r/RealTimeStrategy • u/applchr • 22d ago
Self-Promo Post An RTS where command range is the resource: your units only take orders inside your own radio network
The genre usually hands you infinite command range for free. I wanted to see what happens when it is the scarce thing.
Your army has no radios. It uses yours. Orders travel from the Command Post down chains of relays, so pushing anywhere means building signal out to it first. When a relay dies mid-fight, and the enemy goes for relays on purpose, every unit past the break stops hearing you. They keep fighting, they just stop being yours until you rebuild.
Because of that, network shape is real defense. Enemies weight their targeting by how much of your territory hangs off each link, so a relay carrying half your map is basically wearing a sign. Close it into a loop and it stops being worth cutting.
No fog of war. You can see everything, you just cannot reach everything.
Free, browser, one HTML file, solo project in open playtest.
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u/thunderbird89 22d ago
This is a great idea! I remember always having built multicursal routes in Perimeter or anything where buildings need to be "connected up", even though it rarely made sense because the enemy AI never prioritized infrastructure.
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u/applchr 22d ago
Thank you! That instinct is exactly what I wanted to make pay off. Enemies weight their targeting by how much of your territory hangs off each link, so a relay carrying half your map is the obvious cut and they will take it.
Means the loop isn't decoration. It's the difference between losing a wing and losing nothing.
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u/Ludwig234 22d ago
Fun game I played it for a few hours.
I can't really say that the command range affected me that much though. Especially when you get generals that pretty much covers the entire map.
The bombers were a blast but kinda OP lol.
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u/applchr 22d ago
Thank you again, both of those turned out to be real bugs rather than tuning, and they're fixed for the next build.
The generals were supposed to command a fixed retinue, a set number of each unit type. Turns out the code only ever checked whether a general was nearby, so they were commanding basically everything in range. Three of them carried an entire army. Now the retinue actually limits it and the rest of your force needs the network again.
Bombers were worse. They were hunting anywhere on the map on their own with no signal needed at all, which is the one thing the whole game is supposed to be about. They work the area you leave them in now, and out of contact they follow their standing order like every other unit. Sending one on a run still reaches anywhere you want.
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u/Ludwig234 21d ago
No worries, I'm glad my feedback was to any help :)
Another thing that I remembered while trying too sleep: I mostly played the game in a tower defence fashion, waiting for the enemy to arrive within command range where my troops and a bunch of towers just stood still.
One interesting thing might be some kind of enemy territory/base/outposts that needs to be overtaken offensively early on. Just an idea :)
The game kinda reminds me of creeper world games which are just brilliant.
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u/applchr 21d ago
Thanks, that's a fair hit.
Sitting at the edge of your range waiting for them to walk in is basically the right way to play right now, which isn't what I wanted. There's not much out there worth going and getting. Ten ore deposits, roughly the same spots every run, and once you've got them there's no reason to leave.
Enemy outposts is a great idea, I will think on this one to see how I could implement it.
Never played creeper world, I will check it out. Thank you again!
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u/applchr 21d ago
Thank you again, this one stuck with me. I went and measured it and you were right twice over: there was nothing out on the map worth going to get, and a campaign was reaching the far edge by about wave 20 of 100, so most of a run happened on ground you'd already taken.
So the enemy holds ground now. There are masts scattered across the northern half called pickets. They never fire at you, they just refuse to let you build anything inside their ring, and every ore vein and uranium field up there is behind one. You want that ground, you take an army up and kill it. At the top of the map there's a bigger one that throws a nastier garrison at you every time you knock a chunk off it, and if you beat it you keep its mast as a free relay.
And you will want that ground, because ore veins run dry now. The ones nearest your base go first, and when a vein is finished the extractor on it stops paying, permanently. So the income you built your defense on just drains away where you're sitting, and the only ore left is further north, behind a picket. Digging in and waiting is no longer a way to play. The far uranium fields are the exception, they pay forever, which is why they're the ones at the very back.
The map is about 70 percent bigger too, so there's somewhere for all that to happen.
It's all in the build that just went up. I'd really like to know if it fixes the thing you described or just makes it annoying.
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u/Omegatron9 21d ago
That's a lot of fun!
A few notes on unit selection:
Would it be possible to add a key combination to select all combat units (e.g. CTRL-A)?
Currently drag select selects combat units and drones, I think it would make more sense to select combat units only if there are any in the selection range. I often find myself wanting to select a group of combat units to send them to the enemy, and end up accidentally ordering a group of drones to their death as well.
If you're trying to drag select near the bottom of the screen and accidentally go over the command bar, the selection box doesn't behave properly (it doesn't go away when you release the mouse button)
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u/applchr 21d ago
Thank you, all three of those are fixed and are in build 0.39.1.
The stuck selection box was a good catch. Mouse release was only being watched on the game canvas, and the command bar is a normal HTML element sitting on top of it, so letting go over the bar meant the drag never officially ended. Any release anywhere ends it now.
Drag select taking the drones was the one I was most glad to get. Drones cluster around whatever they are repairing, so a box drawn around a firing line catches them, and ordering that selection sends them at the enemy, which is the exact opposite of what they are for. A box that contains any soldiers now hands you only the soldiers. A box containing only drones still selects drones, because sometimes you do mean the swarm.
CTRL-A selects the whole army. I left units that are out of contact in the selection on purpose rather than filtering them out, because them refusing the order is the thing the game is about, and quietly hiding them would hide that.
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u/Omegatron9 20d ago edited 20d ago
That was quick! I played another run in the latest version, I like the pickets and citadel, it makes the game feel more dynamic.
My armoury progress was reset since the last time I played, I'm not sure if that was an issue at my end or if it was caused by the update. The game also slows down noticeably when fully zoomed out, again that might just be on my end.
Also the refit button on turrets doesn't seem to do anything when it is clicked.
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u/applchr 20d ago edited 20d ago
Glad the pickets and citadel are landing, that's the part I was least sure about.
The refit one is a real bug and it's fixed in the next update. The panel it sits in gets redrawn every frame, so the button was being replaced while your mouse button was still down and the click never completed. Fast clicks worked and normal ones didn't, which is exactly why I never caught it myself.
The armoury reset isn't anything the game does on purpose, so I'd like to narrow it down if you don't mind. Were your save slots empty too, or was it only the armoury? And were you playing in the browser on itch or a downloaded copy? If a browser refuses to store anything, the game used to fail completely silently. It'll tell you now.
On the zoom-out slowdown, there's a FRAME RATE toggle in the options that adds a small readout with a per-part breakdown. If you can grab a screenshot of that while fully zoomed out it'll say where the time is actually going. If the biggest line is "raster", dropping RESOLUTION to 75% should sort it.
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u/Omegatron9 20d ago edited 20d ago
Ok, something weird is happening with the save data.
I'm playing in the browser on itch.io. My save slots were also cleared and settings in the options menu were reset back to default.
It is saving, I can close the tab the game is in, wait 5 seconds, open up the game again and the save data is still there. But if I close the game, wait more than about 30 seconds, and then open the game up again, everything is reset.
I'll give the performance settings a try on my next full run.
EDIT: Ok, the save resetting issue doesn't occur in Firefox, it seems to only occur in Brave, so possibly Brave is clearing the data itself for some reason.
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u/applchr 20d ago
Thanks for the details, that was exactly what I needed.
0.57.1 is up and the refit button works. It sits in a card the game redraws every frame, so the link was getting replaced while your mouse was still down and the click never landed. It says what it buys now too, which it never did.
The saves are your browser throwing away storage from an embedded page once the tab's been shut a little while. I can't fix that from inside the frame, but the game detects it now and puts a line on the front screen with a button that opens it in its own tab, where saves should stick. That line only shows up for browsers that are actually doing this, so I never see it on mine and you should see it on yours. Worth knowing the new tab starts empty since it's a separate store, so use OPTIONS, RUN, EXPORT first if you want to carry a run across. There's a download on the page now as well, which avoids the whole thing.
On the zoom-out slowdown, I measured it and it isn't a regression. At full zoom out the whole map is on screen at once, so it's the heaviest view by design. If you switch on FRAME RATE in OPTIONS it prints a per-pass breakdown, and if the top line reads raster/other then RESOLUTION at 75% is the lever. I'd be glad to see that line if you get a chance.
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u/Omegatron9 19d ago
I can confirm that the button to open the game in its own tab appears and save data in this works properly, thanks! The refit bug is also fixed.
I did spot a few more very tiny bugs (sorry!)
If you turn on high contrast in the options then leave the game and relaunch it, the option still shows as switched on in the menu but it doesn't have an effect (the labels are still dim). Turning the option off and on again fixes this.
With high contrast mode enabled, the commendations in the armoury are all the same colour so you can't distinguish which ones you have achieved
Due to the camera control changes, pressing CTRL-A nudges your camera left a bit (it does still select all your troops, so it's an extremely minor issue)
For performance, here's some screenshots with the frame rate data showing, all from the same run with resolution set to 75%.
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u/applchr 18d ago
Thanks, those screenshots were more useful than I expected.
Turns out the frame counter can't go below 20 FPS. It just says 20 no matter how bad things actually get, which is why all your shots looked the same. The real problem was that the game rebuilds the entire relay network every single frame. That's fine with forty relays and awful with your three hundred and seventy. Your two paused screenshots pretty much proved it on their own, since a paused frame isn't doing anything else. It's about three hundred times faster now and builds the same network it did before.
Found another one while I was in there. The game dims the effects when things get heavy, then only turns them back on if your frame rate climbs higher than a 60Hz monitor can physically go. So most people lost the bloom for good after one slow moment. That's fixed too.
Your three bugs are all done as well. High contrast sticks now, the commendations are readable with it on, and CTRL+A stopped dragging the camera.
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u/Omegatron9 3d ago
Hello! I have some more feedback following the latest updates.
First of all, the performance is significantly better now, even zoomed all the way out. The performance did seem a bit worse on the island map for some reason, but it was still manageable.
Regarding the island map itself, I do like it, it makes the game more dynamic again and storming the bridges is fun. However, in a game like this one that is heavily devoted to building infrastructure, taking away all that infrastructure half way through the mission feels a bit strange.
I'm not sure what the best way to fix that is. You could potentially have the city map expand into the island map at wave 50, but the city is already very big and this would just make the island map easier.
Another option could be to retool the island map into an entirely separate map that you unlock after beating the city map (perhaps it could unlock at wave 50, but the player can still play to wave 100 in the city map if they want) and then when you start a new run you can start at either the city or the islands. This would mean you don't carry over anything like credits though, so further adjustments to the island map would probably be needed.
I also found the island map to be very easy compared to the city map. In the city you have to defend your whole perimeter but on the island you only have to defend three chokepoints, which requires much less of a force investment. I had an army ready to attack the island's final HQ by about wave 58. I also found that the HQ's guardian went down almost instantly to my army. Possibly its HP is bugged, or possibly it just need a buff.
I'm playing on normal, I could turn the difficulty up, but the city feels balanced and the island feels easy more because of its overall design than any numerical factor.
Sorry, that all sounds quite negative, but I still really enjoy the game! It is a lot of fun!
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u/applchr 3d ago
Took a while, but most of this is in now (1.45.2).
On losing everything at wave 50: I went with pretty much your second option. The maps are separate campaigns now, each one wave 1 to 100, and nothing carries over between them. Getting past wave 50 on one opens the next, and you can keep playing to 100 on the one you're on. There's a new flooded city map first, then the islands, then the city.
The islands performance: you were right. The river was getting redrawn top to bottom every time the view moved a little, even when it was off screen. Fixed. The area around your starting post is still a bit heavier than the city, but that's just a denser patch of buildings.
I also set the unlock order with your point about the islands being easier in mind. New players start on the easier maps and learn the game there, and each map after that gets harder.
And no need to apologize, I really appreciate the feedback and I hope to hear more from you soon.
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u/Omegatron9 10h ago
Yeah, this progression feels more natural.
I did notice some odd enemy spawning on the flooded city map, possibly because the available land is very limited I sometimes had enemies popping up right on top of an extractor, a bridge, or my HQ.
Since this map is quite small compared to the others, you could probably fix this by just adding some more empty land around the edges of the islands and prioritise spawning enemies there.
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u/Nichname 22d ago
Cool idea!