Squad Spawns

KuBaN

<div class="IPBDescription">Inspired by Dawn of War 2</div>I've been playing the Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 BETA nonstop for a week straight. Highly addictive. A few things I noticed that might warrant consideration for NS2:

<i>(Note, I'm summarizing DoW2s gameplay, and relevant suggestions are made in italics. I'm not suggesting NS2 should emulate ALL of these features.)</i>
<b>Squad-based combat: In DoW2, units are produced as squads, their numbers varying by squad-type (3 - 5) and function solely as squads. They can be ordered to retreat back to their base to recover lost health/squad members at a cheaper cost than building a new squad. Retreating units take less damage, and player control is relinquished until they reach the base.</b>

<i>The NS2 prototypes released in May 2008 indicated a larger focus on squad-based gameplay. Retreating in NS was already advantageous, especially when spawn-times were high. But the fact of a unit spawning back at the base--that is, nowhere near the group of players he was teamed with--always seemed counter-productive to the squad-combat ideology of NS. Maybe enforce something like this, where a squad must return to base (or some forward outpost) to revive lost squad members. Or have an ability possibly linked to Phase Gate tech where a commander can choose to phase/respawn a unit at the location of its squad, if the squad is not currently engaged in combat. Similar to Halo's Co-op respawns.</i>

Harimau

Hmm, I think they were going to have squad spawning, but not the same way. That is, there is no retreating. You'd spawn, magically, with your squad. But I sorta do like your suggestion instead, but on the other hand, I wouldn't like to be the squad member that gets left behind if the squad decides to move on instead of retreating for reinforcements. Maybe if there were certain points on the map, eg. map-specific and/or commander-placed, where the squad has to be within a certain range in order to spawn their reinforcements. Ah, since NS2 is (probably) going to have some kind of "territories", maybe you could only spawn reinforcements if your squad is some distance within your claimed and established territory, so there would be some retreating necessary. Several ways to go about it.

Truppenzwei

Something that worked quite well in Battlefield 2142 was that squad leaders could place beacons and squad members could choose to spawn on the beacon.

Regards
T.

Harimau

Since you mention that, I think there should be a Battlefield-esque spawning overview map in NS2, so you could choose which base to spawn to (or in the case of aliens, which hive to spawn to), or whether to spawn into your squad (if the option is available). But I don't believe there should be squad leaders, the commander is leader enough. But yeah, I like the idea that there should be some geographical restrictions (whether it's territory-based, outpost-based, map-entity-based or something else) that will necessitate retreating for reinforcements.

StarClaws

<!--quoteo(post=1699827:date=Feb 9 2009, 08:05 AM:name=StarClaws)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(StarClaws @ Feb 9 2009, 08:05 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1699827"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Simply make it commander oriented based on his priority for his phase gates. I get tired of 2 hive lockdowns on NS1 and recycle the phasegates when I finally get a phasegate up at the last hive regardless if they drop a 2nd hive or not.

Code Aspect:
Allowing the comm to select 'phase gate at hive' (Clicking on it) and having a button both for mouse (like the menu with the recycle button) and push a number (for quick keys) corresponding to what priority he would like ... Simple code. Makes quick phasing easy. And you can just have it move the other phase gates down the list as a lower priority.

Another idea is to have this related to IPs and disallow potential easy spawn camping by changing what the next IP to spawn will be based on priority.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->


This quote was in response to phase gate priorities... Came up with IP priorities as well... Squad based gameplay is ideal... But balance with the ability to constantly have a respawn that is always moving ever closer to the enemies location. This could be tough.

If aliens spawned extremely fast... And marines had to use this as a tactical advantage to establish forward bases. This idea would end up with some interesting balance issues later on, but would make a different aspect of gameplay (Do I see a gameplay option other than alien vs. alien and surviving marines?) Just some ideas. But there still needs to be that feel of 'classic ns' ... We can't have too many major changes. They plan to implement other gameplay modes and this could be one of them.

No one wants to see marines spawning in their own hive though... ;p