Unique starting ships

[Psychosis]

the problem with uber kamikaze ships, is that they can be used to kill BASES, actually with scary effectiveness

[Weylin]

I like how starcraft had vastly differing factions.

While other RTS games, such as age of empires had like... hell.. 12 or so to choose from?
But they all just had minor differences (+10 something there -5% here... blah blah), and 1 (And sometimes 2) unique units.

Frankly, Allegiance feels more like how age of empires does.
There's the scout, the infantry, the cavalry, the archer, the siege weapon
Allegiance has the scout, the fighter, the interceptor, the stealth and the capital ship/bomber/HTT... every faction has these units, they just vary a bit.



What would it be like if we had a core that worked the way Star craft does? That is, having each faction extremely unique.
When you look at units in star craft, there is just no comparison between any unit to one that another faction has, they just differ so greatly.

I suppose you could put the Marine, Zealot, and Zerg into the same catagory as an early combat unit, but look how different they are.
Protoss are expensive and slow to build, but shielded and hard as hell to kill.
Zerg are cheap and fast, and a bit fragile.
Terrans are... $#@!, I don't know, I'll shut up now.

Think about it!

[raingriffin]

making every faction extremely unique is going to make all the old players chew on you. Most of the community is set on how alleg is now, or even how alleg used to be in the old days.
Besides, even if most people would like a change of this magnitude, i wonder if we could be creative enough, and if we had resources enough (models, coders etc) to mod 6 factions in such a fashion.
Not to mention that part of what makes Allegiance such a good game is the fact that the factions we have are quite balanced, meaning you can choose a couple and have a reasonable chance of winning when facing an equally skilled commander. Now, balancing 6 majorly different factions would be a nightmare, and long hours of testing. Enormous required effort for a community of volunteer developers...

[TurkeyXIII]

raingriffin: What Weylin's suggesting isn't a change for community core, but for a different core which utilizes different rules. Further reading: http://www.freeallegiance.org/FAW/index.php/Core

I think it's an awesome idea. Make it happen!

(Off-topic for this thread though)

[Vlymoxyd]

I already started a core with 4 completely unqiue factions if anyone wants to start somewhere. But for CC, unique starting ship and possibly 1 unique capital ship is about the farthest I'd go.

[DasSmiter]

We want to balance the stuff we have now then introduce new stuff, not introduce new stuff to balance the stuff we already have

(not @ vly)

[Psychosis]

i think you would be very hard pressed to get someone to say that giga and IC were "similar"

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (Psychosis @ Aug 22 2009, 10:54 AM) i think you would be very hard pressed to get someone to say that giga and IC were "similar"

Thank god someone gets my point.

[DasSmiter]

Erm they are pretty similar.

[Compellor]

With 8 factions, you really just don't want to make them too different. I think Alleg is doing a pretty good job differentiating the factions as is. If your factions are very different, I'd say the upper limit on factions is four, based on my experiences with Warcraft 3. Actually, that was a bit crazy, three factions are probably better. With just two factions, I'm not sure you can really go far enough without some kind of code change. The example I'm thinking of here is Natural Selection, where one team has a commander and uses ranged weapons, and the other team is decentralized and mostly melee.

That said it's kinda fun to speculate on what sort of special ships a given faction would have. It might even be useful if you focus your ideas on shipyard, seeing as that needs an overhaul anyway.