Honestly, when I first came into this topic I figured this would be just another gameplay gimmick. But after watching the first Youtube video, "Time Travel Explained", I was really impressed.
I watched the other 2 videos as well.
So I looked further and read the FAQ, where I saw this:
Q. Dude, paradoxes?! You know, grandfather paradox, units fighting side by side? A. Paradoxes can exist, but since the window of time is limited (e.g, an 8 minute window) all events eventually fall off. A paradox will oscillate between its different states until one of the states reaches the edge of the time window, leaving the players locked into one of the two states. Example: in the case of the grandfather paradox (where you use a factory to build a tank, have the tank time travel to before it was built, and then use it to destroy the factory) you will play with the paradox until it 'falls off' the time window, at which point there is a 50/50 chance of either the tank lives and the factory is destroyed, or the factory remains and the tank was never created. All paradoxes are nicely resolved with time.
...
Q. My head is exploding already. Are you sure this is easy? A. Yes, though grandfather paradoxes are the most complicated aspect of the game, they don't tend to happen much in actual gameplay. ...
This concerns me. For example, suppose your opponent travels back in time and destroys your factories, but before the time waves reach the present, you counter-attack by travelling back in time to destroy your opponent's factories. What is going to happen when those time waves reach the present? The factories that created the units used in both attacks have been destroyed, but if those units disappear, then the factories would never have been destroyed in the first place.
I am curious to know how their game engine would handle such a scenario. I am also curious to know how their engine works in general. In particular, how many causality relationships it keeps track of.
E.g. Does it keep track of individual resources? E.g. if you destroy an opponent's mining base in the past, when those time waves reach the present, will parts of the opponent's current army or infrastructure disappear -- the ones built with resources mined from the now-destroyed base? I assume the engine does not keep track of what resources are used to build what units, because of the havoc it would cause.
So in general, the engine can ignore causality in certain cases to reduce the complexity of the paradoxes, but at the cost of simulating time travel less fully. I wonder where they draw the line. Judging from the example in the FAQ, the engine does keep track of which units were created by which factories, so I wonder how they handle cases like the one I described above.
lol apm? uhh don't count on apm in a game like this, but nonetheless it does seem well...kind of confusing even if you're aware of what you're doing and sort of what you're opponent is doing.I still don't quite understand how someone wins
On March 28 2009 05:26 Alizee- wrote: lol apm? uhh don't count on apm in a game like this, but nonetheless it does seem well...kind of confusing even if you're aware of what you're doing and sort of what you're opponent is doing.I still don't quite understand how someone wins
in this game you can only win if the opponent gives up
On March 28 2009 05:26 Alizee- wrote: lol apm? uhh don't count on apm in a game like this, but nonetheless it does seem well...kind of confusing even if you're aware of what you're doing and sort of what you're opponent is doing.I still don't quite understand how someone wins
in this game you can only win if the opponent gives up
On March 28 2009 05:26 Alizee- wrote: lol apm? uhh don't count on apm in a game like this, but nonetheless it does seem well...kind of confusing even if you're aware of what you're doing and sort of what you're opponent is doing.I still don't quite understand how someone wins
in this game you can only win if the opponent gives up
Source?
lol just joking :D
It's hard to tell, in the videos they say that the time traveling resource is regenerating if you are in the present, so you can't stop the opponent having it...
On March 28 2009 05:26 Alizee- wrote: lol apm? uhh don't count on apm in a game like this, but nonetheless it does seem well...kind of confusing even if you're aware of what you're doing and sort of what you're opponent is doing.I still don't quite understand how someone wins
in this game you can only win if the opponent gives up
Source?
lol just joking :D
And how the hell is anyone supposed to know that's a joke?
Besides, it's a legitimate question: how DO you win a game in this? It's not in the FAQ, afaict.
On March 28 2009 05:34 freelander wrote: It's hard to tell, in the videos they say that the time traveling resource is regenerating if you are in the present, so you can't stop the opponent having it...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my LOLZ when I saw how you could regenerate that entire bar in like half a second in the present.
The way they talk about it, you'd think chrono-energy is a resource that must be used sparingly.
What I wanna know is, what happens if you send a unit back in time, and it destroys the building that created that unit. Can you create a temporal paradox that destroys everything?
Now this is something RTS has been needing - a truly original, new concept.
I see tons of potential for this - moreso in single player however. Starting a stage in losing situations and being forced to constantly go back in time to rewrite the story (with more than one possible way to create a winning situation) would be fun and challanging.
Alright, I'm going to officially say I have too many doubts about this game to continue following it.
First there's the unit factory paradox I described earlier.
Then there's the fact that paradoxes are resolved by a 50/50 chance. This has the potential to ruin the game at a high competitive level, imo.
Finally, the fact that you can regen all your chrono-energy that quickly means they are encouraging high-level players to jump to and from the present rapidly in order to execute a large number of commands in the past. How can they not see this coming?
Their "about us" doesn't mention anything about how much these guys play games. It's possible that they have no competitive gaming experience at all. And the mind of a competitive gamer is completely different. The casual gamer plays to optimize their own personal fun, which generally means little or no effort is put towards breaking the game. The competitive gamer plays to win, which means reducing any game to the easiest possible way to win and developing it from there.
And if they do have a lot of competitive experience, then why don't they say so?
For me, this is the biggest indication that this game will probably fail at a competitive level. Honestly, it looks like fun... but only for a week or two, at which point I'd probably conclude the game is broken competitively and stop playing.
On March 28 2009 05:56 Luddite wrote: wow this game looks absolutely nuts.
What I wanna know is, what happens if you send a unit back in time, and it destroys the building that created that unit. Can you create a temporal paradox that destroys everything?
On March 28 2009 05:56 Luddite wrote: wow this game looks absolutely nuts.
What I wanna know is, what happens if you send a unit back in time, and it destroys the building that created that unit. Can you create a temporal paradox that destroys everything?
They answered that exact question in the FAQ.
Furthermore, I quoted it in this topic.
Learn to read.
Yeah i didn't see your post before. You're right, that's a terrible solution to the problem.
On March 28 2009 05:59 Bill307 wrote: Their "about us" doesn't mention anything about how much these guys play games. It's possible that they have no competitive gaming experience at all. And the mind of a competitive gamer is completely different. The casual gamer plays to optimize their own personal fun, which generally means little or no effort is put towards breaking the game. The competitive gamer plays to win, which means reducing any game to the easiest possible way to win and developing it from there.
And if they do have a lot of competitive experience, then why don't they say so?
For me, this is the biggest indication that this game will probably fail at a competitive level. Honestly, it looks like fun... but only for a week or two, at which point I'd probably conclude the game is broken competitively and stop playing.
Why does it matter toward the success of this game if its competitive or not?
There are plenty of fun multiplayer RTSs that suck as competitive games.
EPT
