RTS (7vs7vs7) - Kingdoms

[TiGGa 0]

So I have secretely worked on my second installment of my RTS engine, trying to avoid those pesky bugs by totally altering the game concept.

Kingdoms is a three sided (optional) real time strategy game, with the US, Russia and the resistance forces as the three opponents. Three kings fighting for the small country of Chernarus. The people in the various towns have already chosen their favorite king and are ready raise the flag in their town.

First, let us talk about the resource system. Gone are the cows, which you know from Farm Wars. The three main ressources are gold, iron and stones. Gold is the player currency, with which you can buy units. Iron is pretty important too, because you need it to produce the units in the first place and stones are needed to construct buildings.

Those three main ressources are gathered at randomly placed resource sites:

The thing is, those resource sites aren't marked on the map until you have discovered them. To help you with this, every Mobile Miner is equipped with an ore detector, which will show you the distance to the nearest resource site. You can mine any of the three resources at the resource site, but you have to make a choice. For example, if you want to mine iron at that giant rock, you can only mine iron at that site for the rest of the game. Even if the enemy is destroying your Mining Camp and building his own there, he won't ba able to mine anything else but iron there. To sum it all up, you need to build a Mobile Miner, drive it to the resource site, transform it into a mining camp and finally choose the desired resource kind to be mined.

After that, supply trucks will transport the gathered resources back to base for further processing.

The castle is your HQ and it will serve as a storage for the ressources.

All the ressources are being transported to the castle first, before they are distributed to other processing buildings. As I have said before, supply trucks will do the transport jobs for you. Those supply trucks will automatically spawn at the castle as needed, as long you have some citizens in your castle. Citizens are the first minor resource you need to know. You need citzens for the supply trucks, you need citizens to be changed into soldiers and tank drivers. Those silly citizens are the backbone of your settlement. Citizens are "produced" in the settlement tents.

Those tents are also needed to raise the population capacity (pop cap). Each new tent you build will have a chance to spawn a citizen every 30 seconds and will raise the pop cap by 20. You can't have more units than the pop cap. Once those citizens are spawned at the tents, they will run to the castle and are transfered into the castle's storage. In case of emergency, you can spawn them at the castle again to distract the enemy for free. They will be armed with a slow loading and very unprecise smoothbore musket.

So, after you have gathered some iron, it will be transported from the castle to the armory.

The armory can either produce light vehicle parts, heavy vehicle parts, aircraft parts or weapons. Once again you have to make a decision after building an armory. The iron will be transformed into one of those minor resource kinds, depending on your choice. After production, supply trucks will automatically come and collect the products, which will be stored in the castle for further transportation.

The next step is the garage.

Here you can make your next choice. The garage can either produce light vehicles, heavy vehicles or aircrafts. Note that you can build as many buildings as you like. You can have several garages prducing all kinds of vehicles.

The garage will need the appropriate vehicle parts, weapons and citizens (crew members). The vehicle parts and the weapons will be combined into a finished vehicle. Once you have a finished vehicle in the garage, you may pay some gold and immediatly spawn the desired vehicle from the garage.

The barracks are working similar to that.

Barracks will need citizens and weapons as resources. Both will be transformed into a soldier with the rank of a corporal. By paying some gold, you can rank those soldiers up which have two benefits: higher ranked soldiers have better skills and better weapons. Basically, you can buy riflemen, grenadiers, mg gunners, at soldiers, aa soldiers and snipers. Depending on the available ranks at the barracks, those spawned soldiers may have different weapon loadouts. A sideremark: soldiers at the highest rank will be medics. Imagine an AT-Soldier with selfhealing capabilities.

An alternative way to generate gold is by occupying towns.

The map is divided into 9 sectors. Each sector will have two towns and two resource sites. If you conquer both towns, you will gain control over the sector, thus enabling you to get tax income (gold). Another benefit of controling a sector is the removal of the fog of war. The fog of war will prevent you from looking everywhere with the RTS camera, just like in other strategy games.

Back to the towns: each town will have a randomly selected favorite side. Let's call it loyalty. If the town likes you, they will spawn friendly citzens when you are near that town, which will conquer the flag and hellp defending the town. In case of an unfriendly town, they will conquer the flag for the enemy and you will have to fight your way to the flag.

Each town will also have a randomly generated population count, which will grow over time. More people means more gold but it also means they are harder to control. You probably need to garrison some troops in the towns to keep them "happy". This will bring us to the next topic: happiness!

Each town will be happy, if their favorite side is occupying them and unhappy, when a disliked side is marching through their streets. There are two happiness values, the pure happiness, and the happiness value including garrison bonus. If the pure happiness value is dropping below 0, a friendly town will change loyalty and chose a random enemy side. If the same happiness value is climbing above 75, a hostile town will change loyalty to your side.

The happiness value including the garrison bonus is depending on the kind of troops you have in the town. Each soldier will get you a +0.5 bonus. Each light vehicle (wheeled) is worth 2 bonus points on the happiness value and each heavy (tracked) vehicle will give you a 10 happiness points bonus. If the happiness value (incl. bonus) is above 25, the pure happiness value will climb by 0.5 points, else it will fall by 1 point each cycle. If the happpiness value (incl. garrison bonus) is dropping below 0, a rebellion will break out. Depending on the (un)happiness value, you will have to deal with weakly armed citizens or javelin carrying soldiers. Those angry citizens will try to recapture the flag for one of your enemies. The thing is, if you have a happiness value of -50, this will turn into a happiness value of +50 once their favorite side has gained control of the town.

Main target is the enemy castle. If you can destroy it, you will defeat that side. Because it is the only objective, the castle got a huge boost in hitpoints. You need about 5 LGB worth of damage to destroy it. I could also imagine other game modes like capture the flag, where you have to extract the flag on the castle's roof to win the game.

So, this is the basic layout of the game's mechanics. The mission itself will be released when it's done.

Edited August 11, 2009 by TiGGa

[Desiderius 0]

Hey Tigga,

nice to see your new mission. Interresting new possibilitys in it. I think Zothen and FHW will give it a try.

Greetings

[Schwab 0]

Sounds very promising again !

Also sounds very good that you rescripted the basics of your fArmA/WineWars engine, because i think the old one gets limited there. It would be very nice to see the "RTS TiGGa Engine" as an open project later to produce more RTS projects for ArmA too.

[erazor 10]

sounds awesome - although i take it it won't work for the AI?

[weegee_101 0]

This sounds awesome.

It would be very nice to see the "RTS TiGGa Engine" as an open project later to produce more RTS projects for ArmA too.

I for one would be very happy to have such a powerful framework at my disposal.

[kremator 1065]

What a GREAT idea mate.

Will play it soon hopefully :)

[AmnesiacJack 10]

Wow, if BIS would hire some of the scripters / mission makers from this forum to make missions for the retail game ARMA would probably be game of the year.

Another release I can't wait for TiGGa :)

Have you thought about using any addons like Littlebirds?

[FunkD00BiesT 10]

Very very nice indeed. If possible can you add ground detail settings along with View distance settings. Mainly to help those out there having performance issues with grass on.

[CrazyAce 0]

:bounce3: heck yeah this sounds like fun, I would like to see wood being utilized as a resource base also, just due to the abundant nature of it and of its building properties.

[Alpha13 10]

Just as I was hoping for an RTS mod, I see this thread. VERY looking forward to it and I am hoping it will have the AI.

[CrazyAce 0]

I would imagine this mission would have AI support due to the lack of servers available runing this mission in MP. I for one usually (if not most of the time) play in LAN games.

[jocan2003 10]

Yeah same here but scripting an AI for that would take ages i believe but its freacking awesome!

****Edit****

What could be possible tho is make the ennemy spawn not far from castle and make them attack it, depending on the base size income whatever, the size and amount of ennemy spawn would increase same for town ressource site etc and make them own the castle and make the castle already fortified and you ahve to blow it up a lil bit like the non coop in farma.

Edited August 22, 2009 by jocan2003

[last_apoc 10]

Oh my god - this sounds so awesome!

[Radunz 10]

Hi, where can i download this awsome mod?

[VariousArtist 19]

The mission itself will be released when it's done.

rtfm? ;)

[CrazyAce 0]

rtfm? ;)

Cool can't wait for a test trial... :popup:

[Radunz 10]

me tooo

[Schwab 0]

WoW ate TiGGa :(

I hope this gets finished some day, because the first alphas were really promising

[This is Bosnia 10]

Hey Tigga,

u know what i would love to see a RTS Warefare.

[CrazyAce 0]

Hey Tigga,

u know what i would love to see a RTS Warefare.

Closest match you will get is fArmA. I haven't heard anything from Tigga regarding logging into this site within the past few months... :( Anyone else have? I hope he didn't disband this project, although I would understand if RL is getting the way.

[Schwab 0]

TiGGa is working on his diploma thesis and wont continue this project for this time. I am sure when he finished it he will continue this one as its Alpha was really promising already.

Unfortunately i dont have that much time as the fArmA development would need, i would be very happy if some scripting support (or manuals, tutorials, translations) could help there....

I tried to build a coordination website at http://farma.eutf.org for this reasons and beta-testing is already working very good in my eyes there. (Thanks to Crazy for example :) )

[deralky 10]

Mhh is this Idea dead?

[teilx 4]

:confused:mmmh maybe

don't see any activity on farma or on this:confused:

[Schwab 0]

Sadly but true a diploma thesis takes at least half a year...

But i am not sure if TiGGa may be re-interested in ArmA2 after that time, i'll ask him when i meet him next time :)