One thing that I didn’t bother mentioning in the original visual updates post is that the economy structures emit particles of various colors, which show their tech level at a glance.

This was already done previously, but in a much more boring way (visually). As you can see here, it is a very nice representation and combination of the colors. It’s worth noting that much care has been taking to make it so that the colors are not easily confused. It is still possible that the colors could be a little bit confusing at first, however in testing, any confusion (if there was any to begin with) was cleared up quite rapidly.

The post Addendum to Visual Updates: Tech Levels appeared first on Evolution RTS.

With the latest release, there were some pretty significant visual updates (and audio). Additionally a couple of new units have been added. Here are some before and after shots of some of the models.

Overseer Before

Overseer After

Metal Extractor Before

Metal Extractor After

Immolator Before

Immolator After

Hover Factory Before

Hover Factory After

As you can see, the models now have full normal maps and have added reflectivity. Up close it looks nice, but when you are more zoomed out the effect is very apparent and makes all of the units look much nicer in general.

New Units!

Technically there is only one new unit. The other just got a new model. The newest addition to the game is the Aegis Anti-Air Defense System. Essentially it’s a long range ground to air laser battery. At its maximum range, it is not terribly accurate, but it gets more accurate the closer a target gets. This is due to the way that the laser itself works. It’s a bit hard to explain… It’s more of a visual thing that you will be able to immediately notice in-game. Without further ado, here it is!

And last, be definitely not least, is the new model for the Protector Anti-Nuke Laser Defense System. Instead of just a boring image of the model, I decided to go with an action shot…

There you have it! Go in-game and check this stuff out! As far as visual updates go, it’s a hell of an upgrade, but it needs to be seen in action to convey the full effect.

The post The most boring article about Visual Updates you’ll ever read appeared first on Evolution RTS.

Over the past couple of months, some pretty massive updates to the UI have come about. I’m going to try to detail it all here. Firstly, the Build and orders menu UI has been moved over to ChiliUI. Now, for players in general, this isn’t a particularly big deal. It won’t change the way that you interact with the UI elements in any way really. However, it’s important to note that because it is ChiliUI, it is more flexible, and that’s the big news here.

From the image above, you can immediately see that the orders menu takes up the entire left side panel. This is because typically the orders menu is incredibly cramped. In a lot of games they will be little squares with randomly sized text or icons on them. In general, it’s a pretty unsightly UI.

Now that the Orders UI has plenty of room to be spaced out, we can now make the buttons more descriptive, which is a pretty big deal. It means that finding buttons on the panel is not difficult, and it is far less confusing for newbies.

Another huge change is the build menu. There are multiple configurations, however, the default configuration is a scrollable list of large pictures, making it easy to see what the units are and what they look like. With other important information displayed on top of the pictures, which we will cover a bit later.

There are 5 configurations for the build menu:

1. Horizontal
2. Compact Horizontal
3. Traditional
4. Right Side
5. Right Side Compact

Horizontal is what you see in the opening screenshot, but I will post it again for ease:

Horizontal

Compact Horizontal

Traditional

Right Side

Right Side Compact

These UI elements (like all the others) can be repositioned wherever you like in tweak mode (ctrl+f11). This should prove to be a more useful layout that caters to almost everyone.

Hotkeys and Buildpic Information

As you can see here, there is now quite a lot of information on the buildpics. At the top, in white, you have the hotkeys for the unit listed. Then you have the Tech Level Requirement (if applicable), after that you have Supply (if applicable), Energy, and Metal cost, all listed plainly and easy to see right in the UI.

Not shown here is the fact that it is possible to create your own hotkey configuration (ask in discord how to do this), and the fact that there are a few more UI elements that help out with hotkey usage.

And of course, all of the information written on the buildpics is toggleable via the options in the settings menu

Credits

Big thanks go out to Adriano Lima for creating the Order/Build Menu UI elements, and doing it so well as to allow for so many configurations. This allowed me to create all of the above configurations with very little effort.

Stowtemid (Commonplayer) for creating the new hotkey system, and setting up the display of information on the buildpics themselves.

And there you have it! This should make the ingame experience even better. Please feel free to leave feedback/suggestions in discord!

The post The evolution of UI Improvements, Hotkey updates that not many people know about appeared first on Evolution RTS.

This release of Evolution RTS brings forward over two months of development advances. Included in this release are:

• Visual Updates
• UI Improvements
• AI Revamp
• Hotkeys Revamp
• New Models and Sounds

I will be covering each of these in subsequent posts, as many of them deserve their own talking points.Until then, fire it up, check it out! It’s new and better experience! Massive thanks to Damgam, Stowtemid (Commonplayer), Sprunk, Maddox and Adriano Lima for all of their time, effort and/or help into making this release possible!

The post Version 12 release party! appeared first on Evolution RTS.

The Enigma TNG is back!!! But it gets even better! We recently got permission from the AMAZING Dreamstate Logic to use his music in Evolution RTS! If you haven’t heard either of these guys, let me just say that they are INCREDIBLE. That is what your mother never told you, because she wasn’t cool enough to find them on her own.

Seriously though, PLEASE give these guys some love. They are incredible artists and deserve all the recognition and love they can get, and if you’re like me, buy everything they have put out because, frankly, they deserve it. I have paid for Google Play Music for years, so it’s been forever since I actually bought an album. That changed the moment I found The Enigma TNG, and when Damgam introduced me to Dreamstate Logic I fell in love immediately.

Here are links to check these guys out, Please do! I cannot explain how awesome their stuff is!

The Enigma TNG

https://www.youtube.com/theenigmatng

https://theenigmatng.bandcamp.com

https://www.facebook.com/TheEnigmaTNG/

https://twitter.com/theenigmatng1?lang=en

Dreamstate Logic

http://www.dreamstatelogic.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/dreamstatelogic

https://plus.google.com/+dreamstatelogic

https://www.facebook.com/dreamstatelogic/

That’s all their info! Check out their music ingame, it’s an awesome experience!

The post Messing with music: What your mother never told you… appeared first on Evolution RTS.

Aircraft have been revamped, renamed, and are now Drone Platforms. Aircraft (Drones) in the Spring Engine are a difficult beast. They are unpredictable, impossible to really control. In a lot of ways, it’s almost as if aircraft in the spring engine follow form over function. By that I mean that they tend to look really good if you set them up properly, but at the same time, their dps tends to be all over the place due to unpredictable flight behavior, sometimes they will leave the map and become unresponsive, etc.

In the past, to deal with this, I have used the only aircraft type that is predictable, gunships. But gunships have their own sets of issues. Range in spring is calculated in 3d, which is extremely problematic when you factor in an aircraft that might be a value of 100 or more off of the ground. Not only does this affect the range of the aircraft, but also the range at which they can be attacked by ground units. If you have dedicated anti-air, then this isn’t an issue, but in Evolution RTS I prefer an “everything can attack everything” approach. In my opinion it makes for a much more diverse matchup and more interesting gameplay. As a result, I can’t just bandaid the problem by making a dedicated anti-air turret that does not attack ground with a bajillion miles of range like other games.

Remember I said that range in Spring is calculated in 3d and you’re screwed otherwise? There is ONE weapontype that defies this convention, beamlasers. Beamlasers can have virtually infinite vertical range. So the solution that I have come up with has quite a few facets, but here are the highlights:

• Super limited range, forcing the aircraft to be almost right above the target and forcing it to get closer in order to fire at it
• Exponentially increased hp so that even though your aircraft have to get well within firing range, they can take a beating
• Speed and strafing which adds a little bit of dodging and reduces the need to micromanage them in a way that is untenable
• Low cost, high supply requirements. This makes them fairly trivial to obtain, but makes it so that getting a proper flock of them takes time and money, eliminating the ability to harass with a few of them with no counter.

Admittedly, this is kind of a weird way to deal with things, but as weird as it is, it works. Moreover, everyone likes the way they operate, so… bonus!

The post Drones on a low budget  – 4 Strategies to make it work appeared first on Evolution RTS.

If I had the smallest sum of money every time that I thought that I had defensive turrets dialed in, I would be an exceedingly rich man. However, past failures of balance help shape the balance of tomorrow, or something like that. But while we’re on the subject of pointless lists…

1. Balancing the damn things

Everyone gets a different vision in their minds about how defenses should look and operate. We conjure up grand visions of the lone defensive turret fending off hordes of enemies and looking heroic in the process. Then reality sets in and you realize that these things need to be much more utilitarian than heroic.

2. Accepting that even though they are balanced, they might not be terribly useful

This is an exceedingly common issue. To make a defensive turret useful is to make it unbalanced. So then you’re left with the realization that even though they are balanced, why would anyone want to spend any resources on building something that isn’t particularly useful?

3. The backlash from players who innocently build your useless turrets

But… They’re balanced. Amirite?

4. Realizing that even though you can come up with some niche reasons why your defensive turrets are useful, in the grand scheme of things, they suck.

And even moreso than this… when a particularly gifted player finds a way to exploit your useless turrets in a way that makes them overpowered in ways you never imagined.

5. Coming up with a brand new rebalancing scheme that doesn’t suck.

Finally, you admit defeat. Your Defensive turrets are teh sux0rz and you need to come up with something that pleases everyone, otherwise your head is in jeopardy of landing on some sort of digital pike.

So… What did you come up with?

Defensive turrets now have much shorter range and lowered hp, but exponentially increased lethality. The range is carefully controlled to be in between the average ranges of raiders and main battle tanks. This makes them very good vs raiders, but causes their usefulness to decline the more sufficiently advanced the opponent. So far, in testing this has proved to be an overwhelmingly positive approach to turret balance.

The post The top 5 most annoying things about Defensive Turrets appeared first on Evolution RTS.

Evolution RTS has seen a little bit of an effects overhaul recently with regards to base structures. In this screenshot I tried to cram all of them in one shot, but I’m missing a few. Regardless, the effects are actually color coded to show the structure’s tier level. Orange is Tech 0; Orange and blue is Tech 1; Orange, blue, and purple is Tech 2; Orange, blue, purple, and green is Tech 3.

Unfortunately, these aren’t quite perfect yet. If you aren’t used to seeing them in motion, it can be a little hard to tell what eir they are from a quick glance sometimes, so as always, it’s a work in progress. It does look pretty though.

The post The Future is all about flashy Effects appeared first on Evolution RTS.

Energy usage has changed, a lot. No longer will your units require energy to fire. This change means that you will no longer have to worry about your army being completely unable to fire if your energy economy tanks. The energy to fire mechanism was unique and was a neat little mechanic, but the problem is that it was always simply to opaque to end users, especially newbies.

The new system implements energy costs for all structures and units except Economy structures and Builders. This means that no matter how bad your energy income is, as long as you have metal, you will always be able to grow your economy. I think that this is a nice way to mitigate the issue of being crippled when your economy is suffering. In this way, the only thing that will suffer is your ability to evolve units/structures, build attacking units/structures. Additionally it is worth noting that evolved metal extractors now have an energy upkeep.

This change has proved to be overwhelmingly positive for gameplay. The energy usage is a graduated cost from Tech 0 being nearly nothing to Tech 3 being quite a lot. This also means that you are not punished for staying on a lower tier for longer which leads to much more varied gameplay. As the game goes on, it means that you will have ever increasing needs for energy. Because higher tier units require exponentially more, you will have to keep expanding your production to keep up with demand.

There are now 3 different units for energy generation.

• Fission Generator
• Fusion Generator
• Cold Fusion Generator

No energy generator is available at Tech 0, this means that in order to begin evolves and increase your army power, you will need to get a tech facility fairly quickly, but another change is that you will get 10 base energy income from the very beginning which is plenty for Tech0 and allows you to start evolving at Tech 1 with very few delays.

The post The uncensored cheat sheet to Energy Usage! appeared first on Evolution RTS.

Holy crap. Clickbait title indeed! So this is what happens when you amusedly search google for a clickbait title generator and plug in your own stuff (No, evo is not moving away from github… we aren’t insane lol).

Before I get into anything though, I want to mention that I’m trying out a new format for newsposts. I HATE writing news stuff with a passion. So what I’m going to try now is “micro news”, as in, I’m going to pick narrow subjects that are important, write a paragraph or whatever I need to to explain it, and call it a day. Perhaps if I do news this way, I can be persuaded to write news stuff more often.

DAI has arrived!

Thanks to Damgam, DAI has evolved into a truly awesome AI. He’s been working on it for some time, but it really launched forward when he added it to Balanced Annihilation. As a result, he ended up getting the support of Doo, who has been adding all kinds of functionality which has been getting backported into Evolution RTS.

One of the more notable changes is the fact that DAI units will now micro when they are damaged, which increases the difficulty of beating DAI exponentially. Additionally, the handicap slider is ever more useful because of these additions.

The post Bye bye, GitHub. Hello, new DAI! appeared first on Evolution RTS.