Achron - OMG My head just exploded!

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

So I just discovered this mind-bending indie game called Achron. What is Achron you ask? Why, Achron is this. A "Meta-time strategy" game, aka, an RTS with real, in-game, adaptive time travel gameplay. And it is mind blowingly awesome.

As those videos show, you can control your forces in multpile time periods, issuing commands to forces in the past or future, going back in time and correcting mistakes and altering strategies in order to overcome your foes, sending units back in time to help buff your armies up and even create paradoxes. You can travel to the future to scout or gain knowledge of an impending attack, or even set off bombs that send everything caught in the blast to the future, buying you time to prepare a defence, etc.

The game is still in Alpha, but you can preorder it and download the demo now and it's expected for release some time early next year and is without doubt the most ingenius take on the RTS genre I've ever seen. I look forward to its arrival, so should all of you.

[Bells]

Ok, yeah, this is a VERY clever concept to do a thing i haven't seen in a LONG time... to give a fresh twist to the RTS genre. Kudos indeed!

Actually i would not be surprised if a larger company decided to get hold of this concept, a la what happen to portal

[Viridis]

Oh yes. I've had my eye on this game's development for a long time. I could see two plays doing some amazingly underhanded things through the timestream if they can wrap their brians around it.

The game is still in Alpha, but you can preorder it and download the demo now and it's expected for release some time early next year and is without doubt the most ingenius take on the RTS genre I've ever seen. I look forward to its arrival, so should all of you.

They note that the money from the preorder goes straight to the game's development, by the way. It's an interesting funding model where buying a game helps them make it.

[krogothwolf]

It's pretty much a donation with the promise of something in return at a later date. It's a good way to do it, if I had the money I would pop one down but I'm broke right now.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by Viridis

Oh yes. I've had my eye on this game's development for a long time. I could see two plays doing some amazingly underhanded things through the timestream if they can wrap their brians around it.

I don't think that's fair to Brian. Nobody deserves being wrapped around anything. But yes, the possibilities for tactical depth are incredible, even with just basic troop selection/creation processes, and they can always add more stuff in later to expand on the core gameplay.

Originally Posted by krogothwolf

It's pretty much a donation with the promise of something in return at a later date. It's a good way to do it, if I had the money I would pop one down but I'm broke right now.

I'd slap that money down right now just for the demo if I could, but by the looks of the specs my pc won't run this at all. However I feel this game may actually be worth investing in a long overdue upgrade of my system.

Long have I dreamed of a game that allowed for such manipulation of time travel to affect the core gameplay, this game finally answers that dream. I already have an innate understanding of temporal mechanics that allows me to understand complex paradoxes in books/films/tv shows that leave other people utterly perplexed, now I can put that skill to good use for once!

[Doc ock rokc]

They really thought all this through. Just watching the Grandfather Paradox video makes me Super excited about this game. I have always Loved this kind of concept and have been thinking of ways it could be done in games. These guys Rocked it. I hope they can make it big

[krogothwolf]

Well, if they can get it noticed or even on Steam, it would go a long ways in helping make it for them. The game looks amazing and fun. I'd love to toss the money down right now but StarCraft 2 took my purchase away for this month and august(damn wife limiting me!)

[The Argent Lord]

Okay, so does anyone actually have the demo? If so, what happens if you chronoport a unit that was destroyed in the past before the time wave reaches the present?

[Jagos]

Paradoxes can exist, but since the window of time is limited (e.g., an 8 minute window) all events eventually fall off. A paradox will oscillate between its different states until one of the states reaches the edge of the time window, leaving the players locked into one of the two states. Example: in the case of the grandfather paradox (where you use a factory to build a tank, have the tank time travel to before it was built, and then use it to destroy the factory) you will play with the paradox until it 'falls off' the time window, at which point there is a 50/50 chance of either the tank lives and the factory is destroyed (because the tank destroyed the factory), or the factory remains and the tank goes back in time and is lost. All paradoxes are nicely resolved with time.

This may take a while for me to wrap my head around, but damn this seems like an awesome RTS.

Starcraft be damned, I may have a new favorite.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by The Argent Lord

Okay, so does anyone actually have the demo? If so, what happens if you chronoport a unit that was destroyed in the past before the time wave reaches the present?

If you do that then the unit survives, because you essentially skip over the changes propogated by the time wave. However the next time wave will also need to be skipped, and the next, and the next and so on, unless you use that unit to go and help itself survive in the past.

Although that's where the real messy stuff begins. I've heard of cases where entire armies have become unstable because people have sent them back in time once, used them to reinforce themselves in the past, then before they travel into the past, they've sent them back again to further reinforce themselves. The problem is though, that because you're changing the battle, and who attacks who and what units are destroyed, as each timewave propogates forward it continues to change the timeline.

Say for instance you do the double reinforcement thing above to fight a battle in the past, only in order to make things better for yourself you move the originals away from the attack in order to keep them alive, but because you've moved them away they don't attack the enemy but the enemy continues to attack them, but is then destroyed by one of the units future selves. The timewave would propogate that effect forward and now when the reinforcements arrive, some of them have more damage, because their past self got damaged more in the past because you changed events. The batle replays with this extra damage only this time, some more of your future reinforments are destroyed because of this extra damage, so when the next timewave hits it popogates that forward and the battle replays again, only this time you have fewer reinforcements because they got destroyed before they could travel back again. Eventually as more and more timewaves pass by the entropy for your army increases and could eventually undo everything you just did, while meanwhile your forces in the future become unstable and start vanishing from history. The only way to save them is either to change events in the past, or start chronoporting over each timewave to keep them existing.

And this of course doesn't take into account what the enemy might do to try and change history in his favour too.