Units (part II)
Finally I get around to part two! I’ve had a number of thoughts lately, perhaps inspired by the recent announcement about a possible 2010 release of Supreme Commander 2, to do with RTS games – more specifically; units, command management / control, and user interface. I’ll continue my rant about units in this post but try to tie in the other aspects as I go along.
Upon reflection, what most strikes me and sort of disappoints me about units in Supcom, as opposed to say, TA, is how ‘light’ and unsubstantial they feel. They appear to slide about the terrain as if skating across ice (yes, especially the hover units but not only those) and don’t bump into one another in the manner you’d expect giant metal tanks and robots to do – it’s all soft and bouncy and well… it just doesn’t feel right.
Units (part I)
Traditionally, RTS units are non de-constructible. What I mean is that the actual units themselves, in almost all RTS games I’ve played, live a short ‘0 / 1’ alive/dead existence, with a certain amount of damage points (shown as health-bars) to represent damage in a fairly abstract way. Most RTS games display diminishing health/damage of a given unit with some kind of cute preset animation. For example, in Total Annihilation the units billow an ever greater amount of smoke. Upon actual death they possess a variety of explosion animations to represent their demise, such as breaking apart or full blown explosions with flying debris!
In Supreme Commander we see pretty much the same system but with fancier deaths or damage animations. The experimental units in particular go out with a real bang. I’m going to propose a more modern and importantly, more fun system in terms of actual gameplay mechanics. It is also, I think, a more realistic way of doing things and fits in with my RTS concept.