Squad Editor Finalization

Swimming creatures would be fine, so long as they stay at the surface. If they went underwater, it would cause too many complications, such as with the 3D movement, the CPU having to figure out whether the rider can or cannot breathe underwater, the effect of water pressure on the rider, etc.

Again, that is something we would have to come back to once we have the base game, with this stage, available for playing and testing.

When you talked about all of these things, I didn't hear anything about unit moral. As countless wars have shown, the will of troops can decide the fate of a battle. How will moral affect the game and how wiill the player change it? By the way congrats on the promotion.

NickTheNick wrote:

Swimming creatures would be fine, so long as they stay at the surface.

That was my assumption on how it would work, since underwater sapience seems to be a no-go.

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

NickTheNick wrote:

Swimming creatures would be fine, so long as they stay at the surface.

That was my assumption on how it would work, since underwater sapience seems to be a no-go.

Yeah, the gaining sapience fully underwater is, but apparently you can colonize the seafloor, from what I've read.

Edit: The total weight of the armour will be the surface area of the parts covered multiplied by the density of the material used. The tag of the compound used to make the armour determines what protection it gives against the different damage types.

So; these are the formulas I've come up wit for armor.
Total weight of armor: Aw=Sc*Md
Freedom of movement: Fm=Uj+Aw
Total Protection: Ap=Mu*Sc

Ap= Armor protection
Aw= Armor weight
Fm= Free Movement modifier
Md= Material density
Mu= Material used in the armor
Sc= Surface covered
Uj= Uncovered joints

Actually underwater sapience is a go, however you wont be able to advance past stone age. At least thats what I have found out.

untrustedlife wrote:

Actually underwater sapience is a go, however you wont be able to advance past stone age. At least thats what I have found out.

Okay, cool.

untrustedlife wrote:

Actually underwater sapience is a go, however you wont be able to advance past stone age. At least thats what I have found out.

Yeah, that has for the most part always been the consensus. The issue people try to overcome is fire/metallurgy underwater.

Aiosian_Doctor_Xenox wrote:

Edit: The total weight of the armour will be the surface area of the parts covered multiplied by the density of the material used. The tag of the compound used to make the armour determines what protection it gives against the different damage types.

So; these are the formulas I've come up wit for armor.
Total weight of armor: Aw=Sc*Md
Freedom of movement: Fm=Uj+Aw
Total Protection: Ap=Mu*Sc

Ap= Armor protection
Aw= Armor weight
Fm= Free Movement modifier
Md= Material density
Mu= Material used in the armor
Sc= Surface covered
Uj= Uncovered joints

The freedom of movement situation is already covered by weight carried and weight capacity.

The first equation, however, looks quite good and is along the lines of what I was thinking of. However, I think tool effectiveness should tie into that, because some materials, such as gold, can be quite dense, but very bad for using as armour. I think the surface covered by the armour should translate more or less into the armour provided. However, what I'm wondering about now is all the different body parts of a unit. In the Aware Stage organisms receive attacks to different parts of their body, so an attack to a limb would do damage only to the limb and not the rest of the body. However, every strategy game I have every played that had battles on a large scale reduced individual units to a single health mesh, i.e. making the whole unit's body one target that would take the damage.

Having said that, I do think that this is one point at which Thrive does have the capability to take one step beyond these strategy games and have individual units have distinct health meshes, so that a shot to the head does damage to the head and a shot to the arm only to the arm. This would mean that armour on the head would only protect the head and armour on the arm only the arm.
 
However, these strategy games didn't just avoid doing this for a reason, and I have a feeling that having distinct health meshes will be a lot for a computer to process in big battles. Is that true? Will that be an issue if we pursue distinct health meshes?

Well, I think it was decided that the damage to limbs and the like would be randomized, so it would still have the same effects of the complex damage system like in the organism mode, but allow the computer to not be too stressed during large battles.

Plus, computers today can handle more than they used to, but they shouldn't be overestimated.

Randoming the damage to diferent parts could be done. Actually determining what part gets hit will be too costly. Finally, just having a single health bar isnt bad either.

However, with randoming the damage to diferent parts there are problems as well (which we might just ignore altogether)

The main problem is decidint what is the probability of each part geting hit. A simple way to do this would be so bigger parts are more likely to get hit. However, there are cases were that doesent work too well. Imagine a soldier with a gun, shooting from some kind of cover. It will probably have most of its body covered, only showing the parts that are essential. That is, the head, as it needs to see where it is shooting at, and the hand with the gun. That is of course unless the enemy soldier doesent go around the cover and shoot him from behind, in which case we have bigger parts more likely again.

As i said earlier, we could just ignore this things, but i believe it is something worth pointing out.

Finally, the weight formula should be Weight = Surface covered * Thickness of armour * Density of material This one doesent need any factors, the final weight comes out automatically.
As i introduced thickness, it should probably matter as well. I propose that the protection offered would be: Protection = Effectivness of material * Surface covered * Thickness of material
This last one probably needs a factor as well, as Protection is an unit we made up, we can factor it to always range from 0 (unarmored) to 15 (iron armour) to 10000 (tank) to whatever the biggest spaceship has (which is probably a lot) This is suposing vehicles use something similar for armour.

Note that the formula effectivelly uses the total volume to calculate protection.

Finally (again), what if armour, instead of making incoming atacks do less damage just added to the total hit-points? Or a mix of both, where it adds to the total hitpoints but it also decreases incoming damage

Ah okay, I thought it would be quite intensive. If that's the case then I agree its better just to treat each unit as a single health mesh. However, we have to then decide at what point to merge all the health meshes of the organisms into one health mesh, without catching the player's attention. Should there be a Research to do that?

Also, if units only have single health meshes, then we would have to apply armour on any part of the body as armour to the whole.

Another thing, the total armour of a unit cannot be one value, because the armour provided by "Polymer" tagged compounds is different then that from "Metal" tagged compounds. Each unit should have two armour values. Their Polymer armour, and their Metal armour.

Lastly, I think defining the armour's thickness would be too much detail. I'm pretty sure a unit will get enough armour before they've even covered their entire body. Also, they will be so slowed down by that point that making the armour thicker would be more harm than good. I think all armour should just have a standard thickness.

And for the effects of armour, I'm undecided as to whether to do add to the total HP, subtract from damage, or both. If we do subtract from damage, hp will have to overall be lower to make sure fights aren't slow, and also it would be possible for certain units to be completely invincible from other certain units. I think we should weight the pros and cons of each one a bit more before deciding.

I think having separate meshes in large battles would be very CPU intensive as the game would have to remember alot more health bars and other information as well as decide which part of the body is hit. Perhaps at the point where you start recruiting squads you merge the meshes there. Squads could be a research (due to the army structure and discipline involved), and you move to recruiting squads (squads can still have single people in for commanders, explorers etc). When you are applying units you can still apply the armour like normal, but then take an average and add a positive buffer of a few % to provide the insentive (as an effect of researching squads). This would make sense to start integrating the squads, as people look out for squad mates and stuff.

We need to try and reduce the complexity of smaller points as you advance through the game to make room for all the new stuff that gets added at each point. I am concerned that there will be too much going on in some places for the computer to handle. We don't want everyone to have to buy high end gaming computers.

Yes, having the thickness predefined would simplify things. That way the weight formula is scientifically acurate*. Probably something like 5mm thick?

Well, kind off. It would be perfect if the armour was a perfectly plain sheet of material, but as it curves the real volume changes. It should be accurate-enough

first i would like to apologise for my poor spelling
i have had an idea floating around my head about design of weapons perhaps you can do something simile to solid works where you can (extrude ect...) and you can designate what the handle is and winch ends are sharp (in the case of swords or spears ect...) and when you get more advanced you can do the same with firearms.
now armor i think that you can make a style in the build menu in a smiler way to weapons but the are is then procedurally generated onto the creature when you equip say a battalion with it (same with weapons) i thought about this because i wouldn't want generic weapons for a civ that has such a unique history (possibly the game comes with a few weapons and armor for those too lazy to make their own)
thanks and good luck i really look foreword the the first version

Already covered. Armour is something brushed on to your units as part of the Squad Editor, and weapons are designed in the Tech Editor. Make sure to read up on concept before posting.

Ok, so now that I know a species can be augmented with machinery, could this be done with the unit creator only, so that you can create say, squads of bionic-enhanced soldiers without giving those augmentations to the rest of the species?

If that doesn't belong on this thread I apologize in advance.

Don't worry it fits, and yes, you can do that.

Since I'm on I'll answer this.

You can create robots, and designate a purpose for them afterward, so that would be viable. I think the definition of a robot in this game is anything with an AI to guide it.

Legged walkers and the like are still up in the air as far as I know.