Rise of Nations -- Time for your ideas!

[Sarxis]

You are going to want to consult with the Age of Empires fans too: they know what works and what doesn't since they have lived through the evolution of AoE.

And having beta tested EE, and being a AoE player, I must suggest that a market system be in place. Not only is it a fun feature in AoE and Star Trek Armada 2, it is necessary for resource balance sake. EE doesn't have one yet, and it suffers because of that.

And be mindful of unit balancing!!!!!!!! This is the most important aspect of an RTS game of this calibre, and it is no easy task to fulfill. This is the number one thing to do.

If you release the game without resolving some of the the beta tester complaints/suggestions, I guarantee that the public will have a less kind response than them.

Fully customizable controls!! As the owner of an ergonomic keyboard, I hate dealing with default control schemes, which are never to my liking. And many veteran gamers (especially of AoE) are going to want to use a familiar scheme; let no key be unconfigurable!

Random map scripting and game recording! Make sure they are in! But I am assuming they will be since RoN is based on AoE2 code, right?

Another thing that a lot of players want is a wider frame of view. It would be nice if a 2x view option was available at the strike of a key, allowing the management of more units at a glance.

[MarBaS]

One thing that i really liked about Star Craft was that it would keep track of how many kills a unit would get. Well maybe in Rise of Nations we could keep track of how many kills an army gets. I like statistical kinds of things like that. Chats and graphs of your civ and other civs.

[Brian Reynolds]

Well, we're back from E3 so time for another Q/A summary!

* Game Length -> obviously for multiplayer it's important to us to have a standard game which can be played in an hour, and we thought RTS fans especially would like being able to see all the kinds of units in a multiplayer game. That's something that hasn't really been available before, so I guess we hit that pretty hard--otherwise no one will believe it actually works! :-) But on the other hand we know that many players (especially the fans we want to bring with us from some of the TBS games we've worked on) are going to want longer and more in-depth games. In solo play especially, but also in multiplayer. So we've added a variety of options to help people get a longer playing experience--
- Our "Conquer the World" open-ended campaign generator (premiered at E3)
- Ability to increase/decrease the cost of technology research
- "Cannon Time" allotments allow players in a multiplayer game to user bursts of "slow motion" to fine tune their attacks or economy or whatever at critical moments.
- Ability to use "free pause" mode in multiplayer allowing players to give orders while paused.

*Formations are important because flanking fire does more damage. That's also why most foot units consist of 3 figures (e.g. 3 hoplite guys in a hoplite unit), so that even with one unit you can clearly tell which way a unit is facing.

* We do have supply units. They provide background-level healing for nearby units.

* We hadn't thought of being able to rename your whole nation (!) but we do let you rename your cities.

* Civilians don't form the basis of your military units (as in, say, Battle Realms), but you -can- research various levels of militia technology to allow your Civilians to have a "To Arms" ability. They can become Militia and later Minutemen and Partisans.

* We have both treaties and alliances, and a "quid pro quo" diplomacy system where you can put a deal on the table and both agree to it. A peace treaty has a stronger game effect than a classic RTS style "neutral" setting; for instance you must declare war (and expend the requisite resources) in order to have your units be able to attack someone you were previously at peace with).

* We have a market for resource trading, and the world market for particular commodities actually trends up and down apart from just the direct interactions by players. You have to reach a certain level of Commerce before you can trade resources though.

* Unit Balance - we have a full time designer (formerly a pro-circles Starcraft player) whose entire job description is unit and combat balance, plus a fleet of balance interns. Good balance is a central focus of the design team (and not just unit balance... nation balance, technology balance, etc). Obviously that's not something I can really demonstrate for you in a screenshot or a movie but I just wanted to make clear the team is taking it very seriously.

* Yes, the hotkeys are fully customizable, and you can map your various extra mouse buttons as well. One of my favorite features is that if you map a mouse button (e.g. middle mouse or an extra button on an advanced mouse) to a command that normally requires a separate mouse click (for example "Set Rally Point" for a building), it knows to automatically use the place you clicked the extra button as the location for the click.

* Yes, we have recorded games & playback.

* We have a lot of kinds of random map, and there's a pretty high degree of customization in the files already. I can't promise full scripting (yet), we'll see if that makes the game or gets pushed to an update or something, it depends on how a couple of programming issues break well for us. I should mention that we DO have a full scripting language for the scenario editor, that's definite.

* You can "zoom out" your map to a 2x view as requested (and a 3/2x view in between); in the default interface this is usually by rolling your mousewheel. We're also looking at the feasibility of a "megazoom" map.

* Yes there are post-game graphs of your nation vs. other nations in lots of different areas.

That's that for now!

Brian

[The diplomat]

re: brian reynolds' message

Excellent! RoN is sounding very promising. Thanks for the update.

[JMarks]

Re: Unit grouping/formations

Originally posted by Dale
One thing I'd love to see is REAL unit grouping/formations.

- Anchient eras: not much grouping or formations. Mostly people acted as individuals.

- Medieval eras: catapults/trebs way out back, bowmen middle, infantry centre, cavalry flanks. And their formation is in lines.

- Renais eras: similar to Med where artillery is at the back, and riflemen at the front in ranks with cavalry on the flanks.

- Modern eras: corps running around where it's possible to have artillery miles back, infantry skirmaging and tanks blitzkreiging around the flanks.

Hi,

Like this idea, and I don't know if what I'm going to say has been treated on the previous pages since I don't have time to read all of them. However...

Surely you do know something about history? Tactics in all the eras, ESPECIALLY the ancient era were quite advanced. Sure you had ereas where people acted as individuals, but what about the real powerhouses? Persia? Greece? Rome? Parthinians? Etc? Pick up any good book on Greek warfare and you'll discover some delicous stuff. The Phalanx (two sides go against each other in a push fest, winner takes few casualties, the other side often runs away or gets slaughtered) and tactics revolving around them when other elements aside from the hoplite are added. (Cavalry takes flanks, elephants dirupts cavalry, infantry defends elephants, etc etc etc) From some of the screen shots I think some of these things might actually be implimented. Booyah!

JMarks

[JMarks]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


ok yin, i know these games arent supposed to be history simulators, but sometimes looking at history can give us some insight into the issues involved.

We dont like rushes? why? well because it unbalances gameplay, but also because we sense its unrealistic - real like was more balanced, Sumer in 3500 couldnt just build bronze age warriors and crush egypt. So something was going on that enabled civs to survive, even when others had miliatry/technologocal leads. Artificial limits to rushing, or bonuses for fighting on home turf may mimic that, but is worth asking what was really going on. Obviously there were no rules in real history that said "no conquest till gunpowder" Maybe it was culture, or some home turf advantage? I doubt this - Egypt WAS conquered by outsiders, later when its culture was stronger. And akkadians with a culture that was derivative from Sumerian had no difficulty conquering SUmerian cities. Bronze age civs simply didnt have the kind of nationalism we think of today, leading to guerilla resistance. (well maybe china did, though i dont think so, certainly the near eastern civs did not) So what did stop ancient "rushes" Logistics and command and control. While it may have been easier for a pre-gunpowder army to keep supplied, since it could live off the land to some degree, this was not necessarily easy, especailly in an ancient world where few areas had large food surpluses. Command and control was also a dilemma - If I march with my army to Egypt, can i be sure that the rival sumerian cities wont revolt while Im gone? until issues of administration and supply had been resolved, at least to some degree, it was difficult to conquer or even raid beyond a certain distance. So it would have been possible to rush your close neighbors, but difficult to impossible to rush the more distant ones.

Yet all these games lack the grognard expedients of explicitly modeling army supply or command and control. These feature are too complex and "unsatisfying" for mass market games. Therefore we can either allow rushes, or introduce rules with various degrees of arbitratriness to prevent them. This is not to say that logistics or command and control SHOULD be introduced to such games - merely that when designing the work arounds, it is useful to understand the underlying phenomenon that did this in the real world.

LOTM

LOTM,

You're off to a good start. However, we must realize that the ancient world was FULL of imbalences. Being balanced would be the exception to the rule. Take the Mesopotamia. What a mess! tons of 'civs' duking it out untill Hamaburi (did I get the right one?) conquered the rest. Same in Egypt. The two kingdoms were united by a strong man. Persians anyone? A series of overnight successes (almost literally) which makes it second only to Alexander the Great's own conquest. Imbalances should be embraced. but other factors of course have to go in. but how does one balance the imbalance? Personally I like EU2's vast amount of countries. However in THIS realtime business I don't know if that could be done. But all those countries made tons of scenarios that we're talking of a reality. Revolutions can be accounted for easier, small countries are in an abundance, and you need a really strong leader to unite even culturaly similar nations. If we start thinking of all these, going towad human history as a model, then we have to leave the civ model behind and create somthing new. Too bad BHG doesn't have an internship for art students with a love for history. :Leaves a not so subtle note:

JMarks

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Brian Reynolds
* We have a lot of kinds of random map, and there's a pretty high degree of customization in the files already. I can't promise full scripting (yet), we'll see if that makes the game or gets pushed to an update or something, it depends on how a couple of programming issues break well for us. I should mention that we DO have a full scripting language for the scenario editor, that's definite.

That sounds brilliant, Brian!
Could you just clarify the difference between "full scripting" and "a full scripting language for the scenario editor"?
Is this like having a limited scripting language in the editor, like (but obviously less limited than) in AoK, but not as diverse (yet) as SLIC in CtP/2?
Either way, it sounds like you're taking customization a lot more seriously than certain other games companies that certain people might have quoted in their signatures...

[Arator]

Custom Nations Please!

Brian,

One of the great frustrations of Civ II was the inability to ADD custom civs to the playable mix in the standard single player game.

Yes, you could create custom civs in a scenario.

Yes, you could hack the text files of built-in civs and change them to your own custom civ, but you had to give up playing with or against the replaced civ in the process.

So, I ask you, in RON can we ADD our own Custom Nations to the playable mix in a standard single player game (or any game, for that matter)?

I myself am partial to the Celts and would like to ADD a custom Celt nation and play as the Celts in RON. Will you give me that power?

Thanks for asking,

Arator

[One_Dead_Villy]

Here's an idea I posted on RON pantheon

Well they mentioned about how difficult (or rather costs something significant) it would be to declare war after you are at peace with someone and costs more if you had been at peace longer.

Now, assuming you are playing online multiplayer, and not against the computer (in which case the game designers has a lot more options for diplomacy), if you are playing teams and no shimo style, then again we would face a no diplomacy game since people would just tend to fight and win as quick as possible. Certainly if you paid tribute to someone in an online game people just laugh at you. Unless it is built into the mechanism of the game that a player can do something besides building military to forstall an attack. Something that would make it not worthwhile for someone to attack you since it will hurt them somehow. This would be the ONLY way to make diplomacy work in an RTS. The declaration of war after peace is one way but wouldnt really work if at start its a team game and war is already declared essentially.

In the real world, what might be a reason your army or population NOT want you to go to war against another nation? Certainly on one hand the type of government your civ has will make a difference. As far as a way for popular discontent to prevent a war, possible reason might be trade. Possibly if there is some kind of public happiness rating in the game like civ, then if an enemy civ had trade units passing into your nation and you can trade with an enemy, the citizens gets used to a level of luxury, so if you attack the nation or the trade units, trade would stop, and your citizens become pissed off and become less productive. Since the trade would be sent by the opposing player, he could use a lot of resources to conduct trade with you and would be under their control. The trade of course would benefit both sides by giving each civ involved gold as usual. So what a typical trade player strategy could be in this system is to start trading with his enemies asap to get their enemy hooked on the trade, then if the enemy attacks then the trade would stop and the enemies citizens work rate immediately goes down so that the enemy econ and war machine would be impacted and would be less able to contuct a protracted war, and may choose to abandone or become easy to defeat, in a counter attack. Of course there would be techs to research to reduce or eliminate this production impact effect, like maybe anti-corruption tech, or religious fervor or patriotism tech etc. and techs to limit trade before it gets out of hand like maybe Isolationism techs, or tariffs tech (which skews the trade gold given to one side to make the trade less worthwhile for the trader), or embargo tech to prevent it all together (but would cost a bit). On the reverse the trade player could research stuff to increase the dependency effect like , product dumping tech, or smuggler tech (to negate some of the effects of the embargo tech) and drug trafficking tech (people get really pissed and riled when they dont get their drugs) , Opium war anyone? :-)

So you get a way for players to use tools besides military might to achieve utimate victory , so that you get a more complex interaction which doesnt have to make the game unbarably long by having techs to negate or mitigate that players strategy of economic war.

[One_Dead_Villy]

Here's an idea for Unit Line of Sight, traditionally its always been a circle but now that there is unit facing in RON...the LOS should be more like a half circle or cone. This is more realistic and gives flanking attacks the surpise element that it deserves, and adds more tactical elements to using flanking attacks and maneuvering, as well as formations other then a forward facing line. So square/circle formations would be good for spoting enemies from all sides but so they cant be surprised or out flanked, and forces people to change formations and facing to deal with a specific threat.

also with a more restricted LOS...different things can have different degrees of angles they can see. Like tanks would have a very narrow LOS which is again more realistic. Aircrafts would have a long LOS. This would also gives a bigger impetus to spotters, scouts and surveilance units (that are so important in real life wars).


Only draw back I can think of is that battles would require more micromanagement, and make flanking too deadly. But this is more realistic, since being outflanked by your enemy has traditionally been the deathnail of an army.

[One_Dead_Villy]

another suggestion a friend of mine had....have the resource meters etc on the bottom section...more ergonomic

[One_Dead_Villy]

i was thinking maybe there could be research items or have to have a general unit to allow troops to have formations (since formations were invented not necessarily a natural way people would fight), and less and less micromanagement even in large groups as u research various military techs.

You can micro if you want but it becomes less necessary if you research various things. Like troops would if u research parthian tactics would automatically back off to maximize range/minimize casualties to engage the enemy rather then just sit there if horsemen charges or a short ranger troop engages you army. The stance would be come an option once you have research that technique.

In regard to that idea...maybe the 1st level upgrade for archery or ranged troops would be to be able to back off to stay out of range while firing. then upgrade the tactic to be able to go up and fire and then back off out of range. The upgrade to also keep moving around to avoid being hit. We need this cause its hard to micro your guys to avoid enemy fire. Then others would have to research ballistics to hit moving targets.

This is no different then attack and defensive upgrades really. In fact attack and defense upgrades really has been used as a catch all for these tactical upgrade, like parthian tactics just means a bonus on defence in AOKTC. But its so much more cooler to see your troops move around and act intelligently.

watching people fight with different tactics would be cool, not only by using different unit combinations but say even the same troop type. I mean the idea of ducking down to avoid being shot during napoleanic time was not even a standard practice. well actually discouraged since it was seen as cowardly. BUT damn that saved alot of lives, and apparently Wellington (for the brits that time) allowed his troops to do exactly that (avoid enemy fire) when they are not in active battle. While most other countries tended to enforce the stand up and take it discipline and take cannon fire, even when not engaging any enemy, thereby taking unnecessary casualties.

Imagine seeing your troops alternately go prone or kneel while they reload and have maybe a defensive bonus, and and your second like fire, then alternate. Then see the other side who hasnt research this to just stand there and get shot to hell.

[Axehilt]

- Rushing -

We dont like rushes? why? well because it unbalances gameplay, but also because we sense its unrealistic

This strikes me as odd. Very odd.

Rise of Nations is the history of the world in an hour. One could assume, based on this, that a Nation will reach medieval age during the first 10-15 minutes of play.

Now consider this: Did any fighting occur in real life prior to the medieval time period?

Yes, rushes should have counters and a battle between two equally-skilled players should last beyond the rushing phase until the final age with many heated incursions. This does not mean that a superior player shouldn't be able to finish someone off early in the game with a well-planned attack (just as some earlier civilizations were wiped out by warfare). One of the most irritable facets of Age2's anti-rush feature (garrisonable town centers) was that good players could not beat newbies rapidly simply because the newbie could hole up in his Town Center for extended periods of time, dragging the inevitable out unnecessarily.

Rushing in any RTS can be countered. Starcraft's infamous zergling rush? Each race has a counter to it and it generally leaves the rusher weakened, economically. Age2's 14-minute tower rush? Countered by superior scouting. Red Alert 2's engineer rush? Countered by walling in key buildings and making Pillboxes. Empire Earth's rush of ? Build the counter unit and a tower near your most important economic assets (or wall off a choke point).

Optimally, defensive structures should provide more power/cost than offensive mobile units since they're stationary - this means that rushing is only really effective when one player gains a decided advantage or outmanuevers the other player to circumvent their defenses.

[dervish]

Hello!
I am also new to this forum, I always hang out at Civ3, actually. How about introduction of such new ideas like Ethnic Trees, Goverment Trees and Religion Trees into RON? Previously, I recommended to think about this in Civ3. Have a look here. These trees should work just as current scientific trees work, and of course, they should be as close as possible to reality and real history.

Bon appettite!!

[Alexander's Horse]

Re: Rise of Nations -- Time for your ideas!

Originally posted by Brian Reynolds
Okay, guys, go for it! Remember this IS a real time game. Brian

Sorry Brian - I go for TBS