You Must Construct Additional.. mod for OpenRA

You Must Construct Additional... (YMCA) was created to make mass battles great again. If you have played titles like Age of Empires II, Supreme Commander or Rusted Warfare, these games sometimes end up in games where two teams just keep pumping masses of units into each other. We think this meat grinder party is awesome and desirable, so we have created a game that aims to provide this experience reliably. If you look at those great games, the mass battles unfortunately only happen occassionaly, in AoE2 it is because most games end in Castle Age, when knights give one side a too big advantage because eco raids were succesful, but once it goes into the late game, it is all about just pumping more and more units from many production facilities into the enemy, in this mode it is important to keep looking at the enemy unit composition and constantly adapt. In Supreme Commander these mass battles are in principle core of the game play, but the exponential growing economy is very fragile, units are built quite slow, so either rushes end the game very fast or a player outgrows the other, so that only a few games happen to have a balance of forces supplying the meat grinder. Rusted Warfare does a better job at this, but unfortunately the economic balance has been changed a couple of years ago, so that everything got slower and early game rushes became stronger. Still it is a good game if you are looking for mass battles.

Another inspiration for this mod was Combined Arms, another OpenRA mod, which was not only an inspiration, but even from which this mod was forked. It is a testament of what is possible with the Command & Conquer universe and we highly encourage you to play it, even though it is very unlikely you don't know it yet ;-)

Find other players on our Discord:
Discord.gg

So let's have a look at the core concepts of YMCA:
1. This game focuses more on strategic decisions, mostly how to scale up your economy and your unit composition. Having the right mix of units is more important than micro around the enemy units.

2. Strong Rock-Paper-Scissor cycles. Strategy games without this concept are very rare, but they differ a lot regarding the strength of this concept. Strength means how hard units counter each other. For example in games like Starcraft, units do not counter each other strongly. You can still win with a certain unit type against it's counter if your micro management is good and your opponent is not playing attention. This means depending on the situation it is not clear if Zealots will beat Siege Tanks or vice versa. In Command & Conquer it does not really matter how you use Conscripts against Tanya. Strong Rock-Paper-Scissor cycles shift the importance of micro management away in favor of strategical decisions mostly unit composition.

3. Linear economic scaling. If you have 10 war factories those will produce 2 times faster than 5 war factories. Usually this is the faster version. I have never seen a super linear scaling, the only elements activating super linear scaling are upgrades in games, that make farmers faster, chop more wood etc. But those effects are then counter acted by the necessity of providing housing and such, which is an element of sub-linear scaling. Warcraft III has the most advanced concept of sub-linear scaling with the upkeep system that directly reduces your income depending on your army size. Early Command & Conquer games had sub-linear scaling by having 4 war factories only produce twice as fast as 1. We pick linear scaling in order to allow to arrive fast at mass battles. Also we allow for linear building production scaling, so building more construction yards is crucial in expanding bases quickly.

4. Complex armor and weapon system. Beside the usual armor classes like infantry, light and heavy, there is also reflector armor and the point defense laser in addition. The latter is not a class, but it intercepts incoming projectiles, which means it counters missiles and cannon shells. A tank that is susceptible to those projectiles becomes a counter to those once upgraded with point defense laser. This system does not provide any help against energy weapons (Tesla, Laser, Prism), combined with the higher cost the upgrade makes a tank weak against energy weapons. Energy weapons in contrast are weak against reflector armor, which is weak against projectile weapons.