Iron Grip: The Oppression mod

Mandarax

Hey all, newbie here! I'm a developer for the Half Life 2 total conversion called Iron Grip: The Oppression, and we're looking for new players and forumgoers so we can get some better feedback. I personally do design, lore, PR, and all the sound effects and such. Anyways, a little info...

Iron Grip: The Oppression is a TC for HL2 that utilizes a new form of cross-genre gameplay that, as far as we've found, has never been tried before. Whereas mods like Natural Selection and Empires pit two structurally (if not stylistically) similar sides against each other, Iron Grip places a completely first-person side against a completely RTS side in a detailed and engrossing almost steampunk or dieselpunk alternate universe.

The setting is primarily set in the post-conquest territory of Kathos, which has been invaded and occupied by the forces of the Rahmos Empire. Small bands of loosely organized Resistance guerrillas do whatever they can to loosen the Rahmos military and cultural stranglehold on their homelands. These uprisings can take place in many places, including cities, seaports, the open countryside, and even on a Rahmos military train.

I suppose what really makes the game cool for me personally is how Iron Grip takes everything I like about multiplayer games: the camaraderie, the struggle against intelligent enemies, the unpredictability, and it merges these with what can make singeplayer missions so fun: huge numbers of enemy troops and tanks to mow down! When a mere four Resistance can be faced with as many as 32 Rahmos conscripts, you've got the perfect recipe for a maniacal-laughter-inducing slaughterfest, and nothing beats a slaughterfest you share with friends!

You can download it from our website at www.irongrip.net as well as ModDB and several other places. You can also check out our ever-growing body of world history and technical development as we build a comprehensive universe that'll be interesting to keep playing in. Give it a try, sign up on the forums, tell us what you think! We're always looking for more ways to improve!

Evil Multifarious

When we tried it at a LAN I was very excited, but it was unplayably buggy.

Echo

First one to yell "sitewhore" gets slapped.

Zombiemambo

Mandarax

Yeah, I figured I'd get that sort of response, but hey, better to try and fail than never try at all :P As for the LAN experience, we totally boned our first release, and our second still wasn't that stable, but now that we're up to beta 1.32 it runs a heck of a lot better. In a stress test we did about two weeks ago, we had six Resistance and a full RTS army, and the server processor only averaged about 3-5% usage, with spikes up to a mere 7%. We're currently reworking our network code as well, so what little lag there is left should be solved next time we release.

Colt

Ya know, for some reason I thought this was for UT2004, but I may try it now seeing otherwise.

Echo

Zombiemambo wrote: »

omgslap

Right click > Save as

Yeah, I'm interested in trying this out.

Heir

Wait wait, so let me get this right.

One side, as in a team is fps players, and the other side is an rts player(s)?

Interesting.

Deswa

If I read it right, one person controls the RTS. I am up for some in a little bit.

Monoxide

I'll bite, let's try it.

Deswa

Get in Vent?

Archonex

I can't do it right now. But i'll definitely be in on this later on tonight. I remember reading about this mod in a magazine (PC Gamer?) and being extremely intrigued by it.

Suriko

This was awesomely fun. Problem is, as the game went on it got more and more laggy, making the end-game more torturous than fun.

I wish the dev team the best though. The concept is there, it just needs optomisation.

Garthor

I'm not clear on the concept, exactly. I see a huge potential gap between skill growth of the FPS players vs. skill growth of the RTS players. 4 RTS units may be evenly matched against a FPS newbie, so it's perfectly reasonable to have 4-8 units per FPS player. However, what happens when the FPS player becomes better, and now they can easily mow down 8 units at a time? What can the RTS player do to make their units perform better?

The only real way I can see it working perfectly is if there is a heavy theme of logistics: you've got enough units to kill the FPS team three times over, but you've gotta cover four potential routes of assault, all at once. If you manage to figure out their plans, cut them off at a convenient rallying point, and bring your forces to bear, then you've skillfully outmaneuvered them and win. However, if the game is based around FPS vs RTS slugfests... it's pretty clear who's going to win out in the end.

Suriko

Garthor wrote:

The only real way I can see it working perfectly is if there is a heavy theme of logistics: you've got enough units to kill the FPS team three times over, but you've gotta cover four potential routes of assault, all at once. If you manage to figure out their plans, cut them off at a convenient rallying point, and bring your forces to bear, then you've skillfully outmaneuvered them and win.

That's exactly how it works.

1 RTS player versus usually about 5 FPS players. FPS players have much more health and weaponry than the grunts the RTS player has to use (though the RTS player also gets a few tanks). Both teams fight over 3-4 control points. Players lose all of the control points, they lose. RTS player's general dies, he/she loses.

I should also add that the FPS players respawn and the RTS player gets more grunts and tanks as the game goes on (which, at present, causes nasty late-game lag). There's also a hard limit of how many FPS players there are, as they play the part of 9 (or somewhere around that number) rebel characters.

Mandarax

Yeah, while the FPS players can get better at fighting against RTS units, a good RTS player will also improve his strategies as he learns the game. A favorite example of mine took place on the Vistorg city map at the control point in the Resistance end of the map. A squad of grenadiers came down the long alley, and the five Resistance who had holed up in the building and around the point engaged them with expert precision... Until another squad of grenadiers came charging through from the road to their right flank and slaughtered them all before they could go "OMG WTF". Similarly, a good general will try different strategies depending on how the battle goes. If the Resistance is really keen on rifles and machineguns, he can go tank-heavy to clear routes for his infantry. If he can keep the Resistance focused on one area by keeping it under constant siege, he can often slip some troops unseen to another control point and take it before the Resistance realizes what's happening. And, in the end, if none of that works, well damn - the Resistance certainly deserves to win for a well-played match.

Indeed, balancing this game is really hard, and the tanks have ended up being the hardest to balance.

In future versions, namely Release 1.5 (hopefully our next release) the Rahmos will be getting a LOT of cool new toys, including flamethrowers, heavy grenadiers (with actual grenade launchers), new tank abilities, and Red Alert style attack dogs that the General and Sergeant can order around. Of course, the Resistance will be getting new toys as well, like their own flamethrower, trip mines, remote-detonation satchel charges, a recoilless harpoon cannon... It's gonna be fun! 8-)

Wren

I tried to play this, but it must not like my computer because I get horrible graphic lag.

trailer looked neat though

Suriko

Mandarax wrote: »

and Red Alert style attack dogs that the General and Sergeant can order around.

YES. :^:

Mandarax

Graphic lag shouldn't be an issue at this point. However, we' have got one issue with weapon animation stutter, because for some asinine reason Valve thought it'd be a totally awesome idea to make the animations report to the server, and have the server take care of telling the client which frame to play and when. Unfortunately, even if you have a ping of 0, it'll probably still stutter a bit because the server doesn't just play the animation, it sorta meanders through it, back and forth, eventually getting to the end, patting itself on the back and congratulating itself on a great job while the client is going "wtf was that crap?". More unfortunately, its proving really hard to fix. We'll try to have it fixed in Beta 1.5, even if it takes a dozen complete code rewrites to get it working.