Achron Interview Page 2

20 Jan 2010 at 15:45:57 by Tim McDonald

Much as time-travel is, right now, the focus, what is there that's clever and new in the standard RTS rock-paper-scissors gameplay, and how does the time travel mechanic impact these battles with abilities? There are a few little hints in the alpha as to unit utility, like stealth units, and I've heard talk of things like chronobombs...

One of the most interesting things that time travel does to an RTS is that it brings out a vast array of strategies beyond the typical rock-paper-scissors gameplay. Bluffing, spying, and other forms of subterfuge become easy and natural, and Achron really is a war of the mind. You can jump to the future, scout out where your opponent is and then undo the scouting. Then your opponent can go back in time and move his base so that your scouting is now misinformation. Here's another fun example of gameplay, assuming 8 minutes of playable history. Your opponent patiently crafts a hierarchy and launches an all-out attack on you 3 minutes in the past. You jump back  to 4 minutes ago and spend all of your chronoenergy managing your forces to defeat his all-out attack. However, he now undoes that attack and then launches a small fleet 7 minutes in the past to take out one of your core factories, leaving you stuck with the result because you've spent your all your chronoenergy on his bluff.

The best part about the time manipulation gameplay elements is that they are (by default at least) symmetric to all players, so they are already well-balanced. We have actually had significant interest from the US Army in using our timeline interface and technology to teach military strategy. Even though you can't go back in time in real life, using this in a multiplayer setting against a good opponent forces you to figure out what strategies will minimize your maximum possible loss.

Going back to your question about the more traditional RTS aspects of gameplay, our units and buildings are largely feature complete, though we have quite a bit of tuning left. We're only showing a subset of units in the current alpha releases yet as we don't have artwork beyond billboard sketches (which is currently true "programmer art").

You mention the chronobomb, which works by sending everything in a region forward in time a couple minutes. This is useful to bottleneck your enemy and to hopefully score some chronofrags, where the units sent by the chronobomb land on and destroy other units of your opponent that happen to have moved onto the battlefield. 

One feature that we have not announced until now is that chronoporters have the ability to put units in what we call Temporal Soliton Shields (TSS). A unit with TSS is impervious to most attacks, but cannot be teleported or chronoported (and thus is also immune to chronobombs). A single TSS is not cheap to create, some defences and fast-moving units can break them almost instantly, and units that can break TSS will immediately respond if another unit sees it when “smart idle” is enabled on a Comm Center building. TSS is thus primarily useful for cleaning up small armies of opponents that have had all their defensive supports taken away. Because our focus is on time travel, we weren't aiming for a large number of unit types for the player to keep track of. Each unit generally has its own role, and we have enough diversity of units to keep things fun and interesting.

For that matter, how different are the three playable races? What sort of units, unique abilities, and focuses can we expect from them?

The three races are very different. You can look forward to trying the two alien races sometime later this spring when we have more of the art ready.

The Humans are, well, us in many years. They've discovered teleportation from studying some ruins in the Remnant System, and have gotten pretty handy with using teleporters. However, they haven't yet discovered time travel at the start of what will become our first single-player campaign, and so you learn that along with them. They have a fairly strong offence, and have the largest number of types of units and buildings. Although a few of their buildings can move, their bases are largely stationary. The humans have builder-type units that throw down "seeds," which quickly self-construct into buildings via a combination of teleportation and nanotechnology.

The Vecgir are an alien race that are somewhat humanoid but bigger. They are the masters of teleportation. Although many of their units generally move slowly, they can travel long distances quickly via self-teleportation. The Vecgir are powerful for surprise attacks and quick retreats, but can also be trapped easily. Most of their buildings are constructed via proximity in a hexagonal pattern; a building can lay out the foundation for a neighbouring building, and then the building is constructed on top. Their foundations have built-in defences, and their teleporters have automatic repel that can effectively slow down a small attack (but can be easily overwhelmed by a many opponents).

The Grekim are a squid-like race. They are masters of time travel and closely integrated with their technology. They do not have chronoporters; rather, their top-level units can chronoport on their own. They also have the chronobomb. The Grekim do not have the ability of teleportation, but all of their buildings are mobile. Buildings are created by a Grekim unit morphing into one, and in some cases this process is reversible. They also have a different kind of hierarchy and a rather unique unit production method, both of which we will be unveiling at a later date.

Comment