Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 81

On February 17 2024 09:45 WombaT wrote:

There must be a way to do it that doesn’t require a brutal level of mechanical difficulty.

I’ve just yet to see it. Or at least I haven’t seen the ‘full package’ as it were. X RTS deals with a particular issue well, or has some interesting system, but the unit control is horrible. Or the eco structure is fascinating but the units suck. Or the micro is horrible etc.

Why not experiment with terrain a bit? What about cover mechanics? What about graduating slopes? It feels Blizz RTS and this Blizz-inspired RTS have two types of ground, low and high and that’s about it.

You could have a mechanic where units can’t fire if units in front of them were on a higher incline (friendly fire would be too punishing), or cut range or something. So if you strategically design a map with areas like this being in likely high traffic areas you can have a kind of explicit anti-deathball mechanic.

Why not go a different direction to what Blizz did in Legacy in trying to spread out bases to maintain an income by having them burn out quicker?

Give each starting base an arbitrary amount of resource yield, and limit every subsequent expansion’s effective mining. Maybe even have bases be variable in this positionally depending on how risky they are (likely) to be to take

So you can get your initial eco going to keep the early game ramping up. But after that, if you want more eco well you need more bases.

In Legacy, there’s an optimal amount of bases, you just take more because you’re going to mine out. Why not make it that more bases = better income, and incentivise expanding out, which then introduces the risk/reward of more moolah versus being overstretched. Which naturally should stretch play out to be more skirmishy.

I’m spitballing some bad ideas, but hey I’m trying. I’m going off the ‘you can’t just do what BW did a quarter of a century later’ rationale.

1. Making it easier to move armies versus limited unit selection often leads to blobs. Solution - don’t try to make it harder to move an army around, make being in a blob disadvantageous somehow. Try to reverse the general idea of ‘more good units in a space = better’

2. BW’s macro was hard as fuck, but it made for good territorial jousting. Solution - Keep macro being easier on a mechanical level, just make there be more of it. Go nuts, 1 base is better than 2, well 10 bases are better than 9. This should also naturally taper off by skill level, more so than alternatives, IMO. A low-level game you might feel great engaging in some 2 base versus 2 slugfest, where a top level game you might have 10 on each side with skirmishes all over the map.

3. Defender’s advantage is tricky because I feel without making the game be too territorial in other ways it can make turtling too potent. But I’m much more in favour of a strong defender’s advantage in a game where you’re spread out everywhere, versus say where 2/3 bases is optimal.

Interested to see what people think of my ramblings and madness haha

On February 18 2024 10:09 Spirral wrote:
Been playing a bit since closed beta, had high hopes, but can't really get hooked on so far.

I was hoping for a further evolution of Blizzard style RTS, rather than a remix of all the old ideas. So far I feel like playing a different mode of SC2. It feels good to play, but everything feels like a recycled idea, which gets old pretty quickly.

But maybe someone who didn't sink in 1000 hours into Blizz RTS already might find it exciting?

When I first saw WC3 I was blown away. Graphics, music, sounds, lore, matchmaking, gameplay, everything felt fresh, modern, innovative, maybe even ahead of it's time. SG so far feels like reheated yesterday's pizza, it's good, but won't lose my mind over it. I hope the impression on release will be much better.

On February 18 2024 17:46 Hider wrote:


I think the people who find it exciting now are those who likes blizzard RTS games, likes a bit of micro and enjoys the process of learning the game, figuring out builds/strategies etc. Being part of a new RTS game that is actively being developed and improved is fun. If I had more free time, I could myself find enjoyment in this.

I don't think it's gonna work for new players. For new players you need to give them a big "why". A why can be, "play this new game to experience the fun low-skill floor mechanic where you potentially can make insane outplays."

Stormgate does not give you that why and I would require very large changes/additions to the game to enable that.

And while it seems most current complains about the game are related to graphics, sounds etc., eventually I expect the complaints - when the novelty of learning the game wears off - to shift towards complaining about larger army micro.

Increasing the length of battles is a good thing, but seeing these massive deathbally army stand still while attacking for 30 seconds is boring. We need to see a lot more movement and a lot more abilities that rewards movement and punishes standing still and allows the top-top players to stand out from the good players.

On February 17 2024 23:02 qwerty4w wrote:
Zero-K and Beyond All Reason have a "line move" UI feature that can be very useful for preventing blob-like army. It was also borrowed by the indie RTS game Istrolid (https://store.steampowered.com/app/449140/Istrolid/), you can see a demonstration in Istrolid here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avGJEmVMpx0
But the problem is when the target audience of your game think splitting units with a lot of clicking is an irreplaceable source of skill, it's difficult to use any UI solution like this.