65 replies to this topic

[Casen]

Why the fuck would you want a GENERIC BUILD SYSTEM as apposed to an entirely unique system which works better anyway? Thats what I really wanna ask EALA.

A retarded person is unique...but they're still retarded. =)

[Beowulf]

A retarded person is unique...but they're still retarded. =)

So what does that make you? Uniquely retarded?

[Phil]

I thought the exact same thing when reading Kacen's post. Pretty unfortunate choice of words.

[Bart]

"Building anywhere" is not conducive to making a good strategy game. Most of the better games have avoided that entirely.

true! BFME 1's build system is much more fun than BFME 2's build anywhere

maybe just farms should've been build-anywhere in 1 as well

[ambershee]

"Building anywhere" is not conducive to making a good strategy game. Most of the better games have avoided that entirely.

true! BFME 1's build system is much more fun than BFME 2's build anywhere

maybe just farms should've been build-anywhere in 1 as well

Totally agree. Personally, I feel restricted building promotes a unique awareness of your positional situation, adaptation to which can be a key to winning. Allowing the ability to build anywhere removes this - once you have your first structure, you can just roll on over to a better spot for everything else. However - if you're can only construct in a key location, you're forced to actually think about your situation; and formulate a series of tactics to adapt. Allowing an expensive and limited form of relocating (such as the MCV) allows for a risky, strategic move, that can potentially make or break a game.

BfME 1's system worked really well too - games like Generals and BfME2 suffer from the same thing - a big, usually empty terrain within which forces will convoy across the middle. The rest of the space serves no purpose whatsoever, and might as well not exist. When you offer a series of points that are critical to hold and control, a strategy needs to be adopted in order to facilitate control and capture. Company of Heroes probably did this in the best way I've seen so far; each point is required to generate a particular resource, but points that are not connected to the main territory do not generate the resource (they're cut off). This means risker, non-linear capture sequences can often pay off, resulting in less effort than the direct approach.

Either way, I can't wait for the industry to realise there's more to 'strategy' than wargames where you gain resources and build units to attack enemy structures :|

[Casen]

Idiots above me.

[True Lord of Chaos]

No, you're the idiot.

[Casen]

No, you're the idiot.

[Casen]

Having only one build location makes the game boring. No outposts, no large bases, no awesome fortresses, just two locations of focus for an entire map. For idiots who like games to be fast and unfun. Typical Command & Cocksuck players.

[Beowulf]

Then go the fuck away, you whiny cunt. Jesus fucks, do you have no concept of strategy or thought? or is every game just LOLIMMASPAMTANKS!

[Casen]

C&C is just that; spamtanks. Also that's completely irrelevant to the point I'm making.

[Ash]

What he forgets is he's been playing games like Warzone 2100 and Supreme Commander. Both excellent games IMO, but the key differences in them (and with Warzone in particular) are terrain and scale. C&C games operate on much smaller maps, and don't confer terrain advantages as much as Warzone. F'rexample, in Warzone, resources are generated by capturing oil points using derricks and building power plants to refine them. So long as both these things are going, you constantly generate resource.
In Supreme Commander, you get mass in much the same way, but power is effectively unlimited and so therefore is mass.

Warzone maps usually take place in mountainous canyons and/or on plateaux that limit your movement. Defending choke points and shooting over them with artillery therefore becomes a piece of cake, while application of force to breach each choke point, followed up using your own trucks to build your stuff where the enemy's used to be, is the order of the day. But you have to remember that Warzone's a much slower paced game, designed to be played out over a matter of hours. If an RTS could be said to be like chess, Warzone'd be it. Also, while you have a limited aerial ability later on (VTOLs), 95% of everything you do will be done with tanks. Cyborgs are a waste of money. So are VTOLs until you get VTOL Lancers or Tank Killers and then you must spam them for them to be any use...

On the other hand, SupCom is attempting to be the full military campaign played across a single ginormous map. The problem is, it usually fails to have maps with detail. BIIIG empty spaces, BIIIG open plains or waterways...it NEEDS the ability to build anywhere, otherwise, nobody'd bother to move or do much. Also remember how weak and piddly everything except T2 defences and super units is in SupCom. If you didn't build everywhere, you wouldn't have anything anywhere after a single sustained assault.

Truth be told, both Warzone and SupCom are about as spammy as a C&C game.
A common WZ2100 player tactic on the campaign is to wait until the game timer's at like 30 seconds before finally destroying that last structure to maximise the amount of oil produced, because everything is persistent between missions - you can hoard and hoard when you're on a mission away from home base and then build and build later.

And don't get me started on Hypervelocity Cannon-Python-Tracks or Retribution-Pulse Laser-Hovers. Suffice to say, that's all you EVER need to produce, except the odd artillery turret and a radar on a hill. Or, you can just build a fuckton of artillery on that hill with a radar and have the enemy base reduced to rubble without doing anything except build...


While SupCom...the whole point is to spam, since what construed a 'good-sized force' in any other game is just a small isolated cluster of units. And that's the only way to get past T2 defences, is to flood them with shitty units and good units and hope it targets the shitty ones first so the good ones can hit it that bit harder.

Explain to me how that latter point is any different than the *standard* C&C player's bum-rush technique? C&C is played on much smaller maps with more aesthetic appeal than practical worth. The resource is deposited in fields which aren't designed to be 'captured' but fought over as they dwindle and wither. You're lucky if there's a derrick or two handy to provide a constant trickle when the main stuff runs out. I would say that induces more fighting and interaction between two opponents than being able to sit there getting fat on resources behind your mighty wall of lancer bunker/T2 (delete as appropriate) defences while still being able to crank out billions of units, a la Warzone 2100 and SupCom.

Yes, it's true that a lot of the map is ignored, but that's true of any RTS. Even in Warzone, why would you go down a path if there was no reason to? Don't say it as if it's limited only to C&C - it isn't.

It's basically down to the style of game. I will agree that everything C&C including and after Generals has sucked more balls than a drug-crazed whore, but I don't agree that build-anywhere did Generals any good at all, nor would it have done any good for older C&Cs. I don't think it would've suited C&C3 or RA3 to go down the build-anywhere route, either. I would tend to agree with Ambershee's last sentence, however I would argue, what else can you do with the genre?

[Casen]

Ash is partially right, fact is I just think games like CNC are just lowbrow and really simplistic as RTS's.

However when I refer to spammy I mean being able to win a battle with gobs of units, and that is was CNC basically is. Little strategy involved whatsoever. Supcom, and by extant, Warzone 2100, being that they allow you to build anywhere and have good defenses (Expecially Warzone 2100...holy shit.), it forces you to adopt other tactics rather than simply rushing the enemy. For instance defenses can get psychotically heavy in WZ2100, I've seen entire batallions of heavy tanks being chopped to pieces by turrets, so you're forced to find a way "around".

For instance, a group of fast attack vehicles with bunker busters. Blow a few holes in the walls and swarm your units in from the side. The walls in CNC are practically useless.

Supcom is another example, ffs I've made psychotically huge numbers of T3 units and multiple experimentals as well and still couldn't get them through the defenses. The game takes A LOT of thinking.

It's just from my experience CNC is more rush rush rush topped off by a heavy storyline and campy cutscenes, I see it as...can't find the right term, but hiding rather mundane gameplay with a "funny/campy" storyline and such. The Red Alert series is most guilty of this. I like Supcom and WZ2100 because rather than focusing on campy units and such it focuses on gameplay and strategy. Though even then Supcom had the chance to put in great cutscenes, while WZ2100 left you feeling...quite alone, but I liked it however. I just think CNC is overrated. I can name many other things that are overrated that piss me off, but I won't so as to not get off topic.

I'm sorry I exploded but I'm not in the best of moods.

Though Ash really got it right about map size: I hate RTS games with small maps.

Also when you say T1 units are weak that's relative; it's only weak if other people are using higher. It's all matched out. Pay close attention!

Edited by Kacen, 09 December 2008 - 12:01 PM.

[Ash]

To be fair, T1 units vs T1 units is a case of 'everything explodes pathetically after 1 hit'.

I would personally have preferred them to take a bit more of a beating, since they lack the opportunity to deal any damage. I appreciate this is fairly realistic for aerial units, but it ends up being pointless to produce all except torpedo bombers.

And WZ2100 does get spammy. The aforementioned HPV pythons and pulse lazer hover tanks attest to this.

WZ2100 is a turtle's paradise. So is SupCom. I think C&C differs in that it tries not to be. Where the former two are slow-paced long games, C&C is a quick-fix explosionfest. I do agree with you about walls, defences, resource gathering and base-building. Believe me, I can see where you're coming from, but I've yet to see an RTS which doesn't, to a greater or lesser extent, fall into these traps in one way or another. Maybe Dawn of War or World in Conflict are the ones which fall into it least, but every game, and every player, fall somewhere on the continuum of rush/turtle, and if you spam enough of virtually any unit in any game and it becomes powerful. As Stalin said, quantity has a quality all of its own.

It's not even as if a mix of the two basebuilding methods is a good idea, as RA3 proved quite unequivocally.

[Casen]

Warzone 2100 is a turtlers paradise I will attest to that, but I'm a turtler, I have a fetish for big bases. There were occasions where 1/3rd of the maps in WZ were literally my base. =)

That's why I hate CNC...no freedom for fortress building. Just dumb pathetic bases, walls that could barely be called walls.

Now, Supcom not so much a turtling game, the shields maybe, but the walls are as pathetic as the CNC walls, and the defenses are no where near as good as WZ2100.

[Casen]

Though honestly the psychotic artillery makes up for turtling in both WZ2100 and Supcom...well okay in WZ2100 there are counter-battery towers. >_>;

[Ash]

Dude, if you build Angel missiles you can essentially fuck up everyone's shit without even trying. Get some of those in a nice spot on the map and they'll destroy the base for you. It's cool, it's realistic, but it's a little dull.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE WZ2100. Me and Apollo have played it online loads.

SupCom defences...yeah. T2 defences + shields = turtle master. The only thing that limits, and not even for very long, is the prohibitively long build time for the engineer units (since the ACU can't build defences...)

[Casen]

ACU can build anything with upgrades.

[ambershee]

Dude, if you build Angel missiles you can essentially fuck up everyone's shit without even trying. Get some of those in a nice spot on the map and they'll destroy the base for you. It's cool, it's realistic, but it's a little dull.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE WZ2100. Me and Apollo have played it online loads.

SupCom defences...yeah. T2 defences + shields = turtle master. The only thing that limits, and not even for very long, is the prohibitively long build time for the engineer units (since the ACU can't build defences...)

SupCom is even worse with tier 3 artillery. 1xT3 Generator, 1xT2 Stealth Generator, 1xT3 Artillery.

Since you can build that anywhere, I usually build four sets. With enough engineers, you can knock it together in minutes, and still have plenty of mass left over for large quantities of T1/2 units to keep the enemy occupied with pointless rushes, so that they don't notice your uber-range rapid-fire super weapons tucked away in that obscure corner of somewhere.

This is of course, assuming you didn't just use a T1 bomber rush and wipe the enemy ACU in the first five-ten minutes of the game, as normally happens in most games I've played. Air defenses can't be built fast enough to save him, unless you know it's coming.

[OmegaBolt]

Ive never understood the point of destroying the enemy as fast as possible. It makes the game pointless, because you never get to play it.