Mass Scale army Ideas

[GhostThruster]

Hi, I'm thinking about making a Warcraft 3 mod that will allow players to control mass scale armies, like in Medieval Total War. Any help or ideas would be gladly appreciated.

 

[DocDude]

First thing you should know is that warcaft's engine is not built for these kind of things, so having thousends of units on screen will result in heavy lags.

but if you still want to do it, i guess you can scale down units, put them in a unit group and then have a trigger that once one of the units is selected it makes some effect that shows that all units in the group are selected (cuz in warcraft you can't select many units at once).

make another trigger that if one of the units is issued an order all other units also get the same order.

and thats pretty much the basics.

 

[Legacyspy]

Even with that, if you have lots of units the pathing will get messed up and units will stutter.

A solution I found was to use the locust ability:

Example:
2 Units 1, Axeman and another Axeman(2) with locust.
They should have identical stats aside from the locust ability on Axeman(2).

Give Axeman one a locust swarm type ability that summons 3-5 Axeman(2).
Have a trigger, when axeman attacked, order it to cast locust swarm.

So now if u have 25 Axeman vs 25 Axemen, you end up with 150 units on each side, and no pathing error. The only thing you have to worry about is people's computers lagging when drawing the 300 units.

 

[GhostThruster]

Um, I wasn't thinking of hundreds of soldiers, just squads or battalions of like 10. When every player (12) creates units, there will be hundreds of soldiers in total.

 

[WhitePhoenix]

A while ago I had an idea for a "formation" system whereas you generate an AI in game for a group of 12 units to behave in battle.

You can branch off the idea to make a player simply select a group of 12 units by an item, or what have you, who are behaving under a psuedo-AI generated in the game itself by the player.

And the locust swarm idea would be... interesting to look at.. I suppose.

 

[Kuritany]

You could make an triger that makes an unit fallow a master unit, but you must maake some thing to select only "the maste unit" when you want to make they move.Then you can select more than one troop.

Good luck

Even with that, if you have lots of units the pathing will get messed up and units will stutter.

A solution I found was to use the locust ability:

Example:
2 Units 1, Axeman and another Axeman(2) with locust.
They should have identical stats aside from the locust ability on Axeman(2).

Give Axeman one a locust swarm type ability that summons 3-5 Axeman(2).
Have a trigger, when axeman attacked, order it to cast locust swarm.

So now if u have 25 Axeman vs 25 Axemen, you end up with 150 units on each side, and no pathing error. The only thing you have to worry about is people's computers lagging when drawing the 300 units.

1.The summoned units by "Locust Swarm" can't be target of attacks, they will die only when the summoner dies.
2.When ever I try to do this things, if the units don't are flyers, they die before the life time ends...

 

[Ham Ham]

I did once a trigger that makes like, you train a footmen squad, it spawns a captain and 5 footmen. Every order you give to the captain, all other footmen will do the same order.
If the captain dies, a random footman from the squad is promoted to captain, and can keep controling the squad. PM me if you are interessed.

 

[GhostThruster]

Thanks for your suggestions. I've already begun a map with my own version of triggers. It would be great if you could test it out--Kingdoms of Legend 1.0a
Also, just curious, do you know any other warcraft 3 maps that have the same gameplay concept I can download? It would be cool to see another person's technique.

 

[Dr Super Good]

WC3 pathing system can not handle that many units, thus why no such maps exist.

 

[MultiGod]

Units collision size could help handling many units, but not doodads I think.

 

[GhostThruster]

For the love of god, I'm not making a map that has thousands of soldiers! Yes, that would have a fuckload of lag, and that is why I have made a map with only a few hundred soldiers in TOTAL. If you tried my map, you would know, And I know that comparison I made with Medieval Total War gives you the idea of bazillions of troops, but I was just making an example. The gameplay is more like Warhammer 40k DoW.