Damage to buildings and structures results in decreased abilities
2_of_Eight
Join Date: 2003-08-20 Member: 20016Members
Join Date: 2003-08-20 Member: 20016Members
I'll describe it very briefly.
So, damaging a player or a structure, as it currently is in NS, does nothing to their ability to function. A fade with 100% HP and a fade with 1% HP are identical. An arms lab with 12 bars and arms with 1 bar are identical. There is no benefit to biting an RT down to half health, besides perhaps having another alien come by and bite it down again.
What I am proposing: partial decrease in functionality with partial damage. This does not have to be proportional to damage.
Examples:
* when hive is low health, spawn delay increases, skulks are born with less HP, or healing speed is reduced
* when arms lab is low, research speed decreases
* when armoury is low, guns are given out with less ammo
* when comm chair is low, medpacks have some factor of randomness in them
* when any chamber is low, its effects are scaled back in radius or effectiveness
Similar effects could be present on players, such as a low health marine having his vision distorted in some slight way. I think simply having it on structures is interesting enough.
Benefit: it is now of use to take structures down to lower health, without even killing them.
So, damaging a player or a structure, as it currently is in NS, does nothing to their ability to function. A fade with 100% HP and a fade with 1% HP are identical. An arms lab with 12 bars and arms with 1 bar are identical. There is no benefit to biting an RT down to half health, besides perhaps having another alien come by and bite it down again.
What I am proposing: partial decrease in functionality with partial damage. This does not have to be proportional to damage.
Examples:
* when hive is low health, spawn delay increases, skulks are born with less HP, or healing speed is reduced
* when arms lab is low, research speed decreases
* when armoury is low, guns are given out with less ammo
* when comm chair is low, medpacks have some factor of randomness in them
* when any chamber is low, its effects are scaled back in radius or effectiveness
Similar effects could be present on players, such as a low health marine having his vision distorted in some slight way. I think simply having it on structures is interesting enough.
Benefit: it is now of use to take structures down to lower health, without even killing them.
Comments
However i suggest this scalable effectiveness of buildings ranges from 100% to 80 or 70%. Why not till 0%? Because this should not be the main aspect that determines the outcome of the battle, or take all the attention of commanders and/or players from the action, transforming NS2 in a micro-management game.
AND I hope this isn´t implemented on creatures/players damage, simply because it would be bad for gameplay. I can´t imagine myself being fuzilated and stearing at my healthbar at the same time just to make sure my health won´t drop below.. say.. 40%, and I´m able to kill that freaking HMG with 1 attack, not 2. Those who played NS1 know what I´m talking about.
Worth repeating: I think this is a good idea.
I'd rather it stay the way it is. I don't think you see this implemented in multiplayer games anywhere anyway.
I'd rather it stay the way it is. I don't think you see this implemented in multiplayer games anywhere anyway.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree with you on the part regarding battles. If fades and marines were made to be less able to inflict damage/defend themselves when they lose health, that would make the battle have a more slippery slope. However, for something like structures, I think it could be made balanced while adding strategies to the game. Rzr has a good point in that it shouldn't scale to 0% by any means; if an arms lab has 1% HP, it shouldn't research 100 times slower than regular. If it's lower than, say, 50%, it would research at 80%. Which is somewhat of an incentive to weld it, but it's not a game-ender.
I think Empires did it in an interesting way with sabotaging. Scouts can sabotage structures, which leaves them operable, but to a lesser degree. Vehicle factories produce vehicles with less hitpoints (which can be repaired right away) and gas pumps (that's not what they're called but I haven't played in a while) still pump resources, but at a lower rate.
<!--quoteo(post=1715163:date=Jul 1 2009, 07:51 PM:name=slayer20)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (slayer20 @ Jul 1 2009, 07:51 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1715163"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'm going to have to say no to this...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->It would be nice to see some discussion going on, either positive or negative, regarding suggestions in this forum. I don't mean to attack you in any way, but this isn't really a voting forum; "I vote for this suggestion", "I vote against". Your contribution of "I'm going to have to say no to this..." does not add to the discussion.
I was eating some chips and my hands were all dirty.
Badmouth said it best. It would just be very hard for the other team to do some sort of counter-attack.
The 80% functionality at 50% health is a good example. Don't add more.
If you add more steps, you'll increase importance and frequency of attacking and welding/healing buildings for single players, instead of making a bigger effort and groups necessary to cause some damage to the opposing team, which won't appeal to all the players that don't like to attack/weld structures and also devalues the importance and strength of groups.
Moreover effects like reduced research time seem to be better than decreased damage/spawnrate/upgrade quality, which is harder to balance or might add too much of a slippery slope as already mentioned in this thread. Not saying that the latter should be avoided, but has to be choosen and balanced carefully.
The overall effect could last only so long as a player used that item on it and immediately ends when stopped, or instead the effect might last a period of time after a buffing the structure for say 10 seconds.
I'm sure this has been brought up before but I thought it fit with the discussion.
I personally don't really like this Idea because it would add too much micro managing and would promote structure farming. But like I said in the interest of brainstorming...
Good idea, bad for this game
Make a mod :)
Translation: A fade with 1HP is a fade with 1HP.
What?
because...
100% > *spawn*..............................*spawn*
030% > *spawn*spawn*spawn*spawn*spawn*
...is veeeeewy bad...
This sounds like an alien version of beacon. Makes sense
Indeed :) This could also be even more like beacon if this would be an ability that the alien commander could switch on. I.e if the hive health drops below a certain point the commander could spend a certain amount of resources to activate this kind of "hyper spawning" on the hive.... just a thought
What?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think the point is that a fade trying to fight with 1 hp is most likely not going to do any damage and die in the process. As <b>badmouth</b> said this would reduce the effectiveness of any counter-attack which I don't support.
While I disagree with most of the ideas in the OP, you should all consider the benefits of having resource towers gather slower when they're damaged. I recently pointed out in the <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=102260&st=240&p=1717224&#entry1717224" target="_blank">commander experience thread</a> that economic harassment, a core component in any RTS, is virtually nonexistent in NS especially in the early game.
Having damaged RTs resource slower would help to alleviate this problem.
While I disagree with most of the ideas in the OP, you should all consider the benefits of having resource towers gather slower when they're damaged. I recently pointed out in the <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=102260&st=240&p=1717224&#entry1717224" target="_blank">commander experience thread</a> that economic harassment, a core component in any RTS, is virtually nonexistent in NS especially in the early game.
Having damaged RTs resource slower would help to alleviate this problem.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I thought that maybe RTs could be upgradable with cheap upgrades that break down and fall off when RT takes damage. That would be almost identical to the usual RTS style, except that there would be no separate AI units. At that point getting even a few shots or bites on a RT could hurt the economy.
That solution would also create more diversion to the present RT dies/survives fights, where the small amount of HP on RT can decide a lot in the course of the game.