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Blake
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Brainfallocatione
Oct 2000
time: 17:22
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Now, I *had* said that I dont like the idea of weapon armour types but I will withdraw that statement because I quite like them in warcraft3 and they are in virtually every RTS game including Red Alert.
If your not familliar the basic premise is we have weapon and armour (or unit) types, ie Infantry, Light, Heavy, Fortified and weapon types light, heavy, explosive.
Different types do different amounts of damage, light weapons are effective vs infantry light armour but ineffective vs heavy and fortified armour. Heavy weapons are effective vs light and heavy but ineffective vs infantry and fortified, explosive weapons are effective against everything except heavy armour.
That is more or less the model used in most RTS games.
Armour type is a combination of the actual ability for the armour to reduce damage, and luck, fortified armour (the type found on buildings) is all about reducing damage, shots bounce off it. But the relative ineffectiveness of heavy weapons vs infantry is to do with luck and overkill, it's hard to kill infantry with single, large, powerfull rounds.
Now note that combat will not be dueling like in Civ games, it'll either be on a combat map /battleboard like in MOO2 , HOMM etc or freeform on the main map (kinda like RTS games...), free form combat obviously means no distinct tile movement.
Possibilities:
In choosing the types we can be more realistic or more abstract, a realistic system would be Infantry, Light, Heavy, Concrete, an abstract might be Energy, Projectile. The difference is that with abstract it's not exactly clear why Projectile weapons do more damage to Energy armour and energy weapons are ineffective against energy armour, we could equally have chosen the oppisite and justify it in some way.
With realistic heavy weapons do bad damage against infantry becase they have trouble hitting person sized targets that like to lay in the mud, it cant be any other way.
Note that Warcraft3's type system is mostly realistic, the weapons are
Normal, Piercing, Siege
And the armours are:
Small (light), Normal, Large (heavy)
Piercing weapons, which are generally ranged units, do extra damage against "Large" class enemies, and less against "Small" this is due to the relative difficulty of hitting the targets and the "Broad side of the barn" effect, while normal (generally melee) weapons do extra damage against small, because whacking a wimpy little archer with a sword does quite some damage 
But then again there are some more fancifull bits, siege weapons do less damage against small, this could be attributed to the difficulty of hitting a person with a large rock, but they also do splash damage.
It's actually for balance purposes.
And then we have this "Wolf Rider" unit which is an orc with a whopping great blade which does siege damage, it's because the unit is designed for destroying buildings, but has the side effect that when the rider hits a fragile little archer with this whoppin blade - it does virtually no damage. It's a quirk of the system.
Then we have "chaos" weapons which does full damage against all armour types and is against mostly used for balance purposes or to make uber strong units that cannot easily be countered.
And we have "hero" armour, piercing attacks do reduced damage against heros, but they should be no more difficult to hit than a normal person, you could invoke the "James Bond" effect (enemy always misses ) but again it's primarly for balance purposes.
Warcraft 3 is a superbly balanced game and seems to use the start with realistic, but dont sacrifice balance and playability for realism. So there is "Things that make ya go huh?!" but in the end it's very enjoyable and works.
Anyway a lot of random rambling in there....
So the subject of this thread is, what should the weapon and armour/unit types in StP be... general discussion of unit design is also appropriate.
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13-10-2002 22:06
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