What do you want to see in DS?

[»LtNirvana]

If anyone has any input on how to improve DS in any specific ways I'm all ears.

[Michio Kaku]

If you are keeping the ships from before you should make them all somewhat balanced so that what we see isn't 24/7 heavy weapons everywhere with 1 scout on each team and some sniper that everyone rages at. Perhaps setting specializations for each ship might help. Some suggestions:

 

Giving the heavy weapons the strongest arsenal (aside from the tank) but poor movement speed and lackluster acceleration to ensure that it is not ridiculously overpowered.

 

Letting the Flamethrower deal tons of damage at close range while still being fast (short bomb range with extremely fast reload rate and travel speed). A weak gun should give it the ability to snipe off long range targets. Try to buff its bombs so that it relies on them much more than the gun however.

 

The Demolitions Man should also be improved to have double bounce bombs with shrapnel or stronger bullets because it is fairly weak even when defending in a base (DO NOT GIVE IT BOUNCING BULLETS HOLY SHIT).

 

The Scout needs to be much more agile than any other ship without being too much faster at top speed, although it should take 4 or more shots to kill someone.

 

The Bomb Turret needs some sort of buff to be on par with the gun turret. Perhaps a much stronger bomb or high shrapnel because right now it is too vulnerable even in a base. Remove all of its repels to ensure that it doesn't have too synergy with the new gun turret.

 

The Gun Turret should be given a slightly higher spread on its multi-fire or the parallel shot from the events because it is difficult to accurately aim at a target without proximity detectors. Remove all of its repels to compensate for this and to make it easier to push into a base filled with turrets.

 

The Shotgunner is in a fairly decent spot right now and I don't really think any changes need to be made to it. Although I dislike how it is more effective at range than in close combat due to the nature of spreading bullets. I'm not too sure how this can be fixed. I'll edit this if I think of a good idea.

 

The tank is in a unique position right now. It requires a specific keyset to play remotely well and its high life coupled with its shitty regeneration and large hitbox makes it a difficult ship to use. It is more of a base defense ship than something that is actually useful on the battlefield. Increasing the regeneration slightly while making its bombs have more shrapnel might help with its play style although it will be extremely difficult to balance. It may need to be completely redesigned to be more of a threat in the open while being less overpowered in bases.

 

Of course for events the ships would still be the same as before, but in public the lack of variety in viable ships is what really killed Desert Storm.

 

Add events where everyone can continue playing for the entirety of the host so that people don`t leave due to being stuck in spectator. After a series of hosts Desert Storm tended to die for hours because no-one wanted to sit in spectator for 10+ minutes.

 

If we are really having trouble attracting players, lowering the skill cap in public might attract more people seeing as a large percentage of the gamer population is pretty casual. Keeping the cap high in events is a must however.

 

All in all, more balance with less exclusion in events should be enough to convince players to come back to Desert Storm.

[»LtNirvana]

Thank you Michio, some very good suggestions here. Just to note, the zone will be going back to turf/powerball so there will be no bases.

 

The turrets are combined to be one ship (. It will have pretty low health, l3 bombs that fly fast with slow reload speed. L1 bullets that fire very fast single fire (no multi or double barrel (I wanted double barrel but unfortunately I can't disable multifire in subgame and didn't want it to have the ability to be triple barrel)).

 

The tank is the only attachable ship so in powerball it makes for a great transport vehicle. It doesn't move too fast by default but I'm giving it the ability to burn energy and kick its afterburners on. It's energy will be high, as always, about 250. It's not a crazy amount of energy and can be picked off pretty easily with no turrets attached. I'm still up in the air about all this since I haven't had anyone to playtest these settings with.

[Michio Kaku]

With no bases the Demoman is going to need to be revamped. Perhaps make it a mine laying machine with decent weapons?

 

I like the turret idea especially since it frees up a ship slot for some creativity.

 

Don't make the tank waste energy through afterburners unless it's base speed is good. The energy drain was tried out a while ago with the standard base speed and it made the tank completely useless.

[»LtNirvana]

Its base speed i havent touched I just wanted it to have some consequences to darting around the map with afterburners. Also, I want to give players ways to manage their energy and have to fight intuitively instead of just waiting to be shot and spraying around. Bullets and bombs will cost a more substantial amount of energy than previously so people who just spray around will be at a disadvantage, much as a person driving a tank will be at a disadvantage if they just dart around with afterburners and burn themselves dry, but if they get in a jam the afterburners should give them enough space to survive an attack if necessary and used properly.

[»LtNirvana]

Also, the demo soldier will have the most health of all the soldiers plus the bombs will have a bunch of shrap in addition to a single bounce. They will still have a thor and they will be one of 2 ships to get xradar, making them critical in keeping snipers in check. Snipers will only have like 35 health so a well placed thor should take one out with ease.

[Michio Kaku]

In that case the bomb speed of the tank might need to be increased as it will be easy to dodge the slow bombs.

 

A larger cost on using weapons is definitely a good idea.

 

I think that if the base speeds of the ships are going to be changed at all then afterburners should cost energy on every ship to ensure that people aren't running around at max speed all the time.

[»LtNirvana]

Already increased tank bomb speed, it was necessary for sure.

 

I don't know if I want any ships besides the tanks to have afterburners. Should they have afterburners at an energy cost? Most of them already have access to rockets.

[Michio Kaku]

An energy cost on afterburners would only be necessary for those ships with movement speed below the maximum. Otherwise it would be easy to reconfigure the controls so that it would be possible to fire while using afterburners, thus removing the idea of a disadvantage of speed for an advantage elsewhere.

[»LtNirvana]

I think you're assuming that all ships have afterburners regardless regardless of an energy cost. This is not the case. The only ship that even has afterburners in my current configuration is the tank. All the rest have constant speeds.

 

Ship 2 is slower as you requested, I think that's a good idea. Ship 1 is faster and more maneuverable. The rest are pretty much the same except the flamer is a bit faster and the turret cant move at all aside from rockets.

[spidernl]

As I've suggested before, I'd like to see some "GUI" elements for turf. Spawn selection, that kind of thing.

 

Also, an idea I think someone came to me with long ago was a "perk"/achievement system a la COD&friends. You'd have one or two perk slots for your account, which you could fill with perks gained by completing achievements. Achievements would be stuff like killing sprees, capturing points on the map, capturing the flag (a number of times), etc. Perks would give minor advantages, and there should be some easy-to-get ones that aren't weaker than harder-to-get perks, so that players don't end up feeling disadvantaged because they have no perks to use in their perk slots at all.

 

If/when you switch to ASSS, I'd be happy to help develop these ideas, as well.

 

As far as settings go, I haven't played in 'the new DS' yet, so honestly I have no idea. Anything similar to the old settings with more useful "other" (not heavy weapons, pretty much) ships is fine with me.

Edited December 13, 2011 by spidernl

[Cheese]

apparently he already switched

[»LtNirvana]

Spider, I love your ideas. Those are the kinds of things I will love to do with DS when we make the switch to ASSS. If you would like to assist me in the conversion process let me know, I would like to start as soon as possible.

 

I still have plenty to do in terms of settings work and extra sfx/gfx and plugin configuration but all that will port to ASSS pretty easily (minus the bot plugins) when we do that. I need to find some ASSS coders to help out with the project as I don't know garbage about programming.

[Cheese]

but i see youre running subgame, which means youre either developing for asss in secret, or not at all

 

additionally, the remaining ASSS developers can be counted on one hand

[Dav]

Already increased tank bomb speed, it was necessary for sure.

 

I don't know if I want any ships besides the tanks to have afterburners. Should they have afterburners at an energy cost? Most of them already have access to rockets.

 

I think afterburners should be added, with a large energy cost to allow "running" of the player. The large energy cost prevents them running from death when fighting though.

 

I also think cloak on snipers and x-radar should have high energy costs to prevent them being active constantly

[»LtNirvana]

I have afterburners on my to do list just like that. Doing it one ship at a time. 7 and 8 have it already.

 

Cloak and xradar are interesting ideas, I'll think about it... would probably be a good idea.