#rtsgames

A good long while ago, I had the honour to design the second faction for the supremely excellent game Nebulous Fleet Command. (Get it here, don't hesitate, what are you waiting for? Get the game!) That faction being the OSP. The OSP's main thing being, that almost their entire fleet is made up of retrofitted civilian ships, hastily pushed into service. Almost. The first ship on the design block was The Ocello class Command Cruiser. The idea behind it was, that it used to be a state of the art Warship, but that time had passed a good 100 years ago. Many of these were mothballed withing OSP territory, and quite frankly you don't look a fully armored 12000 ton gif horse in the mouth, when a battle hardened navy is knocking at your door asking "you and what army?"

From the Tip of the spear we move over to what was avaliable. Civvies. Not to fret though, what they lack in class, they make up for in mass, either by numbers or by tonnage. We'll start with the numbers first, and this is where we meet the clippers. Clippers are the small fry of vessels, shuttles tugs, transport feeders, the small guys of the blue collar world. This may not bless them with lots of armor, but they sure as heck makes up for it in versatility. The Design brief asked for everyday civilian vessels in the size range of 60 to 95 meters, so I gave it my best shot with this lot.

Ultimately only three of these made it into the game, to uphold the delicate balance of the amount of work it takes the team to actually make one of these ships happen and also the gameplay balance of what their exact roles are and wether or not they are redundant, gameplay wise. I think the Team went with the right vessels, and I would only lament that I'd love to have had the "Mantis" as well. This leads us to the final and perhaps most interesting subject: The Freighters. The design document asked for three distinct types of freighters: -Bulk Freighters -Container Freighter -Liquid Gas Freighters Adittionally these ships were meant to be Randomizable in two ways: -be made out of three interchangeable sections, front, middle, engine

-lots of little doodads, like bridges, cranes, tanks etc. So I got to work and these are the results: Bulk freighter base models:

Bulk Freighter with Doodads example:

Finally some remixed Bulk freighter Hulls:

This worked out quite well for my sensibilities, so I went along with the other designs. Base Container Freighters:

Versions with Doodads:

And finally the LNG Freighters You know the drill by now. Base models:

Doodad examples:

And finally some remix variants.

Imagine telling Grievous' story in such a medium... defending Kalee, leading a Kaleesh army to Huk worlds and then working as an IGBC's agent.

It was the year 2000. I regularly hung out with my best friend, Mike. His older brother, Bobby, was always in the office using the computer. He was playing StarCraft. I was really captivated by it. Bobby commanded massive armies and used them to destroy enemies from an isometric point of view.

Bobby never left the computer long enough for me to give it a try, but Mike said they have it for the N64. We stayed up until 7 in the morning the next day playing it. It was terrible. An RTS on a console was an abomination. A mouse and keyboard was a necessity. But I was 10 years old and I didn't care and we couldn't stop playing.

I eventually got the game for my own computer. It was the fist online game I ever played. Battle.net was a super highway to another dimension. I could play with anyone—from the east coast to the west coast, Europe to Asia. It was easier to find people with similar interests than on the Web.

You could essentially create your own game using StarCraft assets. It taught me logic and how to code.

The game was fun. But the thing that became my favorite was its campaign editor. You could essentially create your own game using StarCraft assets. It taught me logic and how to code. You would create conditional statements, and if conditions were met, then something would happen as a result.

When you played other peoples' games, you first downloaded them and they would go in a specific folder that you could open in the campaign editor. Sometimes people used mods that would lock you out and prevent you from reading their logic, but most of the time you could learn from them and see how the games worked.

I read a lot of other peoples conditional statements, copied them and saw how they functioned. I learned a lot about triggers, making things happened at certain times, or causing something to happen when someone brings something to a specific place.

Agora estou na Era Contemporânea em FoE (Forge of Empires), minha cidade é a de Noctúria Lazuli, e meu nome lá é salgor2, ainda permaneço no servidor de Korch, sou da guilda + SANTERIA +, podem entrar se quiser pra ajudar, se essa não der certo, vou tentar ingressar em outra guilda ou voltar pra Ethos, espero que vocês curtam o "vizu" da minha cidade, até mais!!!

I guess for me being the big stompy boot is more fun than being the knife in the dark.