I am going to start a New post with a few questions for Oxide about AOTS.
So i ask everyone to just ask questions about the game and wait for Oxide to answer them. Well lets hope
1- Q: Will it be Volcanoes in the game?
2- Q: Will it be water ( oceans, lakes, rivers ) in the game?
3- Q: Will you have Naval / amphibious Units?
4- Q: Will AOTS have single player mission based story a la C&C? or it will be only skirmish like SINS?
5- Q: Will players be able to fully Mod the game?
6- Q: Will AOTS Engine be fully destructible ( mountains, ground, etc. ) you know what i mean. Example, make a hole through a mountain with a super weapon and make all your units move through it?
They hover but they still need solid ground. So they can't go over lakes or mountains. The aircraft do that though.
I can see mountains being impassable, but I don't see why hovercraft wouldn't go over lakes? Wouldn't that be the main advantage of having a unit hover? This seems unrealistic, and I'm not sure what the point of hovering is then?
Stuart
To the best of my knowledge, the hovercraft would need something solid underneath it(considering the weight of a tank for example), where as with a liquid, you wouldn't gain the resistance needed to stay hovering. The pressure between the craft and the liquid wouldn't be enough. That is just my un-scientific opinion though.
Sorry to burst your bubble then, hovercrafts can easily go over water. That is one of the main advantages of them: They don't care much about what ground you put below them
Yep, that was the main advantage of them in Total Annihilation Core Contingency (1998). I hope they aren't just graphical window dressing here.
Wow, crazy stuff ColaColin, thanks for bursting my bubble.
Back to the question of why make them hover at all, well, it seems like they would be able to make more ground if they hovered vs using wheels/tracks. It is a video game after all
true flying is better than walking, but if you fly/hover you look like you could go over water.
Well I guess for balance reasons it may be helpful to put away with that realism if some design decision was to make all units hover.
I can see mountains being impassable, but I don't see why hovercraft wouldn't go over lakes? Wouldn't that be the main advantage of having a unit hover? This seems unrealistic, and I'm not sure what the point of hovering is then?Stuart
What I understood from Frogboy is that the Final V.1 of the game is that it will not have sea, lakes or rivers and because of that the wont make naval units. as i remember they may be adding it in Future expansions depends on what the community want. , sorry if i am wrong about this info.
it's an RTS game. to be specific. if every unit can hover then you've removed alot of the interesting aspects and choices revolving around terrain and the map.
True, why putting a river or a mountain if there is no use for it in the game.
Long time RTS fan here, played countless hours of SotSE and Supcom 1 & 2. About to sign up for the founders package to support Ashes, but a couple items I couldn't not find about the game.
1 - is there base building? If so, how much? Did not see any screenshots or mention of buildings.
2 - point defenses?
3 - Shield generators?
Tx!
What are think to Build Orders on Field ?
Like this ex .
Guard/Assist
Keep unit at full health. Mobile units: Follow and fire on attackers of unit. Factories (assisting other factories): Build same units
Unit Pause
Pause building or upgrading.
I don't fully understand your response. I think The_Gear was trying to say that hover units would simply be a little faster. Frogboy has said that hover units will have the same movement restrictions as wheeled/tracked units. This means that even if every unit could hover, terrain features such as rivers and mountains would still be important.
Rivers and mountains would restrict movement of hover units, according to Frogboy.
The hovering units can't go over water or mountains. They are channeling gravity so water is a no-go. And a tracked vechicle would probably do slightly better going up the mountain than our hover units.
If you look closely as the units, you can actually see the individual gravity channelers moving around to keep the unit stable.
I have a few questions today.
Q: are we going to have the same Units on Both sides like in PA? or each side will have its own kind of units and weapons? I will be very sad if we will be getting the same Units, weapons and buildings on both Post-Humans and The Substrate
Q: 2 sides its fine (Post-Humans and The Substrate) but its possible to get a third side? maybe Aliens? or thinking about it in a future expansion?
Q: Are we getting some kind of Replay in AOTS?
I REALLY hope the two sides have different units/forces, it adds soooo much to a game. I don' t think anything else would be acceptable in a modern RTS (nor was it in the old either!). I know PA only has one and i think it is much much weaker for it. I am a little worried about this as weren't they the same in SINS and only differentiated with the big Titan(?) class ships?
Even if there was a simple differentiation in the two sides, like one is fast but weaker in general and the other is slower but tougher, with different unit/art styles of course, then that would be something. TA would not be the game it is without the rivalry between the Arm and the Core...ARM forever!
(slight edit for clarity of meaning)
I Just Looked a the teaser and its awesome, Thank you.
So let me ask you about the teaser, do we see any IN GAME ENGINE in that video?? or its just cinematic?
I'm completely in favor of separating land and naval units. However, this explanation makes no sense whatsoever.
Yea I didn't really understand Frogboy's statement either. My first reaction was "huh? gravity is practically the same regardless of the surface!" I think we need more lore details to understand the reasoning better or the reason/lore for this just needs to be adjusted in order to make more sense. Ultimately though, I understand that this is really a gameplay design limitation.
A traditional hovercraft doesn't care what the terrain is because it's basically a leaking balloon and has sensible limitations as a result of it's design. You force air under the object and lift it from the ground via pressure, the pressure needed to lift it increases with the amount of pressure from the mass. The extreme weight limitation in order to maintain a low pressure is the only thing that allows float on water. Whether a hovercraft can float on water is simply a question of whether the thrust required to create that pressure differential is more than the thrust required to displace the water beneath the object instead.
If you're using some sort of futuristic tech where you're doing something different to keep yourself afloat instead, even if it followed the same rule as modern hovercraft it would be extremely unlikely to be an amphibious vehicle and still be an effective combat vehicle. If whatever force that keeps them afloat would simply bore through the water under their weight, they can't be amphibious. Modern hovercraft aren't used as combat vehicles for this reason, they're landing craft where used, as anything that floats on water and carries weight is already by nature somewhat fragile to start with.
A futuristic hovercraft capability of significantly higher thrust, that was capable of supporting a heavily armored war machine of massively high density compared to naval vessels, would be a means to a smooth ride, not amphibian capability. If it was capable of achieving a bit of elevation, say a few meters, it would be an extremely all terrain vehicle. You can't drive a tank through a mountain range or a river, with a three meter clearance you could cross most of them on this planet with little trouble. With just a meter it would put tracked vehicles to shame.
It's held up by gravity, anon.
Re Units: No. The Post-Humans and Substrate have different units, weapons, etc.
Re: Aliens. Not in the base game. If you buy the Lifetime Edition, then yes.
Re: Replays. They are planned. Won't be in the first beta.
The units are pushing themselves against the ground via gravity channeling. Sort of like repelling. They can't go over water because of its density.
true flying is better than walking, but if you fly/hover you look like you could go over water.Well I guess for balance reasons it may be helpful to put away with that realism if some design decision was to make all units hover.
In our mythos, gravity channeling doesn't work on water because it requires the surface to be of sufficient density. It's just a plot device but it's not totally hokey either. There is a very definite distance between the unit and the ground in Ashes.
We have a lot of reasons for using hover units, for example, path finding. In a pinch, a unit can hover over another unit (or building). That's probably the most basic advantage from a game mechanics perspective. We also thought it looked cool.
I've had discussions about this before and it was said that pathfinding is easier with hovering units and I was only able to understand it to a limited point.
The conclusion I came to was "units that hover don't look weird when they go sideways or turn in place, which makes navigation of them easier".
I didn't consider you would allow units to hover over other units or even buildings. Does that mean units in ashes will behave like air units in other games and be in risk of stacking up in one place? I don't like the idea.
It's a pretty common thing in 3D movement.
I believe it was implemented in SoaSE as well. What do you do when two cruisers go at each other? Well, one dives and one raises altitude so they pass by each other easily and efficiently.
If you don't want towers to form and there's not enough room for a unit to 'duck', you simply use a movement algorithm that has 3 dimensions with 2 possible values on the Z axis. A little more room for the pathing algorithm, more efficient unit movement (helps prevent clumping), computationally still relatively simple depending on the implementation.
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