Health systems for super strong units

[Martin_H]

I’d like to hear some thoughts on what is a good “health system”

for this kind of unit:

• very big, strong, and slow
• will be tanking many shots from much smaller units that can’t be dodged
• has up to 9 different turrets mounted on it

under these constraints:

• singleplayer only
• no HUD
• damage system should create opportunities for decision-making
• no smaller support units of any kind
• enemies will be a mix of stationary and mobile units
• RTS perspective

In Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak you have your large carrier from which you build units and that also has some weapons on it. If I recall correctly it works just fine no matter if it has 100% health or 10% health and repairing it doesn’t cost anything. In singleplayer you can load and save as you want, so I quite often found myself sending the carrier ahead without support into combat engagements in the singleplayer mode, because if he can get out of it alive, then I can repair it for free and have won a fight with zero cost to me. If I use any other kind of units, some will likely die and it costs me resources to fight that fight - in a game where you have a persistent resource and unit pool across the entire campaign. I thought that is a poor design decision for the singleplayer game. Granted, in multiplayer it’s a different story but I only care about singleplayer.

Some things I’ve brainstormed:

a) invulnerable from most angles, but super high-lethality weakspots from some small angles (think exposed reactor core or similar), would introduce quite a bit of randomness because AI units have wider spread with their shots

b) give each turret a smaller but regenerating healthbar (remember, no HUD), allowing them to get destroyed individually and then come back online after a longer cooldown period, and at x-turrets or more down at the same time you die

c) health non-regenerating, you lose a random turret at each 10% step of healthbar and there are single-use nano repair pads scattered through the level

d) it’s a stupid idea to begin with, abandon project (this is not a joke reply, this is how I feel about it most of the time)

e) health system that doesn’t just count damage but works with thresholds and basically makes low dps = no dps, but past a certain threshold it takes away one of 10 health points straight away in an explosion, disabling either a turret or slowing your movement, and you get x-seconds invulnerability and after that another threshold starts

f) turrets catch fire after certain amounts of damage, only burning turrets chew away at your (invisible) main health bar and they are not functional while on fire, but don’t take any additional damage either when being shot again while on fire, you get x number of fire extinguisher charges to extinguish fires and need to micro manage them yourself, main healthbar damage slows you down at certain thresholds, no way to heal that kind of damage during a mission

Any thoughts?

[neoshaman]

As a designer, I’m kind of lost at the lack of context, I mean what is the intended experience, will this be repeated? what is the function of the unit in a sequence, what is the type of game? There is just not enough data, which mean any direction is valid.

[Martin_H]

@neoshaman

As a designer, I’m kind of lost at the lack of context, I mean what is the intended experience, will this be repeated? what is the function of the unit in a sequence, what is the type of game? There is just not enough data, which mean any direction is valid.

There is no 1:1 comparable experience on the market as far as I know (maybe for a good reason?).

Intended experience: not sure myself to be honest (I’m aware this could be the core problem, but I can’t fix this, I’ll never be sure of anything). Power fantasy with interesting decisions to make maybe?

Function in sequence: this is the core gameplay loop - you alternate between customizing your 1 unit in the metagame and playing that 1 unit in sort of RTS-like fashion where you wreck havoc among a large number of units that are much smaller than yours. Think of Supreme Commander, but you only have one big Experimental without a base or support units, and the enemy has only regular Tier 1 and Tier 2 ground units and buildings. That’d probably resemble it the closest.

[FMark92]

Maybe think of it like a tank?
-Virtually invulnerable to small arms fire, except for things that would require crew members to be exposed (climbing onto machine-gun, changing a track segment, etc.)
-hull machine-gun ports prioritize units carrying weapons that could potentially damage it (AT weapons).
-built to fight other tanks and shrug off or avoid everything else.

So you could have some enemy units that could damage the leviathan, but that’s why turrets concentrate fire on them.

[Martin_H]

@FMark92

Maybe think of it like a tank?
-Virtually invulnerable to small arms fire, except for things that would require crew members to be exposed (climbing onto machine-gun, changing a track segment, etc.)
-hull machine-gun ports prioritize units carrying weapons that could potentially damage it (AT weapons).
-built to fight other tanks and shrug off or avoid everything else.

So you could have some enemy units that could damage the leviathan, but that’s why turrets concentrate fire on them.

That makes sense in games where you have a combination of tanks and infantry, but when you have 1 tank and nothing else, it seems weird to me to at all have enemy types that can’t do damage to you. You could essentially ignore all the little ones and focus on the few that can actually damage you. Seems like kind of a weird design to me, I don’t know.

[neoshaman]

Okay let’s start with the basic:

• what is the goal?
• how do we progress?
• what are the metric of failures?
• what is the theme?
• is it action or more reflexion?

[FMark92]

@Martin_H

That makes sense in games where you have a combination of tanks and infantry, but when you have 1 tank and nothing else, it seems weird to me to at all have enemy types that can’t do damage to you. You could essentially ignore all the little ones and focus on the few that can actually damage you. Seems like kind of a weird design to me, I don’t know.

IFV, then?

[Martin_H]

@neoshaman

Okay let’s start with the basic:

You mean within the game?

• what is the goal?
  kill all the things with your thing

• how do we progress?
  shoot at the things

• what are the metric of failures?
  the things killed your thing first (thinking of metagame one could make damage something that needs expensive repairs between fights but that’s a bad “rich get richer” feedback loop in my opinion)

• what is the theme?
  scifi with mechs just emerging as tech and yours being the first and only one

• is it action or more reflexion?
  it’s supposed to be intense micro-management of 1 unit, including manual aiming and shooting but movement like in an RTS (technically I guess I should make references to MOBAs, but I hate those and I really only have the B of those 4 letters and feel like that comparison goes nowhere).

@FMark92

IFV, then?

What does that mean?

[FMark92]

@FMark92

IFV, then?

@Martin_H

What does that mean?

Infantry Fighting Vehicle. A more vulnerable vehicle that has weapon ports where bullets can go both ways, but driver and engine are protected.

[LeftyRighty]

sounds like “brigador”

edit: also you might want to look into the genre of games where you are Godzilla(or whatever) destroying cities whilst the tanks/helicopter/troops etc. shoot at you. They’ll have a similar balance of big thing vs lots of little things.

[JoeStrout]

Also sounds like a Bolo. And there was an RTS many years ago based around a similar idea… one ridiculously strong, large unit against many smaller enemies. Ah yes, Ogre. The original computer game (by Origin systems) is long out of print, but maybe you can pick up a copy somewhere to run under DOS Box. There’s also a board game (which is in fact the original design) and apparently a modern Steam version.

Perhaps you can learn something from these?

[Martin_H]

@FMark92

Infantry Fighting Vehicle. A more vulnerable vehicle that has weapon ports where bullets can go both ways, but driver and engine are protected.

Conceptually I’m thinking more of a battleship (a bit scaled down) with 4 legs added to it. But I hadn’t considered a mix of very vulnerable and very robust systems that might each have their own kind of damage and health mechanics. Hm…

@LeftyRighty

sounds like “brigador”

Doesn’t feel close though. In Brigador you’re much faster, very vulnerable, can dodge incoming fire, have only 2 weapons plus special, and move with wasd instead of a click to move system like in an RTS. Brigador is what I originally wanted to make once and then dropped as a concept when Brigador surfaced because I thought I can’t do better than them anyway. Changing scale and playing up these differences is what I needed to motivate me to keep working, but now I feel like it might have been a dead-end.

@JoeStrout

Also sounds like a Bolo. And there was an RTS many years ago based around a similar idea… one ridiculously strong, large unit against many smaller enemies. Ah yes, Ogre. The original computer game (by Origin systems) is long out of print, but maybe you can pick up a copy somewhere to run under DOS Box. There’s also a board game (which is in fact the original design) and apparently a modern Steam version.

Perhaps you can learn something from these?

Thanks a lot, I never heard of any of those, so I’ll check them out!

[neoshaman]

Are you building up your mech? I mean do you decide which turret to go in fixed or free attachement, or just choosing where to upgrade?

What does a level looks like? what is the gameplay loop? how a level or sequence end? Is progression seamless (there is no end level, it blend sequence in one progression)?

Sound like a mobile tower defense game mixed with arena shooter

[Martin_H]

@JoeStrout

Also sounds like a Bolo. And there was an RTS many years ago based around a similar idea… one ridiculously strong, large unit against many smaller enemies. Ah yes, Ogre. The original computer game (by Origin systems) is long out of print, but maybe you can pick up a copy somewhere to run under DOS Box. There’s also a board game (which is in fact the original design) and apparently a modern Steam version.

Perhaps you can learn something from these?

I’ve checked those out and found some good inspiration, thanks! Bolo has a well filled TV Tropes page too:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Bolo

In Ogre it seems they use a combination of subsystem healthpoints and an interesting twist on winning conditions. E.g. depending on whether the Ogre gets fully destroyed or manages to escape to his deployment side of the board again, it can be a major or minor victory for the opposing team, or a major/minor loss if the Ogre achieves his own objective of destroying their HQ or something like that. That’s a way of phrasing optional objectives that I quite like. Perhaps also a good time to mention that I was considering adding “damage taken” as a form of research currency for the metagame. I wouldn’t want to incentivise exploiting that though, so maybe the feedback loop of having to pay for repairs after a mission is not such a bad idea after all. It’s creating a choice for “do I maybe want to tank a lot of damage this round (for research purposes) and pick cheaper weapons for this reason to make it less costly to do repairs afterwards”.

@neoshaman

Are you building up your mech? I mean do you decide which turret to go in fixed or free attachement, or just choosing where to upgrade?

What does a level looks like? what is the gameplay loop? how a level or sequence end? Is progression seamless (there is no end level, it blend sequence in one progression)?

Sound like a mobile tower defense game mixed with arena shooter

Good questions… but all for systems I largely haven’t built yet. Customization is supposed to be an involved process with many possible combinations, but the slots are fixed, no fully freeform designing like in besiege. Leveldesign will probably end up something similar to “industrial chem-park in a desert”. Sequence is supposed to be “play 1 map, back to base, repair and reconfigure, repeat”. I like having a last level. Can’t tell you much about gameplay, that’s the part I suck at. Right now it’s kinda boring without any meaningful decisions. It would look pretty with all the explosions you can make happen, and I’m sure for some people that’s enough, but not for me.

@neoshaman

Sound like a mobile tower defense game mixed with arena shooter

I don’t think that is an applicable comparison.

[neoshaman]

What does happen in a level, you are free to move, is there force scrolling? what is the end goal of each level, survive wave of enemy? destroy a key target? get to a specific point? defend a zone? cycling all of the prior? Isn’t the concept of the game one big unit controlled by the player harrassed by a lot of weak small unit?

[Martin_H]

@neoshaman

What does happen in a level, you are free to move, is there force scrolling? what is the end goal of each level, survive wave of enemy? destroy a key target? get to a specific point? defend a zone? cycling all of the prior? Isn’t the concept of the game one big unit controlled by the player harrassed by a lot of weak small unit?

What does happen in a level, you are free to move, is there force scrolling?

• free to move

what is the end goal of each level, survive wave of enemy?

• would be a valid option

destroy a key target?

• this probably quite often

get to a specific point?

• could be used too

defend a zone?

• I personally dislike these, so at most it’d be rare

cycling all of the prior?

• if ever developed into a proper game then yes

Isn’t the concept of the game one big unit controlled by the player harrassed by a lot of weak small unit?

• yes that’s the concept basically

[mauser100]

What if, alongside your main unit having a health bar, it’s manned by a finite and small number of crew, something vaguely similar to FTL? As it’s a new technology, some turrets are external and require the crew to climb along the outside where they’re vulnerable to fire from smaller units. So while you’re taking damage from a larger unit, you have to decide whether to take the hits because there’s too many smaller units around, or risk sending someone to the big turret because it’s the only thing that will take out the big opponent but potentially lose that crew member if you don’t time it right.

[Martin_H]

@mauser100

What if, alongside your main unit having a health bar, it’s manned by a finite and small number of crew, something vaguely similar to FTL? As it’s a new technology, some turrets are external and require the crew to climb along the outside where they’re vulnerable to fire from smaller units. So while you’re taking damage from a larger unit, you have to decide whether to take the hits because there’s too many smaller units around, or risk sending someone to the big turret because it’s the only thing that will take out the big opponent but potentially lose that crew member if you don’t time it right.

I had that implemented once and didn’t like it. I too thought it would be cool to make risk/reward choices for crew exposure and be able to man or unman weapon turrets or subsystems that give you buffs, but when I had it prototyped I felt it totally kills the flow because it puts layers of tedium between the player’s intention and the thing happening in the gameworld. It also added too many numbers to keep track of and the switching between the UI to micromanage crew and actually shooting things felt really jarring. Just removing the feature again felt a lot better to me. Later I also gave all turrets infinite ammo because I never felt like it’s fun to keep track of 9 more different numbers and when I’d run out it was frustrating and felt pointless.
I think I need to go back to something that doesn’t need a HUD to be understood, operated, or enjoyed.

[Joe-Censored]

Old school games, like on the NES, usually dealt with this by having the player destroy all the vulnerable turrets, then some vulnerable spot on the enemy itself would be exposed for the player to finally kill it. These would be boss type bad guys. A health bar would be displayed throughout that would decrease even with damage to the turrets. It is still a valid way to go.

[system]

I have to say that I really like your idea @Martin_H . I am a big fan of innovative features and concepts.

I’ve had similar ideas, and honestly if you guys have heard of that monster VS hunters game (I do not recall the name) that is what this sounds like.

Yet some advice as I’ve been thinking about design for a long time: find a direction for your project. Tinkering is fun but it won’t get you anywhere without a direction. If you can’t settle on something there is a process, something that I learned from Kiwasi.

1. Brainstorm
2. Settle on a central theme/meta
3. Rule out ideas regardless of how cool they are.
4. Implement according to plan.

Once you have something implemented and semi clear direction you will realize that you are invested in the project and you’ll have reason to finish it.

I did not begin my project because I really wanted to make a Freelancer inspired space sim. I realized at one point that I was personally invested in it. So I’ve been working on it ever since.

People say passion is kind of a myth. I can’t disagree, and its a poor way to get things done. Yet I have to say the same thing about having a “vision”. People say Steve Jobs was a visionary. Personally, I think he just worked really hard with good ideas and the means to implement them. If you don’t have a vision (most people don’t) don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. You just need a direction.

For passion and visions, both are the result of inspiration and its difficult to be inspired all the time. Which is one reason why most dreamers don’t achieve. They only work when inspired.

I think its best to approach almost anything in life with a certain amount of disinterest and disinvestment. Make it like a business. Its just something you do, not something you invest emotionally in.