Today I recorded 3 pre-alpha games of Strike Tactics. The game is still in a very rough, early-draft state, so if there's something you don't like or something you feel is missing, I wouldn't be worried - there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before the game nears a finished state.

In this first video, I play a medium AI in a desert map called "Oasis."

I win the game by amassing heavy ground units (silencer, demolishers and gladiators). As you might be able to tell from the vid, there are some kinks that need to be worked out. The pathfinding, in particular. I recently redid the pathfinding system. I had a perfect system before, one in which units would never bang into each other, but it had a major flaw - it was heavily grid-based, which gave ground movement a very stiff, robotic appearance (great for mechs, horrible for hover vehicles). This new pathfinding you see in the video does not have that problem - units can move off the grid. But the drawback is that it's a lot harder to prevent collisions. I know I can get this new system working so that units never collide, but it's going to take some time. Problems like these could easily be solved with brute-force (a true physics collision system, in which positions are constantly checked and compared on every frame), but in the browser, I don't have that luxury - not enough CPU power with so many game objects. As such, all ground collision needs to be solved algorithmically, with something smarter than a traditional, brute force collision detection system.

In this next video played on a volcanic map called "Eruption," the AI sort of got me pinned down by constantly bombarding my base with bombers - to such an extent that I couldn't build more silos to increase my population cap. For an unknown reason, the medium and hard AI both seem to favor producing bombers - a bug I haven't quite worked out, or even had time to look into.

Lucky for me, the Battleship is extremely overpowered right now so pooling all your resources into producing them is an easy win. You can see the power of the battleships in this video - I roll through the enemy AIs base in less than a minute. In the final game, battleships will certainly be powerful but by no means this powerful! I also show off some peregrines which are aces of the sky type units with air to ground homing missiles and machine guns for air to air.

Air units are difficult to control now, because they are constantly moving and moving fast. I plan to combat this issue by causing them to land after being in the air for a certain period of time. That way, it will be easier to select them. I also might attempt air unit formations someday which is something never really seen in an RTS. The math will be difficult buy I already have some idea of how I can accomplish it.

This final video is me getting absolutely destroyed in the early game by bombers at the control of a hard AI. Like I said, the hard AI sure loves those bombers. Enjoy!