The Spread of Tiberium thread

[Chimas]

Hello folks,

 

I created a mini-map to understand better the spread of Tiberium, in order to comprehend how to project the amount of tiberium for a planned mission.

I attached the files, so you can test it and confirm, correct or add ideas to the topic.

I'm also studying this to make a natural look for the Tiberium fields, with organic growth.

 

 

Some notes:

- The sample provided does not have a split, but it's generating seeds;

 

- In longer SP games, I remember to have the impression of general moments of abundance and general moments of scarceness;

 

- T1 is the spore stage and T12 is the "plant" stage. Plant stage is not the full stage;

 

- T1 to T12 seems to be related to the growth speed of a seed, also the total capacity for that seed and by last the capacity to generate seeds in the nearby cells.

In this sense, T1 would have a small capacity and would take a lot of time to reach its total potential;

 

- Warning: growth speed and seed generation are visual, meanwhile total capacity is speculative;

 

- In the beginning of the game, it seems to have a random function deploying the Tiberium, basing the parameters in the capacity of the seed in the cell. That's why you might have T12 in different stages in the beginning of the game. Yet, I haven't noted any T12 in the later stages in the beginning of the sample provided (the file attached), but I have seen it full in many missions, so the random funtion might regard the density in the nearby cells to provide a T12 at its full stage at the beginning;

 

- Harvester: If I am not wrong, a full harvester can hold 700 credits in its silo. It also has 7 boxes to give the idea of a partial load. But, it appears that these boxes are not filled in a uniform rate (7 x 100 or n*100). It's more likely to be similar to 140-n*10. I was able to harvest up to 150 credits in the first box of the harvester;

 

- It would be interesting to create a map with symmetric fields and load different harvesters with 6 and 7 boxes to see if the harvester 6 is more optimized than the harvester 7, once it won't harvest the next cell and allow the plant to grow full and/or generate more seeds and these sort of ideas.

 

Most of the above are comments, not findings. I'd prefer more people to have a look before stating anything.

 

If you're in this forum often, have a try in the map provided and give some feedback.

Greetings!

SCG75EA.zip

[Messiah]

Seems TD uses the same logic to randomize the tiberium fields like RA1, so it should be completely irrelevant if you place TI1 or TI12.

 

Also a single field will have the first stage in every case and you'll get later patch stages when you place other patches next to a patch.

 

Ran game for hours now:  I recognized that fields occupied by infantry (and probably units too) aren't covered with tiberium.

[Nyerguds]

Goatmessiah: Actually, from experience I know that putting a large field of nothing but TI01 will give you a whole field of barely grown pods at mission start, whereas a field of TI12 will give you a field of fully grown crystals, with less grown tiberium at the edges.

 

So it seems that tiberium in C&C1 uses a combination of RA proximity-to-other-resource-cells logic, and a resource weight for each of the 12 types, which is a pity since placing a field of only TI12 makes it very monotonous since all of the placed cells will use the same tiberium graphics. So it's best to randomize a little between the higher values in the middle of a field.

 

- T1 to T12 seems to be related to the growth speed of a seed, also the total capacity for that seed and by last the capacity to generate seeds in the nearby cells.

In this sense, T1 would have a small capacity and would take a lot of time to reach its total potential;

This is wrong, by the way. TI01 to TI12 are simply 12 different graphics sets for tiberium. Yes, as I said, it applies this as growth density at mission start, but besides that, all of the 12 types have 12 stages of growth, and all of them are perfectly equivalent and will grow to full density.

[peterthepigeon]

A harvester holds 28 bails of tiberium.  Each bail for the human player is worth 25 credits whereas for the computer it is worth 708 credits.