Ive decided to finally make a topic for the new mod I'm making...

Special Forces Mod
Introduction:
This mod is a military strategy game with a few gameplay twists. Instead of mining, resources are based on base control. You also have a commander that must be protected. You play as a military strategist with authority over a small special forces unit. You have well trained soldiers of all types at your disposal, such as the basic soldier (machinegunner), sniper, secret agent, scout, anti-vehicle, and more. Outwit your enemies on the battlefield with tactical use of strategies such as drop attacks, air support, and artillery strikes. Coming soon!

The Gameplay:
You start with your Detachment Commander and an engineer. You are given 2 minutes to pick a location to place your main base. The engineer is there to allow you to begin setting up base defenses (and to make sure the AI doesnt complain about not being able to mine, although mining gives 0 resources). The commander has 2 extra lives (also spawned as units in the beginning). So if your commander dies 3 times, youre done. To gain resources, you need to take over control points (geysers) with your commander. Resources are given periodically. The goal of the game is to eliminate the enemy commanders or capture the enemy's main base.

As for commander respawns, I have two thoughts right now on how this should be done:
1. Commander is made available for construction at the HQ (by giving the player a certain required unit or using gas)
2. Commander is respawned at base location (using LocUnlock). Will have to bind locations to main base after placement. But...Wut if commander dies b4 base placement?

The Game Modes:
Standard ("Conquest") - Place your base and battle it out, free for all or top vs bottom.
CTF - Protect your flag from capture (preplaced bases). Free for all only as of now (How would I get top vs bottom CTF to work? You can capture ally flag!)
Zombie Survival - Play against a zerg computer with a team or alone (preplaced bases). If I can find offsets for EUDs and my EUD version of 1.15.1 works right, I will use EUDs to control undead hit points (change difficulty for less players and increase difficulty over time). If I get EUDs to work, I will also enable team upgrades like shielded soldiers.
Sudden Death ("Elimination") - Protect your commander at all costs! You have no extra lives in this mode!
Greed ("Gold Rush") - Gain the most control points and be the first to reach a set number of resources (default greed will be changed to use resource amounts that work better with the mod)

The AI:
Due to limitations, AI may have to use modified mirrored units or even completely different units (depends on if I can get AI to capture bases right). As of now, I have got the AI to build troops and launch an attack with a simple script. Since the commander is a probe, the AI cannot use it to attack. I may have to change this. Commander is now civilian.

Notes:
-This mod will not support UMS at all due to the vast amount of triggered stuff to make the mod work.
-It should work on default maps. Minerals not removed cause the AIs need them there to work. Mining them yields no resources.
-There is nothing for Protoss, it is unsupported
-Humans cannot play as zombies
-Screenshots will come as soon as I set up all of or enough of the units for Terran (TODO: Commander GRP, tank GRP, rocket trooper, artillery spotter, maybe more???) SCREENIES UP!!!

Status:
Active development. Will not make much progress this week and next week due to me being rather busy.
Special Forces (Terran): 70% (most units done, but I need to make requirements and tech/upgrades)
Zombies (Zerg): 0%
Other Units: 100% (Oh yeah! I made the control points and reconfigured minerals)
AI: 10%
Triggering: 75%
Misc: Extra Features TBD

Comments welcome!

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jan 17 2009, 3:00 am by modmaster50.

This seems like more of a modded map than a mod, I'm guessing it'll need specially created maps. I might be able to help in that department. Good luck with this.

I'm making it to not run on special maps. Vespene geysers are already placed in strategic spots, so the control point placement isnt a problem. With LocUnlock, I can make locations in a melee game.

EDIT: I decided to add demo screenies

War!!!

Moar war!!!

Control points (start location GRP) and me pwning enemy base.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 8 2009, 7:50 pm by Killer_Kow. Reason: Advertising (I'm assuming it's just imageshack doing t

it definatly looks like mostly triggers and not much grpahic stuff. Theres only going to be a couple buildings right? I like that this seems to be more simple, and more microing than just mass attacking. It would be cool to do a more complex rock papper scissor type thing with the infantry. Good luck.

As for buildings, I have only planned to make a command center, control points, barricades, sentry guns, anti-air guns, and bunkers. I dont know if I should make a separate building for vehicles and use cc/control points for infantry only. I might expand the first post with descriptions of infantry unit purposes and abilities.

List of infantry units made/planned as of now (abbreviated form): soldier (chaingun), scout (burst pistol), secret agent (knife), artillery spotter (pistol), sniper (rifle), engineer (shotgun), cyborg (flamethrower for close range, dual blasters for long range), medic (heal). Is that too many infantry classes?

Vehicles (abbreviated form): hovercraft (light), tank (heavy), machine gun tank (medium), assault dropship (transport). I also want to make some sort of combat air unit.

Yeah, this is definately more of a gameplay mod than a graphical mod (especially cause Im not really good at graphics and iscripting that plays frames).

hey, one interesting thing you could do that would make it alot more tactical and scouting, make the vision a whole lot less, that would make it easier to lay ambushes and harder to find the enemy. Especially if you had weapon range better than vision... that might be interesting.

Personally, if this were my mod, i think i would scratch vheicles completely, except maybe a drop ship. From you initial description i got the impression that it would be all infantry, except for dropships, maybe a ground troop transport, and the ability to call in air strikes.

I think the lower vision range is a good idea for the mod. Makes the mod a lot more tactical to play. With your weapons shooting farther than you can see, spotters would become really useful. Maybe I could make scanner sweep sort of a "binoculars" ability for spotting enemies. This would leave the AI at a major disadvantage though, being unable to adapt to using stuff like this (AI only uses scan for invisible enemies, and it only uses from comsat station). If I were gonna implement this, I gotta find some advantage to give the AI to compensate. Maybe an invincible observer unit to take the place of the binoculars. I also gotta see if I can get other units to use scan. Checked, it works!

EDIT: Hmmm...I need advice here. What would be better for gameplay? Should binoculars be detectors? Currently, the scout and placed field cameras are detectors. But sight range is so limited that agents would be hard to detect. I'm afraid binocular detectors would make them too easily detectable.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 8 2009, 6:02 am by modmaster50.

The cpu units can have normal vision range.

I like it, it's been a while since I've seen new concepts in modding instead of just a TC

Create a unit which can use EMP or Ensnare to reveal the cloakers. (EMP wouldn't work if the agents are perm. cloaked, only if they are actively cloaked like the Ghost is.)

This.

Classic MUAI. I guess the computer will have to live with his starter units having bad vision, but I guess the starters will probably end up in a group with long-vision units anyways. Thanks for the idea.

The agents are perm-cloaked. I guess I could use ensnare, but I was thinking of using ensnare as some sort of zombie goo (but I guess it can be both?). Or I could just leave the agents as hard to find. When I release a beta version with just the terrans (no zombie mode), I could see how everything balances out (like one strategy owning all).

With LocUnlock, I can make a location at the corner of the map to spawn all sorts of invisible, invincible, basically unusably units to indicate things like whether the player can place a base or spawn a new commander.

Im adding more game modes too.

EDIT: Screenshot showing the decreased vision range posted. I may reduce it more or increase weapon range.


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 9 2009, 6:01 am by modmaster50.

What will Zombie Survival be like? Enemies created every x seconds, or a "zombie race"?

Zerg will be the zombie race. I will trigger adjust the zombie difficulty based on time and # of players. I may create a difficulty selection feature on your main base building as well. As of now, it will probably be built into the standard game mode with a trigger to detect zombie players. I will probably leave teams as is with triggers, so you have to set the teams up right yourself (otherwise Id need a ton of switches to ally all humans vs all zombies).

As for how difficulty is adjusted, I will use my new memory plugin to patch the fields for the zombie stats (which I will find via a memory searcher). There will also be a special button panel on the main base building made specifically for zombie survival mode, containing team upgrades such as enabling shields, improving hit points, and other stuff, also done via memory plugin.

A playable version should be done within the next week or so. It will not include zombie survival mode and will probably have an extremely primitive AI (attack loop with expansions). It will let the community test the mod for any bugs or exploits that I dont notice (Im not the best triggerer). Anyways, look for more soon!

Sounds like a neat concept.

I might have some extra "zombie" .grps laying around too.

Zombie GRPs would be appreciated. I dont think using the infested kerrigan and infested terran like the SC zombie survival maps will be good enough.

I have a concept zombie mod if you want it -- the main zombie can infect other units.

I was thinking of giving one of the zombie types a modified spawn broodlings ability that will let it infect your soldiers. By main zombie, do you mean starting with only 1 zombie unit on the map that gets more minions by infecting (spawn broodlings can be set to an attack, and that attack can be randomly initiated with iscript)?

Voy made a zombie mod a while back. He didn't go very far with it though.

I only finished the main zombie concept. It has a melee attack and randomly bites small units to infect them, it also had a queen's spawn broodling ability as a spell. I bumbed up the broodling spell cast animation to take awhile as well.

I probably wont be implementing the zombie survival mode until I figure out the iscript and get my hands on a few GRPs (which is one of my biggest problems right now). If it turns out too buggy, Ill probably remove it. Btw, what was Voy's zombie mod?

Another thing. Im still deciding whether to keep upgrades simple and make each one cover large numbers of units, or if I should make strategy-specific upgrades that make the player decide strategically before starting on an upgrade path. Im also still wondering how balance will work out when a full game is played. Since there will only be one race, I dont need to worry about race balance, but Im worried that there will be some strategies that are always preferred. Ill find out more about this when people test the game.

A_of-s-t, Im thinking of giving some zombies a normal attack and an infect attack. In iscript, the zombie will randomly use infect when attacking (probably should be a somewhat low rate).