Chimto wrote:I think an RTS should have a lot of effects. Take Starcraft: when a unit dies, it either explodes in a plume of gore or gives off a nice fireball. You know that unit just died. In Starcraft 2, they either fall over and kind of vanish after a second, or they just vanish in a cloud of unsatisfying colours. In other games you get various levels of effects, but these are the two opposing extremes and serve well for our comparison.
Oh, dear, yes. Adding onto that.
This may be a little bit too much to ask, but this game should really be as amazingly polished as possible, so here:
It would be nice if each faction had specific death animations/death sounds. RTS games are usually pretty hectic, and since death is so commonplace, it's hard to know if it's you who just lost a unit or your enemy.
Bringing up again what Chimto said about StarCraft 2: in that game, each faction has a very specific set of death animations. For example, a specific race, the Protoss, always explode into energy on death, and you can see their "souls" go to the sky. In contrast, another race, the Zerg, have really simplistic death animations--occasional fire, sure, but no explosion, no energy transformation, etc., and the only units with noticeable deaths are the large ones, like these things called the
Ultralisk. I'm pretty sure things are like this because of the nature between the two factions: the Zerg don't care if their units die, they always just make more. The Protoss, on the other hand, aren't very numerous, so the player naturally needs to be well-informed whenever a unit of his dies.
As the player, I want to be able to know exactly the full extent of my casualties in the game. I want to be able to tell when the unit that just died was mine or my enemy's, and death animations really solve that, as well as adding another level of polish to the game.
On another topic:
Another nice thing about some strategy games is the dead bodies. I don't know, maybe I'm just sadistic like that, but some strategy games don't remove the bodies of dead units from the game. They just let them stay on the ground, let it be a mark that a fight took place there. Some games take this even further, and let explosion or burn marks litter the ground. There are even some games where you can use this to your strategic advantage: in Company of Heroes, burnt bodies mean a flame-based unit is nearby, and gibbed bodies near normal dead ones mean you'll probably have to deal with a tank later on. That's something I really want to see in this game, even though it may be too much to ask. I don't know, but it's just sort of nice for me as the player to know the full extent of the battle I'm in.
So, yeah. Unique death animations. And dead bodies that stay.