Supplying Players
Runteh
Join Date: 2010-06-26 Member: 72163Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2010-06-26 Member: 72163Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">Dropping a Supply Node</div>So far I have noticed that not only new players, but more experienced players who are commanding are failing to supply players with health and ammo. Also ammo/health supply drops not only take a lot of time when there is a large group of people, but it looks messy because the comm drops health and ammo packs all over the shop. This also means that when trying to heal players in times of action it is very difficult, because they do not see the packs on the ground and are busy aiming at blurry looking aliens.
Why not make health/ammo drops similar to the crag, but instant and without build. So when a health or ammo node is dropped, it will heal/supply anyone within range until it is exhausted. After around 1 min+ it resets and re activates when someone is within range, but could be taken out in one bite.
This would also work well for catalyst packs...
I know this is similar to the 'alien' style of structures, but it is a real pain trying to get a comm to supply you in publics..
I can feel a backlash already, discuss:
Why not make health/ammo drops similar to the crag, but instant and without build. So when a health or ammo node is dropped, it will heal/supply anyone within range until it is exhausted. After around 1 min+ it resets and re activates when someone is within range, but could be taken out in one bite.
This would also work well for catalyst packs...
I know this is similar to the 'alien' style of structures, but it is a real pain trying to get a comm to supply you in publics..
I can feel a backlash already, discuss:
Comments
Not sure if I like the idea entirely of being able to spawn mini-crags from the sky, might be a bit overpowered.
However, being able to strap an ammo box to a MAC for some money and have it follow a squad and give them ammo/weld them would be very good.
Not sure if I like the idea entirely of being able to spawn mini-crags from the sky, might be a bit overpowered.
However, being able to strap an ammo box to a MAC for some money and have it follow a squad and give them ammo/weld them would be very good.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That is much better, because once the marines have cleared out an area the bot can build :)
If you think medding is bad, what kind of other micro elements and marine interaction commander could provide?
If you think micromanagement in general is bad, what kind of things should add challenge to commanding?
Ect.
Er, what?
Don't take away the times when the game is unplayable due to terrible commander ruining everything?
What the hell are you smoking?
If you think medding is bad, what kind of other micro elements and marine interaction commander could provide?
If you think micromanagement in general is bad, what kind of things should add challenge to commanding?
Ect.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't really find myself wanting for things to do when I comm aliens. Building structures in support of alien advance in each new area, crags and whips and whatnot, that's time consuming. Marines benefit from sentry support and bases in each new node, and will eventually have the comm directing MASCs.
There is plenty for comms to do, you don't need to give them busy work.
There is plenty for comms to do, you don't need to give them busy work.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This... there is already loads to do, if you are not expanding.. you are then repairing structures. You don't stop moving around and you 'also' have to drop loads of med/ammo packs for the team that they either do not see, or do not quite pick it up just before they die. It is quite painful at the moment.
Something along the lines of this. Instead of forcing the commander to drop 10-20 medkits and ammunition during a firefight, players could just hit a key to materialize ammo and health where they are pointing at the cost of plasma. It would take a second to materialize and a short cooldown before it could be used again. It would also have to be researched mid to late game, when every sector of the map should be contested.
It might take away from some of the strategy of the commander, but this also frees up his time to worry about macro, keeps the commander from recklessly spamming items all over, and gives more control to ground troops (first their weapons, now their field supplies).
This also allows the commander to still manually drop meds and ammo using the traditional icon, so if they want to prime a area of a siege they still can.
Problem solved without completely reworking the system or completely removing the commanders need for micro managing. You might just need to give the packs a very slight increase in cost, maybe 2 res or so, to compensate for the ease of giving a marine meds and ammo on the fly.
This also allows the commander to still manually drop meds and ammo using the traditional icon, so if they want to prime a area of a siege they still can.
Problem solved without completely reworking the system or completely removing the commanders need for micro managing. You might just need to give the packs a very slight increase in cost, maybe 2 res or so, to compensate for the ease of giving a marine meds and ammo on the fly.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think this would be a great addition to the supply system. It would allow the comm to stay on top of things a bit easier, it would be more noob friendly without taking away tactics of veteran players. Def should show health and ammo, so people arent spamming 'I NEED MEDS!' to troll..
There is plenty for comms to do, you don't need to give them busy work.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Please have understanding that some people have played RTS and commanded regularly since the beginning of time.
If you can do almost everything necessary in NS2 early beta with low FPS, clunky UI and very, very little gaming time put into the specific game, it's going to be relatively easy for someone more experienced in both NS2 and other games.
I'm an average RTS player at very max, but I could somewhat comfortably maintain a 14+ team with ammo, med and catpacks if given the res. Anyone actually commanding actively or coming from a proper RTS background is going to have a snorefest if you reduce the commander tasks even further.
I'm fine with moving things away from the obligatory comm support routine. It's fine if marines can keep themselves supplied as long as the commander still can do something challenging and useful. Just simplifying things on the other hand gets a negative from me.
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With Blessed's automedpacks, you'd need some delay there. Even now most good marines have 'Need medpack' hotkeyed and they are able to hit it the very moment the first bite lands. So, as long as the commander kept approving, you'd have total instameds for the whole team. I don't generally like automatisation too much, but maybe there's some middleground where it works without being too easy and effective.
The commander would still have something to micro and a direct interaction with his marines, aliens would have something to snipe and also there are no magical pop-up medpacks materializing out of thin air ;)
If it becomes easier to switch back to the main CC menu without returning to the CC then that will solve on problem and next having Marines always appear on the Minimap (also distinguish from the MACs) that will make it much easier to micro-manage.
I think dropping health and ammo would be easier as a comm if the marines running around had health bars like in ns1 (and maybe ammo bars). That way you wouldn't have to select them first to find out if they're low on health.
Putting in perpetual med / ammo stations sounds a lot like making the game into battlefield 21420, TP's now already have the ability to be upgraded to squad spawn (I am wondering if we will even see TP's at this moment in time).
That said a defib concept could be nice (more for gorg here, give him something more to do then just be a walking medpack) although it might unbalance it from alien res use / evolve time point of view.
Exatcly the way of thinking that makes online games so bad these days. You dont have to make commander easy so that every player can do it in order to make every game "good" , bad players make bad rounds but thats were they have to improve.
Medpack concept at the moment is great way of adding depth to commander due resource management of how much you can "spam" med and how does it effect the whole picture / updgrades.
This is not RTS, you are commanding 'people' not brainless units! This means to get people to do things you have to spend more time observing what they are doing, and 'communicating' with them over the comm.
It would make for a much more interesting experience if I know the comm is taking care of me, and letting me know what is going on... Are players being advised to back me up? Am I going to recieve ammo/health (in most cases, not in time), etc, etc...
Otherwise this game will have two parts... the FPS aspect (where every runs and guns) and a commanding aspect, that just supports the players and provides to strategic communication other than building turrets in every room because players wont hold back and defend an area you are trying to build a CC in..
Sigh.
Also, when it comes to replicating buildings, I think it just gets in the way. The aliens are the ones infesting, the marines clearing out. Having armouries dropped all over the place looks awkward to me. The map looks great, but when buildings are placed in unusual places they just seem out of place... and it further divides the comm/alien relationship further, because they don't have to bother with one another.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=111606" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=111606</a>
Just make a med pack which works three times and costs quadruple resources. Or a medpack which works 4 times and costs quintuple/sextuple resources. But not so much that marines have to keep coming back to make sure the resources are used efficiently.
We can keep the med pack and ammo pack. Just give a less efficient easy mode automated thing for weak commanders. Learning takes time and focus. Some casual gamers just want to screw around, build some stuff, research some stuff, and tell marines to kill stuff and not "train" or "focus"(Most gamers suck at RTS). We can serve that larger demographic while serving the high skill demographic, too!
<!--quoteo(post=1809718:date=Nov 24 2010, 09:06 AM:name=Bacillus)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Bacillus @ Nov 24 2010, 09:06 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1809718"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Please have understanding that some people have played RTS and commanded regularly since the beginning of time.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I know, I'm one of them.
I don't need more things to do, I <i>could do</i> more things, but I don't <i>need</i> more things. I have enough things to do to keep me occupied, and I will have more things to do once the rest of the game is implemented and the improved interface will hopefully keep me at this sort of activity level.
Just because I can do a million things per second doesn't mean I derive any enjoyment from it, or that I will be deeply unsatisfied with anything less. Besides, I prefer RTS games that benefit from strategy, i.e thinking about what I'm doing, as opposed to ones that require me to simply do lots of things at once. More time spent thinking, less time spent doing busy work leads to a more interesting game. If I want reactionary no-thought gameplay I can hop out of the chair and go shoot people in the perfectly functional FPS game going on outside, if I command it's because I want to do something different.
<!--quoteo(post=1809799:date=Nov 24 2010, 03:12 PM:name=TrC)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (TrC @ Nov 24 2010, 03:12 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1809799"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Exatcly the way of thinking that makes online games so bad these days. You dont have to make commander easy so that every player can do it in order to make every game "good" , bad players make bad rounds but thats were they have to improve.
Medpack concept at the moment is great way of adding depth to commander due resource management of how much you can "spam" med and how does it effect the whole picture / updgrades.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Individual motivation to improve is fine, but when your lack of ability causes <i>fundamental gameplay mechanics essential to the playability of the game</i> to stop working, that's a bit more serious.
The commander is neccesary, one player on a team of eight-twelve is not. One player on a team of eight-twelve has a lot of other players to pick up his slack, a commander does not have that luxury, even with the multiple commander system you need for everyone to be able to do it because not everyone will want to, and not everyone that does will be brilliant at it, and if nobody does/can then the game simply does not work.
Besides, the golden principle of design is not 'hard', it's 'easy to learn hard to master'. Commanding and everything else in game should be easy to do, it should be hard to do <i>well</i>, which means vital functions should be easy, giving your team infinite health and ammo is vital, so it has to be easy, being able to lock down a room with perfectly efficient sentry positioning and knowing all the best ambush spots for whips, and knowing how to hide your IPs in inventive locations, and being able to perform complex maneuvers like distractions and feints and flanking attacks, those are not vital, but they really really <i>help</i>. Those are the thing that make commanding hard.
also, i view med packs and ammo packs as resupplies after battle rather than during a battle. so me getting mad at a commander for letting me die during a fight wouldn't really happen. maybe ns1 veterans disagree because they got so efficient at dispersing packs during fights, but i find it hard to get mad at a commander when it only takes two hits to die. if i can't survive a fight i blame myself. either i didn't shooter well enough, or i was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Basically my problem with strategical RTS games is that they very, very rarely manage to create depth necessary for any complex thinking. That's why there's the time pressure to make quick decisions, so you have to learn to think and obtain information quickly.
Chess is a brilliant game on its own category. I tremendously enjoy playing it. It has the much needed depth for it to be turn based. Meanwhile I highly doubt NS2 has enough of strategical twists and turns to be interesting on any slower pace of gameplay. It's already struggling with ridiculous learning curve requiriments of modern games where every player has to get some kind of gratification within first 10 minutes of the very first game and also deal with the fact that the units on the field need their entertainment too. That's not a position where you create the most strategically complex and challenging game.
If NS2 is slow and has depth, I can still command in it, no problem. However, I don't want to go into a situation where I get to make 2 repetetive larger scale strategical decisions in a 15 minute round. Much rather I'd make those 2 decisions and spend the rest of the time making smaller micro and tactical decisions and gathering small bits of information that support the large scale strategy and its decisionmaking.
Oh and calling either the commander or FPS part reactionary no-thought gameplay is kinda silly. The game requires quick thinking, not no-thinking.
Strategy can be a very basic thing, I suppose strategy is perhaps not the word and tactics is more appropriate, you need a very big scale game to have strategy, like supreme commnader, but most thought based games do tactics very well, company of heroes rewards you for being able to analyse an environment and efficiently use it to buff your units, NS2 does much the same. The stuff I listed is a good example of that. Things like how to lay ambushes for marines by anticipating their movements and placing whips accordingly, things like ordering your forces to do things and take advantage of openings, stuff like creating mutually supportive sentry gun fields and whatnot, that requires constant if perhaps a little basic thought, but it's still thought and more interesting than mindless health pack spam.
Combine this with things like the possibility of random starting locations eventually, and commanding becomes largely a game of map knowledge and ability to adapt to situations, you will benefit from having a lot of experience with a map, but because there could be so many combinations and directions, and possibly so many custom maps with the editor and whatnot, you would have to develop skils to adapt your placement of structures and expansion routes to any situation.
I think there's plenty of depth in the game, there's a lot of depth in any game that isn't about hard counters or obsessive micro. In a hard counter game the best route to win is to spam one type of unit and rush the enemy, and hope you picked well, or to micro the hell out of your forces, but as micro is only as varied as the units you have, that gets old fast. Map analysis is new every time because it's always a different place and path and obstacle, so you need to think of the best solution, not simply perform the best micro tactic with your units or build more anti-whatevertheenemyisusing tanks.
And most people dont pick it up, its a waste of time and effort, the commander could be upgrading or fortifying an area with a new base instead of "waste" time. Maybe if there was two commanders and 1 was dedictated to resupplying the front lines, but atm in the current beta the performance and bugs out weigh its usefullness imo.
To me I feel that the UI is likely the biggest thing to blame with people not placing the meds and ammo like you would see in NS1. I say this because a lot of times I will be to busy microing down my Macs to really even give a thought to running back to my CC just so I can click it then run back to a marine whos being attacked, and give him some meds, The hot key for the chair seems to be almost a waist of time cuse it never seems to work for me.
Basically I think if they made it so the comm just had to press a single key to either spawn a med, or to spawn a ammo pack, it would make it far easier on the comm to do so, they could do it on the fly as they are heading around the map to send a MAC somewhere to place a com chair.
Another thing I think that would be interesting would be place a depleting source of ammo and health, say a stock pile or something, where a marine could head back to a safe location closer to the front lines to resupply and heal, without having to run all the way back to an armory, or bother the comm to have him drop just 2 med packs and some ammo for him alone. That way you could have the comm place one of these closer to the front, and not have to be bothered with constant resupplying, but still allow the marines to have a quick easy source to heal and get ammo from.
Balancing that out a bit id say make it so it only resupplies normal ammo for your weapons such as rifle ammo, pistol ammo, shotgun ammo, etc etc. but not give special ammo such as grenades or fuel, obviously as well it would need limited uses such as at most 10 grabs of ammo, and maybe 10 grabs of med packs, also would need its own health so if the aliens were to be able to happen upon it, they can destroy it so no marines can come use it again.
thats just my little suggestion.
Big +1 to this.