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OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

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Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#191

Post by fivestarman »

DantesKite wrote: post #150

Very cool. I think so many of the best games evolve randomly and unexpectedly while top down control from developers has stifled game play. Not against developers protecting their IP. Do what you gotta do to make money. But I enjoy seeing open source games giving players the ability to edit and improve game systems. I think back to how many times Nintendo has shut down Super Smash Melee edits, how many hours of skill…

League of legends. I stopped playing that game in 2017 after playing a couple of years. I couldn't stand the game changing every other month.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#192

Post by dragontamer »

mactrey wrote: post #134
dragontamer wrote: post #4

Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack. * Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and instant-killed b…

Starcraft I also discouraged death balls of ground units with the terrible pathing..

I dunno if that's an explicit discouragement though.

Pathing in the 90s was all sorts of bad for all games except Civilization (because there's no collision detection in Civ, so... all units just walk on top of each other).

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#193

Post by dragontamer »

glenstein wrote: post #169
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Civ 1/2 you definitely DID NOT kill all stack of units if you killed one. I played them both a lot (and actually prefer them to newer installments), so I know for sure.

Also not how I remembered it, although my experience is from Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri. There are a bunch of people who don't have this experience so I wonder what's going on.

You're talking to a lot of players who likely only played on Chieftan AI levels: where the enemy AI would rarely meet you in the field and often times only retreat to cities. Even then, they would rarely try to stack-kill the player. It was always possible, but since the easy-AI never attacked in such a manner, the mechanic was basically irrelevant on easy/Chieftan mode.

On more difficult AI levels (Prince or Emperor), the AI would meet you in the field, and you'd have to worry about stack kills. And also worry about cheating AIs who just had more resources than you...

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#194

Post by hjek »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #144
hjek wrote: post #23

OpenRA is currently my favourite free/libre computer game. They've done a fabulous job at keeping the feeling of the original game while updating things like cross-platform support, screen resolution and network play and added build queues (and waypoints, I believe) that was present in later C&C games. They've also tweaked the game play, making thieves able to hijack vehicles and cloak (They are probably the most fun…

Not to get political, but your last paragraph implies there's nothing worth fighting for. To paraphrase John Ringo, I desire peace, but I require liberty. War is waste - but the only thing worse than war is loss of liberty.

> Not to get political, but your last paragraph implies there's nothing worth fighting for.

Do you really believe I'm arguing that there's nothing worth fighting for when I write that: "We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders"?

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#195

Post by bmn__ »

dragontamer wrote: post #188
bmn__ wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair? Mu. An experienced game designer should have the perspective here that this part of the game is just a tedious bore. 1. The computer can calculate the optimal placement of citizens in a fraction of a second, and a micromanaging human will never exceed the best results. He can only find the…

#1 is correct, but #2 is wrong. During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time) The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement. But it only works if the human gives it the right goals. Even w…

> but #2 is wrong

Nonsense, it's been that way since Civ 1. Demo (Freeciv 2.6.4): https://files.catbox.moe/3af6xu.webm

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#196

Post by dragontamer »

bmn__ wrote: post #195
dragontamer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is correct, but #2 is wrong. During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time) The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement. But it only works if the human gives it the right goals. Even w…

> but #2 is wrong Nonsense, it's been that way since Civ 1. Demo (Freeciv 2.6.4): https://files.catbox.moe/3af6xu.webm

When two cities are close to each other, only __one__ of those cities can get the good tile.

Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.

Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.

Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.

-----

Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.

Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#197

Post by dragontamer »

rcxdude wrote: post #164
munk-a wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SC2 having larger groups has allowed a different focus of micro though - stutter-stepping marines is a tactic that was out of reach of most players in SC1 but an absolute necessity in SC2 and the addition of unit abilities has decreased the utility of giganto deathballs - the micro is still very much a requirement.

Not to mention AoE attacks making splits important, as well as melee units still requiring careful setup of engagements for success. SC2 is extremely micro intensive, especially for how fast it is (in fact I dislike how heavily weighted it is towards success), and it feels a lot less like you're spending your APM fighting the game and your own units and more like you're helping your own units against your opponent's…

SC:BW still had AoE attacks, arguably more important ones too.

Nuke and Psi Storm exist in both games, but Plague, Irradiate, Ensnare, Stasis Fields are all AoE effects... as well as AoE damage sources (Tanks, Archons, Valkyries, Devourers, and kinda-sorta Mutalisks).

-------

Lets put it this way: if you really wanted to, you could just have 12-units per group in SC2. But no one would do that, the APM-advantage of having a big group (and manually splitting in the rare cases where a split is needed) is far superior than using 9 groups to split up 108 units.

And sure, stronger players probably split their death-balls into smaller groupings of maybe 30 units or so (you don't want to just A-move all over the place, a degree of flexibility is useful), and only occassionally merges everyone together into a deathball. (Fast and loose is good: you don't want to dedicate an entire army to a battle, especially if they might lose).

But no one is making groups of ~12 in SC2. Its too small.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#198

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

dragontamer wrote: post #193
glenstein wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not how I remembered it, although my experience is from Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri. There are a bunch of people who don't have this experience so I wonder what's going on.

You're talking to a lot of players who likely only played on Chieftan AI levels: where the enemy AI would rarely meet you in the field and often times only retreat to cities. Even then, they would rarely try to stack-kill the player. It was always possible, but since the easy-AI never attacked in such a manner, the mechanic was basically irrelevant on easy/Chieftan mode. On more difficult AI levels (Prince or Emperor…

I always played civ 1&2 only on hardest levels.

Now, thinking of this further, i think I might misremember this because I've never let my stacks be attacked in the field.

Best tactics is to drive tanks via railroads up to the city (sometimes building them in the fly using a ton of settlers in one move) and attack it with 20+ tanks and then move in 10 mech infantry for defence, and I used fortresses extensively.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#199

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

dragontamer wrote: post #98
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civ1, Civ2, Civ2 Call to Power, all suffered from stacked unit insta-kill glitch that OP mentioned. I have very unpleasant memories of a spearman somehow being hidden in stacks of tanks and losing them all to a crossbow or pike. This happened too MANY times to forget; and though enough time has passed that specifics have faded the pain and frustration never will. =) Yeah I'm still kinda bitter about that.

Its not a glitch. Its completely unrealistic, but its in fact designed like that to discourage death-balls. You can search on "stack" in the Civ2 manual to see many, many references to how entire stacks will die all at once! ( http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.365 ). This manual proves that Civ2 designers intended stacks to work like that. Even the "glitchy" behavior of Bombers "defending" a stack (ie:…

> Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game.

I disagree. It is incredible game that did a lot of things right from the first try. It also had extremely nice VGA graphics: i still remember softly animated blue rivers and waves rolling onto green shores with hills and mountains.

And it was the only 'fresh' game, that could surprise you. Like you play on chieftain, have three cities on a nice island, and you are proud to have discovered sail before 1492, preparing for a voyage of discovery.

Next, an ironclad arrives leading frigate with musketeers that destroy your pathetic civilization.

All other games after the first were inevitably formulaic for me. Of course, players who have started on 5th might feel different.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#200

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

hyperbovine wrote: post #151
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to get political, but your last paragraph implies there's nothing worth fighting for. To paraphrase John Ringo, I desire peace, but I require liberty. War is waste - but the only thing worse than war is loss of liberty.

Remind me what we’re fighting for again? In 2021.

I suppose that depends on your definition of liberty
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