KP-CTI is a newly developed implementation of the well-known CTI concept by granQ and kungtotte, designed specifically to be different from classic CTI and to offer new challenges and scenarios to players.
The main focus has been to bring a sense of “real war” to CTI, and at the same time fixing some of the things we considered to be broken in the traditional CTI implementations.
Increase the number of active units in a given scenario, instead of smallish units chasing eachother around the map we wanted full-scale fronts and combined-arms attacks.
Modify the economical system to add tactical depth and considerations other than "earn more than your opponent".
Create a destructible infrastructure for the economy, i.e convoys that can be targetted by the enemy, bridges that can be blown up and so forth. (Future goal, has not yet been implemented.)
Remove as much “dead time” as possible, i.e players should spend their times planning and executing attacks or actively reacting to the enemy's attacks, instead of having to travel for ages just to reach the action.
Playing KP-CTI should feel like you are in a real war.
Always realism, except when we have to choose gameplay.
In this section we list some of the major differences from classic CTI, so that you can quickly see what you need to learn and what you need to forget in order to play KP-CTI.
There are no more bases in KP-CTI, at least not in the classic CTI sense of bases. Each side has a HQ, which may not be attacked by the enemy. This means that there is always a safe area to retreat too (this is also where you respawn), and that you aren't automatically down and out if you happen to lose ground to the enemy.
Buying things is done either at the HQ or at special victory locations known as Harbours (in our implementation, Arcadia, Dolores, Paraiso International, Corazol West, Corazol East, Everon, Tlaloc and Pita Airfield are considered to be Harbours), you capture these as you would any other victory location, but with the added bonus that you may now request troops, equipment and vehicles there.
Some things (such as paratroopers and uavs) are always deployed from the HQ, and then make their way to the designated area from there. Everything else is either deployed at the current location, or at any of the harbours your team controls. So for example, you could be standing in Arcadia, and deploying an MBT platoon from Paraiso International.
Probably the biggest difference from classic CTI is the economy. Resources are divided into three areas (Money, Industrial Capacity/IC and Logistical Capacity/LC), anything you can buy costs varying amounts of these resources. Troops and "strikes" (such as launching a UAV, firing an artillery strike or placing a minefield) generally cost Money, vehicles or deployable assets (such as artillery units and SAM-sites) cost more IC than Money.
Everything costs LC depending on where it is deployed to. LC represents the cost of transporting the equipment to where ever you want it to go, so the further away from your HQ you are (actually, the further from the HQ you are deploying the units to) the more LC it will cost.
To make matters even more complicated, things don't just cost you once, they keep on costing you. When you buy units (a unit is a single soldier, or one manned asset) you will incur upkeep costs in the form of Money and LC. As long as your income from the victory locations you hold is higher than your upkeep expenses you will keep earning. If your expenses are higher than your incomes, you will start to lose resources.
If you lose too much resources, the game will end and the other team will be declared the winner, so make sure you defend your towns well and don't over-extend yourself!
This may sound fancier than it really is, since it is just a case of deploying AI squads (usually with vehicles to go along, but some are vehicle-less) that aren't attached to the players. So instead of buying an empty HMMWV TOW, two soldiers to man it and ordering them through the squad interface to move somewhere and defend, you click the "Commander Menu", select "AT Squad" and click the map where you wish to deploy it and off it goes.
However, unbound AI is one of the major points of KP-CTI, since it allows a much, much larger force to be present on the island. Also, it allows players to deploy unbound AI to defend victory locations, and lets the players focus on advancing towards the enemy.
Almost all of the unbound AI assets are meant to be defensive ones, once deployed they go to their designated destination, set up shop and wait for enemies. Some of them however are meant as offensive assets. Depending on the side you are playing, you will have access to Air Cavalry, SF Insertions or Paratroopers. These are designed as flag-grabbers, dispatched to an area they will move to the nearest flag, engage enemies along the way or around the flag and eventually (hopefully) capture the location.
Since we are both code-monkeys and missionmakers we put a premium on being able to adapt KP-CTI for new missions, islands, different units or addons and so on and so forth.
At the time of writing (V0.112) the code is not as clean as it could (and should) be, but it is relatively easy to adapt the mission parameters by editing the mission or the scripts. Simply selecting and moving the current victory locations (marked by gamelogics) will do the trick for moving VLs. Changing the income for a VL is as simple as changing the arguments sent to the strategicpoint.sqs script.
There's only one file where the buy options and vehicle types are defined (and their costs).
Hopefully it will all be transparent enough that people can just get on with changing it to their needs, but if not you can always drop us an e-mail or come by the website and ask.
KP-CTI is never really finished, we're always making changes to it to fix errors or add new features. If you find bugs, or have feature suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us: kungtotte, granQ.
Change the standard KP-CTI implementation to use Cool New Units or Mega-Awesome Mod. The standard implementation should be just that: standard.
Compromise gameplay for realism (I can tell you this will never happen).
Focus KP-CTI on one area and neglecting the others, it should be usable in player vs player, coop, on dedicated servers and on player-hosted servers.
Vote republican.