest path even though the destination made sense.)

I can almost see how splash damage from certain weapons could work with ff, but I'm still pretty skeptical about it - artillery will open fire on anything they see (or again, you are back to people saying things like: 'There's an entire army approaching, and the artillery just sat there doing nothing!! The AI sucks!') so what happens if enemies poor out of the trees to fight your troops, and are within range of artillery - good bye your troops, hello 'This AI sucks'

If you have further ideas about it that might get round such issues, then it would be cool to hear them - it's an interesting topic the idea of which I find appealing, if not perhaps any ideas for implementation that spring to my mind.

[Sorrow]

Implement diffrent "fire modes"
Ruthless [Just shoot ask questions later]
Cautious [checks to see if fireing will harm a friendly unit and if it dose see if there is anywhere it can move that won't]
Stay put [Only fires if they have a clear shot, dosn't move to get a better angle]

That way you can say, "no it's not the ai, it's the way your using it"

It all comes down to how you handle the Shooting process realy, if each bullet handles and looks after itself then all it would take is a global bool and a pointer on each bullet pointing from it's sorce, which you qwould have anyway if you where having unit "experience" [didn't you guys say you where having Vet unit's ect?]....Otherwise your doing the shooting like starcraft.....Unit pointer to an enemy unit then a timed effect/damage rofl......

[Fost]

Again, I get what you are saying, and this might come up a bit more when we get fully into unit orders, but I'm not totally convinced - I'd guess (and it is a guess - hard to say without testing) that ruthless mode wouldn't actually be something anyone would bother using - do you want to lose units? yes/no? Well, no of course!

Btw: nothing is ever as simple as you describe from the point of view of programming games You've already added another order set to the game to back up the idea of having ff in the first place - not that I'm saying that's wrong (you need to look at any feature and see how to get the best from it, how long that will take, then stack it up against everything else) - just that there's always gameplay knock on effects, that mean you end up doing more work to make an initially simple feature work as well as it can. Anyone remember the 'simple' Aegis mining laser feature for Starscape? that apparently only needed another turret with some flag set so that it only attacked turrets and not enemies. Then it needed normal turrets to avoid shooting asteroids and concentrate on enemy ships, then the HUD turret firing icon needed to be off when mining. Lately people want the Aegis to put more effort into avoiding gems so they don't get crushed on the hull, or to be proactive in mining out a level. You get the picture anyway

I definitely think we'll give the idea some consideration now though - it would certainly be worth trying out some test cases as we'd have a better gauge of what would be fun then and what extra might be needed. Of course, Poo Bear is better qualified than myself to talk about such things.

[Sorrow]

Alot of my projects have gone to dust because of major feature changes/additions stuffing up exsisting code and just stop working all together.....ugg, editing code is a nightmare it realy comes down to doing a solid design and sticking too it [always been hard for me...sticking too a design that is, i always get bigger better ideas half-way through....]

The method i tried to exsplain in my last post would be to handle the shooting more like a FPS would unit has X gun and "fires" which makes a bullet object which has a trajectory speed ect... i personly have no idea what kind of systems yous are using for battlescape..

Don't forget this is me analizing DoW and putting it up aganst the Battlescape design.......FF/Crossfire is only 1 of the features i would love to see in here out of the ones ive mentioned in pervious posts...Battlescape is still the RTS i am waiting for....it's a must have RTS