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

Introduction to this blog and the RTSmod mod

I thought I'd start this blog to give people insight into what I was thinking when I was creating this mod in my head. It also makes me seem a little more like a pretentious berk, particularly when I talk about a lot of this stuff.

However, hopefully you, the reader, will find it interesting enough.

This mod is a sort of conglomeration of various ideas I've had in the past for total conversions, minor mods and so on, but never really got around to doing. When I get around to posting another post next Wednesday, I will likely go through the history of the ideas explored in the post.

Eventually, all these ideas came together when I decided to do a slightly more humorous mod, with each team being named for its playstyle. Since then, I've been thinking a fair amount about how it should work, and have changed quite a lot of things.

The three teams are based on the three major playstyles of RTS games that occur. Well, these are the archetypes as I see them.

Rush is the most common archetype in competitive online gaming. Attacks happen fast, and often, primarily to disable the enemy's prospect of building up or perhaps even destroying them entirely. However, this team isn't just about attacking early. It's also about keeping your opponent on the back foot for as much of the game as possible with large numbers of light vehicles, and map control.
Turtle is more common in casual gaming circles and in singleplayer. Because AI doesn't adapt very well, turtling is quite easy, but obviously much more difficult against an imaginative and competent human player. However, this team is not just destined to lose against a Rush player. It is also the steam-roll faction, and has some advantages over Rush in early game. It has more defined map control as its goals, and is also the only team with damaging support abilities, base defences, and a superweapon-esque building.
Stealth is the last team, and while it isn't as widely played as the other two, it still exists as a playstyle. Basically, the team is designed to be sneaky, and is supposed to win without the opponent knowing it. Analogous situations include sneaking large numbers of shadow teams into the enemy base without them knowing, or chronosphering a tanya in an IFV into their base. Probably the most micro-heavy faction, they must always keep their opponent's guessing, and hide, and not be afraid to abandon a position if it is overrun.

Each of these teams have their own economy model, their own method of teching up and so on. They are entirely unique in this mod, although you will definitely see concepts taken from other games. These will be explained further in future blog posts.

Next week: A summary of the Rush faction.