Yes, UQM is based on the 3DO port.
Color me suprised that people in this thread complain more about the supermelee in SC2 and not the time limit!
I don’t survive long enough for the time limit to be an issue!
What are your feelings about Intergalactic genocide?
Yeah. I was referring to its console exclusivity but they built UQM on that open source. It was the “right” starting point to bring it back to PC.
I played hundreds of hours of Super Melee, including figuring out the file format for the player 1/2 fleets (it was something super trivial, not a feat of reverse engineering) and then writing a random fleet generator in QuickBasic.
It was great for its time. but in a modern game, they really need to rethink either the rules or the ship designs for this to work. The rock-paper-scissors elements are too strong, and there are matchups where one player can’t force an engagement and the other player can’t do any damage if they do engage.
In SC1, I felt like the matchups were well balanced - even ships that should be totally outclassed had an outside chance to pull a win with sufficient skill. Maybe I’m looking back with rose colored glasses or SC2 didn’t achieve the same thing (there were more ship varieties, right?).
There were a lot more ships in SC2, yeah. And I do remember having engagements like the one jsnell is talking about. At first we used to have these looooooong battles where one person stays away and hopes for a mistake by the other player. I used to try to make it so that the camera was zoomed out and I was on the edge of the screen between camera zooms, hoping that would help my brother in accidentally smacking into the planet. But this took so long, we both got tired of it after a few rounds. After that, if we have a particular ship combination, we knew the weaker but faster ship could keep playing keep-away forever but never win, so I used to just come in close, do as much damage as I could before dying, and just move to the next round.
For those who played the recent Star Control game by Brad, how was the melee combat in it?
I barely remember it. It was pretty similar mechanically to the original, but didn’t have a planet gravity well or wrapping edges, and instead had a (shrinking?) arena boundary. That was fine.
What was not a great move is that every race had multiple ships, and they were built with common components, almost like each civilization’s fleet was built in Master of Orion or something. Probably sunk months of a poor designer’s time into building and testing those when one iconic ship is exactly what the game wants.
Watch the guys play around with a melee prototype.
Melee was always heavily derivative of space war. It looks like they took sc2 supermelee up into a modern implementation to start screwing around with to feel out the gameplay. There’s some discussion there that follows from the ideas they’ve been discussing on the reddit. Things like continuous turning vs. fixed angles. All the stories of SC 1&2 involve trying things and constant playtesting to figure out which ideas actually translate into fun. It’s kind of cool to see it in action with such an early development prototype.
And yet somehow the goddamn lander gameplay made it into the release version. Press F to doubt, y’all.
Yeah, from the standpoint of SC1, the game was basically Space War + Archon.
You shut your dirty mouth.
Paul Reiche’s career has basically been in pursuit of the perfect Archon. That game genre defines him.
This feels like a game changer for my future replays of SC2: An interactive starmap to helps you find the best systems to harvest and reminds you where important homeworlds/devices are found.
http://mooses.nl/uqm/wip/js-starmap/#games
If anyone has tried playing SC2 and floundered in the open worldiness of it, this could save you a lot of fruitless exploration.
If you have perfect knowledge you can farm biologicals for the melnorme and get your precursor ship upgraded and the game becomes a cakewalk…
So if you haven’t been tuning in to the streams, this Friday is a good time to do it.
Yeah, I’ve only been able to watch little bits and pieces of them, but it’s pretty cool to see the process. Excited for the next one!