Impossible Creatures: Customization Mechanics

In most games with a customization system, I'd want to address basic mechanics first, and the customization mechanics second.

In Impossible Creatures, the mechanics of customization are tied too deeply into why the game works the way it does.

As a concrete example: the single biggest land-capable animal in the (base) game is the Elephant at Size 8. The single biggest animal overall is the Sperm Whale at Size 10, and it's a dedicated sea animal. A unit's quality and in turn tech level is heavily influenced by its Size, and its Size is only ever the larger of one of the two animals that made up the unit; as Size rises, a unit's HP, damage, and range if it's got ranged attacks all rise, with the only trade-offs being that the Coal cost also rises and they slowly lose movement speed. The Coal cost rises more slowly than HP rises, so in actuality a unit's Coal efficiency is improving as its Size climbs.

Since you are combining only two animals, the overall result is that pure naval creatures are depressed in value for endgame combinations. The Electric Eel theoretically should be the best foundation for a ranged attacker, having high damage, good range, and a hitscan attack, but it's also a pure naval creature which means a land-relevant Electric Eel maxes out at Size 8 via combining it with an Elephant. Combining a Chameleon with a Sperm Whale will result in a ranged attacker that hits harder, from farther, with more bulk to boot, making an endgame Electric Eel a pipe dream. (It helps that Woolly Mammoths were released as a downloadable animal for free, as they're a Size 9 land animal, and if you're playing the official mod of Insect Invasion it outright provides a Size 10 land animal, but I'm talking about the base game here) So too for all the other pure sea animals like Piranha, Archerfish, and so on.

Speaking of Archerfish, they're one of two sources of artillery in the game, and they're the inferior choice. The fact that they're purely aquatic cripples their utility for endgame builds, but another tidbit in how the game works that's a strike against them in general is that attacks can be based in different body parts. In the base game, every 'ranged' attack comes from the head, and so too does the Archerfish's artillery attack, meaning a unit cannot fire Archerfish artillery while also firing a regular ranged attack... Chimpanzees are the other artillery unit, and in their case they're conceptualized as tossing rocks, so it's their forelimbs that provide the artillery attack, which means they can be combined with any ranged unit's attack, resulting in even more damage at a distance. So short of wanting to double up on artillery by doing a Chimpanzee+Archerfish hybrid for an early double-artillery, the Archerfish doesn't really have a place in the game at all. (This isn't even touching on the point that a Chimpanzee combined with a ranged attacker of some sort raises the question of how the heck is the rock/paper/scissors dynamic supposed to work here, though I haven't gotten to that yet)

Another point on the pure naval issue is that stats from body parts are all additive. If you make a piranha, and then you make a piranha with legs that's the same Size, it has more stats. (And a higher Coal cost, but whatever) This doesn't directly punish aquatic animals per se, but it does mean that purely aquatic units are pretty directly inferior to amphibious units, even aside the mobility advantage, and are generally inferior to pure land units as well, since land units will actually have a full range of body parts and so have more stats. Even aside the meta issue that 99% of everything worth fighting over is land-locked (Coal, HQs, most infrastructure in general) and so land units are inherently more useful than sea units, this seriously hurts the prospect of messing around with stuff like a Sperm Whale combined with an Electric Eel; the result will have worse stats than if you took a similarly statty land unit and combined it with the Sperm Whale. Most RTSes that incorporate a navy make naval units noticeably stronger for the cost than land units for precisely these kinds of meta reasons, providing incentives to field a navy in spite of these considerations; Impossible Creatures really should done something like straight up given free bonus stats to a unit if it was purely aquatic. This would even make a kind of realistic sense, as animals can get so large in water because the water helps support their body weight! An amphibious animal can't go as far in size as a purely aquatic animal; whales ending up trapped on beaches, crushed by their own weight is a pretty clear illustration of why.

Similarly to the Archerfish/Chimpanzee issue, in real terms your flying unit variety is fairly limited. The largest flying unit is Size 4; if you want anything bigger, you have to use one of the animals that's larger than that, and that's a very small list; most Sizes above 4 have a single animal in them. Since Size correlates so strongly to quality and tech level, this means Tech 3 is the only area you really have anything resembling variety in. This is particularly troublesome given flying units are automatically at least Tech 3; even if a flying unit's stats ought to relegate it to Tech 2, it will be pushed up to Tech 3, at which point it will be too weak to bother with by the time it's available.

Other combination considerations further distort what fliers are the most sensible to use; in real terms, the Dragonfly tends to be the best flying animal all-around, as it has an additional, powerful attack on its forelimbs (Which won't compete with much of anything), and it doesn't have to worry about hard choices on any of its other parts. The Hornet, by contrast, has its secondary attack and Poison source in its tail slot, and tails often have good features or additional attacks; the Crocodile, for example, has a secondary attack in its tail, and is one of the larger animals you can use without bumping the final design into Tech 5 automatically, and so a Dragonfly+Crocodile combination is simply superior to a Hornet+Crocodile combination while also being one of your best mid-tech flier options, period.

The stat scaling's implications also tie into: the game clearly believes it holds to certain RTS tropes it really doesn't.

In most RTSes, if you look at the trends on numbers, more expensive units tend to be less cost-efficient than less expensive units. They do less damage for the cost, they have less HP for the cost. This tends to ensure basic units are not simply displaced by higher-tech units in an RTS. In turn, the higher-end units get more specialized advantages out of concentrating stats onto one unit; they're less vulnerable to being mass-killed by splash damage, they're more space-efficient and so are what you have to turn to when a battlefield is saturated anyway, and often they outright have access to unique capabilities that ensure they have a place in your army even if they're garbage as combat pieces.

Impossible Creatures clearly believes that units from every technology level have a place even in the endgame, but they don't. The constraints for a unit being valid as a Tech 1 unit are so crushingly constrictive -it has to be a melee unit, it can't be naval, flying, or amphibious, and its stats must be awful- that there's really not a reason to bother with a Tech 1 unit. Even if you want to rush an enemy player, getting to Tech 2 is cheap and fast and gives you vastly more powerful units for not much of a price increase, so much so that an enemy fool enough to try to rush you with Tech 1 units will be effortlessly crushed before they can accomplish anything. In turn, Tech 2 units are sufficiently weak they tend to have limited relevance at best once you're in Tech 3, and while Tech 3 units are actually able to stay sort of relevant the fact is that a higher tech/higher Size unit is just plain better in pretty much every way. They cost more per head, but they cost less per stat, which means they get more done for the cost, which means in real terms they're cheaper. Furthermore, Impossible Creatures has a hard pop cap of 50 units, with all units using exactly 1 pop cap no matter how big or high-tech they are; even if the game had succeeded at making it so lower-end units were more efficient, it wouldn't help much given that realistically you've probably got at least 20 pop cap tied up in your economy (Henchmen use pop cap too) and so the idea of trying to overwhelm a team of five big units with a legion of 80 small units is very much be a pipe dream.

In short, in real terms Impossible Creatures is antithetical to the notion of your basic units being workhorse units throughout a match, while seeming to believe they totally are relevant throughout a match.

A similar point is how RTSes are fond of 'combat units' vs 'grab-bad utility units'. In Starcraft, for example, each side has a unit for detecting stealth units, none of which has an innate attack, and only one of which doesn't have secondary utility. (The Protoss Observer, and the point is debatable since it's cloaked and so can pull off stuff the other detectors can't) Zerg Overlords double as transports and triple as your pop cap source, and the Terran Science Vessel has three different support abilities that are useful in very different situations. In general, most units in Starcraft are either basically pure combat pieces, with any special abilities they have tending to directly support their combat utility (eg how Marines and Firebats can use Stim Packs to increase movement and attack speed), or they have no innate attack and rely on special effects to be useful. (Medic, Defiler, Queen, High Templar, Dark Archon...)

Impossible Creatures seems to angle for that sort of idea as being part of its design, but it's just not there. For starters, there's no such thing as a non-combat unit you can design; every animal has a melee attack on its head, period, which means it's impossible to design a unit that has no attack at all. Then there's the point that there's not that many support abilities in Impossible Creatures in the first place, and they're not concentrated on animals such that you can design a utility-oriented grab-bag unit. Additionally, you've only got 9 unit slots to work with in your entire army, which means that it's difficult to justify expending a design slot on a specialized support unit unless it's amazing, which runs into the problem that most abilities aren't all that impressive. (This is another case where Insect Invasion makes pretty big changes, adding in a number of much more effective abilities and making more of an effort to get multiple useful abilities on individual animals)

Another, relatively minor sort of, point is that the game doesn't seem to properly understand how its own defense mechanics work. I've already been over how Coal costs rise slower than a unit's actual stats rise as Size goes up; by a similar token, Defense spikes Coal costs pretty considerably, but in a more or less linear manner. (That is, 10 points of Defense added adds X amount of Coal to the unit's cost, regardless of whether you're going from 0 Defense to 10 or 80 to 90) This is kinda crazy, as Defense in Impossible Creatures is a percentage modifier; 10 Defense means the unit takes 10% less damage than it should. 90 Defense means you'll need to deal 10 times as much damage as its HP would imply to actually kill it. (The game is at least sane enough to hard-cap Defense at 90%, thankfully)

While the game offers tools to bypass Defense, which should theoretically offer counters to Defense-heavy units, the fact is the game doesn't properly burden a unit with the kind of costs it should have for being insanely durable, and this isn't even touching on how it effectively multiplies Regeneration. As such, using units that bypass Defense is not incredibly cost-effective against high-Defense units in the way that extremely high-Defense units are widely incredibly cost-effective. Thus, the costs/risks involved in extremely high-Defense units are fairly minor, since the advantage an enemy gains for punching right through your Defense is, in economic terms, fairly poor, especially as you get higher in tech and so overall Coal efficiency is rising.

I do appreciate Impossible Creatures' stab at an accessible customization system for designing your own units in an RTS, but the system was pretty clearly designed with aesthetic purposes in mind (Providing a framework the engine can operate within to dynamically create reasonably good-looking units off a player's creations) and the mechanical implications of said system weren't properly accounted for when it came to plotting out unit design. Most tellingly, in the campaign each time you acquire a new animal's DNA the game gives you a little blurb where it describes the animal's real-life qualities and provides an overview of its qualities as a game piece, and the latter element of the description frequently talks as if the animal is a complete piece in its own right. The Lobster, for example, is said to be 'balanced' by its poor line of sight, but line of sight is solely determined by which head you install on a creature. Since the Lobster's head has poor attack and no outstanding qualities (Good Defense for a head, but minor enough it's usually fine to trade it away), this means the Lobster's 'balancing factor' doesn't really matter at all, since you'll just swap in the head of whatever other animal you're combining it with! Nearly every other animal in the entire game has a better head, after all.

Similarly, the game frequently tells you an animal is a 'cheap' option for combining with other animals: what the game means is 'this animal is garbage, and since it is garbage you'll end up with lower stats and thus a lower price'. The game doesn't have a concept like, say, having animals modify the price-point per stat point, where the better rate wins; you pay X amount of Coal for Y amount of HP, and that's it. In a more conventional RTS, it would indeed be the case that such animals would be made cheap for their statline, and the concept would more or less work. In Impossible Creatures, these animals are mostly just bad, often having no unique qualities that justify using them over other animals and having bad stats. Since Size already provides a way of tuning stats and many of the best statlines and best sets of traits are on small animals anyway, it's not even a case where you end up using one of the 'cheap' animals to force a design down into Tech 3 or Tech 2; just stick with combining good, small animals, and you'll end up with a high-quality low-tech unit.

I have mixed feelings about how there was never a sequel. On the one hand, it's entirely possible a sequel would've just reiterated the problems Impossible Creatures has with its customization system. On the other hand, Insect Invasion suggests the developer did cotton on to some of the important points of how their system is designed, just a bit late, so I have to wonder what a sequel would have looked like if it had happened.

Regardless, never time we're wrapping up with talking about general gameplay.... by which I mostly mean talking about Impossible Creatures as an evolutionary midpoint between Homeworld and Dawn of War.

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