Megabots

Super-units in RTS games. They're tricky.

The units with strange or unique abilities/roles like super-artillery or cloaking fields or missile defence are fine. But the generic megabot that's just big and tough and covered in guns is problematic. Lovely idea. Giant stompy robot crushing lesser vehicles under foot. Spectacular. The questions is what function do they serve that an equivalent amount of regular units doesn't? Why build them?

The thor in Starcraft 2 is a lovely example of this problem. A large, impressive super-heavy mech. Like most megabots its primary function is looking impressive. The thor was big, tough and dealt high damage to ground and air targets. But they didn't do much that a bunch of marines couldn't do just as well.

In Supreme Commander 1&2, gameplay niche matters much less. But in general, the megabot units are a more concentrated way to deploy your resources. The megabots are so big and so powerful that an equivalent army of basic units can't be concentrated in a small enough area to be effective.

In the vanilla RTS paradigm units don't perform worse when damaged, so a megabot at 50% health is much stronger than an army with 50% of its units gone. And conversely, you can attack or defend with half an army of tanks, while a megabot that's only 50% constructed is worthless. (Supcom2's "launch half-baked" option excepted). But these differences aren't exactly tactically rich.

So I was thinking about this and I had a weird idea. What if megabots were cheaper than an equivalent army of tanks? Costing maybe half as much as the amount of tanks it would take to kill them.

But taking much longer to build. Really long. That way the megabot's strategic importance isn't what it can do in combat, it's what it requires economically. It requires a different resource to regular units - time rather than money.

So a megabot is an investment, or maybe a gamble. You're accepting a loss of resources with the promise of a massive payoff if you can survive. If other players can scout the in-progress megabot, then it becomes a strategic objective with a tim-limit.

Supreme Commander 2 Experimentals

I enjoy Supreme Commander 2 a lot. Many people say that the first Supreme Commander is much better, but I am not one of them. Still, sometimes I get bored of SupCom2's range of experimentals, and coming up with concepts that add something new to the game seemed interesting. So I did. I probably came up with a few too many actually, so I had to divide them into categories.

Also I sketched some pictures, which aren't very good, but everything's better with pictures.

Economy structures:

Cybran "Betelgeuse" experimental anti-matter reactor
Late game it can be hard to find room to build more power generators. The reactor generates vast quantities of energy with a much smaller footprint than an equivalent quantity of generators. Defending it is much easier, but it's an all-or-nothing proposition and (of course) it explodes with nuclear force if destroyed.

UEF "Butler" experimental supply relay
Borrowing a little from SupCom1's adjacency bonus, this building improves the efficiency of all buildings in its considerable range. Units and buildings are constructed faster and structures produce more mass/energy/research. Rather than a super-resource building, the UEF gets to make its existing ones more useful.

Aeon "Paragon II" experimental mass generator
Shamelessly "inspired" by SupCom1. After a huge upfront cost, this generates mass resources from thin air. Won't single-handedly prop up your economy like in SupCom1, but neither does it explode.

Defensive structures:

Cybran "Impaler" experimental railgun
Fires superheavy metal spikes that must be individually constructed. Low rate of fire and range comparable to light artillery, but the high-velocity spike deals massive single-target damage to ground units. Basic units will be destroyed instantly with the spike visibly stuck in their wreckage (and salvageable!). Experimentals must get used to wearing a new piercing.

UEF "Skyguard" experimental missile installation
An anti-air missile launcher with enough range to cover an entire base. It fires guided missile volleys that, once launched, will follow targets outside their firing range. It also functions as an anti-nuke launcher (albeit with regular range).

Aeon "Juvac" experimental power siphon
Fires a beam that deals drains energy and deals continuous damage to a single target, visibly flowing from target to siphon. After X seconds (proportional to the target's capture resistance) the target will be powered down. Until the unit is destroyed, its controller loses energy while you gain it.

Ground support units:

Cybran "Skywriter" experimental beam platform
A multi-legged walker with four independent beam turrets which function both as anti-missile and anti-air. Mobile defence for your army.

UEF "Mother bear" mobile support factory
A factory on treads that builds land units and stores them internally. Like the flying carrier and the unitcannon, it builds units faster and at a discount. Only minor firepower, but its two support cranes will repair nearby units.

Aeon "Chelovolt" experimental walking shield
An extra-large mobile shield generator. But don't you hate it when units just walk/fly through your shields? This shield is electrically charged and any enemy units inside it will be struck by lightning.

Ground attack Units:

Cybran "Detonator" experimental bomb hatchery
It builds and stores rolling suicide drones that deal medium damage in a large area, but can be destroyed by anti-ground fire before they reach their target. The bombs will roll over water.

Cybran "Honeycomb" experimental MFRL
A basic walker chassis mounting a huge array of hexagonal tactical missile tubes. The missiles all fire in one volley with a long re-arming delay. Long range and dubious accuracy, but barrages a large area.

UEF "Anvil" experimental siegebreaker
A massive brick of a tank, armoured in every obvious way and with a strong personal shield. Very slow, but the most survivable unit in the game. Armed with a battery of short-ranged explosive cannon and a small rack of tactical missiles. Deals less damage at a shorter range than a Kriptor or Colossus, but takes massive firepower to destroy.

Aeon "Soniwa" experimental sonic resonator
A second tracked experimental for Aeon that, like the Pulinsmash, must deploy to fire. When deployed it energises an arc-shaped array. It fires a distortion wave in a long line that damages every enemy along that line. Closer units take more damage.

Flying units:


Cybran "Commissar" experimental flying cannon
A gunship chassis built around a medium artillery cannon. Slow, but it outranges all non-experimental anti-air. Its short-ranged secondary batteries defend against ground attack, but it's very vulnerable to fighters.

UEF "Hephaestos" experimental flying gantry
An unarmed flying construction rig that that has the construction power of a commander. Cannot assist factories. Good for quick construction of a forward outpost, or just late-game base expansion.

Aeon "Herbest" experimental reanimator
A tripartite saucer with dangling jellyfish-like legs. It repairs wreckage into units, transforming other factions' wreckage into aeon equivalents. Experimental and structure wreckage is not restored, instead converted into a proportional number of basic aeon units. Can also repair ground units.

RTS arms race

One of the things I liked in Starcraft was that each race had a siege unit which outranged base defences, meaning that no defence was unbreakable. In practice this didn't matter because investing in base defences would see you overwhelmed by your opponent's massed units anyway but I liked the idea.

I've been playing a lot of Supreme Commander 2, and I much prefer its gameplay to that of Starcraft1/2. However some things Starcraft 2 does very well which SupCom 2 doesn't, is leveraging upgrades to make early-game units relevant in the late game, and keeping units distinct.

These and other things have got me thinking about what my ideal RTS game would be like. I'm thinking a lot about the arms race between units and defences, and late-game obsolescence of early game units. Here's a hypothetical RTS game:

At tech level 1 your only units are raider buggies - fragile, fast-moving units. They're useful as scouts and for killing other raiders. However tech 1 laser towers are super effective against light armour and can destroy many times their own cost in buggies, so much so that a tech 1 rush attack is impossible.

Tech 2 unlocks light artillery units which outrange laser towers and make base attacks possible. Their weapons are only useful against stationary targets, this and their light armour makes them easy prey for raider buggies. This is where you use those buggies you built at tech 1 - taking out enemy artillery or their escort buggies.

Tech 3 is for main battle tanks. These will become the basic attack unit. Their weapon is effective against mobile units and structures, while laser towers and raider buggies can barely penetrate their armour. However this is also when gunships - air units that tanks can't even attack - are unlocked. Light laser towers and raider buggies can attack air (though until now this wasn't relevant) and so they remain useful. Heavy laser towers that can penetrate tank armour are now available, but cannot attack air and are still outranged by artillery.

(Should heavy laser towers be buildable at tech 2? That way you can prepare defences against the tanks before they hit the field, but because there's no air units yet the light laser tower is briefly obsolete. Perhaps light laser towers are individually upgradable to heavy lasers at tech 2, so that even though they're available they're superfluous before tanks appear and you still need to build the lights.)

Now there's a reasonably variety of units on the field and all the basic unit relationships have been introduced. Past that you can have the fun weird stuff that allows for people to be creative and require tactical responses as much as specific counters.

There's still room for expansion if needed. Cloaked units, for example, could give another tier of rock-paper-scissors relationships. If you make light laser towers and raider buggies the only units that detect cloaked units then you've wrung a fourth tier of usefulness out of them, without making them any better in any other situation. (Though I suspect that it'd be getting strained at that point).