I fear infinite upgrades will lead to situations where the teams just spend all their upgrades on damage/health in a neverending race. At some point it's more interesting to reach a cap, and then spend your tech resources in more interesting ways. I remember playing some custom Starcraft maps with infinite upgrades, and it was always a chore to keep up with that one opponent who had 15 attack power upgrades.
[quote who="Ticktoc" reply="9" id="3599399"] You could just have it that newly created units have the upgrade and the old one's already in the field don't. I don' think there is anything wrong with that. It could even be seen as a positive. [/quote] This whole post is about how important it is to be able to learn at a glance what capabilities you and your opponent have. This kind of staggered upgrading would do the exact opposite of that.
[quote who="tatsujb" reply="7" id="3599380"] Quoting AoWFever, reply 5 I'm going to go the opposite way on the drive-through upgrades idea. There is enough micro already with the scale of the game the devs are aiming for; and I think drive-through upgrades forces an unnatural break in the flow of the action. I guess pl
I don't like the "upgrade facility" idea either. Every other RTS ever has had instant upgrade of all units on the field when it hits. It's more interesting to have higher tier units locked behind some kind of tech unlock. Honestly, the most interesting aspect of Sins of a Solar empire is the upgrade tree.
Another game to look at for interesting upgrades is Grey Goo. They allowed you to get one of three upgrades for each of four different sections. (12 upgrades each faction) Each upgrade gave you a specific advantage, but left you unable to get the two other techs in that section. These techs gave specific unique abilites like: * Letting anti air shoot ground * Increasing rate of fire, but decreasing damage for artillery * Turning one tank from anti
Agreed on all points! Especially the fact that there is no tech tree makes scouting pointless. Just have your factory pump out a balanced mix of all units and hit repeat. The likening to a MOBA is quite accurate. Except there is no interesting hero to micro manage.
Well, at least the styles should at least match. Either you have realistic units + realistic terrain(Company of Heroes), or cartoonish units with cartoony terrain(Starcraft)
I would LOVE them to actually make the terrain more cartoony, to fit with the units, not the other way around.
Hm, clustering the icons like annotations in google maps might be a good idea. As you zoom in, the icons split up into their constituents, until you reach a level where the icons are hidden completely. I like this idea. It does require constant re-computation of which units are in which area, but that information should probably already exist if there in pr-unit collision (OC-Trees).
Yeah, icons like in SOASE would be good. Very easy to see unit type composition and position. It's a tough pill to swallow though, as it renders the 3D models nearly pointless. Can hardly remember playing SOASE at a zoom level where the icons were not visible.
One of my main gripes right now is how hard it is to see units on the battlefield. Especially from a high zoom level. Would it be possible to add an edge shader with a thin colored outline on each unit as you zoom out past a certain point? Alternatively, create colored polygons/splines that encompass each "blob" of units on the map.
This was my initial reaction as well. I assume the terrain graphics will be upgraded, as the terrain looks like a game from early 2000s.