Wreckage blocking unit movement

I found many topics on the subject but I did not found an official answer or the community choice. Here is a poll!
We know when an unit died, there will be wreckage in PA. A wreckage can be reclaimed. What about blocking the unit movement?

In TA, an attacked based have natural defense thank to wreckage. In SupCom, this is not the case.

And for PA?
And you, what do you prefer?

Wreckge blocking was an absolute pain in Total Annihilation. I say no.

Completely agree with this, sending a huge army only to see it blocked by it's own wreckage was horrible.

Might have some really serious issues to pathfinding and lagging pathfinding. Not to mention AI dealing with the wreckage.

were talking about huge units and tanks, several meters in height, multiple tons of weight. You would think they would be able to just stomp over any wreckage

no

but actually this should be modable quite easily. so if someone wants it, he can have it.

I would even suggest wreck weathering. In SupCom you often couldn't harvest the wrecks because the battlefield was to dangerous for any type of engenier which leaded to lags since the AI got bugged with the amount of possible mass resources. No need to make the resources lost, but once wrecks beginn to stack, they should be reduced to piles by the engine instead.

With good pathfinding, it's not a problem (play TA with the latest community patch that fixes the pathfinding and you'll see). Having them "holographic" is just jarring. You can always tweak the amount of wreckage by how easy it is to "overkill" and leave no wreckage. Also, bring back 2-stage wrecks.

Even with fixed pathfinding (didn't know there was actually a community patch fixing such engine things), I can't imagine blocking wreckage being pleasant. In TA you were always at a serious disadvantage, if you were the attacking land force. With each unit you lost, your attack got more and more difficult and choke points where impossible to penetrate.

TAuniverse forums are down for maintenance, so I can't link, but they've hacked the engine to a crazy level. Better pathfinding, increased particle cap, unlimited sounds, multiple AIs per player in multiplayer, multithreading and more. They even re-wrote the networking code. :shock:

I say no, because I think robots don't care about other destroyed robots. They just walk through them.

Additionally, even with the best pathfinding, there will be problems with huge scale battles and i don't want to exchange fun for pathfinding.

I'm really in two minds about this. Would it be possible to have it as a toggle option for each game?

Open maps would definitely benefit from having physical wreckage, but maps with choke points could get too annoying.

I voted for don't care, but really I mean both.

This really depends on which style of game they follow more closely, TA or SupCom.

In TA, events took place much more slowly. Wreckage collisions reinforced this style, since even attacks would hit wreckage.

In SupCom, after 10 minutes of building, the game could be lost in under 10 seconds. Massive armies tended to annihilate each other very quickly. In this sense, wreckage collisions would hinder the style.

Personally, I preferred the TA style, so wreckage collisions are okay. I have no doubt that pathfinding methods have improved, so I imagine wrecks will only pose a minor obstacle.

Ultimately, I'm only slightly leaning towards yes. I imagine they could make wrecks less common by reducing the solid wreck health. With such large scale battles, they will nodoubt cause issues.

~

Perhaps there could be some 'trample' effect, where nearby units trying to move around/over the wreck will trample it until it no longer restricts movement.

The two stage wreck (solid, passable) method from TA should be kept.

Remember that the wreckages could have always been easily destroyed.
Wreckages also gave the advantage of kbots over clumsy vehicles. I like the idea of the battlefield changing as the pile of corpses grow.

fixed..

During a massive battle, having to reclaim all the wreckages on the front or manually, constantly tell your units to attack the ground here and there over and over again is incredibly cumbersome, not easy. And it puts the attacker in a serious disadvantage, often making it not worth to try to attack at all.

At most, I think wreck age should only slow units, but never block them. Having wreckage block units only encourages more usage of aircraft.

Yes!

Make some units able to push wrecks. Others go over them.
Forgot to bring bulldozers or heavy tanks and ran into a trap? Now the place is litered with crippled robots blocking your path.

I have to agree, wreckage should block the path.

Just two thoughts on that. First is pathfinding. They've already said they're going to be using a fancy pathfinding method that will likely remove many of the complaints people are having about this by itself. The main reason this was such a problem in TA was that the pathfinding was quite primitive, so units on encountering wreckage, stood around derping and getting shot to death rather than simply going around. In SC this was removed, because once again, pathfinding was still primitive and they didn't know any better solutions yet.

And another thought is the question of scale. Wreckage from a small unit should not necessarily block a large unit that could potentially roll/walk/climb right over it.

That is a wonderful idea. In all the predecessors to PA wrecks were immobile. They could be shot and reclaimed, but never moved.

Being able to simply push them out of the way with the right unit would be a nice change to see.

Why is this even discussed, of course wreckage should block units.

Modern day path finding can cope with it.

What? N72 just found where the engine keeps the hard coded numbers limiting the features, such as number of cycles of CPU spent to do pathfinding, and increased them. Nothing that radical.