Tactical Insertion: 0.3.1 released October 14th

[Artfunkel]

Real-time tactics for Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising
Download latest version | Join Steam group for updates

• No economy! You buy and upgrade your troops at the start of each round from a fixed pool of Requisition. There are no Tier or Power requirements.
• No fluff! RPG elements have been removed, and where possible abilities have been either made ambient (Fleet of Foot) or removed entirely (Kraken Ammo).
• Fast, focused action! Maps are smaller and weapons deal more damage, but with only half their normal range.

Known Issues

• Games containing other human players and AI players cause desync errors.
• Vehicle limits not displayed in UI until the HQ is re-selected.
• Plasma Cannon 'setup preview' range indicator is twice actual range. Range is correct after setup.

Changelog

0.3.1 - October 14th

• Surprise!
• Updated and fixed for DoW2 2.4
• Eldar can now create D-Cannons
• Guardian squads no longer default to melee stance
• Made Terminator Lightning Claws buyable
• Increased Terminator Assault Cannon cost to 300
• Genestealers no longer have Return Fire Only ability
• Fixed some heavy units introduced in 0.3 fading out when dead

previous versions

0.3 - June 27th

• Replaced each race's walker with their tier 3 heavy infantry (except for Tyrant Guard, which remains but has super heavy infantry armour again)
• Removed anti-tank weapons, except for Plauge Marines
• Created a new stealth system. Squads are visible at all times, but are never occluded (coloured outlines) and do not show their decorator or minimap ping to the enemy unless detected. They are 25% harder to hit at all times.
• Removed the 'detector' trait from the game. All entities now detect stealth infantry within 20 metres or engaged in combat.
• Added a Chaos Razorback vehicle
• Added new menu music
• Fixed SCAR error on leaving deploy zone
• Made the AI build its troops very quickly
• Purposefully avoided integrating the turn speed and cover-seeking changes in DoW2 2.2.3
• Base turrets are no longer spawned on maps that have them
• Reinstated intro sequences, which can now be skipped.
• Fixed buff effect playing permanently on Chaos Space Marines
• Fixed Chaos Lord appearing in main menu when Chaos Rising is owned (Black Legion paint remains though)
• Disabled camera input during deployment. This prevents players from cheating by listening through the fog of war to what their opponent is building.
• Start camera behind player HQ no matter which way it is facing
• Move camera to player one's HQ when spectating
• Fixed squad leaders not actually leading squads
• Improve round draw message
• Replaced models seen in hero selection with standard units
• Gave Warp Spider Exarch the WS hero's head
• Updated/removed oboslete loading screen tips
• Internally renamed both maps so that they some make some sense when appearing in the vanilla game browser
• Thunderhawk Down: filled in second half of the map with an improved layoyt, tweaked the behaviour of many world objects. The left-hand half will be revamped eventually too.
• Sandblast: moved platform to the dead centre of the map, fixed pipes beneath VP creating impass, added intro sequence

0.2b8 - May 16th

• 0.2b7 was withdrawn because it sucked
• Improved the way HQs are removed between rounds. They won't remain visible sometimes any more.
• Support round draws
• Cultist explode now costs 20 Waaagh and has 50% range
• Increased cost of Cultist grenade launchers from 100 req to 150
• Gave Tyrant Guard vehicle armour
• Limit Orks to one Dread (back into line now the Burna upgrade is free)
• Fixed Spore Mines being affected by vehicle spawning rules
• Fixed SM Scout's detector decorator not appearing
• Thunderhawk Down: disabled intro until I can work out how to let players skip it (fix GE_PlayerSkipNIS, Relic!)
• Added required map function rtt_setHQFacings(). Takes a table of { X,Y,Z,angle } sub-tables. For ang, 1 is north -1 is south.
• Added built-in support for switching teams around. Just call rtt_CycleTeamsFwd() or rtt_CycleTeamsBack().

0.2b6 - May 16th

• 0.2b5 was an internal release
• Launcher no longer depends on Visual C++ 2010 runtime
• Prevented the starting point entity from spawning initial squads, and made it spawn each race's HQ facing the same direction
• Hacked around despawned HQs remaining visible when spectating by teleporting them one kilometer into the air (!)
• Dead bodies are now removed on round restart
• Removed Wraithlord regeneration
• Can only build one Chaos Dreadnaught or Eldar Wraithlord
• Can only build two Spore Mines

0.2b4 - May 16th

• Fixed crash on building Tankbusta squad
• Fixed SCAR error when spectating
• Double resource points if the game is started with high resources
• Chaos HQ is now uses the shrine animator, making it easier to select
• Added a launcher application
• Maps can show an intro sequence with the command rtt_PlayIntro(nis,messages,completionListener).
  
  • The NIS will not run if there are two or more humans playing.
  • "messages" is a table containing { time, locstring } sub-tables.
• Expanded rtt_setRoundEndListener() to pass the player who won and the victory condition they met (victory_ANNIHILATE, victory_OBJECTIVES, or victory_TICKERS)
• Thunderhawk Down: removed random drop pod from player 1 spawn, added NIS on victory point wins, added tutorial NIS when playing against AIs

0.2b3 - May 14th

• Fixed desync error
• New menu and logo
• Made many world objects more resilient to crushing
• Fixed Bloodcrushers hanging around as statues after death
• Thunderhawk Down: made the 'elbow' between the defender's area and the Ordnance Array easier to hold.

0.2b2 - May 11th

• Fixed not mounting new patch archives
• Fixed Wartrukk taking time to build
• Gave Deff Dread its Burna upgrade as standard
• Only reset victory point data on round restart if there are victory points

0.2b1 - May 11th

• New four-player map: Thunderhawk Down. Attack/defend with an artillery strike strategic point between the two teams. At the moment only the left half of this map is in place. I want to get some games in before I commit to detailing the area between players 2 and 4. (This is why this release is 0.2b1, not 0.2 itself.)
• Renamed "Test Map" to Sandblast and improved its visuals
• Chaos now works!
• Up to date with patch 2.2.2
• Handle refunding/teleporting squads containing other squads (i.e. troop transports) correctly
• Anti-tank weapon range increased to 3/4 of vanilla, up from 1/2
• Fixed Nid Warriors not being able to choose Barbed Stangler (also fixes wrong decorator)
• Allow two troop transports (three for Orks)
• Reduced Eldar Falcon to 700r
• Removed Tankbusta Boys barrage ability
• Gave Stormboyz improved rocket packs as standard
• Fix CSM Lascannon range
• Fix Plague Marine missile launcher range
• Hacked around Plasma Cannon range issue (seems to be a Relic bug)
• Fixed error when equipping Eldar Wraithlord with a Brightlance
• Deployment refund ability now uses the Retreat hotkey (default: X)
• Only play a deploy zone warning to the player who triggered it
• Give "you won" or "you lost" message and audio on round restart
• Move camera back to player HQ on round restart
• Automatically set a HQ rally point on round start
• Gave HQs better icons
• Sandblast: searchlight destroyed when bunker is sufficiently damaged
• Do an even better job of rounding resources to whole numbers
• Improve the way Deploy Skip checks the state of the game
• Map SCAR can hook into deployment init, battle init and round end with rtt_setDeployStartListener(), rtt_setBattleStartListener() and rtt_setRoundEndListener(). Pass the name of your function.

0.1.3 - April 22nd

• Removed deploy zone range indicator. HQ sight range now serves that purpose (units have no sight until the battle starts)
• Reduced plasma cannon range by 1/3
• SM Librarian Smite now costs Waaagh
• New refund icon
• Maps can now control vehicle availability with rtt_disableVehicles(player) and rtt_enableVehicles(player), both of which accept ALL as an argument
• Fixed victory tickers not being depleted after round restart
• Fixed deploy skip ability not working after round restart
• Reset Waaagh on round restart
• Fixed team scores being the wrong way round in UI
• More, and better, sound effects
• Only display deploy zone tutorial when playing locally
• Test map: Show an alert when the player cycles the steam vents
• Console spam to try and catch a bad pointer crash when creating squads.

0.1.2 - April 21st

• Rounds implemented. You must be leading your opponent by two rounds to win the game.
• Refunds now account for purchased upgrades (not for Chaos yet!)
• Spore mines cannot explode until deployment is over
• Now using scar_function_call instead of listeners where possible
• Test map: steam vents console hint hidden when point is owned by a player
• Number of victory tickets reduced (1/10th vanilla values)

0.1.1 - April 20th 2010

• Deployment phase doubled to one minute max
• Can now refund bought troops (but upgrades not yet accounted for!)
• Round resources down, not up, for better floating point accounting
• SM Dreadnaught fist slam now uses Waaagh, has 50% range
• Maps can use rtt_setPoints(num) to set the amount of requisition available to players
• Range reduction undone on suppression weapons with a little more elegance - not sure if it's a fix for the intermittent range bug yet
• Deploy voting button disabled after use

0.1 - April 19th 2010

• Initial release

[boneless1]

I would love to test this mod I will b adding you on steam. Though It doesn't find you name on steam >.<. or Theory if thats it.

[Artfunkel]

Click the link, that's me.

[boneless1]

Hmm but it wont lemme add ya to friends >.<




nvm i got it,

[Artfunkel]

Just had some great playtests with boneless. Thanks again!

[boneless1]

No problem man it was fun, faced paced, pressure tactical moments. I had a-lot of fun testing it and playing it. Need any testing i'm always here on steam. your mod was very enjoyable. Cant wait till update .

[Kresjah]

Did a very quick skirmish (not like the AI did anything anyways) to test this out. Definately seems to fill the role it aims for, although there are a few things I did react to.

In my humble opinion, I think 30 sec is far too little. Unless you've memorised all the squad and squad upgrade costs, you will likely not have time to do a proper setup. I'd suggest upping it to something like 2 minutes. This would allow players like me (:P) who are both new to the mod and aren't pro players and as such need to put a slight extra moment of thought into my choices to get a chance to do that. As it is now, I have quite a few skirmish sessions ahead of me if I want to get ready for some proper online playing with this mod. Considering you already have a "vote to start early" ability, I don't see any harm in that.

Another thing I think could be handy would be the possibility to reclaim a squad. If I accidentally buy a Dreadnought instead of a Devastator Plasma squad, that could essentially kill my match. An ability that removes a purchased squad and refunds its cost (grant_resource_on_death maybe) on removal could be a life saver.

Other than that, this looks like a mod I'm sure many people have wanted and will enjoy. Will be interesting to see what features you'll add to this mod.

[boneless1]

Well Kresjah would you like to come against me in this fast pace mod id love to if you wish .

[Artfunkel]

Great ideas Kresjah, I'll implement the first right now. Perhaps not to the point of two minutes - that would be frustrating if someone went afk - but one sounds good.

The second idea will take a little longer to get in. I guess I'd be looking at a new ability on each squad for it, but is there an attribute ext or SCAR function that returns the cost of a squad? Duplicating the value is bad news...

[Kresjah]

I've never really fiddled much with DoW2 SCAR, nor have I checked that. Alternatively, you could look into Cope's LUA tools, which should allow you to do something similar.

Just an alternative idea on the voting that popped up in my mind, why not make it similar to what you see in e.g. L4D? If a player initiates a vote, the vote will stay open either until everyone have voted OR x seconds. If at the end of the voting session there is more Yes votes than No, the game begins.

I.e., a three player match. Player 1 initiates a vote to start, player 2 immediately votes yes. The voting session automatically ends 8 seconds later with no vote being given from player 3. That would mean there are 66% votes to start the match, so it could theoretically begin.

Now, I figure that in a gamemode like this, a system where it only bases on a majority vote, it can be abused. If it's a 2 vs 1 match, the team with two players can prevent the last player (other team) from finishing his/her deployment by forcing a majority vote to start the game. In that case, maybe you could make it so that a No vote acts as a veto (meaning that if they are AFK, they'll miss the vote and the rest of the players won't have to wait an eternity for the match to begin... if he's there, he'll vote no and prevent being cheated out of deployment time).

[Artfunkel]

I don't think modders have enough control over the UI to do that, unfortunately. There's no way to pop a window up - just the announcements down the side and the status in the middle of the screen.

Not got refunds working yet. Got trouble with GE_AbilityExecuted - caster keeps turning into an apparently empty table.

[Fallschirmjager]

just a question, whyd u remove abilities?

[Artfunkel]

Like I said, to keep the player out of the UI as much as possible. Energy is also somewhat meaningless with battles as short as they are now: you could often just spam away without much risk of running low before the game ended.

[Artfunkel]

0.1.1 is out.. See the OP for changes.

[david]

First i want to say great mod! i played it a few times yesterday with the AI and it was awesome! But For some reason the mod seems to crash for me when i try to hit the thing to deploy troops and this did not happen when i played it on 0.1.0 though.

Now it seems to be working but i don't know why it was crashing the first 5 times i tried it.

[Artfunkel]

I've been getting intermittent crashes recently too, though not to the same extent as yourself. No idea what's causing it yet. :/

[david]

Well it seems to stop after a while and then start up again so its not as bad as it was the first time. I have a question though...how do i increase the requisition using rtt_setPoints(num)?

[Artfunkel]

You create a <map name>.scar file in the maps\pvp\ folder and put the command there. It won't work if you're just a player who wants more req.

Edit: you need to import("rtt_skirmish.scar") too. I'll write all this up properly at a later stage.

[Copernicus]

I haven't played your mod yet (no time) but I like the concept, sounds fantastic. I actually once planned to do something similar and I'll definitely give this one a shot. Plus, I like that you're using SCAR and not just throwing out another my-rebalance-mod. You seem to be talented.

The link to the second picture doesn't work for me; it should link to http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/1250/tiaftermath.jpg instead of http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/1250/tiaftermath.jpg/ (note the backslash at the end of the link).

-cope.

[Artfunkel]

Easiest bug I ever fixed! Thanks for the support.

[Artfunkel]

http://steamreview.org/personal/dow2/tac-ins-0.1.2.zip

I'll hopefully be around for playtesting tomorrow morning. I'm exhausted right now...it's been a busy day, and getting round restarts in was a total bitch too.

Here's a cool screenshot I just took. Shame about the deploy indicator on the ground, I really must fix that!

[Artfunkel]

0.1.3! This will be the last release for a while now, as I want to sink some time into making a larger map that does my work justice.

I'm trying to catch a crash bug in the meantime. If you get a crash, please reply with the contents of Documents\My Games\Dawn of War 2\Logfiles\SCAR-trace.txt. Thanks!

[Syrus101]

it's either that I am blind or are there no installation instructions for this?

anyway looks good and I'm curious to try it

[Artfunkel]

Unzip it into your DOW2 folder then run steam.exe -applaunch 15620 -modname rtt (not DOW2.exe, that's broken). I'll get some installation instructions together for the next release.

[Artfunkel]

I fixed my fog settings! Oooooh yeah.



I've added sandstorm weather effects (which you can't see in that screen) and sound, and as a result the map is now called Sandblast. If I'm going to make it a "proper" one I suppose I'll have to move the victory point to the actual middle...

[Fallschirmjager]

should definitely make a trench map.

[Artfunkel]

What's that, exactly?

[Fallschirmjager]

a map that is essentially made up of a network of trenches as well as No mans-lands for direct access to other trenches.

Trenches would IMO provide heavy cover, and the fact that theyre lower in the ground would protect them well against artillery units in tanks.

No Man's Lands would be open spaces between the trench networks where players could make darining charges across open field into the enemy.

[Artfunkel]

Sounds worth a go. Right now though:



Structurally this map is quite similar to Sandblast, which is to say it's a linear series of routes that split off and rejoin the main path. I'm mixing things up by making it attack/defend (the objective is behind the second team's spawn points), and by giving both sides reason to split their forces up: the comms relay in the centre will give the attackers some sort of advantage, so they'll want to hold on to it while the defenders will want to attack it. It should lead to some back-and-forth instead of the simple head on collision in Sandblast/Test Map.

This map is four player too, so maybe we'll see some cool joint tactics to punch through on one side while your teammate defends the other.

[nathaniak]

Latest version crashes when you play free for all calderis refinary with nids - have not tried other nid settings

[Artfunkel]

Thanks. In what way does it crash, and when? I've not looked at FFA yet but I'll be keeping an eye out for this problem when I do.

[nathaniak]

Well, when you choose your units, it freezes immediatly. I have suspisions it's when you mouse over T1

[Honour]

Hi,

Is this mod eventually going to be something like a table top setup??

and I cant wait to test it, downloading it now

[Artfunkel]

I don't intend to drastically rebalance anything or to make it turn-based, if that's what you mean.

[Darkbladecr]

very nice idea! This would be the real RTS

[Artfunkel]

Here it is, 0.2 beta 1! Check the original post for all the details. It's a pretty meaty changelog if I do say so myself.



Dem boyz is drivin' on thin air!

[sporty]

Loving the concept, and its execution is pretty impressive. Nice job! Was missing the heroes during a first quick play, are you sure you can't fit them back in?

For regular players, it's not easy getting used to those reduced ranges. The 4p attack/defend scenario is a cool idea and mixes things up, got a CTD though the first time I tried it.


If you have need of additional mapping, I'd gladly be of help. Only reference I have is this map, I'm not used to the different gameplay and its implications on mapping, and I can't craft those neat SCAR triggers. Should this be sufficient for your needs, contact me with some details, definitely got some concepts for small-scale maps

[Artfunkel]

Thanks! I'd actually quite like to have a map with a skirmish layout and multiple victory points, because that provides more ground than players can cover and forces you to make difficult decisions about where to send your forces. What do you have in mind?

[Artfunkel]

There is now a Steam group for the mod. Join it and I'll start scheduling some games.

[Artfunkel]

With a bit of help from Santos, I've made an awesome new frontend:



In other news, I now suspect that the desync errors mentioned in Known Issues were specific to Boneless, who I was playing against at the time. Unfortunately he's not been around and nobody else seems to want to help! If you'd like to play a few games and sort this out, join the Steam group and either contact me directly or leave a comment.

[Calgar]

that front looks cool, nice one

[Artfunkel]

Thanks...but it's not as cool as this!



This is going to be the mod's icon (with the sky removed of course).

[Calgar]

that is cool, which game will this be out for? normal dow2 or cr>

[Artfunkel]

Both. There's no difference between the two except that you can't play as Chaos without CR.

[Calgar]

cool, and i must say this looks good and i'll give it a go when i've got collage work out of the way

[Artfunkel]

0.2b3 is out and fixes the desync error! Mucho thanks to thecannibalpenguin for helping me straighten that little bugger out.

Here's the new mod logo you'll see in this release:

[highonsinz]

Love the mod, would love to see a possibility for High Resources to say - double the base resources. Also that CTD related to the AI units at begining of a game is very annoying and I would love to see it fixed, if possible.

[Artfunkel]

You'll be pleased with 0.2b4 then, because it contains your suggestion and fixes that crash bug! It was happening whenever Tankbustas were built, and was caused by their abilities being listed in the wrong order. I didn't even know that the order made any difference before today...

[Wafflecopter]

Getting an error with 0.2b4

MSVCR100.dll is missing from my computer, is the error message im getting when running the mod via the application

[Artfunkel]

I can't believe that. The program is literally three lines long, why does it need the VS2010 runtime? :x