News: Roadmap Resource Revamp & Continental Lattice Updated - Page 10

CraazyCanuck · 2013-07-22, 12:07 PM

Fantastic News.

On cotinental locks. For a faction that is down to their Home WG, allow them the ability to Warp Assault either of the other two WG on the same continent. This option is only available after the faction has been forced into their WG and after a set timer. Timer is cancelled if the locked faction breaks the lock. When active, there is a small window for the locked faction to send troops through before the WG power supply is drained and needs to recharge. With the new resource system, could instill a period of no resource gain or a slower resource gain until the WG recharges. When a warpgate assault occurs, the targeted WG receives a small local warning of the incoming assault as a power surge is detected or what have you.

As for the ANT. New vehicle is a must. Otherwise the larger outfits will just mass spawn sundies and hide the ANT amongst the duplicates. When charged, have the ANT emit an EMP by default that disables radar/HUD/lock-ons from working within its effect.

Maybe as an added effect to increase gameplay, make it so that the ANT can only hang on to the charge for so long before it becomes volatile and destructs

That way logistics involving distance from the facility in need and the closest terminal comes into play. Just stalling an ANT advance or forcing a detour would become viable tactic.

Another variable maybe the time it not only takes for a terminal to charge an ANT but the duration between charges and/or number of charges a terminal may be able to complete before it needs to recharge?

Rahabib · 2013-07-22, 12:42 PM

I still dont really see the need to have it separate vehicle, just let it be the sunderer with a module that takes the AMS slot.

Why:
1) Sunderers are already targets, You dont have to worry about one slipping by unnoticed.
2) Defensive ability. Yea, ANTs may have worked great for those bored enough to drive them in PS1, but in a game with 10x the population, they wont last more than a minute.
3) New vehicle, all new certs, more of a shameless cash in for SOE. Or maybe I just convinced them to do it now.

OK heres why this wont really affect as much as you think:
Yes its new side objective to the game, hurray! But still when it comes to attacking a base, heres your choices. "Well this base now has less resources so it will be easier to take." Once you get it, all it does is push the enemy back. The game is still just one giant tug of war. Thats fine but you cant cut off strategic use of vehicles from other zones etc. So basically, the battles across territories still do not interconnect meaningfully. Now that it will be a unified resource type, taking a biolab or taking an amp makes very little difference in the grand scheme. I personally liked having three types of resources, its just its impossible to cut off a resource type from the enemy making resource types meaningless. Rather than tweaking the system to work, they just went back to PS1 - problems and all.

Ragnafrak · 2013-07-22, 01:06 PM

Originally Posted by Rahabib

I still dont really see the need to have it separate vehicle, just let it be the sunderer with a module that takes the AMS slot.

Why:
1) Sunderers are already targets, You dont have to worry about one slipping by unnoticed.
2) Defensive ability. Yea, ANTs may have worked great for those bored enough to drive them in PS1, but in a game with 10x the population, they wont last more than a minute.
3) New vehicle, all new certs, more of a shameless cash in for SOE. Or maybe I just convinced them to do it now.

Why not:
1) Consider the bigger picture. There will be more than one. There might be 10 or more. Which one is the important one? Undeployed, they all look the same. Destroy the deployed one, another deploys. They become their own camouflage. Think about zebras herding together, their stripes melding with each other to confuse predators.

2a)Just as there are many who, like yourself, would think driving a defenseless ANT less than fun, there are others who believe the opposite. I am one example, and the group of friends I play with think it would be great fun to have to defend a mobile objective such as an ANT.

2b)Saying that they won't last very long is also too narrow a viewpoint. TTK on everything is less than a minute. There are plenty of circumstances when ANTS would be viable as well.

2c)If dying too quickly is a big concern for you, then this would be another thing to add to the list of reasons why the ANT should be its own vehicle. A separate ANT vehicle can have more armor and hitpoints, giving it a longer TTK. Of course, being too durable would mean it would need to give up offensive capabilities, as has already been suggested.

3)Everyone has access to all of the vehicles for free. Low-level certifications are not hard to comeby and are also not purchased with SC. Thus, adding a new vehicle with its own cert lines does not directly lead to more cash for SOE, shameless or no. Further, tagging unnecessary adjectives onto it does not strengthen your argument.

Greenthy · 2013-07-22, 12:56 PM

Originally Posted by CraazyCanuck

Fantastic News.

On cotinental locks. For a faction that is down to their Home WG, allow them the ability to Warp Assault either of the other two WG on the same continent. This option is only available after the faction has been forced into their WG and after a set timer. Timer is cancelled if the locked faction breaks the lock. When active, there is a small window for the locked faction to send troops through before the WG power supply is drained and needs to recharge. With the new resource system, could instill a period of no resource gain or a slower resource gain until the WG recharges. When a warpgate assault occurs, the targeted WG receives a small local warning of the incoming assault as a power surge is detected or what have you.

Or one could just add in sanctuaries, linking to a continent and a BI (while they work on more continents)

Larington · 2013-07-22, 05:40 PM

I would:

Remove spawning functionality from the Sunderer to make it more of a troop transport & front line vehicle repair/resupply vehicle.

Create a new resupply vehicle, the resupply vehicle has the following main options for its Deployment Utility:

1. Troop respawning & re-equipping with drop pod interception weapon on roof.
2. Troop respawning & re-equpping with cloaking bubble device
3. Nanite capacitor, useful for recharging friendly bases or draining enemy bases.
4. Mining/Gathering for sending resources to a continents warpgate.

(Could also have a troop respawning & re-equipping with pain field generator on it)
(Could also have it so that a fully charged nanite capacitor resupply vehicle has a particularly devastating explosion if destroyed, which means you could have fun sticking a block of C4 to it and bailing out as it rolls at an enemy troop spawner)

Later on you could extend its functionality into field base construction in a game update.

Baneblade · 2013-07-22, 06:30 PM

Starstriker · 2013-07-23, 12:16 PM

Coming in late to the discussion, but...

I really like the proposed system. It hits most of my concerns about the resources as they stand right now.

What I would suggest, however, is that personal nanites be used for more than just major force multipliers like tanks, C4, etc, and also have minor costs associated with many of the actions that players can do. I don't know what values you're considering, Malorn, but hopefully this gives a reasonable idea:

Spawning costs something like 15 resources
Spawning at a Sunderer costs 20, slightly more, to give permanent spawn points a logistics advantage
Hot dropping costs 50... dropping from the sky is incredibly helpful, so it should have an appropriate cost!
Reviving a downed player costs 5, substantially better than having them respawn, but makes it burdensome to do so continuously.
Deploying a MANA turret costs 20, so that Engineers are a bit more mindful of their deployables
Tanks and aircraft require resources to repair, making them dependent on resources beyond just the initial pull cost. In fact, reducing the pull costs for vehicles in exchange for more action-based costs would make it so that careful pilots and drivers who keep their vehicles alive a long time still need to consider resources.
I'd love to have rearming vehicles also be resource dependent, but since most forms of re-arm are automatic that's problematic. One solution might be to make the actual FIRING of the vehicle weapons costs resources, which solves most of issues one might have with it, but might be intuitively a little odd. "I have 30 shots in my tank, but I have to spend resources to fire each one? Huh?" Then again, you're already doing that with the infantry consumables, so maybe not a big issue!
If you want to go a little crazy here, you can also use resource costs as another knob to tune in class and weapon balance. Decimators are just plain better than normal rocket launchers? Fine, but you'll pay 50 resources per shot! Want to make the empire specific heavy weapons fearsome and devastating, as they should be? Great, but spawning with one or switching to the loadout will cost you an additional 50 resources, so you better be careful with that thing! I really, really like the idea of having special, powerful weapons or vehicles who can punch above their weight but sensitive to logistical concerns!
I suspect I don't need to mention this, but on principle all player resource expenditures should be initiated by THAT player's explicit action, and never by someone else or via an automatic system. That's why I've got the medic paying the cost of the revive above, for instance.

My intent with these suggestions is to emphasize resources as a personal measure of endurance (IE, the supplies that the player is bringing with them into the field, instead of a bank balance back at HQ) and making player actions reflect that. Players attacking enemy territory or defending a base with hampered resource output should need to be thinking about this stuff.

I think making this stuff absolutely critical to moment-to-moment play is the best way to pump up the mechanics you're talking about and make them sing. If players KNOW that resources will have a significant impact on what they can do and how well they'll stand up in a fight, they'll care that a base is being cut off from resupply and resources will become a critical part of play. If you just restrict it to the cost of pulling force multipliers, players will be a bit annoyed by it but it won't really stop them from maintaining a solid infantry defense/attack, which is what wins a lot of battles.

As far as the resource gathering vehicles goes, I really like the idea of a separate ANT vehicle, for the same reason that others have mentioned: easy identification and separate balancing. Shoving it into another Sunderer module would just make that vehicle even MORE difficult to read, and would impair the counter-play to resupply efforts by making it impossible to identify the critical target in a convoy. It'd also make sense to be able to tune the cost, mobility, and defensive capabilities of the ANT separately from everyone's favourite rolling brick.

Malorn mentioned that it's not ideal to have a vehicle that's just a "space truck" with a sharply limited role, and I totally agree. My thoughts are to make it a more general resource support vehicle. If you implement the kind of resource costs for individual actions I'm talking about above, there'll be a very real risk of friendly players running low on resources in the field, especially on the attack. Why not, then, allow the ANT to resupply nanites to players as well as bases with an optional module? Either a triggered AOE resource distribution or deploying a "crate" of some kind would do the trick here. If you do that, then you might also be able to get away with nixing the attacker's ability to resupply from an adjacent base, since they'd now be able to bring in ANTs to fuel their assault, an interesting strategic wrinkle that a savvy defender might be able to exploit!

An alternative module might instead let you spend the ANT's stored power on a defensive barrier for nearby vehicles and infantry to protect them from aircraft and return fire. That way, you can pull ANTs for things other than resupply runs... those same resources can also be applied in different ways, powering powerful special abilities that REQUIRE the ANT to recharge at a resource node. They can be powerful because they're limited by the ability to recharge the ANT as opposed to ammo or HP that can be locally resupplied. There are a lot of interesting tactical and strategic implications of that, and it'd be a very different kind of gameplay!

kubacheski · 2013-07-23, 02:22 PM

The concepts in the personal resource depletion are somewhat implemented already in the design in the fact that you get resources slower when the base resources are low. Something of a trickle down effect that reduces your income over time as power gets low, not in a constant cost per use. This limiting factor is the basis for ANTs. You have to resupply or you certainly lose the seige, you can't hold out forever.

Now for the cost of respawning and turrets, this is not a personal resource per se. The base is where the energy comes to activate the spawning of soldiers and should come from the base reserves, ammo from turrets comes from base. Vehicles yes, is a personal cost so as not to spam the field with it, but still should drain the base resources as you're using a base function to turn your personal resources into somthing. The bigger a something, the more resources it costs, both individually and the pad.

I love the promotion of supply lines via ANT technology. The question I have is where does it stop? Is it only bases? Can a AMS run out of nanites? How many spawns can a base perform as compared to an AMS? Should you also have to resupply an AMS with resources after prolonged usage?

If so, then why have separate vehicles at all? All Sunderer modules are dispensing resources that a base does (people, ammo, repair, etc). It makes perfect sense to have a module that has the singular role of carrying these resources from collection spot to silo (or other Sunderer w/module xyz). All Sundy's use them, the ANT Sundy simply can carry a lot more of them.

vipjerry · 2013-07-23, 05:38 PM

ANT should be some kind of time bomb truck on map visible to everyone, when it goes off, remaining hack time should be reduced with instant hack on all points in range, or let say it should be instant win if it goes off on satellite base...

Hamma · 2013-07-23, 06:36 PM

I really like the idea of bringing back a small squad transport vehicle that would also have the ANT variant. When outfitted as an ANT it would hold the driver and one gunner and when outfitted as a transport it would hold 6 troops (No MAX units) and be faster.

Blynd · 2013-07-24, 05:50 AM

Forgot abou c4 mobile bombs so yeah got to agree with you on that then

Rivenshield · 2013-07-25, 03:04 AM

Fighting over one's own home continent is going to get reaaalllly boring after awhile.

I still say we need sanctuaries and rotating warpgates so we can fight different enemies in different directions across the same patch of ground.

Baneblade · 2013-07-25, 05:43 AM

I'm sure we will still have rotating gates, but sanctuaries won't make much sense without more continents.

GeoGnome · 2013-07-25, 04:16 PM

You know, there is one thing that bugs me about the resource revamp... why are amp stations not playing a more prominent roll?

Seriously, why aren't amp stations providing a passive boost to the amount of energy your bases regenerate each minute? That way if you hold the warpgate and 2 amp stations you'll get faster energy regeneration. It'd be like the biolab boost, but with resources. I'm fine with them contributing to dome shields, but why not this too?

Carbon Copied · 2013-07-27, 07:34 AM

Mixed feeling after FNO 39 interview/Q&A that almost had my head hit the desk.. after it was said to be likely a quick and dirty band aid of "ANT Sunderer module" (yawn). The lack of vehicle variety and seeming uniqueness is visually fucking boring at times. Oh look another Sunderer, oh and another, oh another... ad nauseum.

If Malorn/Kev-mo/Art team use this option please for all love of god just use the chassis as a start point however a complete unique back end; (i.e you equip the module it looks significantly aesthetically different to just adding a little cone and a couple of glow effects). While giving it downsides and compromises like not being able to transport a full complement of troops (think along an armored bank van line of a plus 1 - 3 etc.) - just something to break the "jack of all trades - it looks the same as everything else" monotonous tone.

Strong words but; please don't fuck the art and mechanics up.