Best way to make game mechanics for an Armored Personnel Carrier?

[Verdun]

This is one of those things that sound very simple at first but turn into a bit of a headache once you think about it some more (at least that's where I'm at right now).

It's very basic to make a unit that can transport other units with basic WE edits.

My issue however is to implement it in a fun and dynamic way.

The first obvious issue with APCs is that in a standard melee game, you have no use for land transport. True, you could make all infantry units move reaaaaally slow, so players are forced to load them into vehicles just to get them to the action at all.
But frankly, that sounds more frustrating than fun, even if it is realistic. Players probably wouldn't want to play a game where they got to load units in and out of transports all the time just to make them faster.
Also, the AI is not gonna play along (not programmed for using land transports) unless you add some triggers.

You could sweeten the deal by combining it with orc burrow or hippogryh rider so an extra incentive for using the transport is to "fuse" units for extra damage and/or new abilities. You get that in Command and Conquer 3 with the GDI's APCs. But then the player has to waste time thinking about whether it's best to combine or split units in any given situation.

The most straightforward idea I have right now is to make the APC unit a summoner - the APC is your main combat unit, that's your motivation for using it, and whenever you get into a fight it summons infantry to fight alongside it. Not bad, the trouble is that it's unrealistic for one APC to spawn endless infantry. So maybe limit the maximum of summoned infantry, but then again, since it IS supposed to be a transport, you'll want to just "load" the summoned unit when not in use. I guess I can figure this out with extra abilities and triggers, but I'll hsve to run some tests to see if I can make this into a system that's

• easy to use/ AI-friendly
• fun to use, rather than just making the game more complicated
• "realistic" in regards to what a land transport is

Any thoughts?

 

[Pyrogasm]

Locust Swarm is kinda what you want. Can tweak the units it spawns to see if you find something that works. Phoenix fire has a similar idea for automatically hitting everything nearby which you can combine with locusted units.

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Squad System v0.9.8 and other similar resources exist here; perhaps you can spawn a set number of troops and control them that way. Some pet/companion stuff might be able to be kludged together from resources.

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Use Exhume Corpses as a passive ability with a cooldown to control the rate at which troops are spawned, up to a limit. If you want to be lazy you could use the level of the ability as the number of available troop spawns: each time you spawn a troop reduce the level by 1 and only spawn if level > 1. Could also maybe use an integer field in the ability to store its current charge number with the field natives. The level method has a cool side-effect of allowing the deployment rate to vary with reserve number: "get the first 3 out really fast and then the next 3 take much longer" for example.

Have a unit-takes-damage trigger (not unit attacked) for the troops to determine when they are 'in combat'. Check for incoming damage, outgoing damage, and orders issued targeting hostiles (all orders seems abusable but maybe that's the way). Save a timestamp of when this last occurred for each troop (or maybe for each APC and all troops use APC's combat state?).

On a medium-frequency periodic timer, loop over all troops and check if they are too far away from their source APC, and also if the troops have been out of combat for X seconds or more bu reading the most recent timestamp; if so, remove them and increase ability level for APC.

What happens when troops die is yet to be determined. You could set the 'baseline' level of the ability at N (the number of troops max) so then you can go up to +N and -N in either direction from that 'normal level' and have a wider array of restock times to account for troop death.

 

[UndeadImmortal]

The first obvious issue with APCs is that in a standard melee game, you have no use for land transport. True, you could make all infantry units move reaaaaally slow, so players are forced to load them into vehicles just to get them to the action at all.
But frankly, that sounds more frustrating than fun, even if it is realistic. Players probably wouldn't want to play a game where they got to load units in and out of transports all the time just to make them faster.

I think the issue with this is usually the jankiness effect of loading and unloading units for the transports. You can imagine this in WC3, you first have to load by issuing a move command from the transport or the unit, then unload them one by one, then lastly, ordering them one last time to attack enemies. Combine this with the fact that you can only control 12 units at a time, it becomes increasingly tedious and frustrating to do.

What if you improve upon this instead? You can create an ability similar to Orc Burrow or Call to Arms where it loads nearby infantry without targeting them, then have another ability that targets an area or unit, unloads all troops instantly from the transport and automatically issue an attack command towards it. This eliminates the selection of infantry, and have the transport be the "main" unit of combat.