Supply Warehouses and Supply Docks in Skirmish, Why are players given a mere supply warehouse in their base? Options

[Jakato]

Hey everyone,

If the devs are reading this, this mod blew my mind when I found it. Especially since there were weapons that reminded me of weapons (Grand Slam - "earthquake bomb" and Tremor AGAS - "Gatling Artillery") I dreamed up as a kid. I'm glad to have got to play this mod. Especially since it made a recent tough time much better.

Onto business, I've wondered why the guidelines for custom maps say "Has to meet the ROTR style supply placement. (1 supply warehouse / base area, docks and crates outside)". When I make custom skirmish/PvE maps (for personal use) I tend to have one supply dock/base and put warehouses outside the bases. I didn't know about the fact player bases should have supply warehouses.

Is it just for PvP sake that players are meant to get supply warehouses instead of supply docks? For skirmish purposes having a dock with lots of supplies seems better, especially if you like to turtle like I do. Turtling helps in skirmish when the AI swarms you along a few main, predictable attack paths. You have a reliable source of income for a while and so if you can't secure the supplies outside your base you still have a decent chance of surviving.

For PvP I can see turtling maybe being less viable and also you probably want to encourage players to go out there and seize critical map areas. I guess for PvP if players were meant to stay in their corners and harvest a huge pile of supplies there may as well just be a single map with no tech buildings or supplies outside the bases.

But that being said, for skirmish I think the big supply dock is fine. It makes it fun (for me at least) but maybe there is some subtle thing about RotR gameplay that I've been missing out on.

I was ready to share some maps I made for fun and then that rule about supplies made me stop dead in my tracks. I was curious as to what bad design decision I'd made with my maps.

[Jakato]

Well I guess my maps will have to stay away from the cool-kids table until I find the willpower to replay ~20 maps with the "proper" resource setup.

Thank you for that explanation Mizo. It helped me understand why the AI randomly started taking resources from my supply depots when I went up to medium (called "hard" in game) difficulty. I thought it was the AI being greedy and going for as many "protected by allies" resources as possible. Obviously I didn't think to compare my maps to ROTR maps to see what the AI did.

Ultimately I don't think this "resource grabbing" behavior is much of a problem, but perhaps there is an "IKEA Effect" in play which biases me to ignore the AI's greed for my supply depot just because it's my map.