Action at a distance, and why it's bad.

Physicists don't like action at a distance. It's bothersome when an action in one area of space has an effect on a totally different area, without any forces acting through the intervening space.

This should be bad in RTS games too, especially Zero-K. RTS games are about the placement of your forces on the battlefield, and these forces can only engage enemies within their attack range, and to get things from point A to point B you have to move them trough the invervening space, by land, air or sea. If the enemy can occupy that space, they can prevent that movement of forces. The one exception to this "action at a distance" rule is long-range artillery and ICBMs, but those do fire through the intervening space, and you can sort of put something in that space to block their path (shields or antinuke).

Zero-K has two units that violate this concept and cause action at a distance. The first is the mobile teleport bridge in the amph factory. This allow movement of forces from A to B without passing accross the battlefield, and there's nothing the enemy can put in between A and B to block it. If you wanted teleportation to be part of the game, you could violate the action at a distance rule and go ahead and do that if you wanted. But it shouldn't be one small unit tucked away in an underused factory simply for balance reasons.

The second unit is the Dominatrix. When the Dom captures things, they stay linked to the Dom forever, and if the Dominatrix is destroyed they revert to their original owner. So destroying the Dom on one front can cause instant, unblockable changes - action at a distance - on a totally different front, in that some units suddenly switch sides.

My fix for the teleport bridge is to replace it with some sort of amphibious transport. (It's presumably there because amphs are slow and needed a means of fast transport). This transport would be the size and shape of a grizzly, but equipped with propellers to help it go fast underwater - it would swim like a sub, not walk like a normal amph. It could then walk on land. You could put allies land-only units in it - imagine that - this big transport amph strides out of the water, shrugging off fire just long enough to drop a squad of cloakys on the shore.

My fix for the dominatrix is to have it's temporary captures slowly transfer to permanent captures. Or take it out entirely, and use it's model for a different lveh speciality unit - a mobile radar vehicle is in demand, and the Dom's model fits that role perfectly.

djinn has to move through intervening space to place beacon, or has to build by a unit that has to go through the intervening space. And it is just faster movement, blockable by destroying the beacon.
and dominatrix has to get close and be close some time to capture. It is not "blockable" so it needs to be reversible for balancing issues.
If I understand you correctly or do you just want to have "real" physics?

I like the idea of an kind of amphibious transport. Current surfboard is just plain useless.

quote: btw surfboards arent transports, they are there to move shields over water, and the ocasinal tremmor, catapult, sneaky pete

sneaky and aspis are amphibious anyway, which makes their survivability higher than with surboard (which is killable by surface and torp weaponry, compared to submerged unit only killable by torps)

anarchid I think that morph thing which makes unit yours was fixed a while ago.

lol we could make ZK like settlers, or DF?

that would make for really long games


i personaly like teleportation/stealth/sneaky crap/unpredictable suprises in game, because they give it some element of unpredictability, otherwhise i could just sleep through any game longer then 5 minutes, by being able to predict all eventualities

Those are things I considered when implementing Djinn. That is why I doubt I will make it much cheaper. There has to be a reasonable cost on bypassing intervening space.

But I am not removing it based on this philosophy. It has not destroyed maneuvering so far. It might do so in the future and there are probably a few tricks that people have not tried with it. These tricks may or may not be completely broken, I would have to judge them when I see them. Basically I think Djinn is under used and potentially has some interesting mechanics so it won't be messed with until someone demonstrates them.

Dominatrix could easily have some extra limitation but I think it is working fine as is.

I personally do not like Zenith because it has no spacial relationship. DRP and Starlight both have aim time dependent on their current target. Zenith just has click then fire which I think is uninteresting.

As google pointed out the resource system (except OD) violates this. The Djinn is even BP-based for the time it takes to transport something. So it is basically a high BP reclaimer-rebuilder.

I don't like the Domi either but that has nothing to do with it. More the fact it does a damage type which only stacks with it's own damage type, and it's skirmisher mechanics.

Also I'm going to put on my philosopher of science hat and say firstly your characterization of action at a distance is totally wrong, it is so wrong it is basically Cartesian. Even Newton used action at a distance (Gravity, and doing away with 'Subtle Fluids' and Aethers). Under current physics there is nothing BUT action at a distance (IE elementary particles are so small that they never physically touch and interact entirely via fields of force that they generate).

Knowing when to break the rules ;)

imo a better rule for RTS is "if stuff happens, it should be represented in the game world."
good example:
Burning units. They lose health but you know why becaus you see the flames.

bad example:
Slowdown effect. Units get slower but they there is nothing that tells you.
Well, there is a purple healthbar but that is not part of the game world, it is the UI, far more abstract.

The dominatrix is more on the bad side imo.
There is the capture beam (good) but then it suddendly changes to this dotted line. (bad)

Most used "Action at a distance": reclaim metal on the front, use metal to build in your factory in the back...

The OP may have something to say about specific units, but the mumbojumbo about "action at a distance" is moot when the most basic thing (metal economy) is based on what is criticized...

>"if stuff happens, it should be represented in the game world."

yep, pretty much. Which leads me to another thought on the Djinn - what if, rather than teleporting, it used a Newton-ish tractor-repulsor beam setup from beacon to Djinn (or maybe a two-way setup, Djinn to Djinn) to actually drag units through space? The enemy could go in between and shoot your transfers as they crossed, so be careful.

Or an even more outlandish idea, a Unit Cannon. Supreme Commander 2* had one of these, called the Mavor, which was a giant cannon that would shoot units across the map, and if the Djinn was bigger I could totally see it launching stuff via gravity repulsor or whatever. Units would need some crash padding to survive the impact though :)

>I personally do not like Zenith because it has no spacial relationship.

Yeah, I don't really like it either. It could be a really nice unit, but right now it doesn't seem to have a good role. I like the fact that you can reclaim the meteors though.

>The OP may have something to say about specific units, but the mumbojumbo about "action at a distance" is moot when the most basic thing (metal economy) is based on what is criticized...

I was talking about AaaD with regards to military force. The economy has it, yes, in that metal gets "teleported" around, and that's OK.



*SupCom 2 sucked, but whatever.