Free Allegiance Forums

IMPROVING(?) EXISTING:

What the...? Auto-Launched when base captured/destroyed?
- Suggesting autotransfer to oldest existing base (Althoug some might argue that Auto-Launch is a part of a gameplay: "Don't sit in your base and eiher launch to d it, or transfer yourself before it's too late")

Build any cons if you have the money for them, even if you haven't detected the asteroid they require yet.
Build another con of the same type as soon as the first one is done, so you wouldn't have to wait until it actually builds the station. (currently displays the "constructor en route", preventing you from building another one)
- These are "logical" suggestions. However, I could imagine some might argue that being not able to do so is a part of the gameplay.

(Not just) Miner limitation
- It's just a little weird that "Maximum Miners" setting affects maximum amount of tower and mine-field constructors as well... I think there should be separate limiters for those...

When miner is destroyed, it could drop one or more (depending on how much He3 it mined - obviously, an empty miner wouldn't drop anything) short-lived "He3 canisters", those could be picked up, stored in cargo, taken home and turned into cash (something like when you bring aleph res tech home, you recieve 1000 credits - at least that's what read-on-you-own Cadet 1 course says in Week 2, "Finding technology in space")...

Belters and Shields
- Most of the Belter player-operated ships have just tough armor, no shields. I would suggest the same for their miners, cons and bases (and everything else that has shields) as well.

ADDING SOMETHING NEW:

Miniminers
- Half the size, 2× faster and stealthier, but also the capacity would be cut in half.
- Maybe faction specific thing

Suicide Explosives
- Explosives you would load in your cargo and that would produce massive explosion once you arm them and trigger them, taking you and lots of things around you along (ships, miners, cons, bases...). The more of them on your ship, the bigger the blast and the more the damage (even those you would have in cargo would exlode).
- Costs credits
- High signature, like 50%-100% (maybe even higher)
- High mass
- Maybe faction specific thing

Ram-Cannon
- Very low damage (maybe even none at all), gives a push to whatever it hits.
- Messing with enemy cons, miners and bombers, or camp the alpeh, when someone comes through, you RamCannon him and therefore push him back where he came from :-D
- Pushing your own bombers/cons - depending on whether or not would the "ram-effect" be affected by friendly-fire settings.

Shotgun Cannon
- Close-range, low fire-rate gun firing swarms of projectiles in wide spread (just like shotgun)

EnergyBooster
- Basically just a booster that would consume energy instead of fuel. The fact that energy regenerates would be balanced out by the fact that full energy bar would be gone faster than full fuel bar (not to mention that other useful thing use energy as well).

RipDrive
- This would be a piece of tech fitting into the "booster" slot. Similar to the "EnergyBooster" it would use energy, however, it would work more like a short-ranged teleport. By holding the TAB, you would start consuming the energy and charging the RipDrive. After releasing it, you would rip some distance (dependig on how much did you charge) in the direction you are facing.
- After using the RipDrive, your speed could either remain the same, or it could be reduced to zero to nerf it a little during dogfights...
- You could rip to the other side of a minefield, avoiding it completely, going "through" asteroids rather than around, not to mention it would be great for avoiding gunfire and missles...

(Front-Fired) InertialMines
- It would work almost like ejecting cargo - you would release a small mine cloud, that would fly in the same direction as your ship did in the moment of release, it would start at the speed of your ship and would be slowly slowing down due to alleg-space drag. Also, it would arm itself after usual 4 sec, but that wouldn't have any effect on it's speed.
- In a way, you could "throw" them on your enemies.

Fake miners/cons
- Much much cheaper and faster to produce, emit high-signature of the real thing, but also lower signature that they are fake... Should any enemy scanner detect the fake-signature, they would be registred as fake until destroyed
- Maybe faction specific thing

Holographic cloak - Would reduce the original ship signature to zero, but also would make the ship give out a signature of another ship (that would be fixed value - let's say everything would be masked as bomber), until the power runs out - then the true thing would appear.

LRM (XRM?) Decoy
- This missle would emit the signature of your own ship when fired and would travel at your own top speed (without boosters), so you could for example sit behind an asteroid, fire this missle in some direction and watch the enemy chasing it, while you peacefully travel in opposite direction.

Booby-Trap
- This device could be deployed by a small con on any asteroid, making such asteroid booby-trapped. Such asteroid would appear as a normal asteroid and would even allow "Build" and "Mine" commands to anyone else but you and your allies. Should an enemy con start building / miner start mining on such asteroid, it would result in large explosion, destroying both the asteroid and con / miner.

Pretty good ideas here =]. You came up with these yourself?

Yes, pretty much... I only went through other Topics and deleted ideas that were already quite often discussed.

What was also on my list before that:

- Cloak-slot specialities (work on energy, stop working when energy is depleted) like "+X% to gunfire damage", "Nan everything in Xm radius", "-X% damage taken"
- Gattling-armed Pods
- Cargo-slot Batteries, Shield Charges and NanPacks (use to repair/recharge your ship)
- The possibility of storing the Powerup floating in space in your cargo for later use (and making powerups more rare)
- BlastBooster, that would send you flying at 500mps in a split second, but also consuming all of its fuel by that.
- Player-pilotable miners, that you could buy in similar way you do with bombers and such
- Mining gun, giving your scouts an option to bring home few credits (the idea was the He3 would get stored in the cargo, so these "mining scouts" would have to fly empty, or equipped with "He3 Storage Containers". Also, they would be able to carry only like 500 credits max)
- Special kind of towers that you could transfer to from your hangar view - they would stay there for ever and have powerful weapons, but would require an operator.
- Ejecting a turret in a similar way as probe, along with the gunner. Turret would stay in place and gunner could either use it to shoot something down or eject himself and pod himself home.

But these went away, since i din't want to look like someone who has never heard of the "Search" function :-D Well, they are here now... At least to let you know that I would be another supporter of those ideas :-)

I think the suicide ship was discussed in a Community Core forum thread. But was discarded by Xeretov as being impossible to balance, so you may want to think about that one too.

*Shrugs Shoulders* Well, maybe I will... Technically it wouldn't be impossible though... Carry around an ordonance with high signature, with large damage AoE efect, that would explode immediately after firing it (it could also have separate damage calculation, so it wouldn't be affected by friendly-fire settings)... If used against bases, it would be basically like troop transports that don't have to go for the green door ad destroy instead of capturing. The "Don't have to go for the green door" part would also mean, that one suicide bomber couldn't be enough to take out the whole station, as it would be much easier... Also, should there be the "Suicide explosives have friendly-fire always ON", it would mean that Suicide Bombers couldn't attack in one pack, as the first explosion would take out the others, before they would reached their goal...

QUOTE When miner is destroyed, it could drop one or more (depending on how much He3 it mined - obviously, an empty miner wouldn't drop anything) short-lived "He3 canisters", those could be picked up, stored in cargo, taken home and turned into cash[/quote]

Obviously this is a code change, but I like this idea. It would add a very interesting dynamic to the game if you could "steal" the enemies load when you kill a full miner, or conversely "save" the load if you just barely lose a miner.

Paradigm2 wrote:QUOTE (Paradigm2 @ Sep 30 2009, 11:46 AM) Obviously this is a code change, but I like this idea. It would add a very interesting dynamic to the game if you could "steal" the enemies load when you kill a full miner, or conversely "save" the load if you just barely lose a miner.

I feel like bios will become dominant with this

It could be more simple (less lucrative).

Kill a full (or mostly full) miner, a 2k (or some other amount) cashbox is ejected

Of course the "He3 Already Mined" to "He3 Ejected" conversion wouldn't be 100%... 50% could be enough (for every 1000 credits one 500cr cashbox is released). And if it wouldn't, there certainly is some space to decide on a more suitable value (30%, 25%, 20%...)

Figuring out how much cash a miner would drop would require a code change, simply having a random chance of a miner dropping money could be done by miner containing a $1000 cashbox (which has to be docked to get cash), I dunno if you can have drones have stuff in their cargo but you could always put it as a special item like a shield (or cm's if drones can load them even if they don't use them) which is worth $1000.

That's a simple solution and empty miners would have a chance of dropping a $1000 cashbox but no code change required.