August Community Poll

Hello all,

You know the drill, we're doing another monthly poll. While there are still more civilian assets that could be added to the game, I think it would be best to focus more on underexplored parts of each factions' unit roster. So, here are this month's options.

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Naval and Amphibious Units: This would include warships such as destroyers, submarines and battlecruisers, as well as landing ships and hovercraft, and even amphibious tanks and other units that can cross both land and water. Unlike many RTS games that feature naval units, where they operate more like "water tanks" (see: Red Alert 2), D.O.R.F's naval warships will be closer to real scale, and will have a whole arsenal of guns and turrets, and will be significantly more powerful per-unit. So don't worry about a Destroyer being a lame water tank, a D.O.R.F. destroyer will have multiple AA cannons, a turret for anti-missile defense, anti-submarine rocket launchers, and torpedo launchers, all with different firing angles that make positioning important. 

Note that there is a little bit of jank with the way naval units currently work. Due to their massive size, they often have Z-fighting issues where parts of the ship's sprite may cut off on certain edges, and as mentioned before, due to mobile units being only allowed a collision scale of 1x1 tiles, naval units currently clip through eachother often if they get too close. The engine's pathing logic needs to be change to allow for 2x2, 3x3 etc tile unit collision so that naval ship collision size matches their large sprite.

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Aircraft: This includes fixed-wing aircraft used for airstrikes, bombing runs and paradrops, as well as helicopter and VTOL units that can be controlled more directly.

Note that fixed-wing aircraft don't work quite the way we want them to now. While the player will be able to control helicopter and VTOL units normally, fighters and bomber aircraft will function more like airstrikes that are called in. While the engine supports a basic form of this right now, the way it will work in the final game will be a little different, with the player "buying" air squadrons, which can be reused after their cooldown, but need to be re-purchased if shot down in combat. There will also need to be some additional QOL additions like the player being able to call in the direction of the strike, logic for the aircraft spawning from a specific edge of the map per-player (rather than being able to call them in from any point of the map, which results in players easily cheesing other players by calling in airstrikes from behind an enemy base), and some other features like being able to swap out the loadout of airstrikes (ie: switching from dropping dumbfire bombs to being loaded with air-to-air missiles for defense against enemy airstrikes). 

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Field Guns and Support Teams: This includes machinegun squads, field guns for anti-tank, anti-air and artillery duty, as well as units with support roles like small field radars and detection equipment. 

Note that field guns will require some additional engine tweaks to work completely correctly; right now, unit deployment functionality doesn't work quite as it should, and units will also not automatically deploy when encountering enemies in order to open fire. There are also issues with unit collision scaling/pathfinding, as for instance a large field gun can only be 1x1 tile when mobile, but may need to be 2x2 when deployed (ideally it would be 2x2 tiles in both cases). There are also plans for certain units such as Halftracks to be able to tow field guns, which is yet another engine logic that needs to be implemented.