I love designing maps And I know the pros and cons to bolth methods. However Empires Is a game Of Few bounderies And deserves More options for resource collection. Which is more Fun, A Dot to dot, or an open canvase?
A dot to dot, obviously. An open canvas would be repetative, which is why all FPS games use a series of dots (rooms) connected together by lines (doorways and/or corridors, or better yet, more rooms). RTS games usually use some sort of island setup, either land surrounded by water, or by cliffs, or by canyons, or forests, but it's still dots connected by lines. If you think that you can actually make a game fun if you take out the need to fight over specific locations, I think you haven't been paying any attention to what makes a successful game, and also that you aren't very good at designing maps, regardless of how much you may like doing it.
They should be disallowable in maps, if they're implemented at all. It's like the metal world maps in Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander's predecessor. They were fun to play because you didn't need to hunt and peck for metal deposits in order to get a decent income. You could just plant a refinery-equivalent anywhere and it'd work at full capacity. All the fun was in the trouble of getting to your opponent's base. They were often maze-styled maps. However, there were also plenty of ordinary maps, which were often more open, though not always. Also, the resource fabrication in SC and TA are heavily reliant on there being multiple resources. It takes a while to make a decent economy out of those buildings, and it's very expensive, so they aren't useful until later in the game. Likewise, having these buildings in Empires might be useful as a sort of backup for refineries; they're too expensive to use as actual resource gatherers, but good as temporary stand-ins if you're involved in a protracted tank battle and most of the refineries for both teams have been blown up.
Ok, let me end this before you people get it too high up in your head: This is not a bold idea, this is a bad idea, it completely negates any strategy that is in Empires. If you want your resource generators, make a map and add buildable resource generators using flags, but don't try to make them buildings. In case you hadn't noticed, we're short on modelers, and such buildings would decrease performance ingame enormously, since they'll be farmed and would probably contain more polygons per model because you want details.
Instead of "Generating" resources why not have a building that just lowers the cost... say like... a steel mill. One building effective only and it lowers build cost by say 5-15% but, the building is half as strong as a barracks, same size as a radar, and costs ~900. Sabotage turns its savings off. pros: cheaper heavys! SPEW FORTH THE CHEEP LT'S!! 5-15% savings Cons: Winning team is more likely to keep one while loosing team can't make one.
Sorry about ignoring the entirety of the thread after this point, but I thought up an awesome idea for a 'gamemode'. Large wilderness map, thick forests that are hard to see through, but vehicles are still able to move through it. One team gets a full base ready to make as many troops and tanks as they need, it's also impossible to breach. The opposing side, starts with the comm, 2 apcs, and a couple of tanks. The running team, gets a much much smaller VF, and radar, and all of their structures are much cheaper, faster to build, but also very very fragile [we're talking, 2-3 grenadier rockets]. Their focus is to survive for X minutes, and they gain res for each APC they have, being able to build more as they produce makeshift VFs, possibly with small fragile generators that are easily hidden, but destroyed by mere bullets. Anyway, if the hiding team work together well, the idea has potential for epic forst fights. Maybe the map could have certain areas which are too thick for vehicles, or even a bunch of pathways, where ambushes can happen in an instant. Yes, with a poor team, this would fail immensely, but played with a good group [12~ good players] it would be really fun, with ambushes popping out of the woods, the CV skidding off the road into a ditch to avoid grenadier shots, while everyone disembarks off the apc and opens fire on the ambushers. An LT skids around the next bend in the forest road and opens fire at the now stuck CV, seeing his plight, one of the APC drivers parks himself in the line of trajectory and opens fire upon the tank with grenades. The LT gets knocked out, and the now wounded but surviving Brenodi push the CV back on the road, and drive off into the forest. Think about it, you could have roadblocks that get smashed open by CVs, and once air units get added, there could be a non-shooting aircraft that gets used as a spotter. How awesome would it be to just duck in the woods as a scout hovers just a few metres above your squad... :D *sigh* now I KNOW it's never gunna happen P.S. Vess, stop Putting random caps In your sentences Please?
spamming could be reduced by space and over reliance reduced by vunerability - imagine a small structure that lays out up to 4 'wings' of solar cells (or some empiresy collecting of solar gumph thats not solar cells), depending on space available to it, each wing needing about the size of a radar, or maybe an armoury (depending on how well it balances). With full wing spread its only 1/8 or 1/4 of a 1 res refinery say. With that, if you want to spend your (50 or so per pop?) res on something that can last say 1 rpg for a wing of solar cells or as much as a turrent for the main part and can go off in a near chain reaction (depending on balance) then you need a fairly decently secure area for a farm. The mapper can put in choke points, without which theres no sense in a farm - but there may be sense in hidding one or two of these things about. If you farm lots then one arty shot or someone finding the farm and you lose a load of res flow. I don't think its inherrently bad, just maybe tricky to do right. The difficulty in making it a map based alternative is that it becomes less up to the commander (in that it isnt) and can't be placed in any areas of sufficient space. Hmm, actually, is there a way of counting a certain type of structure and awarding res on the basis of the number held? say each team gets a flag off of the map area somewhere and the number is adjusted to give res flow equal to a conditional counting thing? main problem is that it probably can't be done, combined with the lack of non-integer income rates on flags and refineries - say if you gave 1 res per tick for each armoury then that'd be hugely overkill, even if armoury health were reduced. (can (for example) armoury health be reduced by a map based entity? i guess not) If someone can say how it could be done nicely, I'll add it to the map based list of things to add to my 'I'll never finish it' map with forcefields and maybe a superweapon.
This dusscussion is about finding more options. and the boldness is I knew from the start I'd get posts like yours.
It doesn't matters how you look at it, having non-fixed position resource gathering buildings will break the game.
We have explained why it is bad, do not simply pick one sentence, quote it out of context, and then use it to claim our posts are invalid. Because I will become irked if you do.
I have to agree with Solokiller. Needing to capture and protect resource nodes is pretty much the only thing that prevents a team from digging in and never coming out beyond the line of their turret farm. Having an endless supply of resources without owning a single res point would encourage such tactics, where the only counter is a rush to Arty. Resources are an integral part of the game, and should not be messed around with. We already see what high multipliers do to the flow of gameplay on custom servers *cough*mittoes*cough*. Just imagine that combined with a fact that you won't need to move an inch from your starting position. Making the res generators into researcheable technology won't work either, since one of two things will happen: If the cost of this research is low, after the initial rush to get this tech researched, the comms would forgo any further expansion and concentrate on farming. Or... If the cost is high and pushes this research to mid to late game, this punishes the losing team since they cannot afford it, while making it even easier for the winning team to steamroll over the entire map.
Well What other methods of resource collection could we add to the current system? There needs to be more options
It's really up to the mappers at this point. If you so desire, you could create a map with 1000 res points, but how is that different from just setting the res multiplier to 20x on your server?
No there doesn't. We have one resource, most RTS games do fine on one resource, usually money, and one way of collecting it, usually harvesting. This isn't even a full RTS game, it's mostly an FPS game.
We can fix that by making them expensive and give them a much slower rate of production than the norml ref, we could also make the next mini generator built more expensive than the one built before, discouraging spamming. They should be large and tall, making them occupy a large amount of space and easier to be rocket sniped, like the nf barracks. And as said before, destroying it should cause a large explosion, starting a chain reaction, destroying a cluster of these generators quickly.
If they are expensive to build, slow to produce, and too big to fit anywhere, why would anyone waste their precious resources to build such a structure? Forget getting more resources, this thing might not even pay for itself! I have to agree with Chris here. Why do you feel that there needs to be more resource gathering options? A large part of vehicles' balance relies on the resource flow. Once you start messing with it, the vehicle costs become irrelevant.
Your the only person that wants turtling to work in empires Once you get bunkers and res generators then your going to want nukes and blimbs
