Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, you cannot do things indefinetly. See, you can only send units a limited amount of time back. And giving orders out of present time costs chronoenergy. You could, in theory, keep building a lot of units and keep sending them back, but wouldn't your enemy kill you in the present while you try to off him in the past? You should also remember that you can't cause a paradox. If you chronostack the same units multiple times, you'll have a very limited timeframe to use them in. So, say you chronoported your present units to 10 minutes back, and then went back 1 minute and ported the same units 9 minutes back. When the next timewave hits the present, your extra tanks will vanish, because the tanks from the present didn't exist where they had to be for the tanks from 1 minute ago to be chronoported.

I do know there will be one VERY interesting thing about this game. Watching the replay afterwards. I mean, game starts, immediately fifty tanks sprout from out of nowhere, five seconds later an armada of helicopters rains death on everything while your workers hastily construct the base that will have to churn out these tanks twenty minutes from now.

As for the perpetual paradoxes...  you know about the universe's failsafe, right? Also, let's put some thought into the problem. Ten tanks are created in 5 minutes and exist for 10 minutes. These tanks then chronoport back twice by 5 minutes, creating an army of 30 tanks at -10 minutes. This army then chronoports forward 15 minutes and dies in a glorious battle. The problem? You have a 5-minute window to use the extra 20 tanks. With the time-travel being limited by plus/minus 15 minutes, there's only so much stuff you can do. And all it would take for the enemy to foil you is a bomber raid on your factory at -15 minutes.

[Servant Corps]

Sean: Remember. I believe time travel cannot change history. I'm tired of arguing, but that's how it goes.

But if I make a time travel game, I'm going to allow for lots and lots of paradoxes. Why not? It'd be funny.

[ToonyMan]

This looks like a damn good game to play drunk.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Sean: Remember. I believe time travel cannot change history. I'm tired of arguing, but that's how it goes.

But if I make a time travel game, I'm going to allow for lots and lots of paradoxes. Why not? It'd be funny.

Because it'd break the balance. And I was speaking of the mechanics for the game, not real world. You can read my insights on real-world time travel earlier in the thread.
Paradoxes would create imbalance. Why? Well, for one because rushing become OH GOD SO WORSE. It's one thing if you rush with the tanks you make, but how about an exponentially rising number of units? And in any case, for now I believe the creators have all the bases covered. They should start betatesting sometime this year, so we'll hear some more insightful comments on the game then.

[SHAD0Wdump]

How about a point system,in where if you create a paradox you lose points,could create a interesting choice between whether to play it by the book or bend the laws of reality to win.

[Karlito]

If you could control time, I think the least of your worries would be trying to manage an army.

The storyline involves space aliens.  The motives of space aliens can't be questioned.

[Servant Corps]

Okay, a video has been released showcasing a paradox. Paradoxes are allowed, but you have to time it effectively for it to work.

The storyline involves space aliens.  The motives of space aliens can't be questioned.

How do we know they are aliens? For all we know, they could very well be the fleet deployed by Earth to destroy the 'alien threat'.

EDIT: Also, there does seem to be another paradox you could cause as well...

[Karlito]

Then, one of the border colonies on the far edge of the human colonies winked out. Then another. And another. Advance scouts were sent ahead and returned hastily-taken images of an enormous fleet, horribly alien, destroying an entire colony world.

The FAQ also mentions the chronobomb, which sends your opponents buildings to the future. It says that it will be possessed by one of the alien races, which seems to imply that there will be more than one species of alien.

[Servant Corps]

Oh.

I really would have liked it if a huge human military force was formed in order to combat the very human military force invading humanity, but oh well...

[Sowelu]

Okay, a video has been released showcasing a paradox. Paradoxes are allowed, but you have to time it effectively for it to work.

o_o

awesome

[RAM]

I can't see why you can't go back and kill you own ancestor...

Your ancestor causes you to exist, you go back in time, kill your ancestor, and cease to exist, but continue to 'have existed' for the duration prior to ceasing to exist. The new timeline becomes: ancestor exists, timetraveller appears and kills ancestor then ceases to exist, everyone looks around and says, "oh, right, another temporal suicide" and goes on their merry way. It is a paradox, but the universe can still function...

You go back and kill your ancestor, you spend some time there, and go on existing just fine, you then go to the future, but nobody knows who you are, you have no history, and the world has changed as a result of your ancestor dying. Someone notices you, checks your genes for links to temporally suspicious deaths and you are put on trial for murder... This has the bonus of not having any spontaneous vanishings...

You go back in time and kill your ancestor, you return to your own time and nothing changed, you go back in time and kill your ancestor again, because it was fun the last time. You then proceed to open a chain of entertainment venues where people go back in time and take advantage of the complete lack of sustained consequences... Combined with the multiple parallel universes theory this gets even more disturbing...

Just because you haven't found a paradox yet, doesn't mean it isn't out there...


At this point I would be seriously cautious about getting my hopes up, there is an absolutely phenomenal capacity for this to be dumbed down...

[Servant Corps]

RAM: I think it already is dumbed down, at least from how I would see it. I think it won't change it from here. It's simplifed and understandable.

And the main reason the grandfather paradox cannot occur is because it is a paradox. It cannot logically happen. You cannot kill your grandfather because then you would not exist. Paradoxes, by definition, cannot happen. Physicists did experiments with billard balls, and the only logical consisent way they would see this happening is if they shoot a billbard ball into a hole, travelling back in time to hit the same ball, which would send that ball right into said hole.

They showed this on NOVA for crying out loud.

But I don't want to get in this argument again, because as one person pointed out, time travel isn't real.

[ductape]

I HAVE MASTERED TIME TRAVEL!!!

yes, that's right, I travel in time. I figured it out a while ago. It's really very easy in fact.

Just one catch so far...

I have only figured out how to go forward into the future.

[Karlito]

A subtle point about time travel is that alliances between players don't necessarily need to be permanent. We currently have a mode in Achron where players can create and break alliances during the game. Say John and Greg are playing against several other players. Five minutes into the game John and Greg form an alliance so that their units do not attack one another (unless explicitly told to). At nine minutes, Greg has been doing much better than John, but only because John protected Greg's units from an opponent's massive attack. Another attack comes in and Greg moves his units out of the way such that John's forces are weakened even further. Immediately afterward, Greg breaks the alliance. John feels that his alliance with Greg was a bad deal, goes back to the five minute mark, and undoes his original alliance with Greg. Now the entire timeline will change accordingly, with John and Greg having been opponents for the whole game, both scrambling to change the timeline in their favor.

We'll need to wait until we have a large pool of playtesters before we decide whether dynamic alliances will be a default multiplayer option. But the option is definitely there.

I like this.  I don't know of any other game that features dynamic alliance making.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Uh, actually most games had dynamic alliances, except in this game they take on a new shine since you can undo the alliance in the past and your forces would have been battling the entire time instead of helping each other.