Fey

see you there, mate! ping Fey there anytime, I can help ya set up the following: ah, we've actually got a proper queue now. it's hot off the presses, made more recently than the ArkDebut mission. behold: very customizable. comes with bulk, priority, infinite, and other queue functions I see you created a thread for your new merc / guild campaign, so I suppose that would also be a fine place to discuss it further

they're also the only map the MP boys like to play Habbanya Erg and nothing else. lol me? we've got uncrushable infantry in d2k now. it was done via a really janky workaround during Summers' Solstice's inception, but Klofkac added proper support for it relatively recently. mostly though, I lean on map design for that and just try to leave infantry rock in lots of places sure dude, feel free to hit me up then SC1 still has quite a large following. if you make something for it, I think you can be very confident it will be played

1200 resources in Starcraft for Siege Tanks? 💀 ik range is, like, the most powerful stat, but doesn't that just mean you gotta mess with how the economy works so the player's income can keep up with that kinda inflated price? my father likes to play on easy mode just to blow stuff up, and aarmaageedoon says my missions are "too easy" even with multiple restarts 😆 can't please everybody I'm not the worst at d2k, and my focus is on mission or campaign design - player versus AI - so my process is testing crap on hard mode / fastest game speed, then scaling it down for normal and easy modes. it matters for the maximum difficulty since players on hard are looking for a challenge. it should be both fair and engaging. normal and easy, those are where some theoretical scaling should suffice to nail the target difficulty as long as hard mode is done up nicely the metric I look to primarily for determining if a mission is balanced how I want it is how long it takes me to complete it, including compared to its neighboring or counterpart missions. players will inevitably have a variety of experiences, but how closely in time it takes for me, knowing them in and out and optimizing for them, to complete them does a lot to illustrate the sum of whatever balance decisions I made for them already that doesn't mean I don't consider how things might work out in a hypothetical multiplayer game though. I passed an MP compatible version of my stuff over to the boys, and some unexpected metagaming came out of it, like... walls and concrete were useable. lol micro potential is a big deal in determining units' viability. take Blink micro for Stalkers in SC2 for example. you can have a unit with relatively weak stats, but with good player control, it dominates. over here in d2k, in ArkDebut, the Keravnos Laser Tank's shield system has revealed some interesting interactions already and suggests great micro potential. needs more testing. there are innumerable complex interactions in RTS, even in a simple one like d2k. makes theoretical balance pretty messy when the rubber hits the road wym money maps? like, macro-heavy, macro missions? there are a lot of differences between how macro and micro missions need to be designed and how a player will use units just thanks to that fundamental difference. or do you mean how the resources are painted on macro missions? at some point we get more into mission design theory as opposed to unit balance theory 😛 different things

I dunno, mate. maybe it's just cuz I'm a hands-on learner, but I've played KKND and this still sounds both overcomplicated and oversimplified at the same time... there are so many more factors that define a unit's strengths or weaknesses there was one concept you brought up that's particularly comprehensible to me though 😛 how I tried to balance the Summers' Solstice campaign was through units' roles, or functions as you put it, as opposed to on an individual basis. so even if we've got some new stuff here or there, they fall into certain categories and their strengths and weaknesses are representative of the category they belong to like Shock Raiders, for instance. fast, high damage, low durability. excels over open terrain, swarming targets. bad in head-on frontal assault. very similar to Quads, Raiders, Flame Tanks, other stuff like that even that example accounts for movement speed, effective weapon range, and other stuff like that too though. not just health and damage a lot of theory falls apart in practice, I've found. you know what they say: in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. in practice, there most certainly is a difference 😆

it sounds a bit too basic to really work out ^^ there are so many other factors to consider in a unit's power. maybe as a starting principle, but certainly not as the core of balance decisions and whatnot do you have some kind of example to showcase the success of this method? a practical example, not... not more math

try running a game just against AI via CNCNET. that might rule out if it's display issues, renderer problems, etc... I also recommend ensuring you and your son have the same game version. Gruntmods and Dunemaster are the two nowadays, and if one doesn't appear to be working for you, try the other it's also worth noting that due to the way the Mission Launcher works, if either of you have run modified single-player missions via the Mission Launcher, it could result in desyncing issues in multiplayer. a fresh / separate install specifically for multiplayer would prevent any related problems I hope that helps!

lay it on us, brother 👀

you'll wanna open C&Cnet, which you'll find in your d2k directory with any modern install package, and then you can run skirmish games from there. IIRC you just click the mini-map image in the C&Cnet lobby to choose which map you wanna load note that due to how the Mission Launcher works, replacing files and such, if you're encountering sync issues with a friend while trying to co-op, consider using a fresh install for the C&Cnet stuff. even if windows isn't being a jerk and preventing the Mission Launcher from properly restoring files after single-player missions, C&Cnet can sometimes give folks trouble anyway if the Mission Launcher was used at all. why? 1998 game voodoo, I guess anyway, hope that helps!

ah, no worries! take your time I'm just doing spritework in the meantime lol. nice to hear from ya though, X3M got that Railgun Tank sidebar icon sorted the other day, but like the Kovi and Castle it doesn't have a place in any tech tree just yet. I DID intend for it to be a unit for the native rival faction to the Aether Knights, but it's a really cool new unit and the AK need something in the Autogun Tank's spot in their tech tree, sooooo I might just put it there. I've got other ideas for that other faction lol oh yeah, Shotgunners were in the Summers' Solstice campaign and will remain the Light Infantry-like unit for the smugglers and mercenaries in this campaign. they have more impact against light armor, albeit only slightly, than the former standard Riflemen. their area-effect, while larger as well, is nowhere near that of Grenadiers or Siege Tanks when trying to determine why exactly the Shotgunner is so superior to the regular Light Infantry, it has to do with their method of dealing damage. they don't actually have higher DPS than Riflemen with that small exception of more oomph against light armor. it's just that they deal their damage sooner, meaning they're more likely to eliminate threats sooner. Riflemen might need another shot or two Trikes' rapid fire attack works because it has the speed to compensate. it gets on top of stuff, eats it, and can leave just as quickly. since infantry are slower and tend to be stuck in the fight, a bursty damage model lends itself very well to the weakest infantry unit the Shotgunner becomes the player's standard infantry on S03V1 and on. both they and Grenadiers can be compared on this mission, and I'll link you to this vid from Felix where the action starts if you want to check it out for yourself, Summers' Solstice is in any regular d2k install with gruntmods or dunemaster nowadays... although I did do a small mostly-cosmetic update to backport a bunch of features Klofkac added for this campaign after its completion, including a new spirteset for the Shotgunners. more details about that are in... this post here ^^ hope that helps

just an update for the curious... lotsa stuff needs doing before I can get on with doing up campaign missions, but just cuz it's boring backend stuff doesn't mean we can't look forward to the final results! Klofkac has been working on reviving mvi's ol' queues system I believe I already mentioned that my current pursuit is spritework and I've also refined the tech tree seen in the debut mission although ArkDebut was released primarily to showcase the tileset, it happens to also be the latest mission created for d2k and I could do up another draft later just to showcase the new art additions and gameplay tweaks. and also to make that art available for other mappers through the mod data y'all can see it in action with or extract it from. I've got a lot more spritework to wrap up first though that's all for now

haha, yeah those final missions can get a bit hairy xD especially the Harkonnen ones! I guess because you get Devastators as Harkonnen, Westwood was like, "alright, start 'em off with the cruddiest of stuff between all the level 9's" lol ah, sorry to hear this issue has gotten in your way on thatun. fortunate it is, indeed, that we can freely select any mission from the Mission Launcher! starting a long mission over again is bothersome, but at least it ain't the whole campaign, right? I hope you enjoy the campaign though! 💕 good luck n have fun!

hey there! the number you're seeing in the error message is the amount of "ticks" that have passed in the saved games you've got. 25 ticks = 1 in-game second, and at fastest game speed, an in-game second is roughly 0.4 of a real-life second. it's just a way to tell you when the crash occurred, for debugging purposes game data invalid is what it sounds like, unfortunately. something in the save file ain't playing nice with the new exe. we try to maintain backwards compatibility, but ya know how development can be the good news is, you should be able to run any mission made with a prior version of the game in mind just fine between stable versions of the exe. there are minor exceptions, like if a bug was exploited for map design and that bug was fixed, the map that used it may be a little different. nothing should be unplayable though and, you should also be able to run more modern campaigns making use of the powerful new features. Cm's index has all known playable content documented: and if you'd like some examples of more modern campaigns, I can make a few recommendations of threads to check out via that index: - Thel 'Vadam Flippy's Great Battle of Arrakis focuses heavily on large-scale macro missions, using some powerful variables-based features, such as 'repeat queueing' to let you mass-produce large armies to clash with - PsYcHo's Smuggler Restructure campaign is closer to vanilla in terms of most of the event types used, but makes use of minimap pings and quite a few lovely new units he created as voxels, which I later polished up - my Summers' Solstice campaign recently had some new features backported to it. nothing that fundamentally changes the missions, except ooone thing on the final mission, but some significant optimizations and QoL but there are plenty of gems besides those; these are specifically campaigns that use new features with the v2.3 exe and all that on a tangential note, the very latest mission designed for d2k at the time of this post is the Arkanon Debut mission included in that tileset's thread. it'd be under "single missions" in the index. that uses a cutting-edge exe though, technically not the stable version of 2.3. still, it might be of interest if you're looking to get a peek at the most modern of our capabilities anyway, I hope that answers your question!

OpenRA is different! different engine and all that stuff. therefore, this process is not applicable to anything OpenRA they probably have another way to get custom tilesets in, but I wouldn't know how that works so, good luck!

I feel that ^^ the build queues are a popular request

aye, unfortunate about the build queue patch being so, uhh... you know. hard to get working thank you! I appreciate that! and I extend the same offer; if you need help getting the repeat queue system implemented on any missions at all (like those that NEED the new exes to work), feel free to reach out. I frequent the Landsraad Discord server, a link to which is pinned on these forums, and could help more rapidly over there. but if you just wanna give it a try and see how it feels, you'll find the system implemented in the recent ArkDebut mission, which is linked in the Arkanon tileset release thread hope that helps!