TerranReaper said:
The Amazing Tea Alligator said:
The title made me lol.
Minor improvements to ui and steamlined controls are not innovation.
If innovation + new really wild things are your sort of preference, then there are plenty of other titles out there - SC2 isn't one of them.
Nice to see you again. On to business.
Well, we wouldn't want another Dawn of War 2 now, do we? I don't think I've asked this, but if you were in charge of the project, what would you have done in order to innovate but at the same time, maintain your audience so they don't all get turned off by the massive amount of changes? In other words, how much would you change before Starcraft stops becoming Starcraft?
Lol, nice to seee you again too.
Well, first of all I'd want to design the game to fit the themes of Starcraft. I'm (obviously) not much of a Starcraft guy, but from what a friend of mine tells me, it is a very dark universe with a whole lot of "Oh god, they're all dead what just happened". Therefore, the game would need to be on a large scale, with many units, eith little survivability, yet just enough that they might survive and endear themselves to you right before they got killed.
I like the classic RTS resource model, not so much a fan of mucking about with requisition points, so I'd keep the resource system as it is. So far as I've ever seen, buildings that one builds aren't ever really something fought over, and never fought 'in'. I would change that, make buildings VEWRY large, in fact, proper scale. Actually using buildings is fairly rare (unless building units and I'll get to that in a sec), so what I would do is simplify reseearch to how it is in SINS (except of course that certain upgrades would require a specific building rather than a number of research stations). For the most part, building construction would remain the same, except for terrans, who would call buildings down from space, rather than constructing these (now very large) buildings out of nothing. Come to think of it, drones wouldn't make much sense transforming into these large Hive complexes, so perhaps it would take multiple drones to invest into the thing?
Hmm, this seems more of a "gameplay should reflect the lore/reality a bit more", which isn't bad, but isn't entirely necessary. If Terrans called down buildings as opposed to magical construction from nothing, then I'd imagine you would want some sort of beacon to be placed, however, the beacon would probably need to have some sort of ridicious amount of health that would reflect the health that the building is calling down. Or you can just have it like the Space Marines from DoW1, either way works I guess. For Zerg, this is the biggest change, since the current gameplay/balance has the rest of the races only having one worker unit construct/warp/pull building from nowhere, the Zerg would be at a severe disadvantage since they have to give up several workers to make a large building. To compensate, you'll probably need to either change the other race's mechanics to be on par with this or change the worker so loss of economy is not so severe that it renders Zerg as an undesirable race to play.
Anyway to build units. In each building would be a control panel/'brain'/what would the protoss use? a crystal? that you can select, giving access to all the units that can be created. When a unit is being built for protoss, their just coming through a portal so that's fine. For zerg it's the larvae, so that's fine. The terrans. These are different, as you can't just have them walk through a wall. I guess that there are a two ways (that I can think of) to deal with this. One way is to have them be dropped in from space. I'm not sure how 'to lore' this is, so this may or may not be acceptable. Another way is to simply have a room where you can see a recruit walk in and go through that thing from the teaser. Where the recruit would appear from origonally is still a problem, but at least you can see the marine being prepped right? All other machines etc. are fine to be shown being built, and the factory lines would certainly be an interesting place to fight. Most infantry units would probably have to be built in squads, but not locked into them, to encourage whatever strategies the player prefers.
Ehhh.... sure? I can't imagine random recruits appearing in the middle of a desert/alien world/arctic world/space platform and walking into the barracks to get suited up into a marine. For reasons unknown, I can't think of anything that wouldn't resemble 40K Space Marines being drop podded in. Without getting into the meta-game TOO much, infantry squads might work if the meta-game is changed a bit.
The combat. The combat would be fast-paced, with most units dying from a a few bullets. The environment would need to be as detailed as the units themselves, and would need to be destructible, as to be as intense as possible. Tanks should not simply have a health value, but rather take damage based upon where it was hit, and how thick/sloped the armor was there.
This wouldn't be a problem if the battles only consisted of Terran (Or Terran faction A vs Terran faction B), however, only one faction has tanks while the rest are either advanced alien machinery or some sort of giant bug. I'd imagine you would need to implement some sort of other mechanic for Protoss and Zerg units in order to compensate. For example, Zerg units should be able to be crippled in certain parts of the body which limits either their movement or combat efficiency. For Protoss, you could do the same thing for some of their units, but they also have shields which plays into the equation. The lore seems to be limiting factor that makes your ideas very hard to implement.
Every soldier would have an inventory, but a more realistically sized one than in Men of War. They would be able to pick up the fallen's ammo, and would automatically do so/scavenge for ammo if they were dry.
Could work, in fact, you can probably do it with the map editor right now.
Direct Fire, but as first person/TPS.
Diplomacy ala SOASE, where peace treaties and going to war is far more serious.
Doesn't seem necessary, and in Sins, if you've ever played a game that lasts for around 4-6 hours, you tend to notice that people tend to make peace with people that are more powerful. Either that, or it just seperates in set faction wars or large backstabbing fests. In which case, I don't really see the point of this.
The AI. Designed as if one was making an FPS if you ask me. Soldiers should take cover, say things relating to the battle field, and inform his fellows on what limbs he's missing. Soldiers should cower/shit their pants ala a morale system should the going become rough. They should be able to jusge when to throw grenades and other accessories (though the player can of course control this to higher precision).
Could work, however, I myself tend to be more trusting for soldiers NOT to use grenades without me saying so. Most AIs in games don't really tend to have better judgement of this and although it does seem realistic, it simply shouldn't be the case, unless you can have it so infantry can "regenerate" their supplies from time to time. This is more a gameplay mechanic though and it varies.
Maps would have to be larger scale of course, to accomidate the buildings, and as said earlier, would need to be more detailed.
The Conclusion. So yeah. Effectively my dream Starcraft would take the basic game of Men of War but fix all of it's problems, and take it up to 11. It's certainly a ridiculous project, but every element has been done, so I don't see why it couldn't be all put together. Although I think it'd work better in Star Wars...
Main problem is the lore that is set from the original game, because there are three distinct factions, the ideas from Men of War can't simply be ported into Starcraft. Men of War consists of several factions from WWII that operate more or less the same (I don't think the Nazis built their stuff any different from say, the Russians). You simply don't have that in Starcraft, you have three races that operate very differently, lore-wise and gameplay wise.
EDIT: Shit, this might be my longest post yet. Sorry, got a little carried away.
EDIT2: And no, we
definetely don't want another DOW2.
