ClaytoniousRex

Hi, J. You can read a bit on this forum about infantry (you will need to clear the "past 20 days" filter to see these older posts), such as this thread, among others. Infantry will not be available in the v1 release. They will be added after the initial release.

We're on track, Drusus! Very soon, you will be in the heat of combat asking me to provide a fire mission for you. As always, the artillery will splash just a few seconds too late to save you from Mace...

The campaign is linear. DropTeam has been built from the ground-up as a multiplayer game, so the single player experience is honestly never going to be as good as multiplayer. The campaign is just enough to get your feet wet and give you a little flavor for the setting of the game, but the meat of DropTeam will always be in playing online (or on a LAN with friends). Each team has an inventory of units that are available in each scenario. This inventory is randomized slightly for each game. You don't have direct control like the point system in CM gives you. Now that you mention it, though, that sounds like a very good candidate feature to add after the initial release. DropTeam is very immersive. There's nothing "callous" or abstract about it. You're literally right there in the heart of it all with real physics driving everything around you. No hexes, squares, or movement points.

Hi, Salkin. We enjoyed it, too. It had plenty of problems, but the basic gameplay mechanic was quite fun. Yes, though with some significant differences. DropTeam shares the basic FPS/RTS mix that was featured in BZ, but: </font> Weapons have realistically long ranges and ballistic performance.</font>Penetration, armor, and damage are modelled accurately. There is none of the "health bar" kind of simplifications you found in a game like BZ.</font>There's a much wider variety of unit types in DropTeam and they make actual military sense (as opposed to the whiz-bang "arcade" items in BZ).</font>There's no base-building or unit production in DropTeam. You do have an inventory of units that are available to you and you can extract damaged units from the battlefield for quick repair and redeployment so this inventory will go up and down during the game, but you aren't creating brand new vehicles out of thin air.</font>... just to name a few. As a consequence of the kind of differences listed above, DropTeam rewards real tactical play as opposed to purely fast-paced twitch shooting. For example, finding and using good hull down positions is very useful in DropTeam. Flanking the enemy, keeping the correct mix of unit types together (such as using EWV units for air cover and sensor jamming as escorts to more straight-forward heavy tanks), coordinating your team, etc. are all necessary to fight a really effective battle in DropTeam. In short, DropTeam shares some of the same basic mechanics as a game like BZ, but DropTeam is much more of a simulation where BZ was more of an arcade game.

Yes, Jack, if damaged vehicles are extracted in one piece from the battlefield then they are repaired and become available for redeployment. The time to repair depends on the extent of damage.

This is largely a matter of the opposing team's skill level. I would say that the majority of the time it's pretty easy to orient your units so that the thicker frontal armor is facing toward the enemy. You're right that when death finally comes, it is often because the enemy has managed to flank you and you're shocked to see rounds punching into your rear or sides, but that of course indicates a failure of your team to protect the flanks and rear (or at least *warn* you about the threat). It is quite fluid but this usually simply means you need to continually adjust your idea of "toward the enemy" as the battle develops. Once he flanks you and is firing on you from multiple directions you have to redeploy. Something heavy like a Thor in a good hull down position is very effective. Just making the enemy waste precious minutes finding a way around it in order to flank it is often good enough to serve your purposes. Of course, *you're* often playing the role of the "shock troop" breaking through enemy defense with a Hurricane at high speed, so in that case it must seem that death from random directions is more typical! In fact, most of what I was saying above is more (but not exclusively) applicable in the defensive roles.

Good point, Caseck. And even if, due to the cruel reality of the "scavenger culture" of The Rim, saving other components is a higher priority than saving the crew, there's still little justification for putting them up front (it's not as though their presence will protect anything behind them).

Hi again, General. 1. Almost all units in the game are amphibious already. There aren't any dedicated "naval" units. 2. For the first release, only wheeled, tracked, and hover platforms are natively supported. So if you wanted to do a mod with walking vehicles then you would definitely have to do some clever work-arounds.

Heh. Sorry, Jack. The five days of silence was actually spent trying to see if we could come up with a *real* answer for you. We've been busy improving graphics and effects in the game due to the repeated requests for that in this very forum, so lately the system requirements have been creeping slowly upward. You can see my original post on this subject in the very first thread on this forum. Those answers are still mostly true, though performance on really low end systems like a Mac Mini is now going to be a little painful at times while playing. When we've done final optimization I'll post a concrete answer for you.

Yes, almost all of them can (after all, they're able to operate in various atmospheres on a variety of planets, so driving into water is not very traumatic for them). Some scenarios, though, include fluid bodies that cannot be traversed, such as magma, etc.

Hi, John. You raise very interesting, substantive issues! Actually, ATGM's *do* have a fire-and-forget mode; the units page is simply a bit out-of-date. The gunner can toggle between the manual LOS guidance mode or the fire-and-forget mode. Fire and forget requires taking the time to stabilize and maintain a lock on the target before releasing the weapon, whereas the manual mode allows the gunner to "fire from the hip" in case he really needs to take a snapshot and enemy countermeasures are making a lock too difficult to achieve at that moment. The manual mode also allows the gunner to do creative things with the missile, such as arcing it into the flank of a target. In contrast, the fire and forget mode always does a "pop-up" attack where, just before impact, it gains altitude and then attacks down into the top armor of the target. On rare occasions, this might not be what you want, so you are free to choose. Yes, I was certainly one of those many. So you're saying the molten metals don't get hot enough to literally attain the 4th state of matter, but they're so hot that people clumsily misuse the term plasma for it? Some of this question is answered below, but I'll quickly point out that EMP weapons are simulated (as one type of fire mission that can be called in as support), jamming and sensing are simulated both for intelligence and for locking onto targets (and disrupting enemy attempts to attain locks on targets). Agreed! The damage model, while detailed and far more robust than what you would find in almost any game on the market (excepting only the rare anomaly like some of Battlefront's games), it is certainly not (yet) a complete simulation of every detail that could have possibly been modelled. Everything you laid out above is interesting stuff to consider adding to the damage model, and we will definitely continue to improve it over time. Various kinds of artillery support are available as "off-map" support assets that can be called in, though they aren't physically present on the battlefield in-game. Almost all of your other points are basically asking the question, "Where's the super high-tech stuff? Why is this stuff so familiar to us backward 21st century has-beens?" The answer to that question is given by the history which leads into the setting for DropTeam. The region of the galaxy where DropTeam takes place, called The Rim, is in the grips of a technological dark age. Combatants in The Rim are making do with the technological remnants left behind by previous generations, having already lost much of the higher knowledge and infrastructural base required to produce and maintain the more exotic, high-tech weaponry that used to be common. However, they're still able to coax their aging (and gradually eroding) Liveships into producing *some* of the types of weapons used by past generations (mostly those that were being sold to the people of The Rim for their own internal conflicts). This leads to a colorful and sometimes shocking juxstaposition of low and high tech equipment being used on battlefields in The Rim at this particular point in history. It is, of course, a temporary state of affairs, since the rest of the galaxy is still fighting high-tech wars with everything ranging from nano-scale weaponry to fully autonomous AI systems, etc. But this temporary window in this time and place is where DropTeam is set, for precisely the reason that it's such an interesting and colorful time and place to simulate actions in. We very much hope in subsequent titles to explore the future of The Rim, as civilization emerges from the ashes and more of the exotic high-tech systems come back into play, and also other parts of the galaxy where these systems haven't fallen into such wide-scale disuse. This leads directly back into previous discussions on the same topic, started by Peter Cairns, so you might want to check that earlier thread out, too.

Hi, Burke. Indirect fire can be performed in several different ways. Assuming a unit's on-board electronics are functioning properly (not damaged by enemy fire or scrambled by enemy EMP) then indirect fire can be performed fully automatically, where you simply click a location on the map and let the computer calculate the elevation and azimuth for you automatically. This is your basic "finger of God" mode. Indirect fire can also be done manually by inputting range values yourself and positioning the gun on your own. In this case, it's up to you to account for gravity and atmospheric density (usually requiring a couple of 'ranging shots' to get things right). This can be useful if damage or other effects prevent you from using the fully automatic mode, or sometimes just because it's easier to accomplish what you want to do this way (good for general area fire from the 3D perspective, for example). Finally, you can resort to direct LOS fire if circumstances warrant it (this is probably a sign that things have become pretty desperate though!) Tarq, I think you're the hands down winner of the Most Obscure Post contest. Obscure as it is, though, it's a strangely enjoyable post. Looking forward to more!

Hi, shadow_comm. Infantry will be very cool; clear your "past 20 days" filter to see past discussions about infantry in DropTeam on this forum. They will definitely be included, but after the initial release. Bastables, TA was truly a classic and many hours of my life disappeared into it! DropTeam is not really that kind of pure "point and click" RTS (there's no resource gathering or unit production here for example) but there's quite a bit of common ground in terms of the "feel" of battles, with lots of mechanized units moving in concert, violent battle across large fields, a good variety of unit types, etc. However, DropTeam is much more of a simulation as opposed to the RTS "mouse click" game that TA was (not to malign TA at all since it was great fun - just pointing out that DropTeam is a bit different). As to the size of battles, this is roughly company-sized engagements, usually with only a few platoons deployed at any one time (using the high mobility afforded by dropships to deploy and undeploy as needed).

Borg Spotting is only available to players who are using command & control units such as the Mercury Command Track. These players automatically receive threat data from friendly units (via a variety of communications mechanisms ranging from neutrino transceivers all the way down to ground induction, so it's widely available even on the "noisy" battlefield). This means that when someone else on the team spots an enemy unit, the player with a command & control unit ALSO sees that enemy unit. This is not true of all other unit types. Except for the specific exception of command & control units, you do NOT see enemy units simply because some other friendly unit sees them. Each unit has its own, isolated view of the battlefield. The best you can do in these cases is talk with other friendly units, alerting them to enemy movements as best you can, or even go so far as to place markers on the tactical display for your entire team to see (these markers are visible to all friendlies in a network game). Using a microphone headset, it's quite efficient to call out enemy units as you spot them, and pretty exciting to hear a friendly shout to you over the network "Enemy MBT's over the ridge in front of you!" even though YOU can't see them yet.

You could play with a small enough inventory that there are no extra units available other than what you and your team mates initially drop with. This is what some of the single player campaign scenarios are like, but we haven't been playing multiplayer this way so far in beta testing. It sounds like an interesting variation - we'll have to try it out.

Sunray, keep watching for new screenshots. Once we've turned our full attention to the graphics and start posting new screens, I think you will be very pleased. Up to now, we've had much more important work to do than polishing the eye candy.

The bottom line is that the idea of DropTeam is that you win by using your brain not just your mouse. Achieving objectives is less a matter of "hand-eye skill" with aiming and firing weapons and more a matter of keeping the right kind of units in the right place at the right time. As for the tempo, this is largely a matter of choice. You can, for example, land a command unit behind friendly lines and direct the battle from a distance, spending most of your time on the tactical map, issuing orders to units and using the "observer mode" to watch the battle from friendly units' point of view rather than being embroiled in the front-line fighting yourself. Or you can choose to raise the tempo and drop straight into the thick of it without taking much time to reflect (though this is pretty suicidal). Even when you're fighting directly, if you take the time to manuever carefully, using hull-down positions, flanking the enemy, and coordinating with your team, then you're going to be far more effective than a lone wolf who simply drives into the action without thinking.

Those are great points, General, and I think you'll have a great time playing DropTeam! I always enjoy reading your posts. But with regard to nuclear weapons, I think Peter was talking more about high-precision tactical weapons than about high-yield nukes: smart missiles fired from UAV's, high power laser beams with autonomous targetting, probably all the way up to nano-scale self-organizing networked weapon systems, etc. His "Rod of God" is not a high-yield nuke but an EXTREMELY smart, high-precision pin-prick of death that is never seen nor heard and against which there is virtually no defense.

But networked dispersed remotes are only cheap to produce because of the massive technological, specialized, industrial base that produces them. If this base were significantly eroded, then they would no longer be cheap at all. You're taking it for granted that the world will always be the way it is today: a relative golden age where highly specialized, exotic technologies are mass produced because we have a broad, deep, stable, civilized base to draw upon. As an extreme example, what if in today's world there were suddenly only 2 or 3 plants still capable of manufacturing high quality integrated circuits? Would it still be cheap and efficient to build an army of networked remote killing machines? Not until you rebuilt some more of those plants that used to exist, right? In the mean time, you would have to make do with more primitive technology. This is not a valid analogy at all. It's actually more like us emerging from a nuclear war and going to conventional, manned aircraft INSTEAD OF networked, autonomous, unmanned robotic flying machines, at least until we can rebuild enough civilization to once again reach the high levels of specialization required to build more exotic technologies. For a short, asymmetric battle where your limited supply of super weapons is sufficient to win, this is absolutely true. Though that scenario is often what we see for big western nations in today's world, that is not necessarily the absolute future of all warfare for all people and for all time to come.

Hi, Peter. I sympathize with what you're saying, but I think you're still overlooking the pertinent parts of the background story that Moon was alluding to. Maybe you had the reaction that many of us have when reading background stories for games: your eyes glazed over by third paragraph or so and you began mumbling to yourself "yeah, yeah, massive empire, yada yada, big civil war, yeah yeah, lots of planets..." and then you moved on to the Units page to get some "real info". So, here's a condensed version: Game play takes place in the wake of a massive conflict, a conflict which used exactly the kind of "Rod of God" weapons you described. It was so violent that civilization was shattered, leading to a sort of Dark Age. The higher knowledge and technology required to make more "Rods of God" has been mostly lost, at least in the region of space where DropTeam takes place (The Rim). The tattered remnants of civilization are now trying to pull themselves back up out of the darkness by their bootstraps, using whatever old "Rod of God" technology they might still have left over (and still be able to maintain), but also using an ever-increasing amount of more primitive, home-grown technology. Therefore, military forces in The Rim utilize a patchwork of technology. Most of it is vastly inferior to the "Rods of God" used during the original conflict with the Mu Arae, because they're only able to use those things that they can build for themselves and/or maintain over the years as higher knowledge continues to dwindle amongst the embattled predatory survivors trying to scrape out an existence in the charred waste of what used to be civilization. There are still "Rods of God" out there, but they're few and far between, and becoming less common as time goes on. This will continue to be true until either The Rim emerges from its Dark Age (probably due to unification by force), or is once again visited by outsiders from the presumably still-civilized Mu Arae direction of space. Even without the whole "collapse of civilization" element to the story, we could probably agree that "Rods of God" are never going to *completely* replace the grunt with a basic weapon on the ground, as history has already taught us (anyone want to guess when exactly infantry will become obsolete? My money is on "never.") Think of it this way. Imagine that the modern-day United States of America became embroiled in a protracted, pitched war (not an asymmetric war like Iraq - this is against another hypothetical nation with similar staying power.) Yes, during the first months of such a war, the "Rods of God" would define the conflict. High tech miracle weapons would shoot instant, accurate death from the skies. But as months go by, and the war drags on, how many "Rods of God" are being manufactured compared with the number being consumed in pitched combat? How long does it take for the "Rods of God" to slowly, inevitably give way to the far less fashionable, far more easily produced, tank and foot soldier? If this war were truly a protracted struggle for survival spanning years, then how long would it take before expensive chobham armor and elaborate APFSDS munitions needed to be replaced by cheaper, easier-to-produce tanks made with simpler steel armor, and simpler munitions for their guns? Anyway, even if you don't agree with that point of view, then luckily we do, in fact, have the whole "collapse of civilization" element. Hopefully one or both will sate you for now, because we're terribly busy trying to finish some programming over here... [ August 24, 2005, 10:04 PM: Message edited by: ClaytoniousRex ]

Hi, General. Yes, there are playable dropships in the game that you can manually control, as well as AI controlled dropships. Whether or not the player-controlled dropships should be armed is a hot topic of debate in beta testing. All of the code and artwork is already in place for it, but we're leaning toward "no" because the game's emphasis is on tactical ground combat. See the background story and units pages for an explanation of how dropship armaments have evolved into their current state.

Thanks very much for the positive vibes, malek77. Both you and Caseck have made many excellent points regarding infantry - it sounds like you've both been sitting at the design table with us. MajWest has also made some thoughtful posts about infantry in past threads (you might need to clear the "past 20 days" filter to see them.) Yes, this is exactly what we're doing. Infantry are deployed and work as squads and there are different types of squads. Yes, that is in fact quite simple for us to do and it's a great idea that we hadn't considered. A creative mod'er could actually do this on his own without additional help from us. Good points about powered armor, too. Sounds very interesting! What did you have in mind? Exactly right. Use of anti-matter and presence on the enemy's sensor network is a big part of the game, so "regular" infantry have a powerful advantage in this respect. Always good to meet another Steakley fan! You've probably already seen it, but there's actually an early excerpt from Armor 2 that Steakley has made public here: http://www.johnsteakley.com Overall, I would say Heinlein had a much more fleshed out vision of power armor than Steakley. Steakley's fantastic book was mostly a visceral CHARACTER story, not so much a technical story about the armor itself.

Hi, FluXs, thanks for taking an interest. Yes, DropTeam includes some non-exlusive art from 3DRT. But, no, you haven't seen "ALL of those vehicles/dropships/structures" somewhere else. In fact, we've established an excellent relationship with 3DRT that has allowed them to create a great deal of additional content specifically for DropTeam with even more still on the way. We're also currently in production with a complete set of indigineous units that are completely original, not to mention hundreds of original textures, sounds, terrains, backdrops, diagrams, etc. The few structures and models that we initially purchased from 3DRT's public "off-the-shelf" supply are truly a tiny drop in the bucket when weighed against the entire artistic undertaking of a game like DropTeam. Even though DropTeam includes mountains of original content, if we come across any more non-exclusive, public artwork that is high quality and fits well with the game, we will happily use it just as we used those original models from 3DRT! Quality is quality, regardless of its source. You can also look forward to a steady stream of new content in the future both from us as free downloads and from the mod community as well.

All of your posts on infantry have made very good points, Major! We agree with you completely. Yes, infantry are definitely going to be a part of DropTeam, but not in the first release. The basic groundwork has already been laid, but they will be added only after version 1.0 has shipped. This is not because we feel they're unimportant; it's because we want to do infantry correctly and with the same high quality that other units have received.

Yes, this can sometimes be a problem when playing on public servers, Soddball, but you can always play your own game on your own LAN against an opponent who you personally like to play with. You can play head-to-head, with plenty of AI players on each of your teams that you both give orders to, in addition to controlling your own personal units. You can also play this way via Internet, but it sounds like you might like to sit down and play next to other like-minded players, which is perfectly fine. There are a lot of ways to play DropTeam, and jumping into public games is only one of them. Here's the definition of simulation: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">sim·u·la·tion n. Imitation or representation, as of a potential situation or in experimental testing.</pre>