I have seen multiple threads about "flanking give 10% bonus damage" and the benefits of Rock-Paper-Scissors (or Lorry-Slime-Snail) balance. The trouble with these arbitrary bonus damages is that it feels strange. Did no-one else ever wonder why Pikes decimated Paladins, but got screwed by Militia in AoE:2?
I propose some ideas to create emergent behaviour which make the game more coherent and provide more selling points.
1) Range units on hills do more damage and shoot further.
Given that all projectiles are simulated more range on hills should not be a problem. In addition arrows do a set ammount of damage and an additional ammount dependant upon their speed. Simply put, if you fire an arrow of a cliff, it has more time to accelerate under gravity and thus will be going faster when it hits the ground than an arrow fired accross a field. This way the game uses the arrows speed to modify damage accordingly, creating an emergent reason to put archers and catapults on high ground.
2) Cavalry and Spears
Standard fantasy RTS balance dictates spears > horses. Sticking with this theme, emergent behaviour could be created that cavalry do additional "bash" damage dependant upon their speed (ideally most of their damage should be dealt this way). Additionally cavalry slow down when they take damage and spears offset damage from the unit (they effectively have a short ranged attack). Thus is cavalry hit a unit of swordsmen, nothing slows down their impact and they do full bash damage. However if a unit of cavalry charges into spearmen, then the spears do damage to the cavalry, slowing them and reducing their damage, meaning that the spearmen can now overwhelm the cavalry (this also means keeping cavalry static is bad).
3) Uphill and Downhill charging
Similar theory, if all units did "bash" damage on the charge and moving uphill was be slower than moving downhill, you get emergent behaviour where charging up a hill is not as wise a move as charging accross a plain. This means that hills are providing defensive bonusess emergently, rather than arbitrarily.
TL:DR
I argue (badly) that it would be good to take advantage of the physical simulation that the MOHO engine does to create emergent balance rather than arbitrary.|||I really like your idea! Far better than the usual RPS system. It would need some serious testing first but I think this could really bring fantasy RTS games to a whole new level.
If you would make bash damage a percentage of the whole dps you would even get a nice additional way to balance units.|||Wow, very nice! Good use of the physics and simulation to add depth! I don't know if they can do the physics of so much melee interaction though? The only melee damage in supcom was the crush damage on massive units.
Send an email to Chris with your initial post in it and the concerns other have about how it would work and see if he talks about it in a blog!
|||The funny thing, cavalry only does bad against pikemen in real life when the pike men are set for the charge. And even then, if the cavalry know they are going to do that, they can quite often maneuver around them even then. So yeah, pikemen did not automatically win in real history, just if they had a smart leader.|||seiya|||I see an actual use for the formation painter now!|||I fully agree with your idears. well thought of, good sir. 
|||I like #1, and while the others aren't bad ideas.Adding a secondary damage variable to ranged units based on their speed is kind of emergent but you then have two variables.
If you base ranged unit's damage to be purely based on speed, from that simple rule you could get complex behaviour, such as controlling hills to gain range and damage bonuses, not because you designed it that way indirectly or not, but because that is the result of ballistic projectiles. p.s. due to ballistics, airborn targets will take lower damage than ground targets, due to aiming at a target higher than them.
several birds with one stone.
Similarly, if you tweak unit turn speed, their weapon damage, rate of fire, and range, you can get a nice complex behaviour set between units that aren't programmed into them.|||sanman|||Here's an idea; if we're going to let kings mount horses/etc, why not all units? Rather than produce set cavalry units, you produce the mount and the rider separately. Riders are just your normal everyday foot soldier units like archers. (but we can still have 'rider' units, like knights.
Once joined together, the cavalry unit has a hidden stat called... something, which represents the rider's stability on the mount. Taking damage causes this stat to reduce and return to normal quickly. If the value reaches zero, the rider is forcefully dismounted.
Riders and mounts can take damage separately, meaning you can kill the mount without harming the rider, and vise versa.|||K-lord|||Cybran Freedom Fighter|||Destroyer224|||For the most part I was talking about the world, what it's made of, and how it can be interacted with.
Two simple rules that can have interesting effects when players divise a means to use them would be water and magma. Magma that comes in contact with water hardens into a tile of obsidian, a very basic rule of the game. There is also a rule that has any unsupported tiles fall to the floor and crush/hurt whatever is underneath. Two basic rules that don't at first glance seem related, right?
Then some clever players found a way to get a finite amount of water and magma to meet in midair above a designated hallway. The magma hardens into a tile of obsidian as intended, and the new tile of obsidian (which is not supported because it hardened in mid-air) falls to the floor and hopefully hurts the bad guys underneath it.
There is no way the creator of DF predicted such a use of the system, but because the basic rules are not based upon a set of specific conditions and reactions, (except maybe the water/magma thing, but you get what I'm trying to say here) there doesn't need to be any pre-emptive scripting or coding; the game already supports it.
Same with countless other things in that game, like luring magma men onto a tundra to harden them into a stone statue, or boiling forgotten beasts composed entirely of water and letting their vapors drift away.
EDIT: I'm sorry, but this was so offtopicly ontopic that I felt I needed to show it:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64447.0
They're designing a computer, using simple mechanical devices inherent in DF, for the sole reason of making a fully-solvable Rubik's Cube in-game. God I love DF.
Oh, and this has got to be the mother of all examples of emergent gameplay.|||Okay, fair enough. Incidentally my personal favourite is the bridge-catapult.
As a general model, DF does show ways interaction can be made out of simple rules. Isn't that a selling point of SupCom (and TA) too?
Well yes, of course, and hopefully KnC. I like the speed idea. Really neat. I'm not sure if having it make armoured soldiers turn into human wrecking balls (as opposed to just killing themselves and not doing much damage) would work, or even be desirable, but the other consequences seem believable and desirable.|||K-lord: you should write that to crackedout
.|||I have indeed played DF. Was that directed at me? If so, then I think you missed my point. :)|||Some of mine may not be practical for a RTS game but I'll just put them out there, see what people think. I was revisiting a few accounts on the battle of Agincourt last week, and a few things came to mind from further reading today:Quote:|||I like the ideas posted in the OP. It'd probably need some reworking of the system to pull off. As it stands, GPG currently has weapons set up so that projectile speed and weapon range is hard set with the unit and projectile BPs. What they should do is get rid of range and speed values in the BPs and replace them with "mass" (weight) value in the projectile's BP and weapon firing "force" in the unit's BP. Then, upon game initialization, it can calculate and store projectile speeds and weapon range (for level, flat terrain) based on the projectile speed, 45 degree angle, and gravity. Then all they need is some sort of quick formula (if quick is possible) that can recalculate range on the fly with height variances based off the "normalized" range.
I also like the ideas posted above by Winter-Dragon.|||seiya|||Supreme Commander had its own sort of Emergent behavior, such as using TMLs to shoot down Soul Rippers.|||IsikBala|||Or using Strategic Bombers to kill Czars, using huge Scout clouds to deflect nukes, using Novaks to rape any nuke or game ender, etc etc etc.
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