A page about modernizing Machines - Wired for War
Towards the end of 2021 I had nothing better to do so I installed and finished
the single player campaign. I started by drawing a reaper and ended with
updating the UI and a few ideas about a custom unit designer.
First time I played machines was around 99 or 2000, I dont recall being
impressed that much. I had a friend who was obsessed with this game, he forced
us to play it as if it was the best thing ever made.
Machines tries to blend C&C base building with fps shooting by letting the
player enter inside any unit and control them using keyboard and mouse. It
wasn't a new idea for its time as games like Urban Assault 98 and Battlezone
98 managed to blend the unit management and strategy aspect with FPS gameplay
much better. There were also many other 3D strategy games that had better
pathfinding and fast paced gameplay compared to machines so the game was
somewhat forgotten without making much impact on players.
What I really like is the visual designs of the robots. They look cold and
heartless as any machine should but also full of character thanks to the use
of their tiny white glowing eyes and rabbit ears. I still cant think of any
other RTS game that has such simple yet powerful character designs.
Like many games of its time the path finding of units is horrible. Actually
the path finding in this game can be the worst ever made. Some units move
painfully slow, they bump into each other and get stuck trying to follow even
the simplest orders. I've seen 3 units gt stuck to each other in an open
space.
Points to modernize if a remake is ever made;
- AI is horrible. It occasionally attacks with a bunch of units from the same
direction. Harvesters get stuck to one another when moving, some units stop to
calculate new path after move commands. Indoor missions have narrow corridors,
some levels have narrow canyons and combined with the dumb pathfinding the
game becomes really unplayable even for a retro fan who is used to shitty, old
games like me.
- The range and intelligence of enemy units seems to be a little watered down
compared to the player's units. This is good if you want to enter a machine
and play the game as FPS. However, FPS mode is not as practical as it seems
because your units dont have enough HP so you cant really stay inside a unit
for long before it blows up and you have no way of controlling other units or
building stuff while in FPS mode.
- Game needs a new Command / Build menu when the player is in FPS mode
- Healing, scavenging and repairing should be automatically performed when
target is near
- Selected machine should always have health bar above it.
- Pointing mouse above a machine should show health bar (as long as the cursor
stays on the machine)
- UI needs to be updated for modern standards.
- Maybe minor increase to the hit points of all units to make first person view more useful
Sidebar
I had nothing better to do so I decided to spent some time modernizing the UI
Gave the Isometric RTS UI a face-lift. Now it looks closer to what modern
games have. It is semi transparent so action is still visible underneath,
better organised in terms of user experience as you don't have to move your
eyes from top of the screen to the bottom to read notifications. I cleaned up
and simplified the unit commands where the old one had tons of useless
orders and text buttons.
Generic commands available for all machines - attack move, move, guard area,
scatter, stop and waypoint.
Special commands (such as build, heal, repair, scavenge etc) should be
available on machine type and should appear under the selected machine's
portrait. Some special commands such as healing, scavenging and repairing
should be automatically performed when target is near and have a radius if
such command is given to the selected machine.
Production menu (building new machines)
By default you couldn't see what was lined in production after the first 4 or
so machines, now the queue should be visible, clicking on something in the
queue should remove that unit from production queue.
FPS screen
Some cosmetic changes and a command interface to add some functionality to the first person view.
By default you had no way of controlling other units or building stuff while
in FPS mode. This new UI should allow you to select few followers and tell
them where to move etc. Holding CTRL will allow the player to use the mouse
cursor as if in isometric view so the players can click around giving orders.
Construction menu can be added for constructors etc.
Machine Designer (adding a custom unit designer)
There are many machines that can be built but lets be honest, the player only
needs to use a few of them. (reaper with double plasma is the best thing
around) Maybe an army designer to mix and match body and weapons would allow
creation of more fun and useful alternatives.
Now the players will use the technician units to research new body parts and
modules instead of new units. Players can open the Machine Designer menu to
mix and match the researched parts and modules to create their own armies.
There can be some limitations like different body types can have different
number of module slots. Heavy weapons can only be placed on heavy body types
and the more you add the longer it would take to produce vehicles and the
slower they would move so you have to mix bodies and modules carefully to
maintain the perfect efficiency.
Body types can be the base parts of all vehicles in the vanilla game;
Scout (wheeled),
Transport (heavy wheeled),
Grunt (threaded),
Warrior (heavy threaded)
Reaper (mech)
Enforcer (tank)
Knight, (hover)
Gorilla (extra heavy mech)
Wasp (aircraft)
Bee (aircraft bomber)
Modules can be stuff like;
Auto Cannon
Bolter (couple of different version)
Flame thrower
Healing
Rockets (couple of different version)
Plasma (couple of different version)
Pulse (couple of different version)
Locator (stuff that finds oil)
Mines
Bombs
Tankers (to manually create oil transports from different body types),
APC
Constructor (to build stuff)
Technician
Shield (I think its called armour in the game, there can be a fer
versions like heavy, med and light)
The player should be able to create every default machine found in the vanilla
game plus have the ability to mix and match stuff.
Weapon Triangle (weapons and their effects)
The game has 4 main weapon types; Bullets, Rockets, Pulse and Plasma. I'm not
really sure what the difference is between them. Bullets seem to bypass armour
(shield is a better term) and rockets always damage armour before they can
damage hit points. But other than that, the mechanics are very obscured.
Maybe an easier to understand rock paper scissors system can work better.
- Bullets do low damage to the body but high damage to shields.
- Explosives should damage both shields and body at the same time.
- Energy weapons should do heavy damage to body but low damage to shields so
you may need a few machines that shoot bullets to get rid of shields and then
hit them with plasma wielding machines
Hopefully this new weapon triangle should make more sense.
Factions and Logos
The game has 4 factions, Reds, Blues, Greens and Yellows. Somehow they seem
to have banners ripped from Warhammer games. These banners seem very out of
place and contradict with the game's visual style. It's almost as if the
banners were added at the last minute, without spending any thought just for
the sake of adding.
The machines of each faction can have different head shapes. Doesnt matter
what they are as long as they look different from each other. Instead of out
of place epic battle banners each factions logo can be the silhouette of its
head
