It´s quite complicated from the getgo, so many things to do and no idea what to actually do. Watching AI was interesting though since they know what they do and the art looks good. I don´t think I could personally get into this kind of game but I know there´s an audience for those. The world generation could take some more variation in terms of noise (but also in terms of biomes)
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TMA RTS Tech Demo's itch.io pageComments
Thanks for feedback, a guide of sorts and some more variety in terms of terrain art and structures are definitely on the to do list.
For the noise map, in testing of earlier versions I found that playing around with a larger value seed setting might generate some maps that have a more noisy look. Because of some missing terrain tiles it won't look that great. I'll likely switch to something else or even add a setting to change between various map styles at some point.
I pretty much noped out of this one after placing the capital building. I just don't do well with games like this. The aesthetics were pretty nice and the only thing that I could mention is that it hung for about 15 seconds after hitting Start before Generating Map popped onscreen.
That's too bad, if you don't want to play there's a demonstration mode of sorts you can get to by adding only AI players, so you can just watch them fill the map with stuff and then nuke each other at the end.
I'm glad you liked the art style, I'm a big brainlet with art so this means a lot.
The hang up is normal (though 15 seconds is quite long, on my 2700x it's more like 5 seconds) and adding a progress bar would slow down that part of the loading considerably. Might add a message that pops up as soon as you hit Start to let players know this is normal.
Long live art brainlets! If you try out the demo mode be careful you don't add too many AI players. I haven't added any restriction on player count yet and my lazy code for separation between AI capitals might cause them not to be able to find a spot to place the first city, which freezes the game iirc. On small sized map I found that 4 AI players is good and at a max speed setting they can take over the map in a few minutes. Low FPS during the massive endgame firestorm is to be expected, I optimized it as much as I could but still have to balance how much fire spreads by quite a bit.
Thought I fixed that but I guess the UI still gets confused when only AI players are in game, to remove the fog of war spotlight the game can be set to Sandbox game mode, in Default game mode the Capitals and Radar structures are used to reveal the map with a tech tree element to increase the range of revealed map, as well as how far you can zoom out.
Thanks for the feedback!
I think something like a percentage selection for each job could be much better suited for population management as the number grows, I realize the game becomes tedious as the scale grows.
Could add automation as in using the AI growth algorithm to grow your own cities around some capitals you place, customizable with settings for how much of each structure type should be present.
Pausing is also a planned feature, should be easy enough to implement even for multiplayer. Fast forward could be done by reducing the tick time, speeding up the entities like planes, missiles and clouds by a certain factor. I'm sure it will induce a lot of lag, very much so when using the unreasonably fast AI speed.
One thing that may be necessary to get things to go faster while running smoothly is to multithread the player action processing. Firestorm processing already happens using a set amount of worker threads each having their own chunk of the full map, still lags a bit during end game with fast AI but it's much better than as I'd originally implemented it.
I'll most likely tone that feature down a bit since it can easily consume an entire continent, right now cities have pretty much no firefighting capability.
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