I was reading a few recent newsposts on VGcats, once of which linked to this:
This apparently premiered at the GDC (I didn’t follow it, so I wouldn’t know). What do you guys think about it? It’s obviously very early in development, but I think it’s a good idea. It’s actually pretty similar to some ideas I’ve had (though mine were for an RPG). One of the biggest flaws I can see is that between two exceptionally skilled players it seems like a battle could take about 7k years to finish.
I can’t really say much more since it’s so early in development, but I really do think it’s a cool idea.
Christ on a cracker. That kind of stuff already hurts my brain reading and thinking about SF books and movies, but doing it real time ? Multiplayer ? They should change “Achron” to “Aneurysm”.
The interface doesn’t help, either - it’s already not super clear with only a handful of units doing one jump, can you imagine the results of a protracted, one-upmanship timerewinding contest ?
I smell conspiracy. The govt has developed time travel - no, they stole time travel from aliens - and know they need to train/identify people to fight metatemporal conflicts.
If I suddenly vanish from history, you will know I was right.
The “time wave” concept that makes it possible to implement the game simultaneously removes all time travel elements from the game.
Consider: My opponent is attacking my base, but I haven’t yet built defenders. In a normal RTS, I would frantically order my barracks to build units, wait for them to finish, and hope I was in time. In this game, I would go back in time, order my barracks to build units, wait for the timewaves to catch up so I actually have them, and hope I was in time. The net effect is exactly the same.
Ah, but you could also go to the near future before the results of the attack have “updated” the time wave, build some crap, and bring it back to the present just in time to stop the assault. Which if it hadn’t been stopped would have prevented the creation of the troops that did prevent it and I’ve gone cross-eyed.
Also, your opponent would notice you rushing to the past to build units, so he’d have to dispatch different forces back then to beat you there, too. It’s kind of like playing 3D chess : it doesn’t really add anything new, but it’s a great deal more complicated and provides umpteenth new layers of complexity and possible strategies to devise and counter.
Especially when compounded with the whole “units acting at different speeds” thing.
I agree that the time waves probably make it such that any match in this game could be mapped onto a match in another game which had no elements suggesting time travel.
But I still think there’s something to calling the game in the links a game that involves time travel elements. In it, I can lose a battle, then do something that allows me to re-fight what looks for all the world like the very same battle, and have the outcome be different this time.
Of course, I can do that with any normal RTS in single-player using save points. But the way this game allows you to do it in multi-player seems more interesting.
What I want to know is what happens in a hypothetical scenario like the following. A attacks B and wins. B didn’t want to win that battle, he just wanted to distract A. Once B has attacked and won, it follows that B has committed to the attack–distraction successful. Now A wants his own troops to not even have been there, but instead to have been somewhere more useful. So he goes back in time and moves them elsewhere so that they won’t be there when B attacks.
Now back in the future, before the appropriate time wave hits, everything’s as it was. B’s troops are fighting A’s troops and winning. But after the time wave hits, what happens exactly? Supposing B never noticed A’s trickery, B will still have ordered his troops into the battle field and ordered them to attack. But in a sense, he can’t have ordered them to attack, because the troops won’t have been there.
So what happens exactly? Do B’s troops start attacking troops that aren’t there? Or do they just ignore the attack order? Or what?
If the program could simply update the entire timeline at once, would it really need to use the “time wave” mechanic to make a coherent game? I’m not sure. I suspect so, but I haven’t really thought it through. What would prevent it?
Is the time wave mechanic needed to make the game playable, or just to make it runable?
I’m starting to envision a kind of meta-time Chess game.
It’s played like normal chess with the following additional rules:
In lieu of a move, you can change one of your past moves instead.
Illegal moves are forfeited.
If there is a checkmate position on the board at any time in the game, the checkmated player loses.
If there is more than one checkmated position on the board at two different times in the game, the player checkmated in the earlier position loses.
Capturing the king is illegal. (It’s impossible in normal chess, but could be possible in meta-time chess so I’d make the rule explicit that it’s illegal.)
My guess is that one second they’re shooting like crazy, and then the time wave hits and they’re left standing there idly (and a bit shot up) since there’s nothing left to attack. B now has to figure out when the troops were moved and where they might have gone. Oh, and rewind a bit to cancel the useless attack ;). Meaning the really important strategic points in the game are those time wave points, until they’re so far in the past it that becomes prohibitively expensive to “rewrite” them.
Now, what I really wonder is how the game “rewrites” what happened between say a T-3 time warp and T. Imagine you finally build enough troops in the present, and have hogged enough timebar to be able to send them back to swing the result of a T-3 skirmish. The enemy units that originally survived the T-3 skirmish went on to destroy a couple buildings at T-2, before eventually being pushed back at T-1. Only now they all blew up at T-3. Do you get the T-2 buildings back at T ? And what about the units you used at T-1 to beat back units that have now been destroyed earlier, do they suddenly re-appear unharmed ? What have they been doing inbetween ? GAH ! It’s confusing.
Well, that’s one way to look at it. The other would be that a second ago there definitely was a battle going on, and then suddenly one side vanished (because the player roped all the units and moved them somewhere else. In time, in space, what’s the difference ?) - but the battle still happened. If you move back to before the time wave hits, it’s still going on. And then it suddenly isn’t. And you can rewind and it’s going on again. Except it can’t. But maybe it does ?
Imagine one of player A’s tanks encounters one of player B’s tanks. They duke it out, and eventually player A comes out on top - he selects that tank (which is more than a bit bruised) and moves it back in time at the start of the encounter. So now A has two tanks to B’s one, and even though one is battle damaged, the odds are both will not only survive, but B’s tank will have done less overall damage because it was destroyed faster. What becomes of the 2 remaining tanks from that point on ? Is the shot-up tank suddenly healed ? Does the second one suddenly vanish when the next time wave hits ? How the hell does the game deal with paradoxes like that ?
The way it looks to me, there’s no such thing as moving back to a time before the time wave hits. The time waves move inexhorably no matter where you travel in time.
If you’ve played Braid, it looks to me like the timewaves are like objects in Braid with a green sparkly aura. Time travel effects don’t affect them.
I wonder if those time gates need a corresponding gate in the past, if not it could make for some really interesting strategies.
For example, late in the game both players may have expansion bases, Player A has been (unsuccessfully) whittling down Player B’s original base. Eventually Player A succeeds, but by this point B has one or two heavily fortified extra bases, how to solve this? Well, build a gate and send your army back in time to when that was his only base while ordering your standing forces at that time to also attack. Between having a future (presumably more upgraded) giant army suddenly appearing in your base as well as a time-appropriate army bearing down your base, well it’s going to die. That WAS his only base in the past so he had no way to expand and therefore all forces disappear when the timewave hits (unless, of course, he sends builders back in time and builds an expansion base back in time immediately after that attack, but we won’t go there for obvious reasons).
I think it would be essential for a playable game, so that your opponent is capable of responding before their entire military vanishes. Without the time wave mechanic (either in digital or analog form), whoever sends something back in time first (in real-time, not game-time) wins.
OK, how about this? My enemy attacks in the past, and is trashing my base. So I send a bunch of my favorite unit back, and they’re able to defeat the enemy in a bloody battle. But his units, through surgical use of focused fire, manage to take out my building that built those units in the process. The timewaves from that destruction reach the present, and so lo and behold, my barracks is now destroyed, and so I didn’t have a bunch of those units to send back, and so I didn’t fight off his attack after all, and so he trampled all over my entire base. I could try re-building my barracks and sending more units back, but by the time the timewaves catch up, that would take too much chrono-energy, so my entire base just suddenly goes kaput and I lose.