Skirmish, Star Wars Style By Chris Rubyor
Multiplayer Designer, Petrogylph
Hey, gamers! This is Chris Rubyor again, with part two of our look into the multiplayer modes in Star Wars: Empire at War. Last time, I covered two-player galactic conquest, but now for the mode you can get up to eight people involved with: skirmish!Skirmish was designed from scratch and incorporates a variety of new and traditional real-time strategy mechanics. Your very first skirmish multiplayer game is going to feel different than what you're used to. However, I can assure you that the new system is very easy to understand, and it usually takes just one game to become comfortable with the change.
We've come up with a design that focuses primarily on combat and unit tactics, but also allows the purchase of units and tech level during skirmish combat, something not found in galactic conquest or the single-player campaign. This new mode of play is fast-paced (similar to Command & Conquer or a Warcraft-style game), but reduces the amount of base micromanagement that you have to worry about.
Keep in mind that skirmish combat requires two separate designs to accommodate for planetary combat and space battles. Therefore, ground and space are essentially treated and balanced like separate game modes.
Our ground skirmish design called for preplaced building pads. This is important to understand, as there is no real base-building mechanic other than rebuilding a destroyed structure. These pads each fill a specific role and allow you to requisition units for battle. An example would be something like selecting a heavy factory and clicking on a heavy tank icon in the interface. Our unit-build system is still similar to a traditional real-time strategy game--we just use it in a different way.Unlike in traditional real-time strategy games, whereunits appear out of structures, in Empire at War we bring our units to battle through our reinforcement system. When units are requisitioned, they go into a reinforcement pool. At any time, you can access this pool of units and bring them into battle. There is one catch: Units must be brought into battle at reinforcement-point locations. Reinforcement points are vital in gaining ground on your opponent. Without them, it becomes very difficult to get units to strategic locations in good time.
We needed a way to unlock units, so we designed a simple tech-level system. Tech level is achieved through an upgrade tied to a command center. When a higher tech level has been reached, new units and upgrades are made available. If a command center is destroyed, the tech tree will collapse to tech level 1. That means all upgrades and units available from the higher tech levels are lost. You must tech back up. Upgrades work similarly. If the structure they are tied to is lost, the upgrade must be repurchased for it to come back into play.
Since the economy is controlled from a galactic level in the single-player campaign and the galactic conquest mode, we had to design a new tactical economy system for multiplayer. So we came up with neutral mining facility pads, which are scattered throughout the battlefield. When mining facility pads are captured, they generate necessary cash to fund your war effort--unless the enemy destroys them!
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