After much back and forth, we’ve decided to set the RTS in Cairn. It’s pre-grim-dawn though, so no aetherials, although there may be some cthonic elements.
We wanted to give it more of an historical civilization feel but with fantasy elements, since I think straight history is kind of limiting in terms of what you can come up with for interesting units and abilities.
So in terms of setting it will be a bit more Age of Empires but with some magic and fantasy units, alongside more traditional army units. In terms of gameplay feel, it will be a bit more toward SC2.
The goal is not for every game to be under 20m - it’s more that a game shouldn’t automatically last 20m regardless of how mismatched players are or how bad of a match someone has. I’ve had plenty of SC2 matches that have lasted 30-45m but that happened because it was an intense match against very evenly skilled opponents. In SC2, there are sort of checks at various stages, where you can win or lose depending on skill level vs. your opponent and the build / strategy you’ve chosen. Often there is some sort of early harass or rush, it may be the end of the game if one side is unprepared or executes poorly… but if its held off, things progress to the mid-game tech / units, where again there may be engagements, which could be decisive but, if not, the game then advances on to the end-game tech / units. Some of the best pro matches I’ve seen have lasted over an hour.
What I don’t like in AoE games is that it often takes 10-15m just to build up to the point where you can do anything that could potentially win you the game. It gets boring playing those first 10 minutes over and over, with little variation, because there is almost no player interaction. In AoE it is also much easier for people to drag the game out hiding around the map and refusing to quit even though they have no hope of winning.
So the idea really is that the game-time shouldn’t be artificially inflated by things like a prolonged build-up where you’re not even really interacting with your opponent. I certainly am not trying to make it so games only last 20m or less. I mean if people are having an intense and interesting match, where stuff is constantly happening, I don’t think they’ll care that it passes 20m.
For the ultra casual, I think mostly they’ll be playing the campaign, where the length of pvp matches is kind of irrelevant. We can pace out the campaign however we want.
The stand-alone thing Zantai was working on, was sort of an experiment that didn’t really pan out. We went into it thinking we could leverage GD tech and art to create a new gameplay mode, that probably wouldn’t have great sales potential but would be worthwhile since it wouldn’t cost too much to make. In the end though, we ran into challenges that would have required more investment to overcome and we felt like the end result might be a more expensive project than we anticipated, that might end up looking like it was just a mod. So we decided to cut our losses and focus on other things.
As a generally frowned upon RTS turtle base fan, would should I expect from the citizens of Cairn pre GD? I’m not impressed with how their cities held out afterwards, so I fear you may not support my particular(ly) dumb play style.
Something about loading up a few bots and making a super base to slowly shred them I always found more enjoyable than rapid expanse, for serious play
We have our own resident fans of turtling and recognize it is a mode of play enjoyed by many filthy casuals, so we plan to support it.
Even in SC2, terran is quite effective at obnoxious levels of turtling in mp. Beyond a certain point, it just delays defeat, as you eventually can run out of resources while allowing your opponent to control the map… but it can sometimes be employed to try to jump to higher tech.
In play vs. bots, it is even more possible to facilitate this kind of play, since, even if we tried, we can probably never make bots as effective as a human at figuring out how to pick apart a well planned player defense and we probably won’t try. As much as I pvp, I also enjoy trying to hold out against waves of overwhelming AI forces.
In terms of fiction, you have to remember, the Aetherials used a stealth cheese strat to infiltrate the Erulan empire and sabotage it’s defenses from the inside. Erulan will likely have the best turtling ability out of the three planned civs.
FF is wrapping up, so there isn’t a huge amount of design work left. Although, wrapping up a project entails filling in all the bits necessary for player accessibility, like tool-tips, UI, etc, along with optimization and other feature refinement and polish; so there is still a ways to go before release. Wrapping up a game always takes way longer than you expect, even when you expect it to take way longer than you expect…
I’ve been working on the RTS on the side for a while and will continue, on a high-level, to define the civs / units, core gameplay, setting. Zantai has been helping to further define things and fill in details of the design, like unit ability system. He’s going to be heading up the campaign and is outlining how that will work and what sort of scripting and editor functionality we’ll need to build it.
What’s your opinion on game speed Medierra? I loved SC2 as well, but felt the game speed was too fast for all the multitasking constantly required. Which made the game more about reflexes and multitasking speed than strategy. Though I do also agree with you - on the point about spending too much to build up before anything happens.
I find many RTS too slow, but SC2 way too fast. Will game speed maybe be an option? What are your thoughts on gamespeed?
Nice…seems like your design preferences translate well to what I love from SC2. My total career games just shy 800 but we are in same league and I’m also playing on NA. We might had bumped into each past years!
Since this will set in pre-GD Cairn, how many and what kind of playable races/faction will there be? Is it all humanoid? Will it be assymetrical matchup like SC2 or more similar races like WC3/AOE?
Are there any chances of seeing some dev streams for FF in the coming weeks/months medierra?
Interesting to hear that you worked on Empire Earth as well. One of my friends who’s big into old strategy games (Age of Empire 2, Starcraft 1/2. Kohan 1/2, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for a few) got me into it recently and I’ve been finding it refreshing.
I think the issue is not with the speed itself so much as how fast certain units can die due to hit points relative to damage. When I decided to check out WC3 redisastered the first thing I notice, other than the clunky pathing, is it takes 10 years to kill anything. I definitely prefer SC2 now - although I think I may aim for somewhere in between.
I don’t think SC2 is all about reflexes and speed. I’m honestly a rather slow player for a hardcore RTS fan and I still find strategy is massively important and often allows me to overcome much faster players. In my mind, strategy is your build, army composition and plan of when and where to attack - most of the macro aspect of the game. Could probably lump econ in there too.
A massive part of becoming better at SC2 is experience and learning how to react to different situations. If you stay calm and react properly, you can often prevail, even if the other player is using some cheese strat and double your APMs. A good example of this is games I’ve played where someone is being hyper aggressive with marine drops or mutas (not that those necessarily classify as cheese strats), just picking me apart and, sometimes, there is just no way to be everywhere and stop every attack, so you’re constantly taking damage, getting eaten away. Knowing that’s going to happen though, you tech up and focus on building an army comp that they can’t fight. I play protoss a lot and if someone is going nuts with mutas, I’ll work toward blink stalkers, eventually adding in archons. Then you move out with that and it’s an army mutas can’t engage into.
Another example would be, someone builds a proxy stargate and shield batteries below a cliff outside your base, then starts attacking you with voids. That’s a strategy and godly void micro doesn’t really make it much deadlier. If you don’t scout or react properly, you may lose your base right off. But you learn things like, if you’re also protoss, you can defend with talkers and shield batteries, then just stay close to the batteries and fend them off until you have enough stalkers where you can burst down the voids, not allowing them to get back and recharge shields. On both sides, its much more strategy and game-knowledge than speed.
Or sometimes you do an end-run around their army with lings, a warp prism, etc, and they have zero defenses because they’re so focused on offense. A lot of these very aggressive fast players are 1-dimensional. Often they are operating on a bare-bones economy too.
Just played one the other night with Rhis where someone was picking us apart with fantastic phoenix micro and their ally was sending roaches at us. I switched things up and started just pumping out craploads of lings, because phoenix are kind of useless vs. tons of small units, given limited graviton beam energy and ran around all the roaches to the base and crippled their economy and I would not say I controlled my lings particularly well but they go the job done. Was enough turn a bad situation to our advantages and we eventually prevailed as we were then able to tech up / working on better economies. Reflexes and micro barely mattered.
If you get to the enemy’s base and, behind the hyper aggressive attacks, they have also have expanded, teched up and halt you with a solid defense, then they’re high-master / GM and you’re out of your league lol… no helping that.
The other element of the game though is tactical control, which is where the micro ability comes in more. When you’re controlling more fragile units like marines, lings, mutas, etc, you really need to be paying attention to them when you’re out on the map and be able to react quickly to sources of AoE that could wipe you out. Or really, in a big blunder, you can lose your entire army, pathing into lurkers or tanks. In this regard, WC3 and AoK are definitely much more forgiving, not so much due to speed but because units are way more durable. With WC3 hitpoints, you might have 3-5 tank volleys to react vs. 1-2 and that does maybe allow for more tactical reaction and maneuvering… but I wouldn’t say it trumps strategy / macro.
Like a release date. 
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