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Achron — an RTS With Time Travel
An anonymous reader writes "As much as I'm looking forward to StarCraft 2, there's a new RTS gaming tech that has me even more enthused. The Escapist Magazine has posted interviews and footage of the upcoming 'meta-time strategy game' Achron, which was announced at GDC earlier this year. It's a multiplayer RTS where you can send things through time. The official site has some gameplay footage as well, and it looks like their tech is useful outside of gaming."
It's easy to imagine pushing things into the future, but pushing things back is a little harder. If it were single player, then okay... the computer remembers were everything was at the time somehow, but you would have to travel with it to make the simulation work or, perhaps, be required to work with multiple time segments simultaneously. But to do it multiplayer? Really boggles the mind.
In novels, there are roughly two main ways time-travel might be used (with a lot of gray area and variations): as a simple plot device that changes the setting, or as a hard-sci-fi thought experiment about how the world might work, or what effects there might be, if time travel were possible, and particular laws governed it. There've been videogames using the first strategy, of course. And some have elements that start going towards the second, but still embedded in the game's plot rather than the actual game mechanics. Interesting to see time-travel and its effects as an actual playable element.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is the most original thing I've seen to come out of the RTS genre in a long time.
And to think, there's no reason Blizzard couldn't have done something just as innovative and different for SC2...they just don't want to take risk.
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Of starcraft 2 with time travel. game starts, then "nuclear launch detected" with a blinking red light on your command center.
According to what I saw in the first video, this wouldn't be possible. Rather, you are able to fight in the past that has real influences on your present but you aren't able to truly fight your opponent when they are starting out. On top of that, you can see where your opponent is in your time stream. And on top of that, you can speed up how fast you flow through time. Since most RTS's are based on reaction time (hence the title of the genre), it becomes very obvious to me that the default strategy is to get into the game and crank your speed up as fast as it will go. Then beat your opponent to your resource rich future and send units back in time. Always fight as far back in the past as you can.
Of course, they limit how far back you can go and how much influence you have in the past but this is a new balance that would make for interesting game play. I have a feeling that my above observations are learned early on in the learning curve.
But in your scenario, you would both be in the future launching nuclear warheads on each other in the past. I doubt this game will include such far reaching weapons for the simple fact of confusing alternate realities.
They didn't address what happens if you constantly send the same unit back in time from multiple points in your stream to generate an army at one point. I guess the 'update waves' are a function to control that.
My work here is dung.
Having already played this game in the future, I can only say that things get really strange if you try to go back in time before the game was launched and try to prevent it from being installed on your opponents computers.
Also, if you see a player on the network named John Titor, don't play against him. He seems to know what's going to happen already. Fscking cheater!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm normally not a grammar nazi, but it looks like it's time to apply the grammarFunc. grammarFunc("An real time strategy...") --> "A real time strategy..." grammarFunc, for all your recursive grammar policing needs.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
According to what I saw in the first video, this wouldn't be possible. Rather, you are able to fight in the past that has real influences on your present but you aren't able to truly fight your opponent when they are starting out. On top of that, you can see where your opponent is in your time stream. And on top of that, you can speed up how fast you flow through time. Since most RTS's are based on reaction time (hence the title of the genre), it becomes very obvious to me that the default strategy is to get into the game and crank your speed up as fast as it will go. Then beat your opponent to your resource rich future and send units back in time. Always fight as far back in the past as you can.
The correct strategy is to send one unit back in time to kill your opponent's mother before he was even born. If that fails, you have one more shot before the sequels get crappy.
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The chrono belt probably just logs the character's X,Y every 5 seconds. This does not actually imitate time travel or solve time paradoxes. That chronobelt does not undo what you just did 5 seconds before!
When you go back in time and change something or forward, you have to solve a paradox of something happening.
Achron does this by running both possibilities simultaneously. It's definitely novel and fresh.
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Console players play this the whole time. PC games 5 years in the past. :)
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They've limited the number of possible states (fractures) in space time with a graph that only has a limited number of states.
Eventually they fall off the edge and you can not longer go back there so it's not arbitrary.
I just hope things like AI are smart enough to change the future although it will be complex: you send a unit on a waypoint from A to B. Your opponent sends a unit to run past you in this past. Do your units attack this unit automatically and then are in a different position in the future?
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No no, you have it all wrong. The correct strategy is to go back in time and become your opponent's father. It may not necessarily help you win the game, but it will give all of your future "your mother" taunts a devastating ring of truth, thereby increasing their impact. Plus, you'll get laid, which is always a bonus.
"Spear men sapping my tanks!"
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Technically, I belive the goal is to make sure your parents still do it...otherwise that picture of you just might fade away to nothing...
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I looked at some demo footage of the game and it seemed like time travel really is just like literally adding another dimension to an RTS game. Where in a normal RTS you can be attacked in the West, East, North, South (and potentially on different levels, if the game has land and air units, in Achron you can also be being attacked at a physical location that's also "in the past" and "in the future". You can go to the past and future like you'd go to different places on a map.
To make it sane, the player exists in "meta time", a kind of overall time that ties together all the different positions in game time. The difference from a spacial dimension is:
a) the further away from the current moment you want to operate, the more time energy you use up. I think you can observe any time period for free, it's just if you want to send information or objects through time that it gets expensive.
b) effects take a while to propagate - stuff causally resulting from a battle in the past takes a certain amount of meta time (player time) to propagate to the present game time. Sounds weird but think of it like this: if your opponent goes back in time and blows up *all your stuff* you will not see anything change in the present have until the "time wave" propagates the results of these events forward to the present. At that point all your units are going to disappear. But in the meantime you have a (limited) window in which to go back with some units and "fix" the past.
This *sounds* complicated but it really is just like an extra dimension of movement with some odd properties added. It makes a lot more sense if you watch the videos, once it clicks, it clicks.
And yes, you can do grandfather paradoxes and travel to the future. Have fun!
So what happens when you send a unit back in time to kill itself?
Better be written by Stephen Hawking. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around how exactly things will play out. If I destroy a unit production structure in the past - will that in turn destroy all of the units produced by said structure? Will it refund the credits used to create those units to the other player? It seems like they will have to limit consequences to only one or two steps - if I were to destroy a building in the past, removing its created units from the playing field, which in turn restores the units/buildings that they had destroyed, things would get way too complicated too quickly. Looking forward to this - hope they release a simplified version pre-Alpha so that people can play around with it and help tune many of these sorts of decisions.