Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?

To be fair, considering their history with FAF, this thread should have either never existed or have long been locked.

Let's not have any accidental advertisements ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶.

Why is everyone ignoring the 2nd part of my opening post that they have access to their source code?

FAF: "Sorry, can't change that, we tried."
Sanctuary: "Let me scratch my butt and see what I can do."

@ftxcommando said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

I actively hope they fail

Could not expect anything else from you.

There's not a single thing I would like to see in FAF that involves changing the source code, except maybe fixing the sound bug. An entire new game with a better campaign, cutscenes, coop, all new units and factions, and everything could be made without the engine source code. The real important factor for me is that Sanctuary can actually make money, which means they could have regular tournaments and updates.

I don't think Sanctuary is a scam or anything. Just these type of things have a tendency to suck. PA had millions of dollars and an experienced team, but I couldn't play it more than a couple hours and then never touched it again. All the other similar games are even worse. I don't think it matters if they are paid employees or free volunteers, or if they use Unity or whatever. Creating the game today is significantly less difficult than it was in the early 2000's. You can find countless resources about everything you need to know and what the other games have done.

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

There's not a single thing I would like to see in FAF that involves changing the source code

Really? There are loads of things (balance and taste dependent) which could potentially be better:

• improved pathing instead of all this bumping into each other
• sub depth not fixed
• radar and sonar shadows (no more hiding radar behind a cliff)
• no free intel from mex/factory upgrades
• possibly some different intel models such as deployed drones with limited lifespan
• modular units without the clunky upgrade system (e.g. in game unit designer)
• better damage models
• better unit AI (e.g. auto dodging, raid mode): for those of us who don't think the game is about unit micro

• I don't find pathfinding to be as bad as everyone claims and it is entirely manageable by playing correctly. Why should massive amounts of units driving around in an active warzone flow perfectly around one another? It looks and feels unnatural.
• Fixing submarine depth would be okay, but who cares.
• Radar and sonar shadows would be annoying and make the game harder to play than it already is. Same for removing intel from upgrades. FAF is clearly too hard for most people to play already and there's too little scouting and awareness in 100% of games already, so intel gathering should not be more difficult.
• Idk what deployed drone intel means, I'm sure it would be trivial to create drones with a limited lifespan in FAF.
• FAF unit upgrading system is good enough. You don't want to have many upgradable units or upgrade choices as it makes the game unclear. Having multiple ACU's and multiple experimentals on each tech level, that you customize and lock-in before the game starts would be cool though. Adding a small deck building aspect to the game and increasing variety. It's probably theoretically possible on FAF.
• Damage models or armor or whatever would also have to be used very sparingly. When you are dealing with hundreds of units at a time they need to behave consistently, doing consistent damage and having consistent HP.
• Automatic unit micro is certainly possible in FAF, but is banned (rightly so).

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

A had millions of dollars and an experienced team, but I couldn't play it more than a couple hours and then never touched it again. All the other similar games are even worse. I don't think it matters if they are paid employees or free volunteers, or if they use Unity or whatever. Creating the game today is significantly less difficult than it was in the early 2000's.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

Planetary Annihilation raised $2,229,344. That is a truly shoestring budget to make a 3D RTS game from scratch. The budget for the original Supreme Commander was many times this, it was a full AAA backed by a major publisher. Now to be fair a lot of the budget for Supcom went to things like a campaign, story, pre-rendered cutscenes, voice acting etc. but PA was doing something very ambitious on a pretty tight budget. Especially since Uber Entertainment hadn't ever made an RTS game before, they had only made Monday Night Combat iirc. On top of that they were making their own game engine from scratch, and it had to handle multiple spherical planets as well as scripting to destroy them via megaweapons. The volume of units was also orders of magnitude higher than Supcom, which meant that to save performance each unit had a very quick time to kill so it could be removed from the game more quickly to make room for more. There also was only one faction at launch (there is another with the Legion mod but that came out far later).

The fact that Sanctuary is being made on a popular and well tested engine and the mechanical gimmicks are less ambitious makes it a pretty different situation imo. People on the dev team also came from the Nomads FAF mod which means they have experience making RTS games.

Several of the people working on PA literally worked at GPG making supcom, they had plenty of experience. The main problem is that the spherical map idea is total garbage and should have been thrown out after initial prototyping. It's just not fun or playable.

A good campaign, story, and all that crap is pretty essential for an RTS game. As everyone has been discussing lately, most of the players are casual. These things have to be there and they have to give people a proper idea of how to play the game and make it simple to transition to multiplayer in order to maintain a playerbase.

I haven't played the Nomad's campaign, or any of the coop missions, but I'm pretty sure they still aren't teaching people how to play properly. People could have made a good campaign and tutorials for FAF, but they didn't. The same people are making the campaign for Sanctuary, so I have to expect it will be equally lacking.

I'm also concerned that early access, without the campaign and tutorials and such in place, could be disastrous. People used to understand the importance of first impressions, but now everyone just launches unfinished games. If the new player experience isn't exceptional from the start then it's likely many potential players will try the game early, be unimpressed, and never come back. I know I never gave BAR or PA or anything any more chances after I tried them the first time and was unimpressed.

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

They've never mentioned anything in their blogs or anywhere else, as far as I know, about improving the steep learning curve and making it easier for new players to transition from single player to online play. Which are the actual design problems needing to be tackled. They just talk about adding even more mechanics, like weather and terrain destruction, to a game that was already too unapproachable from the start. Their focus seems to be on technical features rather than game design.

It's possible that it will still be good enough since there's no real competition for this type of game. Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance were both horribly balanced, barely ran on peoples computers, and lacking all the usability features FAF has added since, yet they still did pretty well and we're still playing them.

Everything they have shown so far does just looks like the FAF map editor with some stuff tacked on still though.

What in Halo’s singleplayer taught you the skills necessary for pvp? The harder you make the sp experience in Halo you actively learn poor skills for translating to mp. Most of the skill overlap between the two is just learning guns and weapons.

People just need to accept they’re two different environments that have different things that make them fun.

@ftxcommando the issue is a SP campaign is stationary while multiplayer meta is dynamic. Obviously SP could teach certain concepts that are core fundamentals but sometimes devs don’t know how multiplayer will develop (like in a new game).

Not very comparable since FPS games are much simpler mechanics wise, and I haven't played Halo. Regardless, in all these games they spend time teaching you how all the mechanics work. It's been a long time since I played FA singleplayer, but when I did I certainly didn't come out of the experience understanding what reclaim was, what stalling mass/e really does, what buildpower is, how the flux economy even works, and I didn't even know you could upgrade mexes. There's never even anytime where your opponent is playing with the same rules as you. They don't use reclaim and mexes to make their units, they just spawn out of nothing, so you never even properly interact with the mechanics of the game. Not understanding what;s going on is not core to the singleplayer experience, it hinders it. You have more fun when learning new things and understanding what's going on.

It is clear to me that you could create a campaign where you start out by learning how to collect mass, through mass extractors, and converting it into tanks. Shown that there's a simple ratio of factories to pgens or mexes to pgens. Once you are competent at that you get sent out to the field where you are instructed to secure the mass deposits before the enemy, so that you can produce more units and defeat them. You can introduce reclaim in a similar way. You can be instructed to raid their engineers before they build the mexes and get the reclaim. You can be instructed to drop areas with transports to get them faster. You can encounter an enemy that has a T2 factory and be instructed that once your opponent has T2 tech you should probably get it too.

You can do all of these things while still having a storyline, and still having scripted events and units spawning out of nowhere as well. It is how every decent game operates these days. You get a trickle of mechanics over time and instructions how to use them, mixed in with scripted events where using those mechanics is necessary, and mixed in with a storyline, and mixed in with scripted events and whatever. It's literally what game design is.

That stuff isn't fun though. People get into the game cuz of the big cool stuff, not learning how to make it in sub 15 minutes.

Your campaign would have a lower attrition rate for people getting into pvp while drastically lowering the amount of people that care to even get into the game.

I strongly doubt they will produce something at the level of sup-com. I love how ambitious they are but I don't think they can outdo Gas powered games with hundreds of ppl with actual game design experience.

they also send mixed messages. sometimes I hear it's an endi game... then they announce features that will be groundbreaking . they might be better than supcom in some aspects but they wont be better overall

If people are buying the bigbrain flux economy strategy game I'm sure they can make it through a few introductory missions explaining how the mechanics work. Learning and mastering things is what fun is. If you make an achievement to make 50 tanks in 5 minutes people will sit around as long as it takes trying to get the achievement, gamers are smoothbrain achievment hunters. And if they don't want to strategize and learn shit then why are they buying the game? If you actually know how to manage the economy you get to the big, fun units much faster. I remember leaving the game running for hours building a mavor on T1 mexes because I didn't know how to do anything.

If you really want to make a game for big explosion fans you can have a secondary mode that puts you into the action in a more tactical, rather than strategic way. And you can have the sandbox modes and whatever. If these people are not interested in learning mechanics, then they are ultimately just in the wrong place. They should go play some simpler game or watch a Michael Bay movie. They are not my intended audience and if they are just going to leave after the singleplayer experience they do not contribute to keeping the game and community alive.

I didn't buy the game because of the flux economy nor was that even remotely a selling point for me in 2008. I bought the game because it had a sick 6 legged robot attacking a giant base and advertised itself as a real strategic game where you managed a whole war not just a small tactical battle.

None of the marketing for the game emphasized the economy because that doesn't sell anything. Even paradox games don't advertise the spreadsheet management they are.

anyone thinking Sanctuary is ever gonna top SCFA is smoking straight crack and needs to be put in an insane asylum.
FAF is making strides with a 2008 game in performance thats not been seen anywhere else but LOUD & now FAF due to the fact that we have good cooperation now unlike before where sprouto and jip share their experience and it improves both Communities and Overhauls.

FAF is going to have a fast non laggy game and tbh it already does, Jip is just adding more and more capability now.
So now i wonder who wants to play Sanctuary when it looks like Supcom 2 wannabe with IMHO Disgusting Pathfinding that doesnt look natural at all.

RE to Cyborg
FAF unit upgrading system is good enough. You don't want to have many upgradable units or upgrade choices as it makes the game unclear. Having multiple ACU's and multiple experimentals on each tech level, that you customize and lock-in before the game starts would be cool though. Adding a small deck building aspect to the game and increasing variety. It's probably theoretically possible on FAF.
Damage models or armor or whatever would also have to be used very sparingly. When you are dealing with hundreds of units at a time they need to behave consistently, doing consistent damage and having consistent HP.

1. Well I mean refer to Heroes of Alliance, Cyborg, It does an armor system in a MOD and does it well not to include a bunch of other systems that diversify the game even more.
2. Upgrade system is fully capable of being applied to units just like factories and such. It's not hard, same with enhancements the game could be a lot more diverse if Balance Team wanted to go absolute wild and get spicy like we did in LOUD.

If you want the game to be more interesting in terms of balance and gameplay. It's literally limitless.
So idk what you are talking when you say bad upgrade system and such.

Everybody should instantly disregard anyone who thinks they have solved the secret issue that makes casual gamers mostly uninterested in highly complicated real time strategy games. The truth is the average gamer is frankly not smart or patient enough to appreciate the genre. It’s not about tutorials or accessible mechanics.

I'd also like to know who found the vanilla campaigns to be extremely fun and exciting. You aren't getting any big fancy units until late in the campaign, and most of the missions are just having you do some arbitrary tasks like transporting civilian trucks or killing an arty base with little or no guidance. You sit around for hours inefficiently building up some units and defending against waves of scripted gunships. I'd think a campaign where you are actually taught to contest resources and have back and forth interactions would be more interesting rather than less.

@zeldafanboy said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

The truth is the average gamer is frankly not smart or patient enough to appreciate the genre. It’s not about tutorials or accessible mechanics.

The people on FAF aren't smarter or more patient than the average person, as much as you might like to think we are. Writing off the problem as unsolvable and blaming it on everyone else being stupid isn't a recipe for success and progress in the genre. Everyone is capable of learning to play and learning to appreciate the genre if given the proper opportunity and resources.

Yeah I'm inclined to agree this thread has run its course