My dream to get Supcom FA/TA players to like Wildman

[SeraphimLeftNut]

I have a dream to make Wildman appeal to the Supcom FA/Total Annihilation player.

If it wasn’t for TA I wouldn’t be a gamer. If it wasn’t for FA I wouldn’t still be a gamer. What is it about these games that makes them so different than anything out there, and can that something be applied to Wildman? Can I be persuaded to give my money to GPG and then with a clear conscience beg others to donate as well?
Only Chris Taylor knows the answer, but I will pose the question as best as I can. What follows will first describe what makes TA and FA unique. Then, based on the little we know about Wildman, a proposal to apply above ideas will be given. The rest will be a series of dreams based on the proposed gameplay, while making some specific assumptions about gameplay, which may or may not be possible or desirable for Wildman.

What do you tell someone who has never played TA or FA, when they ask you how are they different from other games? The answers usually given use the words like massive scale, huge battles, large maps, big robots, huge explosions, etc. Then when you look at an average ranked game you find it is less than 10 minutes long, decided in the T1 stage with less than 100 units. The key to understanding the greatness of our beloved games is that they are open. They are open, and they have no limit, and you will never reach the limit and you don’t have to, to win the game and to enjoy yourself. To see how this openness is achieved we have to look no further than the economy, its connection to the units and to the map.

The three resources explained, this is key.

Power/Energy
This resource is what gives you access to unit abilities and gives you the opportunity to progress to the next tech level. The production of this resource tells you where you are in the tech tree at that point in the game. Power generation is done by a unit that is on the battlefield and can be destroyed, consequently the player can move around the tech tree in ANY direction as the game progresses. To a TA/Supcom FA player a Fusion/T3 pgen is more than just a structure, it is the ticket to the show. Your ticket can be taken from you by the enemy and you can find yourself where you were 20 minutes ago. The consequence is that the path the player takes through the tech tree becomes infinitely diverse and is a strong function of the ally/enemy strategy and the outcome of the individual battles.

Mass/Metal
This is the resource from which everything is made. It is the connection between the map and that which grows and how fast it grows in that part of the map. It can be taken from live units by scarifying them and it can be taken from dead units by reclaiming them. It is that something that always increases changing the character of the game with time. The player might have a crippled base, low power and lower build capacity, but now there is plenty of reclaim from dead enemies and allies. Mass is that which is taken out of the ground, changing the environment, by changing bases, the armies and the map itself. Map control is mass control.

Build Capacity
This is the resource that allows the player to control what happens in both space and time. This is the resource that must be spread over space in such a way that the player’s strategies can be executed with utmost efficiency. Wars are won by engineers that create the right force in the right place at the right time.
What is striking about the resources in our beloved games is that they don’t have a face, they are very general, they are there in the background judging us and our enemies with equal and predictable scrutiny. They are the physical laws that we take for granted, but allow the artist and the scientist to create miracles. This simplicity allows the freedom to the map designer, the unit designer, the tech tree designer and the player to create a huge number of different games. We can take something this general and apply it to Wildman and we can imagine what it might look like.

What do we know about Wildman? A big dude with a big bone runs around killing things with a posse and it is evolutionary, the bone keeps getting bigger. This is pretty awesome and leaves a lot to the imagination, especially the word evolutionary. To make things as general as possible let us assume there are no structures just humans/humanoids/animals running around the map evolving, there is also a tech tree. Let’s begin with power/energy.

The idea behind power is that access to the tech tree is given by units that are on the field that must be built, protected, upgraded and can be destroyed. In this posse following Wildman you will have individuals that are going to be the keepers of the tech tree. (I am not making any assumptions about unit creation and I am assuming there are not structures, this is easily generalized to structures). These will be the primary targets of the enemy, as losing these will prevent you from accessing certain technologies as well as prevent you from using certain abilities such as increase LOS, cloak, etc. (details that are not necessary here) As these are the keepers of the tech tree there should be a method for opening up new areas of the tech tree, there are many possibilities here, for example turning 3 level 1 shaman into 1 level 2 priest, or you can upgrade the same unit through the tech tree, etc. What is important is that they cost resources, can be killed, can be redundant and losing them prevents creation of specialized units, utilization of abilities and progression through the tech tree. You should be able to send your enemy back to the beginning, with nothing but a few battle scars to their name.

You can imagine that this progression of keepers of the tech tree as not linear, part of the tech tree can be either mutually exclusive or be accessed by different types of units. You can imagine completely separate parts of the tech tree, access to which is determined by a certain keeper of the tech tree unit.(this can replace factions, if this choice is forced very early in the tech tree and can be called religion, etc. ) You can also imagine a complete loss of keeper of the tech tree class unit can be used to change you “faction”. Another important aspect is that there isn’t a separate window for the tech tree,(unless it is just for illustration and teaching of the game) all tech tree upgrades can be done through unit manipulation while still having your eye on the battlefield. You can also make it more complicated by making these keepers of the tech tree produce some secondary resource such as “culture”, which can allow abilities such as capture, infiltration, etc. and can be used to counter the enemy’s cultural abilities.

Moving on the mass/metal, it is important to remember their main qualities. Mass is used in the creation of any new units/humanoids, obtained from certain areas of the map, that you must control, from dead enemies, from sacrificing your own humanoids, consequently it always increases and the game’s character changes. I think cannibalizing the dead bodies of your enemy should be mandatory, but putting it at least as an option somewhere in the tech tree is a must; same goes for self sacrifice.(When you win a battle you better hope you have a keeper of the tech tree that knows how to cook, and if you lose you better go after their cook as your last target) As you progress through the tech tree and your high culture no longer allows you to engage in such barbaric acts perhaps an alternative way of extracting “mass” from your dead enemies can be dreamed up.

Build Capacity. This is intimately connected to humanoid creation and the most obvious as well as the best analogy is women. I completely understand that some euphemism might be necessary here because implications are both awesome and restrictive. Although there is no safer way to hit a kickstarter goal than to let a player control a cannibalizing Wildman, who steals the enemy’s women to yield big bone wielding sons and fertile daughters. Are you a God or an evolutionary cul de sac? I will let you come up with the substitute, but main ideas of build capacity have to be preserved. These beings(humanoids) must cost resources, can be killed, can be placed anywhere on the map(within reason), and should be necessary for the creation of new units. Perhaps certain areas of the map should have some capturable breeders or a certain number should always spawned at the Wildman’s location, since losing all of these in a battle would limit all possibilities except to wonder the map alone looking for a fight.

Assuming this game ends up being the greatest game in history and women are chosen, there should be an advanced keeper of the tech tree that would look like a cigarette smoking suffragette and all women within a certain radius would turn from a usually weak fighting breeder unit into a bone wielding monster that would leave death and destruction in its path, enemy women cry and become infertile, while the suffragette would have the test-tube baby upgrade allowing for the creation of new sexless fighters.

All jokes aside, I hope that I was able to show what was special about Supcom FA and TA. A game is not massive, when you repeat the same task 1000 times over, each time with different colored enemies that have different weapon stats to match your new weapon stats. A game is not massive when it has 100 different resources and 1000 different upgrades. A game isn’t massive if it has 1 million active players online all fapping away, thinking someone gives a shit. A game is massive when each new map is a new game, when each new player has their own style, when there is no right or wrong answers, when there are no artificial limits, when limits are there to be discovered after 5 years of play and every answer leads to 5 new questions. One way to recreate this is to follow the discovery that was made with the creation of Total Annihilation. It is a shame that only a single game applied that discovery and there is no reason to believe that that discovery is only applicable strictly to RTS games in the style of TA. Above we had a dream with many ideas that may be silly and not applicable to the current idea of Wildman, but if the ideals of the three resources are adopted, this game will at least get my support, will likely get the support of an average FA/TA player and has a good chance to create a completely new genre.

With this set up as soon as any specifics about the games are chosen, some implications of the 3 resources system immediately become apparent, creating new ideas on the spot, while other implications remain to be discovered by the players many gameplay hours later.

If this captured anyone's imagination I would be interested in hearing your ideas.

If a game like this already exists and I am a noob, please let me know.

[GallantDragon]

I've got the general gist of what you're saying, but for the love of [insert deity here], SPACE YOUR PARAGRAPHS.

Otherwise, you've just given me a whole lot to think about.

[SeraphimLeftNut]

Expanding on the mass/metal resource analogue in Wildman

This is the resource that is necessary for creation of all units/humanoids, must be gained from the map, must be reclaimed from dead enemies and live ally units by killing them. Associating this with food leads to cannibalism of dead enemies and is not desirable, because it would make it a very niche game. One possible alternative is to associate it with “passionarity” a concept put for by a Russian anthropologist, Lev Gumilev. “Passionarity” is a parameter associated with a group of people and is a necessary resource for the survival and prosperity of that group. Passionarity (you can think of some better way to call it) would be gained from certain “holy” sites on the map (mass points in Supcom FA), from artifacts that can be moved around the map, from sacrificial killings of own units(this can be made as graphic as is necessary for the general theme of the game), desecration of dead enemy units and burial of own dead units. To keep this consistent with the spirit of the three resources it would be necessary to have a keeper of the tech tree unit at the site, with the access to the proper ability in the tech tree(self sacrifice may not be allowed by default). Utilization of passionarity is explained in the idea for the Build Capacity analogue.

Expanding on the build capacity analogue in Wildman

This is the resource that allows the player to control the creation of all units/humanoids in time and in space.(engineer in TA/FA) Making these be women is not desitable for obvious reasons, instead these can be a class of units parallel to the keepers of the tech tree units and in fact can take on some of the tech tree access capabilities (factories). These units have the ability to spawn units in all the different classes, warrior, keeper of the tech tree, woman analogues (let’s call them breeders), etc. The tech level of the breeder determines what units it can produce, and to produce a unit a certain amount of passionarity is necessary. Multiple breeders can of course utilize passionarity faster to produce units faster.

To review:

We have wrapped together the tech tree/power generation concepts into the class of units we call “keepers of the tech tree”. These can be produced by the “breeders” which are the manifestation of build capacity in Wildman. The breeders use passionarity which is the analogue of mass/metal to produce everything.

As you can see these concepts are not intrusive you have enormous freedom to create almost any game starting at this point, but they will make the game very dynamic. I hope you can see how this is in a sharp contrast to your typical game where all the different resources are parallel to each other and exist separately from the map and battles. In the above set up, everything is connected.

And naturally if the Wildman is the analogue of the Commander/ACU he is a little bit of a warrior, a little bit of a keeper of the tech tree and little big of a breeder.

Further thoughts of sacrifice:

In Supcom FA, due to the high importance of reclaim, holding the battlefield after a fight and safely delivering engineers to reclaim the mass is a crucial part of the game. The same can apply to Wildman where after a battle the dead bodies of allies and enemies must be properly disposed of to maximize passionarity. A keeper of the tech tree can initiate a ceremony, which can become a prime target of an enemy counter attack. This ceremony can be something as awesome as gates of hell opening with the enemy bodies coming back to life in eternal fire, with thunder and lightning, a direct LOS for the enemy to see what is happening to their brave warriors and of course an epic score from Jeremy Soule.

An analogous ceremony can take place when you sacrifice your own units to use their passionarity to create a different necessary unit.

You can do this, or you can make another cheeseburger.

[ColonelSheppard]

is this true or expectation/hope?

[SeraphimLeftNut]

If this was true I would be giving my money to gpg. This is likely very far from reality, but it is hard to say since there are basically no details about the game.
At the same time CT in one of his videos said they are open to fan suggestions, this is my suggestion.

My fear is that they either don't know what they want to make, or want to make another clone of some games from the past.

They say it is supposed to have supreme commander elements in it. They are either lying or it must have something along the lines of the ideas put forth in this thread.

[Prince__]

I think they know what they're doing ,otherwise they wouldn't start with a new game from scratch.I always trusted GPG and they didn't make something wrong so far.I will go for 85€.

[SeraphimLeftNut]

I hate to be negative and CT seems like a great guy.

They still have not shown people what this game is. How are we supposed to support this?

They keep repeating this game is like Supreme Commander. WTF does that mean?
I hope they aren't just using whatever value that game title has left to get a little more hype, while completely ignoring every single Supreme Commander game concept.

I guess I can't claim they are, since they haven't told us anything about the game yet.

They already got 300K without telling anyone what the game is, I think if they actually articulated some solid original ideas that would get people excited they could easily hit their goal.

[ColonelSheppard]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013- ... publishers

[Yankee]

Hello everyone! I am a backer of Wildman and would love to see this game get funded. The following link has an updated introduction to Wildman. Why should you support Wildman? Chris Taylor said if this game is funded he would like to eventually get back to large scale traditional RTS games like Supreme Commander. This means there is a good chance that if this game is funded that Kings and Castles will be made.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gas ... action-rpg

As you can see it is only $10 to receive beta access and $20 to receive a digital copy of the entire game!

[Panzer]

The kickstarter was planned horribly in my opinion, with very little information about the project actually given and that is exactly why it stalled so hard. If GPG had just used the intro video they put up now, as well as the project mercury demo, people would throw money at them! I know I would! I still will because I love GPG! Personally Wildman grew on me as CT explained it more and more and I think if everyone just gave it a chance and watched the video updates they will see how awesome of a concept it really is!

DONATE FOR GPG, DONATE FOR CHRIS TAYLOR, DONATE FOR WILDMAN!