Crate's Grim Dawn Related RTS Project

Ah, that’s a bit sad Medierra, but guess you have to try these things to see what’s possible. Won’t know unless you experiment a bit now and then.

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

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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.

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Wow, keep the info flowing big M. But also more on the town builder please too. :smiley: Like a release date. :wink:

So I’m assuming

You - leading FF
Zan - leading the RTS now his standalone project’s died
Grava or Hyboreal - leading the horror survival

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.

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Very nice! And what about the horror survival game? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Only that, yes, grava and hyboreal are on it

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FF is wrapping up? but that means maska’s saga on discord might also be wrapping up! The horror!

Well, that’s better than nothing I suppose. :wink:

Anyway, shoo! Way past your bedtime. Don’t need you worn out and tired otherwise FF will never release. Go to :bed: !

And the survival horror game’s name is… Trip South.
:scorv:

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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?

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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!
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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? :smile:


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.

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So what game engine are you planning to use for the RTS? I assume the Unreal one mentioned on FB a while back will be for the horror survival?

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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!

Hah quite possible. Although I have not played much 1v1. Probably only like 200-300 games are 1v1 and most of those were vs. Rhis when I was learning the game.

After diamond, I found trying to advance was so grindy I just lost interest. That and, these days, you get into even low diamond and suddenly you’re getting matched against masters and occasionally GM players. Or worse, you’re getting smurfed by master/GM players who are “gold-level” and trash your MMR. It’s pretty obnoxious when you advance 50 MMR in 3 wins, then lose it all to one game vs. a smurf. I don’t mind that as much in 2v2 since then, I’m playing more for fun.

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Hmm good point about durability. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. Always interesting to see a game developer`s view on other games in terms of mechanics and balance as to how they might have done things different.

Personally not a fan of “miss something for 2 seconds and it can cost you the game”. But falling asleep while units battles it out is also a bad extreme in my book. The reason I like GD (I play HC only) over other ARPG’s, is because I feel your game is more focused on preparation and character building, while still requiring skill through knowing your enemies, having to position correctly, desicion making (fight or flight, skill priority/rotation etc.), but most importantly - that one mistake most often won’t ruin you. You have to make several misplays in a row to die. While in, say PoE, you can play the tankiest build, make no mistakes, and just get deleted by something random and arbitrarily.

I feel like game balance on a fundamental level (like base stats, damage, resistances, monster types and abilities) is very well done. As if lots of work went into it. Diablo 3 was a case of - the game is always too easy or too hard. It felt like monster balance wasn’t even tested. Me and my friends got bored to death it was so easy, showing a huge flaw in basic work towards monster Vs player balance.

I think that, no idea if you agree or disagree, when you make a game you need to look at a scenario from the monsters’ perspective. In that “If I controlled the monsters against the player here, would I have a chance to kill the player?”. Anyway… just thinking loud/ranting at this point so I’ll stop.

Oh I think Medierra would agree with you. From an old Archon the Wizard GD stream back in 2013 which Medierra took part in, he had this to say about some monsters in TQ.

“Basically at night, after I had done my work for the day and needed to relax, escape, I would put more stuff into the game. So one of the things I would do is basically devise especially heinous heroes and champion monsters. So I think two of the most dreaded enemies in the game in Titan Quest Immortal Throne were Toxeus and the Dactyls in Immortal Throne which were things I thought up in after hours, you know because sometimes you have to punish people.”

:rofl:

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I just wanted to chime in and say how much I love the fact that you guys (Crate) decided to put the RTS in Cairn as a setting. I am completely amazed by the lore, visuals and atmosphere of Grim Dawn, and I think Cairn has a lot of potential as a setting, for different game genres, RTS being one of those.

Naturally, what I ultimately hope for is Grim Dawn 2, but I am very enthustiastic about any game you make, especially if it’s in Cairn.

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Medierra dropping more info.

“It’s funny because there’s a number of deities in the constellations that exist purely to provide constellations to put points into - but some of them we’re now taking to expanding on for lore / backstory in the RTS.”