Hyperspace is awesome

[TurboSlug22]

In HS, I see 2 things that are hurting the zone right now.. first is that players will RQ if they lose faith in their team. Second is the zone is quite challenging for new players..

 

Ive been thinking about ways to expand the gameplay without actually changing the the way the players play the game.

 

Please hear me out:

 

I think adding new things to buy is a great way to keep players interested in upgrading and buying things.. the more things to spend money on, the more time players will spend playing to earn money.

 

So imagine if sector 8 (where scrap and salvage is located) Was cut in half, and half of it was left open and empty except for a powerball goal tile. Imagine if players could spend money to buy a base! - the bot would award them 50 bricks (or enough to build a base) and the player could lay bricks one at a time to build the walls of the base. Players can do ?undo to remove a placed brick

 

Bricks would be bot controlled. Bricks would be on their own frequency so they act like regular walls. Here's the cool part, you can give them HP! so you have to repair your base etc Say for instance you could also buy turrets... which are like point defense guns that dont move but have much lower HP.

 

Say, each team has a designated area where they can build at..

 

This way, you could allow the player to actually build their own destructible base. Similarly to how regular items are regulated by the EXP bar, you could limit base expansion to powerball goals - so like, 5 goals lets you buy a certain number of bricks and turrets... (10 bricks per goal and every 5 goals you get a turret)

 

...

 

My thinking here is that powerballing is like mining - you haul resources back to the base and you get to spend money to convert those resources into base building components...

 

This way, New players can be quite effective to help their team by scoring power ball goals - and also ppl who are left alone on their freq after their team RQ's can still be effective vs a large enemy team if they want to spend some money... BUT if they do not get a continued supply of powerballs from the center, they cannot repair their base even if they have lots of money. This makes blockading possible and effective.

 

Thoughts?

 

EDIT: To counteract teammates who grief by laying bricks in strategically bad places, you can select bricks and type ?vote (or something) to have it removed if enough players agree

Edited May 11, 2010 by TurboSlug22

[Dr Brain]

Bricks cannot be made to work like that, because of technical limitations on the game.

[TurboSlug22]

Bricks cannot be made to work like that, because of technical limitations on the game.

 

Hm that sucks

 

well it was a fun idea

 

No luck working around that with laser doors i guess?

[JoWie]

There is a way to "remove" tiles, but you would need to have players reenter the arena to get them to be placed back. Could be a fun event tho.

 

It would be possible to have "destroyable" bricks by simply not repeating the brick lay packet if it has been destroyed. The downsides of this method would be a delay in the destruction of bricks and a lot of packets that need to be sent (17 bytes per brick, per player, per brick delay). Increasing the brick delay would reduce bandwith, but increase the delay after destroying a brick.

In my opinion this is infeasible unless done very sparingly (like say, at predetermined strategic points such as an base entry)

Edited May 11, 2010 by JoWie

[Samapico]

Doors are easier to control than bricks... though you're limited to 8 independent 'sets' of doors

[TurboSlug22]

One thing I really like about HS is how the upgrades stay with you after you die... Its like the investments you make in the game are tangible. That's a good spirit for a zone to have.

 

What I was shooting for here was a way to give players ownership over some part of the map.. some way that they can invest into the game and carve out something more for themselves than just a ship - but something that parallel's the zone's gameplay so as not to unbalance it.

 

In Eve online, players can build their own starbases with sentry guns, mining outposts, warp points, shields... a complete base that they need to defend from attack

 

HS is a basing game where the goal is to reach the core of a base and hold it against enemy attack. So if we give players the ability to exchange time played online (what we want) for the ability to design their own base - why not?

 

OK, so you cant use bricks to make bases in pub... No destructible walls..:\

 

What if you could allow the player to create the base alone in a private arena using bricks as a way to tell the bot what you want in your map. The player could design their base and the bot would check to make sure there's a good path to reach the FR. If the player accepts the final bill, section 8 in the map is updated with their base but not published to pub yet (since this requires recycle)

 

Here's the fun bit, when the zone dies out for the night and nobody is playing, the server can automatically update the pub map and the zone is refreshed with new content 2 new bases in sector 8 (one for each team) for the remainder of the day. (so there's room for 2 purchases per day... Dont queue up purchases, just make it so the first 2 people online after reset can buy - the incentive here is to BE online at reset, to boost population during slow times)

 

I think, having turrets to defend a base adds an interesting level to the game, since, while alive, those turrets will generate money for the owner online or not. This is a desirable thing for players to achieve obviously, however, considering turrets and bases are very expensive, the amount of money they generate for a player isn't such a big deal The idea being, the most expensive items in the game can only be afforded this way...

 

As a player, when you siege a base in HS, you want the JP. You want the reward for destroying the base. (and i guess, holding the flags) So if you could destroy turrets and the entire team was awarded $ for destroying it - that'd be cool

 

In regard to purchasing turrets, you could have different settings for turret AI's (costing different amounts) turrets that aim in 1 direction and fire when an enemy crosses a certain zone (good for inside bases and cheap) - or turrets that aim directly at nearby enemies and fire (Good for perimeter defenses) etc etc..

 

--

 

Lets please just consider the idea without bringing manpower into the equation

 

What do you think?

[tcsoccerman]

Let's discuss creating a new client that supports all of these cool features.

 

But let's leave manpower out of the equation.

 

What do you think?

[TurboSlug22]

Let's discuss creating a new client that supports all of these cool features.

 

But let's leave manpower out of the equation.

 

What do you think?

 

Well, you wouldnt actually need a new client to allow the player to use bricks to tell the bot what they want for a base... The bot would just update the map file .. seems doable to me

 

I'm glad you think my suggestions are cool

 

anyway, I said lets leave manpower out of the equation because thats a whole other aspect of the discussion.. for now I just want to focus on the quality of the ideas...

[»Purge]

Sounds like a great way for people to design lame bases for easy rewards. That's something a bot can't check for and requires staff input. In any case, having a bot write a base onto an existing map based on layed bricks would be pretty hard to conjure up and would require more time that current HS devs don't have. http://www.ssforum.net/public/style_emoticons/default/blum.gif

 

A more interesting idea, IMO, would be to let teams design the base they are defending using some sort of shared team resource to add extra offense and defense characteristics to the base.

[kid]

Shamelessly stolen from Castle Defenses in Warcraft 3:

 

Gates. Your team can open and close them at will, forcing the other team to take the other of two routes.

 

 

For Example

 

          /      /
----------/gate a/
               |  
               |
----------\gate b\
          \      \

Where ?gate would open gate a and close gate b, and visa versa. This could be done with bricks.