Difference Core

Development areas for Allegiance core (IGC) design.
RoboTel
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 8:00 am

Post by RoboTel »

Alright, I am in interested in creating a core which expands upon the advantages and disadvantages of each faction, making them more unique and shifting their play styles away from one-another. Factions would gain unique research progressions in addition to the base progression to help flesh out their specialties. These would not be another tier of tech, but rather potential areas of investment to deal with particular situations.

Realistically I am not entrenched enough in the community to do this on my own, so I am checking here to see if I could even get people to test if I did indeed do this.

A general list of things I might be doing:

-Expanding on all factional differences, pushing them away from the average.

-Giving Bios Super-Heavy and Light-Heavy Cloak options for heavy weight lower energy, and low-weight high-energy versions of the Heavy Cloak.

-Granting EMP cannons a large increase in effective shield damage, including to minor bases, and an increase in ammo consumption. Reducing relative minigun damage to shields, but normalizing tech 1 shields to this level. Increasing the cost of shield research and its relative power slightly.

-Granting some faction troop transports 4 EMP-Cannon or minigun slots to be used for this.

-Enhancing the health, cost, and carrying capacity of Giga miners substantially, reducing their acceleration substantially aswell.

-Further reducing the capacity to TF miners, increasing their acceleration (and maybe mining speed) to compensate.

-Changing most faction's heavy scouts to be more specialized to the needs of the faction.

-De-standardizing AB damage types to make base shields easier or harder to destroy.


I am open to ideas as long as they fall within the original purpose of increasing factional differences. Tell me, would anyone be interested in such a mod?
DasSmiter
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Post by DasSmiter »

I support new cores and all, but this look a bit out there on the weird scale.
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TurkeyXIII
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Post by TurkeyXIII »

Not weird enough if you ask me!
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Death3D
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Post by Death3D »

BRING TURKEY CORE BACK! (or actually, into relevance) I want to fly Bios/Rix Hvy int hybrid!
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RoboTel
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 8:00 am

Post by RoboTel »

Look, I don't really consider this idea that weird.

Certainly some differences are already pretty extreme and would not be increase (Bios and Rix research, for example), but the idea would be to make each faction solidly different.

Imagine Giga with megatankers of highly resistant miners, capable of loading and unloading massive amounts of resources, from even deep-space exploration with arm guards.

Imagine Technoflux with the opposite, a swarm of highly efficient miners that clear cut sectors where a refinery has been made.

Bios that is able to use its stealth reliably to phase in and out of sight, but will lose to other factions in an open dogfight.

Belters with the ability to equip the new faction-specific variants of weapons in their ships.

Rix with a series of cheap to research and highly specialized guns for each type of ship to fit a niche use not properly explored by their current limitations, and the already implemented ability in XC03 to always rip to their scouts.

Dregh with even greater potential speed for long distance cruise with high damage missiles, enabling long-range strikes from well defended sectors where their H3 spec mines lie.

Ga'Tarren... rebalanced to deal with the changes in other groups.



I don't think this concept is all that weird, but I was merely inspired when I realized that their current CC and XC cores were straying towards normalizing the factions in order to increase ease of balance and make minor differences more significant, rather than aiming towards a more asymmetric balance by emphasizing actual legitimate counters to tactics.


If anyone has any suggestions for this, especially telling me why things I mentioned are bad ideas, please do. I prefer specifics, if possible. Even informing me that the basic concept is undesirable to current players would be nice, so I could know to just give up on work.
Jimen
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Location: Boston-ish

Post by Jimen »

Do you expect your core to ever be balanced enough to be playable? What you've described so far just looks like "take every faction and make it $#@!ing broken" - except for TF, Bios, and Rix, all of which you appear to want to nerf to death. It's nice to have ideas, but if Dreg's current 1.2 speed isn't enough of a boost for you, then you're almost certainly going to end up with a core nobody wants to play.
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RoboTel
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 8:00 am

Post by RoboTel »

Alight, I can appreciate most of that.

So you would argue that an acceleration decrease would not be enough to offset a minor speed increase in Dreg? Certainly 1.4 is too much, but what about 1.3? 1.25? What if some other factions also received speed increases, namely Giga and Belters? If I heavily nerfed Dreg's acceleration, but gave them high acceleration low max-speed boosters, would that be good enough? I am very willing to listen to you as long as you address why each idea cannot work, to even the most limited extent.

Why do you believe TF, Bios, and Rix are not broken based off the descriptions I have given? Where do I list aspects of them I would nerf, especially anything large? If anything I would assume Belters the most nerfed by my basic description, as I barely even listed any advantage they might gain.


Do you believe significant differences insurmountable as a balancing problem? Yes, this is intended to be balanced. Otherwise there is no point.
Jersy
Posts: 250
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 6:30 pm

Post by Jersy »

Note: XC REimplemented standart rixian SR scouts - it was the same way in the original core from microsoft ;-)

But for the rest of your ideas:

Quite frankly, I have no idea what would that do with game balance, so I don't know if those ideas are good or bad... Feel free to experiment with it... Test it offline with some friends, when you are done - to see if everything works more or less the way you wanted...

I won't judge it until I play it ;-)

(be careful with high speeds though... With higher speed come more severe lagjumps)
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RoboTel
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 8:00 am

Post by RoboTel »

Well, my most major problem in testing is that I don't know anyone offline who plays this. My lack of direct attachment to a community I can call on is part of the reason I made this topic.

Anyway, I am going to go forward with making the basic changes. Modding Allegiance is a relatively simple endeavor compared to many other games.
FreeBeer
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Location: New Brunswick, Canada

Post by FreeBeer »

FYI, if you want to test some cores, I can probably help out with that. I can throw the core up on Stripe. All I ask is that the core be tested enough where you're confident that it won't crash the server (since that could kill another game that's also running). You'll also need a way to distribute the core and any graphics or sound files, since they won't be on Auto Update. PM me and we can co-ordinate.
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