5punk

Home page: http://achrongame.com/site/index.php

Preorder gives you instant access to single/multiplayer beta.

The game is ugly (and I mean compared-to-this-Doom-looks-fucking-awesome-ugly), but absolutely and utterly chaotic.

Basically, along with the usual RTS elements, you have the ability to jump around in time (last 4 minutes or next 1 minute) doing things, and for a price you can also warp units back or forward in time.

The game cleverly solves paradoxes by implementing time waves which hit every 45 seconds. A time wave picks up any change to the past and modifies the present accordingly when it hits. Time waves move forward in time faster than present - if you do something 2 minutes ago, you'll have to wait for the first time wave that passed whatever you were doing to hit to see the changes to the present. You can have your base wiped out in the present, then four minutes later overwhelm the very same army in the very same base. The strategies are however not unlimited, since there is a chronoenergy thing, which recharges faster the closer you are to present and depletes more per action the further away you are from present.

Timewaves handle paradoxes cleverly: If you create a mech, timewarp back into the past and destroy the factory that created it, the first time wave will render the mech non-existent, which in turn makes the factory survive. Since the factory survived, the mech is created, and the next timewave will erase the factory, since the mech destroyed it, but the mech survives. This will oscillate between the two states until the paradox event falls off the timeline, and therefore isn't passed by time waves anymore. Causing a well-timed paradox can turn a game around.

There are GRAPHS! involved in the game, you can see damage taken, damage dealt, units trained, resources and time warps at any given point in the last 4 and the next 1 minute. The graph changes in time as timewaves move past them - and as timewaves move past present, in the future you can see the projected playout of events if noone did anything else.

The game also records your units' actions - if you move back to the past, any command you give at a given point in time will be executed, regardless if the unit was disturbed by untimely (haha.) events. You can, however, undo any of your units' actions that it would do in the selected timeframe.

An interesting mechanic is that I noticed that drag-selecting a group of units is recorded as selecting every unit in that area at a given point in time and subsequently giving a command to these unit gives a command to every unit in that area at that given point of time - which means if you have four mechs standing in your base and you drag-select the area in which they stand, then you order them to move to the enemy base, and then 30 seconds later a time wave hits which causes a fifth mech to be standing in the very same area (which you obviously couldn't select in your previous present because it wasn't there), every command you issued to the first four mechs will be issued and played out for the fifth mech - and that fifth one will be halfway across the map with the other four as well after the time wave.

TL;DR: Game is ugly, but the time manipulation element is fantastic and I want it to have my babies.

Yes, it's absolutely confusing and unsciency but it could certainly be fun in a 5punky context.

Don't ask S2B about it.

Ah, this rings a bell.
Yes, RPS previewed it a while back. I remember watching the video and my brain dribbling out of my ear.

Baliame wrote:Preorder gives you instant access to single/multiplayer beta.

O RLY? I was put off getting it last night as the website implied that multiplayer wasn't working yet. Has it been put in and the website just not updated? Because if it has, I'm buying the shit out of this game.

EDIT: Looking at the forum shows that there is indeed multiplayer. Shit is being bought.

EDIT 2: Dribble.

I found C&C confusing. I think this would make my brain explode.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Don't ask S2B about it.

pffffft, i make sense to myself and thats what matters....

i think im going to have to get this later if anyone will be up for a game

shot2bits wrote:
pffffft, i make sense to myself and thats what matters....

i think im going to have to get this later if anyone will be up for a game

I am very much up for a game. Lets schedule one for yesterday.

i want to see if this game can be broken by a coordinated paradox, by going back to kill a unit, getting someone to come kill your unit that killed the unit, and then you sending something back to kill theirs, rinse repeat for as long as you can before it gets too far into the past and watch tha game spazz out as it tries to figure out which units are supposed to be alive and which arent.

shot2bits wrote:i want to see if this game can be broken by a coordinated paradox, by going back to kill a unit, getting someone to come kill your unit that killed the unit, and then you sending something back to kill theirs, rinse repeat for as long as you can before it gets too far into the past and watch tha game spazz out as it tries to figure out which units are supposed to be alive and which arent.

From what I can tell from the videos, the game will handle this situation far better than our tiny little minds.

Joose wrote:
From what I can tell from the videos, the game will handle this situation far better than our tiny little minds.

im not so sure, i like to think it would happen in realtime in life so the cycle would go on and whoever takes the last strike would come out ontop.

but since this adds the time waves the timing off your attacks seems to become a new factor that will vary the outcome in some way.

there are various ways you could make the situation more complex by doing things like building units from multiple factories, and then sending them to destroy the same enemy unit, so if the enemy strikes back by going back and destroying one of the factories but misses the other(s) then it will be forced to figure out whether the unit that will remain would have killed the enemy unit or been destroyed itself, which should mean it has to replay the battle without the extra unit that would have stopped existing. to make the situation further interesting if your unit ended up destroyed from the battle is if you went back to destroy the factory that made the unit that has just destroyed you. now this could be simply resolved by you having lost one unit and factory and destroying one unit. but a factor i dont see the game taking into consideration that is if the factory is gone then the original fight couldnt have taken place as that unit would never have been made, but if that fight never happened, then that player would never have had to send that unit back to destroy the factory so you should come out on top without losing anything but i doubt it would cancel the players moves in that kind of situation. and if it did then that player could just do it again to swing it back in their favour

shot2bits wrote:werds

Unfortunately, paradoxes like this are something that the devs specifically cover in one of the videos. Trust me, they have it covered. Its kinda complicated, but basically the way it works is that every time a wave passes, the situation flip-flops from one outcome to the next, until eventually all the options have fallen off the end of the timeline and you are left with just one.

To take the simple example they have in the video: make a mech, go back in time, blow up the factory that made the mech. As the time waves pass it will keep flipping from the mech surviving to the factory surviving and back again. Eventually, the changes will fall off the end of the timeline and you will have either the mech or the factory survive. If you add more factors and more time jumps in, all that will happen is it will flip between more than two different states.

You cant just keep going back and buggering it up more though, due to the time-energy thing.

thats partly the point i was getting at, the game handles it in a way that appears to just give it a random outcome at the end of it all. or it could be that you can wrangle things to fall off the timeline in an order that works in your favour. if its the latter thats fine and how i expected it to be its just hard to tell without having played it yet

it would just seem a bit annoying if you spend ages planning out some crazy scheme where logic dictates you should come out on top to have it all work out in the other persons favour because the computer essentially flipped a coin x amount of times. im not saying it couldnt be hilarious, but i would still find it frustrating

oh and whether it takes causality far enough so that say, your oponent builds a factory in retaliation to something you have, if in the past that something is destroyed, then if the sole motive of your opponent building that factory was in retaliation to that, then really the factory should never get build, but the computer has no way of knowing the reasons behind the things people do so the extend of the change is limited.

now obviously if the game did somehow do this, then theres no way they can repress the players memory of the event so they can just build it anyway

shot2bits wrote:thats partly the point i was getting at, the game handles it in a way that appears to just give it a random outcome at the end of it all. or it could be that you can wrangle things to fall off the timeline in an order that works in your favour. if its the latter thats fine and how i expected it to be its just hard to tell without having played it yet

it would just seem a bit annoying if you spend ages planning out some crazy scheme where logic dictates you should come out on top to have it all work out in the other persons favour because the computer essentially flipped a coin x amount of times. im not saying it couldnt be hilarious, but i would still find it frustrating

Nope, not random. For want of a less brainaching way of saying it, the changes fall off the timeline after a set amount of time. So yeah, you can time things so that stuff falls off the timeline in the right order to best serve you. Im betting thats going to be bloody difficult to pull off though. Whilst you are fiddling around perfectly aligning the timeline to your advantage, you opponent could use his brainpower to just beat the shit out of you with traditional RTS tactics.

oh and whether it takes causality far enough so that say, your oponent builds a factory in retaliation to something you have, if in the past that something is destroyed, then if the sole motive of your opponent building that factory was in retaliation to that, then really the factory should never get build, but the computer has no way of knowing the reasons behind the things people do so the extend of the change is limited.

now obviously if the game did somehow do this, then theres no way they can repress the players memory of the event so they can just build it anyway

Yeah, but in your example a decent player would go back and cancel the order to make the factory, as it would now be unnecassary. Unless of course, the factory was needed to make the units that destroyed the units that made the factory necassary in the first place. But then we are back into falling off the timeline territory.

Yeah, but in your example a decent player would go back and cancel the order to make the factory, as it would now be unnecassary. Unless of course, the factory was needed to make the units that destroyed the units that made the factory necassary in the first place. But then we are back into falling off the timeline territory.

yeah i meant it so that the factory would be unnecassary. and yes you could go back and cancel it if you didnt find another use for it. but im saying that they shouldnt have to go back and cancel it because the reason for it being built never existed IT should never have existed, and theres no way for the computer to know the motivation behind what they do

You can only go back 4 minutes and it's subject to diminishing returns cos of the special time goo, so I doubt there'll be much room for such brain 'sploding tactics and I imagine the timeline won't be that long either, or the CPU would simply grind to a halt keeping track of it all. The going forward in time would be a total brain fuck though. Go forward one minute, plonk nuke, opponent parks in a clear area...nuke materialises and assplode army.

just played a few games with bali and after some hilarious confusion as to how we build stuff and generally what the fuck was going on it seems to be quite good, but would definately be better with more people.

theres one map i rather enjoyed that only gives each player 1 unit but is covered in teleporters and chronoporters (the thing that lets you send units to the past) which horses players to chase each others mechs around in the past trying to clone them at the right time to get the upper hand. in the end of our game baliame had 1 unit left for a while and all of my shit was dead, but aparantly i gang raped him just before he blew up all my stuff for the what mustve been the 10th time and aparantly it turned out i won