Real Time Strategy Master Thread

The thing about the Aspect Warriors is that the game doesn't really treat them as elites. They come in big squads like everyone else. Space Marines are also guilty of this.

My dabbling in modding would've involved sharply cutting squad sizes for them, along with hard caps on *all* Aspect Warrior types. Guardians would be the only massable Eldar infantry unit.

Yeah, that's a big problem with making a WH40K RTS game that has the Astartes as an independent faction in their own right. If you were to be even broadly lore-accurate with respect to their abilities, a single 10-man Astartes squad should be able to take on 10 squads of 10 Imperial Guardsmen each at minimum and come out the victor (if perhaps seriously damaged). And then you have to contend with the fact that each Astartes chapter has only about 1000 battle-brothers at the best of times, and even the exception — the Black Templars — only has about that many in any of its numerous crusade fleets.

Logic dictates then that to solve this, you either keep the battlescape's scale small enough that a player would be hard pressed to field 1000 individual Astartes at the same time, or you impose such a punishing population cap system on the faction that it would be practically impossible for the player to reach that number without hacking the game's code.^note I believe it's safe to assume that this would be paired with the implication that an individual Astartes soldier being "killed" is actually just them being injured severely enough to be evacuated back to HQ to be patched up and returned to the "recruitment" pool

That said, I wouldn't be so harsh with respect to the numebrs of the Aspect Warriors, as their "elite" status on the tabletop is more of a byproduct of needing to have equivalents to the Elite options of other factions. In the lore, Aspect Warriors are just made of all the Aeldari that walk the Path of the Warrior (which isn't exactly a small proportion of a given Craftworld's population, especially the more bellicose ones), and so they're not truly "elite" troops as a rule (there may be "elite" members among them by dint of experience, but that's it); that honor goes to the Exarchs, who are lost on the Path of the Warrior (i.e. become too obsessed with the art and emotional experience of warfare to ever leave it) and thus typically have accumulated far more skill and experience than normal Aspect Warriors.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 24th 2024 at 4:15:18 PM

The way I was thinking of modding the game was to basically make Space Marine squads only 3-4 men strong, but each is as powerful as unmodded Terminators. Same with Aspect Warriors.

Guardsmen and Orks, on the other hand, would be mostly untouched, maybe slightly reduced because their numbers are already causing pathfinding issues as is, even without trying to move alongside vehicles. Unload a fully loaded Chimera in a confined area and they'll actually get stuck. I had to restart the second Order mission in Winter Assault more than once because of this.

Is there a way to have a faction field both mecha and conventional vehicles that fulfill similar niches without being redundant? Like, say the faction has both an MBT and the mecha equivalent of an MBT; what would be a good way to make both of them useful to have in a non-redundant way, and neither one is impacted alone by the choice of map/level to play on (i.e. if the MBT is useless to use on the map/level, so will the mecha counterpart)?

Ironically C&C Rivals had a possible solution: make the Predator MBT be the conventional tier I or II tank unit, and the mech (the Titan in particular) be a Tier III tech unit that now packs a particle gun with greater range capable of penetrating multiple vehicles similar to the railgun from Tib Sun. Make it shoot over obstructions like walls or small hills, but at the cost of being easier to spot at greater distances, and boom, you've got a unit with a unique setup versus the basic tanks.

Oh yeah, and Nod technically had a second tank in the game too - the Tick Tank with it's burrow ability - but that was more of an alternative option instead of a direct upgrade since it didn't have any other special traits or strengths versus the basic Scorpion tank.

Edited by SgtRicko on Jan 31st 2024 at 2:00:02 AM

I think a lot of terrain play would make it easy to distinguish legs and wheels. Like imagine if we take every Protoss walker and replace their legs with wheels. Stalkers, Immortals, and such would function the same, but the Colossus' cliffwalking ability would make no sense.

The first Empire Earth has both mechs and tanks in the final two epochs.

The way it works is that from WWI to the modern age, tanks come in two types, HE and AP. Both have a damage multiplier against infantry, but AP tanks have one against HE tanks as well, so they're just objectively superior.

In the Digital Age (ie. 20 Minutes into the Future), AP tanks disappear and HE tanks upgrade into laser tanks. Simultaneously, a large variety of cybers (mechs) become available for more specialized roles than the Jack of All Trades laser tank. Both are vulnerable to the same units (AT guns and anti-tank infantry) for the most part.

• Hyperions are general-purpose with a beam laser and can go underwater to attack ships and even submarines.
• Minotaurs are anti-tank with homing ATGMs.
• Pandoras are anti-infantry with a splash-damage sonic weapon.
• Areses are flying Glass Cannons that behave like helicopters, with the same weaknesses (ie. small-arms fire from infantry, AA, helos and fixed-wing aircraft can all target them, the last of which they can't even fire back at).
• Zeuses are similar to Minotaurs but have the same armor type as AT guns, making them resistant against things that are normally effective against cybers but vulnerable against small-arms fire and artillery.
• Furies are Fragile Speedster Action Bombs that fight in melee and explode when killed.
• Apollos are unarmed Barrier Warrior medics with abilities focused around keeping allies alive with healing, shielding and debuffing enemy damage.
• Poseidons are unarmed mobile cloak generators that can also pull an Enemy Exchange Program with enemy cybers.
• Tempests are Magic Knight melee fighters with abilities focused around neutralizing enemy aircraft and Glass Cannons.
• Hadeses are unarmed spellcasters that can chronoshift high-value targets off the map to temporarily remove them from the fight, infect enemy cybers with a contagious DOT effect and even Cast From HP teleport themselves.

You can actually switch over entirely to cybers in the late game and they're their own unit category for faction bonuses if you like using them, but you still have so many alternatives available that mixing-and-matching with conventional units has zero drawbacks.

Edited by amitakartok on Jan 30th 2024 at 6:11:24 PM

The C&C Rivals approach doesn't fit, since it just puts the walker into a separate tech tier and makes it objectively superior to the lower-tech tank. That said, your suggestion of making the walker's tall profile a double-edged sword by making it able to shoot over obstacles but also spottable from a greater range (would that mean that you would see it in the middle of the fog of war?) makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, that reminds me of a common argument for walkers being that they can traverse highly rugged terrain with little to no effect on their speed, whereas wheeled and tracked vehicles would be have to greatly slow down while moving on said terrain. Maybe have conventional vehicles possess greater maximum speed on normal terrain that is greatly nerfed on rugged terrain, while walkers have significantly lower maximum speed ^note barring Front Mission/Armored Core-style "dashing" but aren't slowed down in the slightest by rugged terrain, and in fact are able to stand on certain terrain tiles that are considered too rugged for a conventional vehicle to traverse.

How do these cybers compare to conventional vehicles of the same tier(s) that fulfill similar niches?

This is one of the reasons I figure why mecha/walkers would be a thing in both real world military application and sci fi in general.

Legs can go where wheels and tracks have great difficulty or are outright impossible. For example rugged mountainous terrain, people and animals (pack animal or otherwise) can cross or climb steep cliffs and canyon walls, sheer slopes of hills, ridges and peaks all much more readily than any jeep or tank or tractor. Unless the mecha/walker in question is positively enormous, a worn or piloted Mini-Mecha type thing could be very advantageous in such places.

So to translate that to RTS gameplay, having mecha/walkers being able to stand on or traverse various terrain tiles or areas that regular vehicles cannot would be a great differentiator.

Or maybe spider-like legs. I know, they'd be even more of a pain for the maintenance crews and require even more complex designs in order to make them function properly, but assuming someone masters the idea they'd be great for several reasons:

• Harder to trip or disable with several legs, and if it falls it should still have it's turret facing properly
• Grants more ground stability & recoil control
• Assuming it's lightweight, might even be able to scale steep surfaces
• Could have small tires attached to the bottom of the legs, allowing it to drive normally on pavement if moving large distances.

I think the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell would be a great example of what I'm talking about. Bonus points if said spider tanks have adorable and cuddly AI personalities

That issue with maintenance of the complex leg parts just made me think of a possible solution: Would the walker's limbs having an artificial "circulatory system" whose "blood" analogue contains nanorobots help with conducting repairs with minimal need for disassembly and such? I'm reminded of Metal Gear RAY, whose legs utilized artificial muscles instead of conventional hydraulics or motors, and used white-colored nanomachine-filled "blood" for self-repair in at least those muscles.

PS: While the conversation is technically going on a non-RTS tangent, maybe it's not that much of an issue if we avoid dragging it for too long.

It was actually worse than that: the mass-produced Metal Gear Gekkos used cloned ungulate muscle tissue for the legs and joints... so that was actual blood you'd see if the legs were damaged. It's also the reason why the Gekkos would urinate at times: they were releasing bodily waste.

Not included are ships and anti-submarine copters, for lack of relevance. Also didn't include Space Age content from the expansion.

Summary:

• In a pure-cyber army, only Areses and Tempests can fight back against helicopters, only Tempests can hurt fixed-wing aircraft and only while they have energy left for casting Antimatter Storm. Without this, they get raped by fighter-bombers and AT helos.
• Zerg-rushing cybers with massed infantry also works well, as only the Pandora has splash damage that works against them and it's not all that durable.
• AT guns make mincemeat out of most cybers except flying ones and Zeuses. Against the Zeus, howitzers work well.
• Furies explode when killed (or ordered to), but the explosion does friendly fire and can set off a chain reaction.
• No cyber can outrange static defenses. Areses aren't targetable by Laser Towers, but any form of SAM downs them very quickly.

There's one campaign mission where you can build nothing but cybers in order to familiarize yourself with each individual model's strengths and weaknesses. There are also two campaign missions where you can't build cybers at the start while the enemy can, allowing you to practice anti-cyber tactics with conventional units. One of these is the final mission of the game where you have to face down a Nano Age (ie. late 21st century) army with Modern Age (ie. late 20th century) units.

On treads vs legs in difficult terrain: I'm fairly certain there's turn-based-tacticals (the Advance Wars genre) that account for this, with walkers handling forests and such better.

Tiberian Sun's engine had the means to implement per-terraintype modifiers for wheeled/walking/hovering motion types, but no values were set by default.

^ And the existing values for wheeled, tracked and water were direct port over from Red Alert.

@SgtRicko: Okay, that seems to be a really unnecessary idea by whoever it was among the MGR devs that came up with it. And I notice that nobody actually answered the question that I asked.

@amitakartok: Wow, so they almost completely replace conventional ground vehicles in those ages, huh?

Can't really answer it because I've got no real-world comparison to think of, save for the body's healing and immune system. And even assuming we did have self-healing mech legs, it'll also raise the question as to whether they could become "ill" or infected by mold or bacteria - or in videogame terms, chemical or bioweapons.

Edited by SgtRicko on Feb 2nd 2024 at 2:54:55 AM

I wasn't suggesting that the self-healing system has to be biological/organic in nature, only that it emulates it via artificial means, in the same way that robotic arms emulate human arms in overall structure using completely non-organic materials, at first crudely with hydraulics and motors but now with R&D gradually pushing foward towards artificial muscles.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 2nd 2024 at 3:26:31 PM

...I just had a thought.

While I never played Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, I remember reading that it has a partial regeneration system where units self-repair a portion of damage taken from each hit while the rest needs external healing to fix. I'm not talking the early-to-mid C&C's Mammoth tank being able to fix itself up to 50% health; rather, if a unit takes, say, 200 damage, it regenerates 50 HP of that back on its own, but still needs assistance from however its faction heals units to get back up to full strength.

Would this work for space RTSes like Sins of a Solar Empire with the explanation being that while ships do have damage control crews, they can only do so much without a drydock? Or would it be too gimmicky?

Edited by amitakartok on Feb 2nd 2024 at 3:59:08 PM

It has a high risk of being too gimmicky. Subsystem damage and partial regeneration are easily frustrating to players and worse, the AI won’t be significantly affected by it preferring to basically suicide those units. Or worse, the AI will dance around repairing from such effects far more effectively and efficiently than any human player.

I personally think it’s a needless complexity. But that’s just me.

Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance was released today, and 9-Bit Armies: A Bit too Far will release tomorrow.

Haven't played the Terminator RTT myself, but from what I've heard it plays similarly to Syrian Warfare due having the same initial developer until the 2022 War in Ukraine caused Slitherine Studios to assign a new team. Buuut if you haven't played the prior, think of it as a more punishing Company of Heroes in how there's a heavy emphasis on keeping units either out of enemy line of sight or in cover at all times, lest they quickly get obliterated from all directions by a unit they didn't spot. No basebuilding either; you requisition units off-map via a point system.

9-Bit Armies is about as old-fashioned as it gets. It's basically C&C Tiberian Dawn or RA 1 in nearly every way, even down to how constructing additional factories only speeds up the production speed instead of building multiple vehicles simultaneously. Spamming hordes of units with little regard to survivability is how to win. It has a co-op campaign though, and you're encouraged to replay missions to beat better par times in order to unlock additional starting units for your base at the start of every campaign mission.

TL;DW Zade likes it, but bar a couple of surprises in the campaign it's precisely what you'd expect - retro C&C clone - and little else. Also, the game only contains 2 factions and one campaign, which can be played co-op. Oh, and the current price is (slightly) discounted at $17.99 USD, but it'll bounce back to $19.99 come March.

What's the Faction Calculus / A Commander Is You breakdown of Company of Heroes 3's factions like? I only see descriptions for the factions of the first two games.

EDIT: Nevermind, I just realized that there's a dedicated thread for the game.

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 29th 2024 at 2:52:13 PM

Nevermind again, that thread seems pretty dead.

So, uh, anyone here who played COH3 that can answer the above question?

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 30th 2024 at 5:26:37 PM