Proposed New Turtle Upgrade System

The Turtle upgrade system is a little bland. Most players ignore them for most part, which shouldn't really be the case. I believe that the changes they make do not justify the time taken to click on them. So, here is the new set of upgrades, once again divided into four sets of two, in the format:
Upgrade Name(set one of four):
- Thing it does 1
- Thing it does 2

Turtle Heavy Infantry Upgrade (set 1):
- EMP Rounds for BAI Infantry
- Adds 50% infantry HP (heavy armour)
- Slows down infantry by 25% to 30%
- AA Infantry gets increased range

Turtle Assault Infantry (set 1):
- AGES rounds for BAT Infantry
- Increased RoF for AA Infantry and AF Infantry

Defence HAT Upgrade (set 2):
- Repair Drone
- Adds 50% HAT armour (heavy armour)

Assault HAT Upgrade (set 2):
- HAT MG Upgrade
- The AA Hat gets the ability to use its AA missiles as make-shift artillery
- Anti-Building Shot for regular HATs

Adaptive Infantry (set 3):
- AAF Additional Ammunition types
- AN Infantry get the ability to disable an area around them, rather than specifically targeting

Advanced Infantry (set 3):
- AN Range increase
- All Infantry get the ability to self-heal slowly

Advanced Aircraft (set 4):
- Aircraft Armour
- Double ammunition capacity for the TUBA

Advanced Fortifications (set 4):
- Building Armour
- All buildings and the Super-Heavy Vehicle get the ability to send out a shockwave to do damage to units around it.

Anyways, comments appreciated.

TUBA update

The Turtle Ubiquitous Bomber Aircraft is receiving an update!

Previously, it has been somewhat clunky to use. Two per fairly ugly airfield, having to take off etc. And the model didn't really make much sense.

So, I'm replacing it with a much better VTOL aircraft. The airfield will be replaced with a much more compact helipad, which can fit one TUBA per pad. They will also not take up much power.

Hopefully, this will make them more popular and useful.

Rush gameplay change

It seems to me as though Rush has become the primary steam-roll faction. This is because of a few things:

Turtle players are unwilling to build artillery pieces to bombard civilian structures.
Rush players tend not to attack until they have an overwhelming force, while using their force build up to harrass any attack forces that leave an enemy base.

So, I have a change proposal:
Each Rush unit will take up power. Each Rush command building will give around 15-30 power. If the Rush player runs out of power, then his production stops.

This means that Rush players will either have to build a lot of command buildings (wasteful), or fairly constantly harrass opposing players (which is what I want). Hopefully, players will choose the latter, and come up with relatively creative ways to attack their opponents so that each strike does at least some damage.

Mission ideas

I'm just going to be dumping down mission ideas here. Read for spoilers and stuff. The story will be a bit weird, especially involving such factions as Rush, Turtle and Stealth.

Introducing Rush:
Goals:
Introduces Rush resource mechanic
Basic Anti Infantry Infantry
Basic Anti Tank Infantry
Building Hub
Infantry Command
Construction Vehicle
Mission Progression:
Player starts with a construction vehicle and $5000.
Player is given access to the building hub
Player is asked to build a building hub
Once the building hub is complete, the player is asked to upgrade it to an infantry command
Once the infantry command is upgraded, the player is asked to build five BAII
The player is asked to mount the infantry, and move to the next clearing, dismount, and eliminate the infantry that have formed up there.
The player is then given access to BATI, and then asked to eliminate the two HATs parked in the next clearing.
The player is then asked to move any remaining infantry up to the group of houses past the HATs, and garrisoning the buildings
The economy mechanic is explained.
The player is then asked to eliminate some infantry and a bunker with his current available tech.
Once the player has done this, the mission ends.

Suggestions as part of an overarching campaign:
The commander has been given orders to eliminate this Turtle controlled area, no reasons given
A new war between these two factions after masses of tension
Possibly a break from a lull in fighting in a massive on going war.
Ignites lots of fighting (that will presumably unlock weapons as warfare escalates)

Mod abstract

I'm going to be setting up a moddb page, and I have to have, for want of a better word, an "abstract". My perusing has made an approximation of length, 200 words or less.

So here's where I will dump it before I put it up there.
Goals: Get people to know what my mod is about without specifying anything specific. Specific information about units or teams will belong in other pages beyond the abstract on the front page.

Required information, in order of importance.
The RTSmod is a total conversion for C&C Generals: Zero Hour
It has three factions
Each faction has unique resource gathering mechanics, build mechanic, tech trees, units and structures
All units are useful throughout the course of a game
Each faction has a significantly divergent playstyle
Much more dynamic gameplay than Zero Hour
Teams are Rush, Turtle, and Stealth
Enhanced urban combat
Intuitive interface
Team names!

Test abstract:
The RTSmod is a total conversion for C&C Generals: Zero Hour which strips out the teams of Zero Hour and replaces them with three factions with significantly divergent playstyles. Each faction has its own resource gathering mechanic, build mechanic, tech tree, and units and structures. It features highly dynamic gameplay, as well as enhanced urban combat. All units have a very specific role in the mod; no unit is useless, or left behind as the game progresses. The teams, Rush, Turtle, and Stealth, are very well defined in their roles while still being balanced at all stages of the game.The interface is simplified so that icons are easy to read, and ordered in an intuitive fashion, while the game is still complex enough to be engaging for a long time. This means that it is very easy to pick up, while still rewarding experience and skill.

*changelog*
Moved teams sentence immediately after units sentence
Moved ease of play to end of abstract
Changed wording of units sentence ;; Again

New experience mechanic

I can see the purpose of experience in games. Almost any modern RTS has experience (under whatever name). A couple of exceptions, like Universe At War, Dawn of War, possibly other RTS games with 'war' in the name...

Anyway, the purpose is this:
Experience (of unit or player sort) rewards the player for engaging the enemy. Depending on the game, it rewards you for doing well against an opponent. Some games include a mechanic for rewarding the engagement itself (in Red Alert 3, you get additional player experience if you lose lots of units), although most don't.

Experience can be called any number of things, although experience is probably the most popular one. An example of something that is the 'experience' mechanic that isn't called that is the "Tactical Aid" mechanic from World in Conflict, a sort of player experience.

Unit experience is experience that a unit acquires to improve itself, and only gets it from units it kills directly (or, by supporting other units, ala lieutenants from Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts). Unit experience does not benefit all of a player's units typically.

Player experience is experience that is gained from any of the owning player's units. It typically results in benefits for all or some of that player's forces, or the player's pools of resources.

I have decided to change around my unit experience mechanic. The goal of this is to make the experience bonuses curve more graded. Currently, units simply get 120% attack range for getting up to rank 3.

However, I have planned to change the unit experience as thus:
At Rank 0: A unit has 100% rate of fire and range
At Rank 1: A unit has 110% rate of fire and range
At Rank 2: A unit has 120% rate of fire and range
At Rank 3: A unit has 130% rate of fire and range

If you remember from before, a unit goes up one rank by killing twice its own value.

There are several reasons for this:
Firstly, it is more intuitive. You now know, 1 rank up means +10% rate of fire and range, across the board.
Secondly, it means that the benefits of experience gain are much more immediate. A rank 1 will beat a rank 0 of the same unit in a head on fight. A rank 2 will beat a rank 1 and so on.
Finally, the benefits don't really show themselves in a short battle, but only in longer battles. So, experience doesn't really help for ambushes (range notwithstanding), but serves much better for battles that last longer than one volley. Artillery reloads faster, snipers can shoot marginally faster, HATs turn enemy tanks into paste faster, and so on.

There is a possibility that infantry ranges may be a little more tightened than they currently are, but we shall see.

Anyway, right now, I'm fairly happy the mod has survived the worst of my emotional pits, and has gotten to the point where I can show people progress that isn't pure code stuff.

Hopefully, I shall have a decent playtest session on friday, and do some balance updates then (and also get some proper reaction, maybe even written up!). Currently, Stealth is still a little underpowered (so, perhaps a price drop on advanced infantry and vehicles), but not enough games have been played. Turtle may be a little too powerful at the moment.

Special Ability balancing

I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about balancing special abilities.

Turtle:
As it stands, the Turtle tree is fairly balanced. Well, the scout side of tree is a little more useful, as bases are less important for two of the teams, and the speed penalty on the Heavy aircraft is quite high.

The latest changes I have made for this makes the heavy side of the tree recharge its abilities 30 seconds faster, so it much more useful against fortified positions (by virtue of higher damage). Also, the heavy side gets damaging ability 1 rank ($4000) earlier.

Rush:
Rush abilities are a bit harder balance, since a lot of them are situational. When playing against Turtle, the AF upgrade for Rush Anti-Tank Infantry is still quite popular. Beyond that, the Light Tank Assault Gun seems like a fairly popular choice.

I tend to choose the medium tank sonic barrage also.

Unsure how to balance this, probably associate a money cost with the upgrades.

Stealth:
During the course of a match, stealth has access to every unit available. However, some units should probably not be available at the onset, which have a cost of 3 (which require 1 rank).

More balance stuff

Alright

Last Friday (4/09/2009) marks the finalising of all the mechanics, so only balance changes and bug fixes from here on out. Woo. The last one to be completed was the stealth Hammer Space weapon.

Monday (31/08/2009) marks the last of all vehicles, buildings, and aircraft other than Stealth MCVs to be modelled.

The smattering of playtesting resulted in the following:
The Turtle Unarmed Scout ability is now very useful against stealth for hunting down MCVs, although it is still good to have a presence around the map. Stealth players would be advised to avoid the middle of the map.

The Rush ASV also got used a decent amount, although not enough games were played to determine balance issues.

It was discovered that Stealth recovered too easily from losing an MCV. The cost of MCVs was increased to $3000, and their build time increased to 30 seconds.

It was also discovered that Stealth does not build units fast enough, especially since they can only have one of each production structure. Build times for Stealth units reduced to 7.5 seconds for basic infantry, 12.5 seconds for advanced infantry and vehicles, and 15 seconds for drones.

Stealth MCV abilities have been buffed slightly.

Turtle building commandsets have been standardised such that the first six icons are always the garrison icons, for future interface where a specific part of the interface will be cordoned off for garrisons (turtle or otherwise).

There were several bugs fixed as well.

Playtesting

I'm very happy about today's playtesting. I got a lot of feedback, and quite a lot of people turned up, and played it quite a bit. So, aside from bugs:

Stealth is still a little too difficult to win against. Thus, the teams are getting an upgrade to their stealth detection capabilities:
Stealth's Spy Satellite will have its reload time reduced.
Turtle's Scout aircraft now does stealth detection, but none of the variants with bombs do.
Rush's Air Transport will detect stealth

I've seen every single unit used at least once, except for the Rush air transport. I believe this is because it is far too redundant and inconvenient to use. So, to improve the usability of this unit, it will now be the Rush Aerial Fighting Vehicle! With this name change will also come a functionality change. It will only be able to transport a single infantry, but that infantry will be able to shoot out. It will also be able to detect stealth.

Also, now units should automatically shoot at enemy structures. Since you cannot capture enemy buildings, there is no real incentive behind keeping them there.

The AGES has been nerfed, though not by as much as initially decided.

POW could be changed to do subdual damage instead of normal damage (as its effect is currently very little). Name change possible?

Stealth needs a bit of a boost, maybe? We shall see.

More playtesting

I hosted some more playtesting yesterday.

Results:
Anti-Fortication Infantry were used quite widely. They actually seemed a little too powerful. The speed of the round has been reduced, and the scatter radius has been increased. This keeps them effective against their intended target type, while making them worse against mobile units.
Various stuff happening thanks to bugs that I have not fixed yet.

I am fairly happy with the fact that players seem to have to use about three different units, lest they wish to lose against every enemy who does. I'm surprised at how balanced it seems to be, although more playtesting will obviously determine how good the balance actually is.

Playtesting results

We only managed to get a couple of games going, both of which were Turtle vs Rush.

It was discovered that Turtle is a little more powerful than Rush, and that Turtle defence is stronger than Rush offence.
Changes based on this observation:
- Rush Anti-Fort infantry have had a range increase
- Rush Anti-Fort infantry no longer require line of sight
- Turtle Anti-Fort Support Upgrade was too effective against enemy units, increased scatter, increased min range, removed the auto-target

It was noted that Turtle players seem to have a massive aversion to using vehicles, or even building a war factory. It was also noted that Turtle players are not aggressive at any stage of the game, allowing for very easy mid-game economy harrassment.
This does not have changes based on it, as it is due to poor management by opponent

Turtle Support Abilities had some debug prices and reload times left in. Those have now been removed.

Should have Turtle tactical weapon online at some stage

Playtesting on friday

This is mostly for self-reference.

I have running playtesting on Friday, and thus need to come up with a match-list:
Turtle vs Rush x 2 (switch players)
Rush vs Rush x 2
Turtle vs Turtle x 2
Stealth vs Stealth x2

Testing

Hello all

Work hasn't yet finished, but there isn't very much to write about.

Just started some actual multiplayer testing, and this has brought to light a few interesting things.

Good:
The teams work fairly well internally.
Rush and turtle are fairly fun teams to play and to play against.
Infantry are good all game

Bad:
Stealth are difficult to play against and play
Disguise mechanic not working well, switched to them not showing up on RADAR
Some differentiation issues, as I'm still using same models for different units (needs fixing)

Balance stuff:
Stealth units are too expensive
Stealth detectors (mainly infantry) are not good enough at it.
Stealth MCV is now not stealthed when deploying, bit too good before
Stealth units build too quickly, particularly for early game
Stealth units stealth too quickly

Thus far, Rush and Turtle haven't really met on the field. Turtle has faced off against turtle, and it was discovered artillery was too accurate, and the SIFV healed itself too quickly.

Rush v rush has not yet been tested yet.

I will update more posts about the testing when more gets done.

Still implementing changes.

Still coding through the changes I mentioned last week.

I still need to think of several things, and then crank out maps while I deal with models and crap.

Things to think about!
- Stealth Abilities
- Medium Tank special ability
- Turtle, and feasibility of various bits of code.

Getting back to it

Alright, in the hiatus I managed to find someone to do texturing, so while he is getting prepped for that, finishing studying etc. I've started to polish up my code.

There are a bunch of rather messy things in the code that I have left, on the basis that I will come back and redo them later. And so I have.

One of the things that I have changed is the Turtle defence and vehicle repair.

Turtle no longer have specific AT or AA defence structures.

Now, instead, they have a dedicated bunker structure, which fills no purpose other than to be a bunker. As a result, it is a lot tougher than other non-HQorSuperweapon buildings.

So what about that anti-air anti-spam weapon? That's being moved over to the HAT AA vehicle.

And if you want it to be a base defence. Dump it in a building! Same with the HAT, although the high power autocannon is being removed entirely. Yes, this does mean vehicles can now be placed in buildings. You may have one HAT variant inside a building, or five infantry. It repairs all of those, which means that the factory no longer has a dedicated repair bay, and instead simply functions as a bunker in combat.

This means that you won't have to have a frontline factory, instead just having bunkers for forward bases.
This also makes the HAT self-repair module a slightly less attractive choice, rather than what it has been during playtesting, a no-brainer choice, which is something I want to avoid.

Stealth has been getting a make-over in terms of their support abilities powers, the details of which can be found in the overview post, down at the bottom. But for most part, the abilities are being split up over the MCVs, and diversified to six different abilities. I still need a sixth one, and maybe a fifth.

Rush has probably received the least change, as all they have is coding cleaning and bug fixes. There is one issue of the third Medium Tank upgrade, which I suspect will turn into a rather micro heavy one. I'm thinking possibly a next shot double damage ability, or something like that. Interestingly, the Medium Tank is the most upgradable of anything that Rush has, so it's supposed to be the main part of any force. None of its upgrades make it able to beat a HAT one on one, but they do generally tip the scales in its favour in different situations.

Anyway, that's all for now, hopefully we can get to work on the artwork, and post some next week.

Still breaking

Still taking a break. Found someone to help with texturing, so we'll start doing up some models and pasting them here.

Taking a break

I'm currently taking a break. BBL! Hopefully. It's disappointing to see many hopefuly projects fail. I hope mine doesn't become one of them.

Gamer Profiles

While reading about various games and game design, and who you have to think about when making a game, ultimately you have to consider who you're catering to. Quite a lot of people have written about the topic, but I think I shall too, with regards to RTS games in general and specifically my mod.

I might touch up on this later, but without further ado, player archetypes, using names of various sorts from the various other authors on the topic.

Power Gamer: This is the pro-gamer, and the kid who wants to be etc. I personally don't hold this sort of person in high regard, as they tend to follow trends and patterns with various patches. One thing I do respect is the reason they play, which is to win. Generally, methodology is flawed in that once a "winning strategy" has been found, they generally stick to that.
This doesn't necessarily apply to all power gamers, as many good ones can be imaginative and insightful.
To curb the 'winning strategy' idea, I have tried to make many paths to victory, and all of them have efficient counters, so long as you know your opponent is using them. Thus, no one single strategy should win you every game. Some are better than others, others are definitely worse (the sell-all building at the start of the game 'strategy' should never net you a victory).
Similarly, there is no such thing as a "one unit army". You should not be able to devise an uncounterable army made up of a single unit, even two units are fairly hard pressed.
Given that the 'power gamer' mindset is fairly prevalent, I would not simply lock them out entirely. The Rush team is effectively built around the pro-gamer ideal. During playtesting, Rush is very fast to attack. More importantly, however, is that the player is almost always doing something. There is hardly ever any waiting time for Rush. If you're not doing something, you're probably losing and out of money.
Rush is also all about micromanagement, which is also difficult, as they also have the largest numbers on their side. A pro-gamer may find himself comfortable with Turtle or Stealth, but Rush is specifically designed to cater to a pro-gamer style of play.

Casual Gamer: Everyone knows who this is. If you play computer games a decent amount, you'll run into a few of these as well. Their reasons for playing are mostly to destress and unwind. Winning would be nice too, but isn't necessary. Casual gamers prefer longer games. They also tend to play less, which means they often come away from their last game of the day thinking about something new to try.
The source of this inspiration is sometimes in the back of their head, based on something that happened during the last game (if only I had done...), something someone else did (that's really clever), or off the internet (forums or guides and the like).
While I think thinking about it is rather good, the behavior of casual gamers tends to be rather lazy. Generally, once the casual gamer has completed all of his things that he wanted to do during a game, he will generally be contented and happy that that particular part of his strategy worked.
Casual players will generally also enjoy playing against the AI more, and also enjoy 'comp-stomps', battles with fellow players allied against a dastardly and automated foe. Most likely the reason for this is that an AI can often be relied on fairly well to be predictable. While the casual player may not win against the AI, he may think about what caused him to lose, and try again next time. Not a good strategy for playing against thinking human players, who will also change strategies between games.
Turtle is definitely the casual gamer's team. A turtle is competitive in its own right, but is less aggressive than Rush, and not as tricky as Stealth. It requires less short term thought than Rush; a Casual gamer does not change his plans on the fly very well. However, it definitely requires a lot more long-term strategy than Rush, as its units are generally not very good strategic assets.
Because of a casual gamer's playstyle and ideology inherently has its own fairly large weaknesses, casual players will tend to lose more against human players. Hence having a team based around the casual gamer mindset is helpful in that it can make things challenging for a power gamer while still being beatable. The Turtle team is not helped by being able to micro fairly well, as their units do not respond quickly enough to receive a huge benefit from, uh, 'uber micro'.
A casual gamer may attempt to play one of the other two teams, but will generally be hurt by the massive number of things one has to take care of. With Stealth, one has to be mindful of everything, and with Rush, there are many things to be done and taking a short break will hurt them very badly (especially with their lack of automated defence).
Casual gamers also tend to like big, powerful things and flashy stuff, which Turtle probably has the most of. Awesome but whatever.

I can't really think of a good game for this, but in Magic there is a character archetype called "the Johnny", who likes customisation and personalisation above almost everything else. This sort of player will tend to have a favourite set of upgrades that they will go for first in RTS games. In games with mutually exclusive upgrades, they will only have those, and often try to get them to work rather than change.
To those players, I offer mutually exclusive upgrades. Especially with Rush, and partly with Turtle. While I suspect there will be some favourites, Johnnys who play those teams will definitely have their sets and their orders in which they get them. Stealth has this to an extent, but it can eventually get all upgrades by the end of a game. There will most likely be an order as people strive for their favourite units at the start of the game.
Rush has upgrades for its different units, purchasable through its upgrade system. There are 11880 combinations of upgrades, many of those combinations, possibly even most, useful in some way or another.
There is definitely room to move in there. Turtle has a whole 4 bits worth of combinations (16), and those too are pretty independent.

At this point it may be worth noting that archetypes can overlap. I do know at least one person who is a very casual gamer, and makes no qualms about being intellectually lazy, but these people are few and far between.

Hmm... Probably time to post now.

Points of commonality and Map Design

I wonder what points of commonality there are between my three teams. It will probably be shorter than the differences.

Obviously the teams are not totally unrecognisable to each other. Every unit should be useful against the other teams. You shouldn't stop using, say, AA Drones just because you're facing rush today.

Alright, so first point of commonality:
Production buildings: Each team's production buildings are divided into infantry, vehicles, and aircraft.

Basic Infantry: Each team has basic anti-infantry, basic anti-tank, and basic anti-air. They can fulfill all the basic combat roles with those.

Err... ???

I could come up with that, at least.

Oh, they all use infantry, tanks, and aircraft.

Enough of that.
Map design!

Obviously I can't really use the original Generals maps, as the mod would be unbalanced for most cases, especially those maps with little to no garrisonable buildings. This would force Rush into an all-or-nothing game.

It's also important for turtle, as there should be at least a few defensible positions that are also vulnerable to artillery. No single structure should be able to defend three choke points, so the chokepoints must be layed out at around 300 units from each other.

For stealth, map design doesn't matter as much, since their economy and bases aren't reliant on terrain. However, it's useful to leave a few cars lying around here and there.

Also, with map design, try to make it so that each team's weaknesses and strengths are emphasised. For instance, you'll notice in a few of my map designs that areas where combat would be likely are separated, thus emphasising the difference between, say, a HAT and a light tank.

Similarly, there are generally several civilian buildings near a supply depot, to force conflict between Rush and Turtle players. However, there tend to be less buildings than straight up zones of either kind, so that the defender does not have too much of an advantage.

Of course, a turtle player could start killing off civilian buildings so that a Rush player would lose one incentive to strike at a particular location (although resource denial is still very important).

You can assume that players will be performing economy harrassment, so you should have more buildings than you need, at least purposes of Rush. On the same vein, make it so that turtle expansion points are relatively defensible.

The placement of cliffs is also important. Try to avoid having areas of the map which are entirely inaccessible to everything but aircraft. To that end, I've fenced a lot of areas off with cliffs. This is good, as players tend to ignore cliffs as "impassable zones", and a Stealth player could take advantage of that using advanced infantry.

Balancing stuff

It's something that I was always going to have to do, but it's time to talk about balance.

I have just about finished all the coding associated with gameplay mechanics, and am about to start, in earnest, the aesthetic feel of the mod (which I have talked about before, although some things have changed, ye shall see!).

It's been apparent for a while that balancing this mod will be quite difficult, and there most likely never be a possible configuration that something this diverse can be completely balanced. But damn it, I'm going to try.

And in this post, I'll just dump down ideas I have for that.

The first sort of balance method is using what I shall call "Move to Range Calculations". This is very simple, and most likely inaccurate in most cases. However, it can work for some cases, particular with specific unit counters. If a unit can beat an equivalent cost of its intended counter, then something should probably be done.

The way it works is you have an imaginary battlefield, with the equivalent cost of two units arranged on either side. The battlefield is as wide as the longest ranged weapon's range. The shorter ranged unit (or units) move towards the longer ranged the unit, with the longer ranged unit firing as fast as it can.

This is obviously very simple, and doesn't work for things like artillery, which miss moving targets, and doesn't account for anything like novel maneuvers or anything like that. It also doesn't work for support units that do no damage. It becomes more complex, although not impossible, for weapons that scatter and have a blast radius.

It does work for very simple things, though, for instance HAT vs Rush AT Infantry. The calculation shows that the HAT would kill one Rush AT Infantry before being killed by the other five. Definitely, a hard counter. It also shows that in HAT vs Rush Light Tank, the HAT would win after being reduced to 330 HP.

Obvious disreprencies occur if, say, Rush AT Infantry were found to be beating equivalent costs of Turtle Anti-Infantry Infantry, or Stealth Advanced Anti-Infantry Infantry.

Anyway, this method's major weaknesses are obvious, and its major strength is that it can be done entirely in the head, without the need for firing up the game.

Of course, unit match-ups are only a small part of balance. All the unit match-ups could be balanced, and yet some team would be better than another, as things like ease of resource collection, ramping up eco, strategic concerns etc.

For instance, while a HAT will win most armoured disputes, it is strategically weak as it cannot relocate to deploy its considerable firepower. Hence the best way to determine balance, if the most costly, is by actually playing lots of games, and then examining how various units and abilities change the game, probably while watching replays. You don't want to mistake one player's incompetence for their units being underpowered.

Once you have identified the unit that is balanced or unbalanced, you can go about the problem is several ways. It's obviously not going to be every aspect of the unit that is unbalanced, so you have to identify what it is causing it. The unit will be too fast, too powerful, too tough, or maybe too cheap and plentiful.

The various was of going about that are quite varied. If a weapon is too powerful drop its power, or increase its reload time. Maybe give it a pre-attack delay. Shortening the range could also work.

One of the things that will most likely crop up during playtesting is the three team's income will probably not be balanced. So it needs changing. Turtle is very easy, as I can change the number of collectors spawned, the speed at which they travel, how much money they pick up per trip... That's about it. But quite a lot can be changed. With Rush, it is slightly more complex, as I can simply change the amount of money each building gives you. However, a significant portion of the Rush economy is map dependant.

So, once I've made a map, with that, I can control how many buildings in total are on the map, how many buildings are in a cluster (important, as 10 buildings in two clusters are more defensible than ten buildings in 4), where the buildings are located in relation to choke points etc. All of this, I'll figure out when I go over map design.

With Stealth, it goes a little backwards. Normally, one would be able to change how much of a unit's price they get in return. However, for this, it means that a Stealth vs Stealth game would occasionally run down to almost nothing (scratch occasionally). So with Stealth, to make their economy "worse", you make everything on the Stealth Faction more expensive, and to make their economy better, you make everything on the Stealth Faction less expensive.

Whole Unit, Building, Tech, and Faction Listing

I'm going to write this up so basically I can have this document anywhere, and update it accordingly. Eventually, it will be full of unit icons, building icons etc. along with complete unit profiles. This will also be a permanent link in the sidebar, so anyone can find it quickly and easily. It will also eventually have good formatting and contents.

Weapons Key:
R: Range. How far the weapon can shoot
MR: Minimum Range. If this isn't there, then there is no minimum range.
D: Damage. How much damage the weapon can shoot
L: reLoad time. How long it takes for the weapon to reload a magazine. (milliseconds) If no clipsize and clip reload time is mentioned, this is its rate of fire.
C: Clipsize. How many shots it fires per magazine.
Q: The rate of fire for shots within a magazine.
P: Pre-attack delay: How long it takes for a weapon to fire an already loaded shot. If it isn't referenced, the pre-attack delay is 0, as in it shoots immediately once it's pointed in that direction.
M: Hits all moving vehicles. The weapon is either guided or hitscan. Well, rather, it has the same chance to hit, moving doesn't affect its chance of hitting. Generally, missiles.
MI: Hits all moving targets. The weapon is hitscan. See above
S: Scatters when targetting infantry. Weapons can definitely be M and S.
SG: Scatters in General. Usually for artillery.
AI: This weapon is good against Infantry. A note on all ineffectivities: If a weapon is not 'good' against a particular sort of target, it does 20% damage. The exception is AA, where if a weapon is not AA, then it cannot target aircraft at all. Aircraft on the ground are heavily effected by AT weapons. If a weapon is solely anti-infantry, it only does 1% against other targets
AT: This weapon is good against Vehicles and parked aircraft..
AF: This weapon is good against buildings.
AA: This weapon is good against and can target flying aircraft. Also means that this cannot target ground units
B: Blast. This weapon has an area of effect
E: EMP, which shuts down vehicles and buildings that have been struck by it, but do no damage.
G: Kills Garrisoned troops per shot.
A: Limited ammo that the unit has to return to base for.

It will not contain any of the thoughts behind the units etc., but simply their cost, function, pre-requisites and other things you need to know while playing the game. It will be fairly similar to what you will see as tooltips while mousing over icons. We shall start with the most traditional of teams, Turtle:

Turtle Faction:
Turtle Buildings:
Uh... A note on Turtle Buildings. Every single one of their buildings can be garrisoned. Infantry placed inside a Turtle Building will heal at a rate of 10 HP/second. Vehicles need to be sent to a vehicle bay or vehicle factory.

Turtle Command Centre:
Price: $2000
HP: 5000
Power: +10
Prerequisites: None
Notes: You start off with this building. Like all Turtle buildings, it can hold up to five infantry. Because of its massive amount of health, it makes a decent point to put a front-line. It is also required to have both RADAR and use Support Abilities.

Turtle Power Plant:
Price: $500
HP: 1000
Power: +20
Prerequisites: Turtle Command Centre
Notes: This gives you power to do stuff with. Also works as a makeshift bunker, although low HP makes it not a particularly good defence structure.

Turtle ROB:
Price: $2000
HP: 1000
Power: -5
Prerequisites: Turtle Power Plant
Notes: This is a Resource Operations Base that gathers money depending on how far the ROB is from a supply point. Obviously its low HP and high cost means that this is a very important building to defend.

Turtle SDT:
Price: $200
HP: 1000
Power: -20
Prerequisites: Turtle ROB
Notes: This has a large stealth detection radius. You can only build one of this. It is also your basis for various research options. Once again, take care of it.

Turtle Railgun:
Price: $5000
HP: 5000
Power: -20
Weapons: None, sort of
Prerequisites: Turtle SDT
Notes: This is the Turtle Superweapon. It has quite a lot of hitpoints, but bad guys will also more likely concentrate on this before a command centre. With a 3 minute load times dealing massive damage to units, but less to structures, this is obviously useful for taking out enemy forces rather than bases.

Turtle Infantry Command:
Price: $1000
HP: 1000
Power: -5
Prerequisites: None
Notes: This builds infantry units, is relatively cheap, so can be useful as a make-shift bunker. However, the enemy may concentrate a decent amount of firepower towards this, since infantry are useful.

Turtle Defence Structure:
Price: $500
HP: 2000
Power: 0
Prerequisites: Turtle Barracks
Notes: This is a simple building that works as a garrison. It can be upgraded to have various guns on top, which take up an additional take up power. The weapons are Anti Ground (R250D80L1000MIAT), which takes up 5 power, Anti-Air (R400D50L4000C4Q1500AAMB), which also takes up 5 power, and Anti-Fortification (R1500MR450D300SBAIATAF), which requires a Turtle Factory and takes up 15 power. The respective costs are $500, $500, and $1000

Turtle Factory:
Price: $2000
HP: 2000
Power: -10
Prerequisites: Turtle Barracks
Notes: This produces Turtle Vehicles! Not much else to say, really.

Turtle Airfield:
Price: $2000
HP: 2000
Power: -10
Prerequisites: Turtle Factory
Notes: This produces Turtle Aircraft (well, the TUBA). It can store two aircraft, and that's about it.

Turtle Infantry:

Turtle Basic Anti-Infantry Infantry:
Price: $200
HP: 100
Weapon: R225D6L200MIAI
Notes: Not much to say. Standard infantry movement. This is the longest ranged basic anti infantry infantry. Er... 30 DPS. Can be upgraded to be simply ineffective vs vehicles, as opposed to entirely useless.

Turtle Basic Anti-Tank Infantry:
Price: $400
HP: 100
Weapon: R250D60C3Q100L5700ATAFMS
Notes: Long ranged AT soldier who applies damage over the first 300 milliseconds of firing for 6 seconds total. 30 DPS! Can be upgraded to be able to switch to an alternate R150D100L6000AIMBG weapon

Turtle Basic Anti-Air Infantry:
Price: $400
HP: 100
Weapon: R300D80L4000AAM
Notes: Stock standard AA infantry. 20 DPS vs aircraft!

Turtle Advanced Anti-Fortifcation Infantry:
Price: $800
HP: 100
Weapon: R375D300L13500P1500AIATAFSGB
Prerequisites: Turtle Factory
Notes: Is good vs stuff staying still. Not so good against moving stuff. Can be upgraded to be able to switch between and Incendiary Weapon and EMP Weapon.

Turtle Advanced Armour-Neutralising Infantry:
Price: $1000
HP: 100
Weapon: R150MIE
Prerequisites: Turtle SDT
Notes: Neutralises up to one target! Can be upgraded to a R250MIE weapon

Turtle Vehicles

Turtle Heavy Assault Tank:
Price: $1200
HP: 600
Weapon: R250D500L10000ATSMI
Notes: This vehicle is quite slow and has a slow turn and turret turn rate. This means it is rather vulnerable to flanking. However, it has a massive amount of frontload, so is very good at taking out taking out enemy tanks. Against singular enemy units, this is probably the best, but cannot face off against an equivalent cost of anti-tank infantry. Can be upgraded to also have a R150D5L100AIMI machine gun on top, or an upgrade to self-repair.

Turtle AA Heavy Assault Tank:
Price: $1000
HP: 600
Weapon: R300D50C4Q1000L6000AAM
Notes: A very generic AA vehicle. Mostly for support actual HATs. Same choice as above.

Turtle HAT Constructor
Price: $1000
HP: 600
Notes: This unit can build all Turtle Buildings, and also benefits from the upgrades mentioned above.

Turtle Super-Heavy IFV:
Price: $4500
HP: 5000
Pre-requisites: Turtle SDT
Notes: This is a massively slow vehicle with no weapons of it own, rather it carries a bunker atop it that up to five infantry can be mounted in. It is large enough to crush smaller vehicles. It moves as quickly as an infantryman. It should self-repair.

Turtle Super-Heavy Railgun Carrier
Price: $5000
HP: 5000
Weapons: R300MR100D80L100ATAFMI
Notes: Another massive slow vehicle that has a smaller version of the railgun on it. Basically another game-ender.

Turtle Aircraft

Turtle Ubiquitous Bomber Aircraft:
Price: $1500
HP: 200
Weapons: R350D5L100AAMI + R320D500L4000A2ATAFM
Notes: This is a relatively fast aircraft that is better for support than for scouting, as it has almost no sight range. It also uses its MG for AA fighter purposes and its cannons for AG purposes.

Turtle Upgrades:

Turtle Powered Ordinary Weapon:
Price: $500
Notes: Is a weapons upgrade for Turtle Basic Anti-Infantry Infantry, and is mutually exclusive with the Turtle AGES.

Turtle Anti-Garrison Energy Shot:
Price: $500
Notes: Is a weapons upgrade for the Turtle BAT Infantry, and is mutually exclusive with the Turtle POW.

Turtle HAT Self-Repair:
Price: $1000
Notes: This upgrade gives all HAT variants self-repair. Mutually exclusive with HAT Defencive MG.

Turtle HAT Defencive MG:
Price: $1000
Notes: This upgrade gives all HAT variants a defencive MG. Mutually exclusive with HAT Self-Repair.

Turtle AAF Ammunition:
Price: $1000
Notes: This upgrade gives Turtle Advanced Anti-Fortifcation Infantry additional ammunition types. Mutually exclusive with Turtle AN Field Modulator.

Turtle AN Field Modulator:
Price: $1000
Notes: This upgrade increases the range of the Turtle Armour Neutralising Infantry. Mutually exclusive with Turtle AAF Ammunition.

Turtle Building Armour:
Price: $1500
Notes: This upgrade increases the health of all Turtle buildings by 20%. Mutually exclusive with Turtle Aircraft Armour.

Turtle Aircraft Armour:
Price: $1500
Notes: This upgrade increases the health of all Turtle Aircraft by 50%. Mutually exclusive with Turtle Building Armour.

Turtle Support Abilities:

Note, prices are not anywhere near finalised, nor are the reload times, so those are not listed. Their general effect has been finalised, as has the tree path.
Turtle Scout Aircraft:
Points Cost: 2
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: None
Notes: A fast, lightly armoured scout aircraft flies over. The scout aircraft is the standard fast aircraft with additional cameras and other recon equipment attached.

Turtle LBFB:
Points Cost: 3
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle Scout Aircraft
Notes: (Light Bomb Fast Bomber) A scout aircraft with a small explosive device that is effective against all targets.

Turtle MBFB:
Points Cost: 3
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle LBFB
Notes: (Medium Bomb Fast Bomber) A scout aircraft with a medium sized explosive device that is effective against all targets.

Turtle EMPBFB:
Points Cost: 4
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle LBFB
Notes: (ElectroMagnetic Pulse Bomb Fast Bomber) A scout aircraft with a wide scale EMP device that can shut down large numbers of tank and vehicles.

Turtle IBFB:
Points Cost: 4
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle EMPBFB
Notes:(Incendiary Bomb Fast Bomber) A scout aircraft with a wide scale Incendiary device that burns infantry.

Turtle LBSB:
Points Cost: 3
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: None
Notes:(Light Bomb Slow Bomber) A heavy aircraft that drops a light explosive device, same as before.

Turtle MBSB:
Points Cost: 4
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle LBSB
Notes: (Medium Bomb Slow Bomber) Pretty self-explanatory.

Turtle SBSB:
Points Cost: 5
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle MBSB
Notes:(Super Bomb Slow Bomber) A slow bomber with a really big bomb, really good for striking an opponent's staging grounds.

Turtle AFBSB:
Points Cost: 4
Reload Time:
Prerequisites: Turtle MBSB
Notes:(Anti-Fortification Bomb Slow Bomber) A slow bomber with a bomb that does massive damage to a small area. Good for taking out buildings. Not quite enough to take out a super-heavy or command centre.

Rush:
Rush Buildings:

Rush Building Hub:
Price: $500
HP: 500
Notes: The building hub can be upgraded into any other single Rush Building, at the cost of $2000 and one minute.

Rush Infantry Command:
Price: $2500 (only useful for a Stealth player destroying the building.)
HP: 3000
Notes: This builds all infantry, and Rush Constructor Transports. That's about it, really.

Rush Vehicle Command:
Price: $2500 (See above)
HP: 3000
Notes: This builds all vehicles, and Rush Constructor Transports.

Rush Air Command:
Price: $2500 (See above)
HP: 3000
Notes: This builds all aircraft, and Rush Constructor Transports.

Rush Support Structure:
Price: $2500 (See above)
HP: 3000
Notes: This grants the Rush player the ability to use the minimap, and also heals friendly units around it.

Rush Infantry:

Rush Anti-Infantry Infantry:
Price: $100
HP: 100
Weapons: R125D5L100AIMI
Notes: This can be upgraded to have a R75D10L100AIMIG flamethrower for $50.

Rush Anti-Tank Infantry:
Price: $200
HP: 100
Weapons: R150D200L5000ATAFMS
Notes: This can be upgraded to have a R300MR100D200L8500P1500AIATAFSGB for $50.

Rush Anti-AirInfantry
Price: $200
HP: 100
Weapons: R300D80L4000AAM
Notes: This can be sidegraded to have a R300D20L1000AAMI for $0. This just in, it isn't a straight upgrade. More on that in another post.

Rush Vehicles:

Rush Light Tank:
Price: $600
HP: 350
Weapons: R150D30L1000ATMIS
Notes: This unit has a high top speed. It can be upgraded to have a R200D300L10000ATMIS weapon. It can also have its engines upgraded.

Rush IFV:
Price: $600
HP: 350
Notes: It means Infantry Fighting Vehicle. It can be upgraded to have an R100EMI weapon, and also go faster for $100. It can hold two infantry who can shoot out.

Rush Constructor Transport:
Price: $500
HP: 350
Notes: This can build Rush Building hubs. It can also transport 5 infantry, who may not shoot out. It can have its engines upgraded.

Rush Medium Tank:
Price: $800
HP: 450
Weapons: R200D200L5000ATMIS
Notes: The medium tank is probably the most upgradable thing in the Rush arsenal. It can be upgraded to have a R200D150L5000AIBMIS weapon. It can also be upgraded to have a laser targetter, which increase the amount of damage your units do to a particular target by double. And lastly, you can upgrade it to have self-repair.

Rush Aircraft:

Rush Guppy Transport:
Price: $1000
HP: 200
Notes: This can carry up to five infantry who cannot shoot out. It can be upgraded to have additional armour, and also increased engine power.

Rush Guppy Gunship:
Price: $1500
HP: 200
Weapons: R200D5L100AIMI R200D40C8Q100L7200ATMS
Notes: A gunship with AT missiles and an AI machinegun. It can be upgraded to have a pellet drop cannon R50D60C20Q100L30000ATAFBSG

Rush Upgrades:
All Rush upgrades cost 4 command points, and enable upgrades in units. Refer to the unit description for a more detailed description.

Rush Anti-Infantry Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Anti-Infantry Infantry

Rush Anti-Tank Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Anti-Tank Infantry

Rush Anti-Air Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Anti-Air Infantry

Rush Light Vehicle Engine Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a locomotor upgrade for Rush Light Vehicle Chassis.

Rush IFV Armour Neutraliser Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush IFVs

Rush Light Tank Assault Gun Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Light Tanks.

Rush Medium Tank HE Rounds Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Medium Tanks.

Rush Medium Tank Laser Targetter Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Medium Tanks.

Rush Medium Tank Regenerative Armour Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a self-healing behaviour upgrade for Rush Medium Tanks.

Rush Aircraft Engine Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a locomotor upgrade for Rush Aircraft.

Rush Guppy Transport Armour Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks an armour upgrade for Rush Guppy Transports.

Rush Guppy Gunship Annihilator Cannon Unlock:
Notes: Unlocks a weapon upgrade for Rush Guppy Gunships.

Stealth
Stealth Buildings:
Stealth do not have buildings in the normal sense. Rather, they have MCVs, which can deploy into buildings. However, while they are deployed, they still count as vehicles for the purposes of being shot at (so they have vehicle-armour). They are, however, uncrushable in either state. Also, they can disguise while packed up, and are stealthed while deployed. While deployed, they should be able to listen in on enemy commands in an area around them. Also, you can only have one of each MCV.

Stealth Primary MCV:
Price: $2000
HP: 800
Notes: Is an MCV. This produces infantry while deployed.

Stealth Secondary MCV:
Price: $2000
HP: 800
Notes: Is an MCV. This produces vehicles while deployed.

Stealth Tertiary MCV:
Price: $2000
HP: 800
Notes: Is an MCV. This produces drones while deployed, and also allows the use of Stealth Support Satellite abilities.

Stealth Infantry:
All Stealth Infantry can stealth.

Stealth Basic Anti-Infantry Infantry:
Price: $200
HP: 100
Weapons: R175D20L500AIMI
Notes: Nothing at all to be said really.

Stealth Basic Anti-Tank Infantry:
Price: $400
HP: 100
Weapons: R200D210L6000ATMS
Notes: Again, very basic, other than the ability to stealth.

Stealth Basic Anti-Air Infantry:
Price: $400
HP: 100
Weapons: R300D80L4000AAM
Notes: Hahaha. Stealth Basic Infantry are so basic! Don't worry, it gets interesting from here on out! At least for the infantry!

Stealth Advanced Anti-Infantry:
Price: $1000
HP: 100
Weapons: R300D150L3000P3000AIMIG
Notes: This can switch to binoculars, and can use them to observe an area or unit. Using these high-tech binoculars, the Advanced Anti-Infantry Infantry can also detect stealth in that area as well as its own, doubling the coverage, but also able to find Stealth units without endangering itself. Also, it can climb cliffs, something that every map designer for this mod should be aware of.

Stealth Advanced Anti-Tank Infantry:
Price: $1200
Weapons: R150D10L80AIMI R300D500L15000P500ATMS
Notes: This needs to switch from one weapon to the other (the AI weapon is default). It can also climb cliffs.

Stealth Advanced Anti-Fortification Infantry:
Price: $1200
Weapons: R150D10L80AIMI
Notes: This unit can not only climb cliffs, but also plant bombs that do 3000 damage in an area of about 80. It can have up to 9 of these bombs in place at once, and must be alive to detonate them.

Stealth Vehicles:
All Stealth Vehicles can disguise.

Stealth Anti-Infantry Transport:
Price: $1200
Weapons: R175D5L100AIMI
Notes: This can transport up to 5 infantry who cannot shoot out.

Stealth Anti-Tank Vehicle:
Price: $1200
Weapons: R300D500L15000P500ATMS
Notes: No notes for this vehicle.

Stealth Anti-Air Vehicle:
Price: $1000
Weapons: R450D160L8000AAM
Notes: No notes for this vehicle.

Stealth Anti-Fortification Vehicle:
Price: $1500
Weapons: R450MR150D100C20Q100L60000AIATAFSGB
Notes: You need to force this unit to fire on a location, it won't fire on its own.

Stealth Drones:
Stealth Drones fly, and are also stealthed.

Stealth AT Drone:
Price: $1500
Weapons: R300D500L15000P500ATMS
Notes: Drones are pretty boring, TBH.

Stealth AA Drone:
Price: $1000
Weapons: R450D160L8000AAM
Notes: See above

Stealth Support Satellite Abilities:

Satellite Target Assist:
Cooldown: 2:00
Notes: Increases friendly unit's range by 100%.

Satellite Magnetic Resonance Wave:
Cooldown: 2:00
Notes: Heals all units in radius up to full health.

Satellite Magnetic Resonance Wave Overdrive:
Cooldown: 2:00
Notes: Shuts down all vehicles and buildings in the area.

Satellite Explosive Magnifier:
Cooldown: 2:00
Notes: Halves the effectiveness of armour of units and buildings in the area.

And there you have it. One last thing:

Civilian Structure:
Notes: Can garrison up to 5 infantry who can shoot out.

Civilian Bunker:
Notes: Can garrison up to 5 infantry who can shoot out, and are immune to garrison clearing effects.

Hope you cats have fun playing this once all the graphics and sound is finished. I'll probably release a "beta" version once I finish the graphics, and work on the sounds while getting feedback.

Proposed Change List:
- HAT Constructor renamed to the HAT CSV (Heavy Assault Tank Construction Support Variant) and given the ability to repair vehicles. Or some other ability, as the other constructor has an ability of some sort. (Cancelled)
- Turtle different turrets removed (done)
- Turtle buildings can now store one HAT variant, and can heal it (done)
- Turtle factory 'service depot' removed (done)
- Added Turtle Defence Fortification (done)
- Turtle AAHAT given the AA turret's weapon.
- Turtle AAHAT price increase.
Will write up railgun code when I have free time. The last few weeks have just been overloaded with stuff.

- MCV Health Increase to 1000 HP

- Adding two more stealth support abilities, and then splitting them up across the three Stealth MCVs, rather than having them all on the tertiary, for a more consistent function of MCVs.

So... templist
- Satellite scan (detects stealth and gives sight range) Reload time 2:00 for Primary MCV (done)
- Heal Wave (heals all units and buildings in area) Reload time 2:00 for Primary MCV (done)

-EMP Wave (shuts down all vehicles and buildings in an area for 10 seconds) Reload time 2:00 for Secondary MCV (done)
- Satellite Targetting (increases range of effected units) Reload time 2:00 for Secondary MCV (done)

- ????
- Satellite Anti-Armour Fire (increases damage taken by a single target) Reload time 10 seconds for Tertiary MCV

Hero units, or the lack thereof.

A few people have asked me about hero units, and whether they would be in my mod at all. After all, most RTS games have heroes of various sorts. They range from the slightly better units (Act of War, campaign only), to fairly fleshed out beings complete with experience, gear, and special abilities akin to an RPG (like Warcraft 3), and most of them falling somewhere in between.

There are no units in this mod that you can only have one of (barring Stealth MCVs, although they're hardly 'heroes'). Probably the most similar to heroes are Stealth Advanced infantry, although you can have many of them in a game. What is meant by advanced?

Well, I use the term "Basic Infantry" to refer to any infantry that you can build right after building a barracks or other infantry recruitment centre, money depending. So Advanced infantry are infantry that have pre-requisites other than a barracks and money.

Both Turtle and Stealth have Advanced Infantry in the normal sense. Turtle's Advanced Infantry require a particular building to build, and Stealth Advanced Infantry require an unlock to build each. Rush's advanced infantry are upgrades of their basic infantry, and also require unlocks to get.

Advanced infantry are not necessarily better than basic infantry. They simply fill different roles. All teams have basic infantry that fulfil basic combat roles (obviously). All three teams have anti-infantry, anti-tank, and anti-air infantry. Anti-tank infantry also double as early game anti-fortification, although they do not outrange defence structures.

Advanced Infantry sometimes fill the same roles, but in different ways (not 'just better'), but also tend to fill less standard ones. So... Here's a run down of advanced infantry.
Turtle Advanced Infantry:
Advanced Anti-Fortification Infantry:
Requires: Turtle Vehicle Procurement Facility
Description: Turtle Anti-Fortification Infantry are artillery infantry. While they do less damage to buildings and tanks, they frontload a lot more, and have increased range. This allows them to target defencive structures and fortifications without risk. The increased frontload also means that first strike capability is more important than normal.
Turtle AF infantry can also be upgraded to be more versatile also. The additional ammunition upgrade gives them EMP rounds and Incendiary rounds in addition to their standard rounds. The EMP round does have a wide area effect, but doesn't disable for very long, so it's mostly a stop-gap, and isn't as effective as dedicated EMP weapons. However, being hit by an EMP might make the enemy stand still long enough for them to be hit by more artillery.
The incendiary round is a good weapon to use to protect your tanks from hordes of anti-tank infantry, and has a wide area of effect, so is probably the more useful of the two extra ammunition types.

Turtle Advanced Armour Neutralising Infantry:
Requires: Turtle Stealth Detection Tower
Description: Turtle Armour Neutralising Infantry can't actually kill enemies. However, it can effectively neutralise enemy vehicles to be picked off by support. Really, this ability is quite useful. It allows slower turtle vehicles catch up to enemies, and also mitigates the efficiency of hit and run attacks.
One of the more hilarious uses I have found for it is mounting them in super-heavy IFVs, and then having them lock down enemy vehicles and then crushing the enemy vehicles with the super-heavies.
Its upgrade increases its range to match that of anti-tank infantry. While the AF infantry increase their versatility, AN infantry just get a straight upgrade. The range increase means that the armour neutralising infantry can start shooting at opposing HATs at the same time they are being shot at, rather than significantly after (probably never, since they die).
This infantry, while non-lethal, has quite a lot of uses. Be creative.

Rush Advanced Infantry:
Rush advanced infantry are simply upgraded versions of their basic brethren. So for this list, I have forgone typing "Advanced" in front of everything.
Anti-Infantry Infantry:
Requires: Rush Anti-Infantry Flamethrower Unlock
Description: Taking this upgrade for a Rush Anti-Infantry Infantry replaces their gun with a flamethrower. The flamer has shorter range than the assault rifle, but puts out damage much faster. Essentially, it takes the Rush basic anti-infantry weapon, and makes it more of what it is.
It can also clear garrisons from buildings. This unlock is highly useful when used with an IFV, as it closes the distance, and also provides protection when attempting to take out a building garrison.

Anti-Tank Infantry:
Requires: Rush Anti-Tank Artillery Unlock
Description: Taking this upgrade for a Rush Anti-Tank Infantry replaces their missile launcher with an artillery weapon similar to the Turtle AF infantry, although shorter ranged and less powerful.
The difference between the two is that the Rush one is much cheaper and easier to crank out, and once the unlock has been acquired, there is nothing stopping the user from upgrading any anti-tank infantry. However, it is slightly worse, so you need more for the same task.
Once again, this is very useful with an IFV.

Anti-Air Infantry:
Requires: Rush Anti-Air Flak Unlock
Description: This upgrade maintains the same DPS and range as the unupgraded version, but does less frontload. The projectile travels faster too, so it's better for responding to an air raid, but the lowered front-load is worse for a planned attack (for instance, attacking a turtle ROB). This is probably the slightest change in role for the Rush upgrades.

Stealth Advanced Infantry:
Stealth advanced infantry, as I stated before, are the most similar to heroes. They are quite a departure from other infantry in that they are expensive, and actually inefficient. They tend to be a little softer in their counters. Also, they can all climb cliffs. Pretty cool, eh?
Advanced Anti-Infantry Infantry:
Requires: Advanced Anti-Infantry Unlock
Description: The Stealth Advanced Anti-Infantry is a sniper. It doesn't exactly infringe on the basic anti-infantry infantry's role. While it kills infantry in one shot, it does so at a much slower rate than Stealth Basic Anti-Infantry (about half as quickly). However, it does it from a longer range.
Secondly, it can snipe people out of garrisons. This means that it is very useful in a Stealth vs Rush game, as it can eliminate Rush's money sources.
Thirdly, it can observe an area indefinitely. This allows it to spot greater distances than normal, and also stealth detect in that area. This makes it the most mobile and versatile stealth detection available in the mod. This makes it very important for Stealth Mirror matches.

Advanced Anti-Tank Infantry:
Requires: Advanced Anti-Tank Infantry Unlock
Description: The Stealth Advanced Anti-Tank Infantry is a special ops soldier carrying a heavy AT rocket launcher, and a submachine gun. While it is a soft-counter to infantry, the equivalent cost of basic anti-infantry infantry can do it faster and at longer range.
It is, however, quite good against vehicles. Maintaining the same DPS as basic anti-tank infantry, they frontload more, so are much better for ambushes. Their ability to climb cliffs also makes them more able to escape from tanks that survive an ambush.

Advanced Anti-Fortification Infantry:
Requires: Yeah... You know.
Description: Unlike the other two anti-fortification infantry, this one plants bombs in the fashion of C&C commandos. Like them, however, they are not just good against fortifications, but things staying still. Once again, it has the same SMG as the Advanced Anti-Tank, making it another decent all-round infantry, although very expensive for what it does. It is generally good for giving a wake-up call to enemy players who have forgotten which army you are playing, especially since they can have up to nine bombs placed at any one time.

Bombs can also be placed on vehicles, although you have to be careful if you don't want your infantry crushed by heavier vehicles. This may have some obvious applications, like sticking it to a construction vehicle while it's building an expansion, and then letting it drive back into a base before causing damage.

The additional mobility gained through using advanced infantry may well be worth it, especially if the bad guys have stepped up patrols at choke points.

Indeed, all the advanced infantry are very useful, and generally are good as supporting units, although are generally not the units to spam or build lots of, which is my intention.

Stuff

It's that time again, for the two people in the world that care. Recently, I've been cranking out icons, at the rate of about one or two a night. The difficulty in making them will ramp up when I start making the non-icon ones for Rush, and I still mostly have to code the majority of Stealth stuff. Mechanically, the remainder of coding should be simple enough, and re-hashed from previous weapons and the like.

I haven't really decided on an style for Stealth icons. Possibly screen-shot icons, in the vein of Command and Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3, although I personally don't like the look of those. Maybe a more serious picture, compared to the cartoony imagery of the Rush faction. A mugshot for the infantry. I don't know. I'll find out when I get there.

Hmm... It seems like more of my designs for units seem to come out of bizarro world. Asymmetry seems to promote that. Certainly a lot to think on. This is a relatively short post. I am way too tired.

Hmm... The stealth build mechanic is giving me problems, but on the upside, their other stuff seems to work just fine. Cool.

Feel and Aesthetics

It's been a bit of a week.

I've decided to avoid texturing until I can clean up my textures a bit (and models). :P Also, Empire: Total War has been a slight crimp in progress (considering I've been doing this for 2 months now).

That doesn't mean I have stopped working on the mod entirely, it just means that those particulars (which are the most visually effective) are going to be the same for a little bit yet.

I have been thinking a fair bit about how my mod will 'feel', and how it will look. When I look at other C&C Generals mods, they tend to follow the aesthetics of Generals. That is, everything is rather close to the real world with maybe some high-tech weapons and the like. The icons tend to be pictures of things, rather than anything informative. This is a particular problem for me, as I would like everything to be as readable as possible.

One of the points where this is most apparent is the difference between anti-tank infantry and anti-air infantry. Both of these function in a similar fashion (rockets), so pictures are most likely to be confusing for a player who is unfamiliar with the team, or the mod in general. Hence, I have gone down the information route. Rather than make the icons to be representative of the unit, the icons will represent the function of the unit. For instance:

The turtle image for Anti-Infantry is very readable. You know that whatever this unit this is, you use it for fighting men! Not aircraft, not tanks, not babies, men!

Hovering your mouse over the icon will give you a description with the unit's name, cost, time to build and a short description (usually reinforcing its role, but also how it differs in its role to similar units). In the case of Turtle buildings, their power consumption or production is also listed.

Of course, not all the icons will be easily readable. Some things are not really easy to describe in the form of pictographs, so a little in-joke ends up there instead. For instance, the Turtle's Superweapon, the Railgun, has this icon:

Anyway, I did think about some sort of anti-everything icon, like the NO symbol over earth or God or something.

Rush will have more toony icons, representing the unit. One of the reasons for this is so I can have a bit of fun drawing silly looking people with Kalashnikov and RPG parodies. The other reason is that Rush is a slightly more complex team compared to the more standard Turtle team, and is more "the competitive players' team" in that its primary goals are large numbers of units, lots of micro and map control. Hence, I expect players playing Rush know a little about what is going on after one game (especially since they have very few units, in which you may get all of them in a game).

The upgrade icons will be done closer to the turtle icons, although some of them may be more about aesthetics rather than function. The flamethrower will have a flame icon, where-as the anti-tank unlock will have the anti-fortification symbol.

In terms of units and buildings, I want each team to be distinctive from the other teams in the mod, as well as from other mods and vanilla Generals. Also, everything will be smaller. Infantry and buildable buildings will be scaled more than tanks (civilian buildings stay the same, but hopefully the infantry will look like they can fit through doors).

Airfields will definitely drop inside so they are not such a chore to make.

Anyway, that's all I can think of for now, sorry for the late post, and hopefully I will have more stuff to write about next week.

Models and stuff!

So, I started working on making models yesterday (not as hard as I thought, but texturing is definitely a lot more work). Obviously, I have a lot to learn at this point about doing that sort of thing.

As far as the coding has gone thus far, I have done almost all of the code for Rush, and very nearly that for turtle (so, aesthetic stuff mostly remaining). Stealth, I only just started.

Over the course of making the mod, various new things come to mind. For instance, I realised that all three teams apply their upgrades similarly. Once the upgrade is bought, all units have the upgrade. If you have read any of the rest of the blog, you'll realise I am trying to make these teams as different as I possibly can while still being recognisable and playable.

So, I have now changed Rush and Stealth's unit upgrade mechanics.

Rush: Rush have a total of 12 unlocks, in which a player may choose four over the course of a game.
Each of those 12 unlocks enables an upgrade in one or more units (the same upgrade). These upgrades are permanent, so no going back. This shouldn't be a problem for any Rush player, as their units are as expendable as they are cheap and plentiful. I have tried to make the upgrades change the usage of the units in question as much as possible, so they facilitate strategic and tactical changes in all players once they figure out which unlocks the Rush player has acquired.

A good example is a Rush vs Rush mirror battle, where civilian buildings are constantly changing hands (or being destroyed). One Rush player gets the Rush Anti-Infantry Infantry unlock, which gives the Rush Anti-Infantry Infantry a flamethrower. This increase DPS and allows the infantry to clear garrisons, but shortens range to the point where it would lose to an infantryman without the upgrade.

The other Rush player would counter this by increasing the number of troops in his front line buildings (perhaps, there are several ways of countering this strategy), and also taking the Rush Anti-Tank unlock, which changes the Anti-Tank Infantry into an artillery unit (totally unable to hit moving targets, but long range and high frontload). Thus, if the first Rush player ever does capture a building, the artillery Rush player can use his artillery infantry to deny his opponent that income, and also start demolishing his opponent's income with artillery fire, adopting a scorched earth tactic.

Similarly, if you discover your opponent has taken the artillery upgrade, take the speed upgrade for all light vehicles. And so-on.

Obviously, if you take the first upgrade you also have the element of surprise (and also being proactive about strategy is helpful, it's not helpful to stand around and wait for things to happen). Keeping your cards close to your chest has strategic benefits. If you gain an advantage early game, you may want to take the counter to the counter of your original unlock, or not to throw your opponent off. Information warfare is very important.

Stealth: Stealth apply their upgrades differently again. All stealth upgrades are granted when you have a Tertiary MCV Deployed. Not to all the units, rather, special abilities are unlocked that allow you to grant bonuses to all units in an area (a buff I guess). The bonus is only temporary, however, they can change the course of a battle.

All the abilities are tied to the same timer, so you can only have one active for 10 seconds or so per minute. However, they definitely do provide a quick fix, or perhaps even as part of a greater strategy. e.g. Increasing a targets suceptibility to damage before ambushing it, using a range increase just before firing artillery from some distant unfindable spot, or AT rockets and the like. Gaining the upper-hand over Turtle long ranged infantry for hilarious effect if you manage to eek out a Tertiary MCV early game.

Of course, an opponent can see you using that ability, and thus can feel just a little safer for 50 seconds, or press your lack of advantage. They will also know that you have a Tertiary MCV somewhere one the field, and may step up AA precautions as a result.

Blargh! One of the things I haven't learned is save regularly. Damn crashes, destroying everything I create! For the 2 people who may care, I'll upload later in the week.

Historical Crap

I personally have always liked modding, although as I've gotten older, I've become more realistic in my goals and what-have-you. Also more persistent. Originally, it was mostly mucking around with INI files for Red Alert and RA2, or liero (loads of fun), and then it was with tibed and generals (I use notepad for everything now).

This is the first mod where I've had a defined plan and everything written down. However, it has incorporated a decent amount of ideas from previous ideas I've had floating about my head.

Probably the most prevalent and recent is a Red Alert mod for C&C3, which I started thinking about after they released the mod SDK for C&C3. It was not going to be Red Alert, but in 3D, but more like Red Alert retold with a different playstyle and from a different perspective.

It would have told the story based on the Allied victory being inevitable, and have attempted to link Red Alert and Command and Conquer that way. Playing as the Soviets would have had you fighting a losing war, holding out in various scenarios etc. You'd find that Kane leaked plans for some sort of EMP weapon to Nicola Tesla, and you'd have to hold out etc. As the allies, you'd make various pushes into Soviet territory, and eventually do various peace-keeping operations after the war as Nod rises to power.

The gameplay would have substantially different from C&C3 or the original Red Alert. Both teams economies would have been derived from their control of civlian villages all over the place, rather much like the Rush resource mechanic currently in place.

Each team required power (facilitated by mobile generators) to run their turrets and RADAR.

All buildings for each team would be mobile, except for defence structures. The buildings would be dropped in via a cargo plane. This mechanic can currently be seen with the Stealth team. The Allies would be able to camouflage their buildings so that a soviet force may just ignore them. Alternately, the soviets could garrison one squad inside each of their structures, allowing them to be a little more defencive.

All defence structures would also be dropped in via cargo plane, tesla-coils rather violently so. The player would take their completed structure and order it in, with a rather similar interface to the standard C&C scheme.

Ordering in troops would be similarly facilitated. All of your production structures would have an exit waypoint, which could be deployed near any other production structure. A cargo plane would drop your troops off there. This was supposed to be a different take on the traditional Red Alert and C&C idea of "More production structures make production faster", as all your troops would end up at one place four times as fast if you have four times as many production structures, even if they're in different places.

Rather than the traditional idea of superweapons, the soviets would have mobile V2 rocket launchers and the allies would have howitzers. Both would be strategic level weapons that must be deployed before firing, and have a long reload time.

Something I did think about a lot, but eventually dropped, was the idea of logistics. Tanks would carry around 60 or so shells, V2s would carry one shot etc, and you've have to drive your stuff back to a supply depot, where little dudes would run out with ammunition and a wrench (for repairs, obviously).

Little dudes with wrenches notwithstanding, the aesthetic of the mod would have been a lot darker than Red Alert or any of its successors. Soviet tanks would be dark and belch smoke everywhere, Allied tanks would be cleaner, although similarly coloured, and the only bright things would be explosions and fires (from the inevitable firebombings).

The tech tree I thought about a bit. It could have gone two routes. One was via a global timer (set by the host of any game). After 15 minutes, you could get tech 2. After 30 minutes, tech 3 etc. This would mean that tech rushing would have no meaning, and really the only thing you could do was be more efficient with your early units so you'd have funds for later ones (or go for an all out rush).

The other tech would be a global kill amount, also set by the host. Say, after $15000 of units had been destroyed, the game would progress to the next tech level. This would also be good to more efficient players, and worse to less efficient ones. Obviously, in larger battles, the kill limit would increase.

Anyway, if you've read the rest of the blog, you can see where various things ended up from that mod.

In its infancy, when I first proposed the idea and talked to a couple of people about it, things were quite different from the way they currently are.

Stealth was originally going to use its basic anti-infantry infantry to deploy teleportation beacons anywhere on the map, which has sort of evolved into the Rush constructor mechanic, which enables what I like to call a cockroach strategy. The cockroach strategy is initiated when a player loses or is losing a base, so abandons the original base and quickly sets up another one elsewhere.

Rush was going to be able to construct weak sustainable economy structures which would each produce 1 power, and also be able to build a generic be-all-end-all turret (kinda like the gattling turret) that took up one power. Hence, one resource generator, one turret. This was replaced by the more different capture civilian buildings and get money, as well as being more conductive to rushing, and making them strategically seperate from turtle and stealth. Base defence is now afforded by units (as is stealth detection).

Anyway, that's all I can remember for now. There are obviously a lot more things, but currently they're not coming to me at the moment, and I'm out of time.

Next week: Hopefully some concept art and maybe even renders, as well as a status report.

It's quiet out there

I have a question for whoever may be reading this. Is it appropriate that you must hunt down every last production building as well as every last builder unit to win a multiplayer/skirmish match? Tell me where-ever.

Anyway, the Stealth faction. The Stealth faction is designed to be very sneaky, obviously, and promote more strategic gameplay. One of the more difficult things to balance is spamming stealthed units, as the counters cannot so easily be moved to where the spammed units are. Hence, several things have been done to stop as much spam as possible.

The first is the economy, discussed earlier. The economy relies on active involvement from the player, rather than being automated. It also discourages spamming units, as spam is one of the least cost effective strategies, as once your opponent starts cranking out the counter, your kills/death ratio will drop rather dramatically, and thus your ability to spam will be nerfed in the future.

The second is the way the units are designed. While the other two teams may have some units that fulfill many roles, Stealth has almost none of these. Their units are very specialised, and finding a good all round unit to spam will be difficult.

Obviously, Stealth does have quite a few advantages also, although as unconductive to spam as possible.

Stealth's build mechanic is based of three Mobile Command Vehicles, or MCVs (C&C throwback, there). It's rather similar to the mechanic for the British Commonwealth in Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, although with a few differences. Firstly, they are functionally different. They are not intended to hold ground, but rather to provide a stealthy base of operations that can be easily moved to another area. Secondly, they are more dedicated. The Primary MCV only produces infantry, the Secondary MCV only produces vehicles, and the Tertiary MCV only produces drones.

The MCVs are stealthed when deployed, and count as vehicles when packed up. This is important for reasons discussed later. The MCVs also provide valuable information by 'listening in' on enemy movements. Thus placing your MCV slightly off the path of commonly travelled routes is a good idea, although you never want to get caught.

The first Primary MCV is paradropped in at a location of your choosing from around your starting location. Once deployed, your can start producing infantry. Each MCV is also able to build the other two MCVs.

Which brings us to the tech tree. The tech tree for Stealth is based around kills. You get more kills, you get more tech. Obviously, it's non-linear. To get the Secondary MCV, you need to purchase that off the tree. To get the Tertiary MCV, you need to already have the Secondary MCV, as well as buying the Tertiary MCV off the tree. You also need to purchase various specialist units which have their own tree starting with the Advanced Infantry.

The Stealth faction have more infantry than the other two teams (though not combined), and they play a more important role in the Stealth player's strategies, as well as their opponents'. All Stealth infantry are... Well, stealthed. This means that they are undetectable unless you have a stealth detector unit nearby. The majority of stealth detection is also based around infantry, which means that your opponents' infantry will now play a larger role in the battle too (as opposed to being relegated to useless in lategame).

The Stealth basic infantry are enough to see you by almost everything. Their AA infantry is the same, pretty much (it seems to be a point of commonality between the teams), their anti-infantry infantry is halfway between the other two, and so are their anti-tank infantry. Their basic anti-tank infantry also serve as better anti-fortification than their advanced anti-tank infantry, which keeps both units useful in both their own roles and in others.

Their advanced infantry sort of blur the line with the well-defined roles. The advanced anti-fortification infantry pack a powerful assault rifle and demolition charges, while the advanced anti-tank infantry have the same assault rifle and a deployable missile launcher. Neither are particularly spammable, since they are both very expensive for their purpose, and you can only have one demo charge on a building at a time. You also have to deploy the anti-tank infantry for it to kill tanks, and then pack it up to move on, so it's better for ambushing than going out and attacking an enemy army.

The third advanced infantry is the advanced anti-infantry. This infantry actually does much less damage per second against infantry, but does it at a long range. It is a sniper, and yes, it can shoot people out of buildings, important for harrassment against an opposing Rush player. It also has an ability called spot, which stops it from shooting, but allows it to see further into the fog of war, and also detect stealth units, which means that it plays a vital role (doubly so!) in a Stealth mirror match.

All of the advanced infantry must be bought through kills, in the same fashion as MCVs are. How much of these tier 1 options you'll be able to get at the onset of a game remains to be seen at this point. The tree is also undecided at this point.

Stealth vehicles operate in a different manner. Stealth does not have any tanks, which are defined as vehicles that can shoot while moving and crush infantry. All Stealth vehicles are based off the same chassis (except for the MCVs). They are divided into anti-infantry, anti-tank, anti-air, and anti-fortification. Anti-infantry is the only vehicle that fulfils multiple roles, providing the Stealth player with transport capability, which holds up to five infantry who cannot shoot out.

One thing I don't believe I have mentioned is that whenever a transport is destroyed, all the infantry inside are also killed. This applies to all transport vehicles, not just Stealth ones. The way this affects Stealth in particular is that it increases the importance of destroying transports before their payload is delivered. It gives a large hit of funds from the troops inside and the cost of the transport itself.

Anyway, there are several points of commonality with Stealth vehicles, which I have dubbed a 'chassis bonus'. Something I want to try in this mod is the idea that several vehicles can be based off the same chassis, and thus an upgrade that applies to a particular chassis effects all different variants of. Some example chassis include the Turtle HAT chassis, or the Rush Lightly Armoured Vehicle chassis.

The stealth vehicle chassis include the ability to disguise the vehicle. All Stealth vehicles can disguise. This is an important departure from the stealthy infantry. Disguising vehicles means that an opponent knows something is there, but not what is there. Obviously, using Stealth vehicles relies a bit more on the opponent than using infantry. You must attempt to bluff your opponent into believing your force is something else, to maximise killing potential.

The two most basic examples are disguising as your opponents' vehicles to get into an advantageous position and making your force look vulnerable to a particularly sort of attack. The first is the most basic, being usable in C&C Generals with demolition trucks. The second is slightly more complex. The example I use most of the time is disguising your AA units as AT units, so that the bad guys send out aircraft to quickly dispatch your units, and then you get a ton of loot.

There are sneakier things you can do with that. For instance, you could disguise one of your MCVs as one of their construction vehicles, and then try to sneak into their base (because it's probably the last place they'd look, but maybe not). Once deployed, you will no longer be risking anything as your MCV will be stealthed.

In larger multiplayer free for all games, you can try to make opponents attack each other, or maybe even break truces. The possibilities are many!

Stealth vehicles are also extremely fast, promoting hit and run behavior with their long ranged weapons. This tactic also provides high reward for fairly low risk. The thing that most Stealth players should have at the front of their minds is whether their actions will be rewarding while suffering as few losses as possible. Rush doesn't need to concern themselves with this, as their economy is self-sustaining and permanent. Turtle needs to think about it more, but bad decisions are not as quickly reflected in their economy.

The last pair of units are the drones. Stealth have two drones, both of which are stealthed. One provides AA support, and the other provides AT support. Outside of these roles, they are close to useless, other than keeping an eye on the battlefield below.

The upgrade system works similar to the patch system of the Novus. You can swap out various upgrades for new ones depending on what situation you are in. This is facilitated by the Tertiary MCV. The upgrades have their upsides and downsides, and obviously you have to weigh them up.

When playing against Stealth, you obviously have to use strategies that are a massive departure from the ones you'd use against Turtle and Rush. One of the goals of this mod is that build-order and strategy is not only dictated by which army you are playing, but which army your opponent is playing. Games where the teams are cosmetic changes or slight variations in heroes or special units can often get bland very quickly.

Next week, I'll talk about the history behind this mod, where various ideas originated etc.

Turtle up, superweapon bait

I have recently had my wisdom teeth removed, and thus am hopped up on drugs. This shouldn't affect my writing ability, however I have been informed that this will not be a legally binding document. oubw4lknm

Before I start describing the turtle team, I would like to say a few words on turtling in general. In competitive gaming, only new players turtle. Turtling leaves the initiative in the hands of the enemy, which is of course one the many steps on the road to defeat. However, turtling remains very popular in single player (especially in campaigns, where the bad guys already start with an army), and in 'comp-stomp' games, where several players face off against computer controlled players.

One of the reasons for this is that computer controlled players are fairly predictable. If they run in to your defences once, they will likely do so again in short order. This gives the players a feeling of security, and once their defensive line is perfect (or such that a bad guy won't be able to get through with predictable attacks), can start moving out of the base, or spamming superweapons and what-have-you.

Against a human player, though, their imagination often gets in the way of the idea of a perfect defensive line. Thus, turtling is much less popular than attacking and rushing. So, how to make it so a turtle team has a fighting chance against a player of isn't turtling? Well, I tried, and thus far I believe I am fairly successful.

Firstly, their economy (discussed previously) lends itself well to turtling. Unlike Rush, its economy is not spread out, but concentrated in specific areas. This means that the area to defend allows it to be economical to defend heavily. Their economy has another effect, which comes a little later.

Secondly, almost all of their buildings can be garrisoned. Even the humble power plant (which turtle must build many of) can often be a formidable bastion. The bad guys have to weigh up the pros and cons of attacking any structure, or perhaps even send a sacrificial unit to figure out what you have in a building (possibly revealing your bluff, if you haven't dumped anything in there).

However, there is usually a strategic choice involved, as you often do not have enough money to build enough infantry to defend everything all the time. The obvious choice is to garrison the outer buildings of your base, or put AA infantry inside the inner buildings.

The turtle team is also the only team with defence structures, superweapons, and offensive support abilities. Superweapons and support abilities are obviously "free damage", although all support abilities can be shot down be enemy AA. This is obviously part of the end-game scenario, where the map has dried up.

Rush and Stealth both have permanent economies. So long as there are civilian structures left on the map, Rush can get money. The act of getting money does not reduce the amount of money there is. Stealth can get money until the point where there are no opponents left on the map, and have an effectively infinite resource pool from which to draw.

Turtle, however, runs out of money. There is a finite amount that can be carried away from battle. There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly is it is encouragement for a turtle player to take initiative. The turtle player should know that it cannot turtle indefinitely, and at some point must venture out of the base into the murky wilderness beyond. Either that, or set itself up into an endgame position with superweapons and long ranged artillery.

Outside of the base, a turtle army is far from helpless. Indeed, their tanks are much tougher and heavily armed than their counterparts. Against a Rush player, the Rush player should be aware that in head-on confrontations, the turtle player will likely get the first shot, a shot which would rather harshly impart justice on any foe. However, they do not have any anti-infantry vehicles, and thus must always have accompanying infantry to support their slow, powerful tanks.

Something else that a Turtle attack force is vulnerable to is flanking, as their turn rates are quite slow. Thus, a Rush light tank wouldn't expect to win against an HAT, it may be able to do considerable damage before getting blasted, rather than none.

As mentioned before, Turtle are the only team to have superweapons. One 'superweapon' is shorter ranged, cheaper, does less damage, and takes up less damage. This is the Anti-Fortification Tower. Its main use is area denial, and sustained bombardment. It fires once every twenty-seconds, and can be fairly devestating against the bad guy's base.

The other superweapon is the railgun. This is more standard than the AF Tower. It has a 3 minute reload time, but when it fires, it will take out all units and lighter buildings in an area on the map (it has infinite range).

Those two weapons are part of the turtle's endgame. The other two are the super-heavy vehicles, unlocked through the support abilities tree. The super-heavy IFV is basically a mobile building that doesn't produce anything. It has five garrison slots. The other super-heavy vehicle is the Railgun Carrier, which carries a smaller version of the superweapon. It acts as a sort of artillery/MBT. Both superheavy vehicles are extremely tough.

Turtle infantry are definitely a part of the bread and butter of a turtle player's strategy. Other than being relatively versatile compared to the tanks, they are also part of defence and are Turtle's main source of stealth detection. Artillery infantry serve as the only cheap artillery on the team, and can also serve a variety of battlefield roles with the appropriate upgrade.

Which (finally) brings me to the upgrades for Turtle (which I think I forgot to cover for Rush). Turtle has 8 upgrades in total, divided into four sets of two, of which players can have 1 of. Since the upgrades are permanent and irreversible, they are a major strategic decision. For instance, one pair of upgrades deals with the HAT chassis.

The HAT (Heavily Armoured Tank) Chassis upgrades apply to everything with an HAT chassis. That is, the HAT, the AA variant of the HAT, and the HAT Constructor, the Turtle builder unit. The options are an anti-infantry machine gun, or self-repair. Each of these improve HATs in different ways. As HATs are very slow, it takes them a while to get back to base and repair. Thus, the self-repair module increases sustainability, as well as time. However, HATs are also not very good against infantry (indeed, the constructor and AA version can't even target them). So thus it is a step-up in versatility (as well as DPS).

That sort of choice can affect the direction of the game. Once an opponent knows which upgrades have been taken, then can start changing tactics to take advantages of your weaknesses. Say an opponent knew you had taken the self-repair module. They might push just that little bit harder to destroy vehicles on low health, so that those vehicles will never get a chance to self-repair.

The upgrades happen sequentially, and get more expensive the further up the tree they are.

The turtle aircraft are mostly fit for a close air support. While they are relatively fast, they have a short sight range, so they are none-too-good for scouting. They are decent against all targets, but must return to base to reload.

Also, the rush upgrade mechanic:
Rush gets its upgrades from killing enemy units. There is a limit of four upgrades in total, but they do not cost anything, and are not mutually exclusive with each other. This makes them less limited than Turtle upgrades, but you have less control about when to get them.

Sorry if this post is a bit rambly.

Next week: Stealth Summary