Post by gilgamesh on Aug 2, 2017 15:34:27 GMT
EA once was working on a first person command and conquer other than Renegade, which was supposed to mix FPS and RTS elements. I'll just leave the video here to maybe leave some inspiration for features, like their squad and weapon system which is pretty interesting.
I loved the first Executive Assault, even wrote a long review for it, having written it back when the game was still in development, I could not really criticize it as the features were open to development, but now that its finished and number two is in the making. It is time to address the flaws of the first game which could be worked on to make Exec2 something that other game developers never managed to pull off, a good FPS/RTS.
First thing missing in Executive Assault, which was probably because it would look weird, was a fog of war. This made it easy to snipe across the map till that got nerfed and made it very to to anticipate what the enemy wanted to do. A suggestion to this would be to mix more ridged terrain with a fog of war, or to only draw enemy models dependent on a view range of a certain unit. An example would be a huge mech walker is obviously more capable of seeing far than a little trooper.
Having this system in place would allow for people not to be able to cheese anti air when they see the first airplane coming out of the enemy bade, and would allow more strategies with ambushes and such to take down the executive.
The second issue with the game was the resource gathering system. As a long time fan of RTS games, with at least 10.000 hours in total spread spent on them I can only say that macro management is one of the most important things in an RTS. Building an economy should be simple, yet rewarding, and should be open to harassment and have options to expand upon.
The system in place in Exec1 was not satisfying, the collection of the various single minerals which were very hard to see and the iron extraction was a chore. A way to perhaps improve on it is making a mining system similar to the StarCraft franchise or command and conquer franchise with dedicated fields that have miners work on them, perhaps even make an underground mining system on a map by the use of tunnels, which is something only a FPS/RTS can pull off. Or just have units that work like drills, or perhaps large vehicles like coal miners we have in real life. It's really open to ideas, but it should be a little more complex than the last game, but still of course stay simple. This of course sounds silly and contradictory, but having a right macro system in an RTS is essential for depth.
Air combat was satisfying yet could improve a little, same goes with artillery. Perhaps make it more of a support system in which air and artillery can only be called down close to ground units as a support unit, they would have to go back and refuel after a cetain period of circling through the dedicated area, and artillery would only have a certain amount of salves, as in Exec 1 they were extremely spammable. The exception to this would of course me AA aircraft which could patrol a designated area and reconnaissance and transport vehicles. Of course the huge aircraft is also not bound by this.
The problem in the first game was really, that there was no limit on what to do, so you could just bombard the exit of an enemy factory and score an easy win.
Adding a counter unit like a force field generating tank that creates a sphere which blocks from aerial attacks would also make it interesting, as being able to counter certain things in a mix up could be interesting.
Now for today, the last thing I want to address to make this thread not too long is the base building aspect. The only criticism here really is that it felt a little restrictive with the way the grid system was made up, it was really cool that you could make hallways and such but building them and base defenses proved difficult when there was so much restriction with no ways to expand upon it. Also the defense building that would have access to all the doors and such was a nice idea but it did not fully feel like it was worth breaking into. Perhaps there are ways to improve on that.
That's it, hope it brought some things into light, I might add on ways to improve later, at least from my perspective. Of course some things are very hard to develop and that is why can not be made possible, however, exploring ideas is of course always a viable option.
I loved the first Executive Assault, even wrote a long review for it, having written it back when the game was still in development, I could not really criticize it as the features were open to development, but now that its finished and number two is in the making. It is time to address the flaws of the first game which could be worked on to make Exec2 something that other game developers never managed to pull off, a good FPS/RTS.
First thing missing in Executive Assault, which was probably because it would look weird, was a fog of war. This made it easy to snipe across the map till that got nerfed and made it very to to anticipate what the enemy wanted to do. A suggestion to this would be to mix more ridged terrain with a fog of war, or to only draw enemy models dependent on a view range of a certain unit. An example would be a huge mech walker is obviously more capable of seeing far than a little trooper.
Having this system in place would allow for people not to be able to cheese anti air when they see the first airplane coming out of the enemy bade, and would allow more strategies with ambushes and such to take down the executive.
The second issue with the game was the resource gathering system. As a long time fan of RTS games, with at least 10.000 hours in total spread spent on them I can only say that macro management is one of the most important things in an RTS. Building an economy should be simple, yet rewarding, and should be open to harassment and have options to expand upon.
The system in place in Exec1 was not satisfying, the collection of the various single minerals which were very hard to see and the iron extraction was a chore. A way to perhaps improve on it is making a mining system similar to the StarCraft franchise or command and conquer franchise with dedicated fields that have miners work on them, perhaps even make an underground mining system on a map by the use of tunnels, which is something only a FPS/RTS can pull off. Or just have units that work like drills, or perhaps large vehicles like coal miners we have in real life. It's really open to ideas, but it should be a little more complex than the last game, but still of course stay simple. This of course sounds silly and contradictory, but having a right macro system in an RTS is essential for depth.
Air combat was satisfying yet could improve a little, same goes with artillery. Perhaps make it more of a support system in which air and artillery can only be called down close to ground units as a support unit, they would have to go back and refuel after a cetain period of circling through the dedicated area, and artillery would only have a certain amount of salves, as in Exec 1 they were extremely spammable. The exception to this would of course me AA aircraft which could patrol a designated area and reconnaissance and transport vehicles. Of course the huge aircraft is also not bound by this.
The problem in the first game was really, that there was no limit on what to do, so you could just bombard the exit of an enemy factory and score an easy win.
Adding a counter unit like a force field generating tank that creates a sphere which blocks from aerial attacks would also make it interesting, as being able to counter certain things in a mix up could be interesting.
Now for today, the last thing I want to address to make this thread not too long is the base building aspect. The only criticism here really is that it felt a little restrictive with the way the grid system was made up, it was really cool that you could make hallways and such but building them and base defenses proved difficult when there was so much restriction with no ways to expand upon it. Also the defense building that would have access to all the doors and such was a nice idea but it did not fully feel like it was worth breaking into. Perhaps there are ways to improve on that.
That's it, hope it brought some things into light, I might add on ways to improve later, at least from my perspective. Of course some things are very hard to develop and that is why can not be made possible, however, exploring ideas is of course always a viable option.
