The gazilionth turret change.
DC_Darkling
Join Date: 2003-07-10 Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Join Date: 2003-07-10 Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Since so many suggested changes already hmm. 
Now turrets are at the moment, fairly useless. Buffing them to much creates player vs machine instead of player vs player.
But lets try to find something to make them not so useless.
* Link maximum of turrets to a structure, preferably the CC. More CC = more turrets to place.
- This prevents marines spamming them at every RT, but enables scaling with more tier.
* Remove the area limit for turrets around their battery & perhaps combine it with room power.
- You can now place turrets in more useful locations rather then around a battery. If the battery & room power is gone, turrets become disabled.
- It is possible to not use room power, but still only the battery. As the battery can be placed anywhere in the room to power any turret in the room, it IS harder to find. Needs testing if battery + power node versus battery.
* Make it shoot bilebombs to reduce bile damage.
- It was a brilliant suggestion from someone, I think. It would protect vs gorge rushes. How much it reduces damage would need to be tested. (I myself do not think bile is in a bad place dmg wise)
* Balance health, damage & resources needed values accordingly.
So there you have it.
Free to place turrets on the map, to a certain maximum, as long as somewhere in the room is a battery. (room as in, the exact area which a power node powers)
You can now place turrets to cover each other & certain structures, place them in corners, reduce bile damage by spreading them.
Prevent massive turtle by linking them to a CC for example.
The added freedom of the placement combined with the bile suggestion ensures they are not a complete waste of resource.
ok, done.
*hides in hole for the oncoming flame storm*
Now turrets are at the moment, fairly useless. Buffing them to much creates player vs machine instead of player vs player.
But lets try to find something to make them not so useless.
* Link maximum of turrets to a structure, preferably the CC. More CC = more turrets to place.
- This prevents marines spamming them at every RT, but enables scaling with more tier.
* Remove the area limit for turrets around their battery & perhaps combine it with room power.
- You can now place turrets in more useful locations rather then around a battery. If the battery & room power is gone, turrets become disabled.
- It is possible to not use room power, but still only the battery. As the battery can be placed anywhere in the room to power any turret in the room, it IS harder to find. Needs testing if battery + power node versus battery.
* Make it shoot bilebombs to reduce bile damage.
- It was a brilliant suggestion from someone, I think. It would protect vs gorge rushes. How much it reduces damage would need to be tested. (I myself do not think bile is in a bad place dmg wise)
* Balance health, damage & resources needed values accordingly.
So there you have it.
Free to place turrets on the map, to a certain maximum, as long as somewhere in the room is a battery. (room as in, the exact area which a power node powers)
You can now place turrets to cover each other & certain structures, place them in corners, reduce bile damage by spreading them.
Prevent massive turtle by linking them to a CC for example.
The added freedom of the placement combined with the bile suggestion ensures they are not a complete waste of resource.
ok, done.
*hides in hole for the oncoming flame storm*
Comments
Hehehe, not a popular topic, is it.. turrets.
You've got some interesting ideas as far as the battery goes, what if the turrets work off of normal power while it's up and the battery is charged by normal power, then if power goes down, the turrets still operate for a period of time (something along the lines of 30-45 seconds), then the battery is actually a battery that can work as backup, and still defend an area if the power goes down. The battery range could be optional but only sentries within the battery range will continue to fire after the power goes out.
Granted, that's not an all together useful feature if the sentries aren't worth much as far as defense to begin with.
Are sentries effected by weapons upgrades? If not, perhaps they should be.
Anti projectile laser turrets?
Laser-guided gorge-seeking rocket turret?
High-damaging laser beam cannon turret that can only fire the direction the commander aims it (one per battery, great for aiming down long corridors vs onos).
This game has so much untapped awesome tech potential!
I like the idea of the sentry being more effective with room power. I would increase battery range and make batterys recharge themselves when the sentrys are not in use and room power is down, though. If batteries would stay uncharged after those 40 seconds of fire it would make using sentries hard to use for offensive operations, and sentries do have a potential role there. To balance, the time a battery can supply the sentries could be downed to maybe 10 to 15 seconds of continous fire.
As for the bilebombs... depends on how that plays out. Looking at the low HP and overall damage it would be very useful if they could shoot down bilebombs, but the rate at which they do that should only protect from continous fire of 1, mabye 2 Gorges (with 3 sentries shooting). It's not like the Gorges don't have alternative uses, but I don't think their base sieging power should go from 100 to 0. Alternatively you could do something like this:
-Sentries have to be around a battery even with room power.
-The battery coordinates the sentries
-One battery holds 2 sentries
-Each comm chair adds one possible battery per room
-One of the 2 Sentries per battery shoots down bile if bile is incoming, a single Sentry gun can contiously neutralize 1 Gorge biling.
-The other Sentry of the pair will always fire at aliens and not at bile, even if more than 1 Gorge is biling.
You place the battery and can place the sentries from the battery instead of having to select and build them manually. The marines only have to build the sentry battery, the sentries unfold by themselves once the battery is finished. If a battery is destroyed the sentries that belong to it will die within 5~10 seconds after it (but batteries get a small HP boost so they dont die by being stared at anymore. Sentries will continue to shoot after the battery is dead if room has power). If a sentry dies, it costs 3res (like Hydras) to replace it at any location within senry radius.
Edit: the idea is not to improve sentry performance or price tag, but rather to simplify and speed up placement and construction.