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Stand-by Ion control... |
SmellyTerror
Cadet
Joined: September 24, 2003
Posts: 52
From: Canberra
|  Posted: 2003-12-11 02:55
I got to thinking about a suggestion from Spetz here, and about the upcoming orbital platforms. I'm thinking of something similar, epsecially for the MV, to make those low level pilots a bit more useful, and to add at least an extra stage to (at the moment) fairly mechanical system invasions.
The Big Fat Ion Cannon of Doom
(Ok, the name could use some work)
Each system can have an Ion cannon. This is a monster starbase that is built somewhere within x units of the sun of the system (allowing it to be pretty far out, but not so far that it's silly).
The starbase fires insanely large bursts of horrible pain. It automatically fires at the biggest ship (otherwise choosing a random target of the largest size). The bolt has limited tracking abilities (call it the, um, powered containment field that is, errr, gripping the fabric of space to, um, turn. Ok? Good). This means that it will always hit a station, will probably hit a Dreadnought, and is damned unlikely to hit anything else (unless the pilot is stationary). It could kinda get you behind a planet, but there would be a "sweet spot" where the thing can't get you.
A fully strapped station, if hit, will be left with must of its hitpoints vapourised and a whole lot of flashing components. A Dread just has a brief moment to swear while everything falls to bits.
The cannon fires every 60 seconds or so, and has an essentially infinite range. The bolts move pretty damn fast to stop people jumping around indefinitely with a trail of destruction following.
The Ion cannon is built horribly slowly, and requires a big fat pile of minerals to construct. The first bit (the, um, construction gantry) can be done without minerals, and then counts as a Starport to let you deliver resources.
Of course, supply ships flying out to the gantry could make it pretty easy for enemy scouts to find it...
Ok, the cannon eventually becomes a big-arse space station, with pretty good defence - something similar to a player-piloted station, but, say, 5 times as buff. Have it's defences mostly based around AM torps and that sort of thing - that is, little ships can beat it, but Dreads will get creamed. Obviously, once it's found, it should be pretty easy to destroy with Cruisers/Destroyers/Frigates - unless, of course, it has friendly support...
It might be nice to allow Fleet Admirals to dock with the thing, and control its weapons manually.
It takes a *long* time to build (say, two hours?), so once it's toasted the attackers will have plenty of time to start trashing the system, even if people try to rebuild it. Defences would start to come on-line much faster, but the big gun would be out of action for ages.
Possiblity: Each shot from the cannon costs x resources (Urdanium?), and the thing only has limitied supplies, so you need to keep it going with supply routes or whatever (making a 'dictor siege a possibility).
Regarding the limit, I'd suggest limiting it to one per star in the system ('cause it, um, links directly to the star's centre to hyperspace chunks right out of the core. Yeah, that's it). The first person to link a cannon to the star gets a working cannon. That makes multi-star systems more strategically appealing.
It might be an option to make the shots come from the star itself rather than the cannon - that'd make it harder to find the cannon itself, and you could just call it a "solar destabiliser", or something. Maybe that'd be the K'Luth version...?
You could vary the damage, too, so maybe the ICC gun does less damage but more disabling (for the return-of-the-capture-option with the patch), and the K'Luth does less damage but fires faster, or whatever.
Note that once the general direction of the shots is known you could hide behind planets. Unless there are two well-placed guns...
Young folk with crappy ships could make their contributions in the MV by finding and attacking the cannons, or, if defending, spotting enemy Dreads for their own cannon's attention, and defending the cannons themselves.
Give the cannon decent ECM, so you need to get close to find it, but disallow it from ever being less than 0.1.
[Anyone played Conquest: Frontier Wars? Yeah, like that]
[ This Message was edited by: SmellyTerror on 2003-12-11 02:56 ]
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SmellyTerror
Cadet
Joined: September 24, 2003
Posts: 52
From: Canberra
| Posted: 2003-12-11 03:01
Oooh ooh, and when a cannon drops to 80% health, it sends a message to the lobby.
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XxIceDreamxX {C?}
Cadet
Joined: August 19, 2003
Posts: 78
From: Santas Grotto North Pole Earth Sol
| Posted: 2003-12-11 05:06
those things in the conquest demo were fun.. but... when you sent your dreads through into there system and you had to use their shield special thing to stop them being killed was annoying... but good idea 
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Quinsisdos^4
Vice Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 11, 2003
Posts: 199
From: Cornwall, UK
| Posted: 2003-12-11 05:54
I thought they sounded familiar, I just plonk these at entrance to home systems, but back to the point.
Ok, what about projectile speed? And these could cause some considerable annoyance to some players who enter a system with a really nice modded station only to be totalled in two minutes. True, it would stop stations from making a presence until this thing had been taken out. Also, it shouldn't have much in the way of hull strength, but laden with Anti-Dread weapons so only small ships can take it out. Oh, it needs to be ECCM forted
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slice
Admiral
Joined: October 18, 2002
Posts: 164
From: UK
| Posted: 2003-12-11 07:39
ive been trying to find that conquest game for ages, anybody gimme a url for the site please. I'd forgotten the name
(seem to have a serious short term memory problem at the moment)
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Nxtwave
Admiral
Joined: June 19, 2002
Posts: 93
| Posted: 2003-12-11 09:09
I think this is a cool idea since it would add alot more combat to the game.. However, firing that much energy must come up on sensors. Or atleast I would like it too. I think some kind of warning system built into the ships would be nice like "Warning... Massive built up of energy detected" And then you could see on the map where it was comming from. Maybe not the spot where the shot was being fired, but really close to it. Because with that much energy being fired, someone would have to see something.
Wouldnt it be cool though, when the whole capturing enemy ships comes back, that it would be possible to cap the enemy space station and use it against them. Just a thought.
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Bigwolfe
Fleet Admiral
Joined: October 16, 2003
Posts: 156
From: Bland County
| Posted: 2003-12-11 10:38
that would be cool, but would this so called cannon have it's own supplier?
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SmellyTerror
Cadet
Joined: September 24, 2003
Posts: 52
From: Canberra
| Posted: 2003-12-12 01:26
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Ice: thanks.
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Quins: exactly!
I'd like projectile speed to be something pretty fast - so a charged ship might be able to e-jump if he was really on the ball...
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Slice: here y'are: http://conquest.ubi.com/
Damn fine game (hugely underrated), and something that I think would appeal to most Darkspace players. An excellent demo, too - damn challenging AI. Actually, one of the best AI's I've ever seen in an RTS.
I should point out, though, that my idea is not supposed to be quite the same thing, but yeah, that's the kind of feel that I think would be good.
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Nxtwave: actually, that's a good idea - at least to warn that modded station to get the hell back out of the sector, fast.
Capping would also be a very cool thing - give the cannon a pile of infantry slots and leave it to allied ships to keep the elites coming.
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Big: dunno if it'd need its own transport - it'd probably just get in the way of defence firing anyway. Forcing people to rely totally on other planets to import resources would be a good way of making life difficult for people who might want to use a cannon in someone else's system (though not impossible...)
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I thought of an problem, though - what if it misses? Does the bolt turn back around? It can't have an infinite range or you'd end up with bolts sailing around all day following frigates (who would probably be whooping and yee hawing their way through enemy fleets). As amusing as that might be, it's a bit silly...
So I figure a range equal to, say, the diamater of the larger planetary systems? If that means that a bolt might make a second pass after missing (depedning on its turn radius), so be it.
I'm glad you guys liked the idea. I post a lot of lame stuff when I'm bored at work... :/
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-Apocoflips!!-
Cadet
Joined: December 11, 2003
Posts: 9
From: Exathra!
| Posted: 2003-12-12 05:44
depends what the projectiles like,, if its self guided and detects its missed.. it explodes a few hundred gu's past its target and explodes causing damage to whatever ships are within 200 gu's or something
Or if it did have a limited range.. then it would give a chance for some of the heavy armour to retreat before it got mashed..lol
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Tiffy Rando
Grand Admiral
Joined: January 19, 2003
Posts: 354
From: Austin, Texas
| Posted: 2003-12-12 08:37
OK guys.... let's think for a second... Ion cannon: It would be a big Fat charged particle beam
Or, you couldo the star wars thing... UGTO would get an ion cannon that would fire.... hmm, say a giant FLUX bolt. Sorta like, (I hate to mention this) the siege gun from cataclysm. Except it chew up armor, and fry shields and systems.
ICC (cannon) would actually fire like... a WALL of uber-range super-ludicrous-speed PCM's on CRACK... or something of that nature. It would fire on multiple targets at once.
And the solar destablizer thingy for K'luth sounds great... It would shoot a big torpedo or something at the star, and then the star would flash a little, maybe change colors some, and then it would lob out a Massive solar flare towards the target... like 10 times more powerful than either of the other two superweapons, but shorter range, and a slower recharge.
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Tellaris
Grand Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: April 30, 2002
Posts: 830
From: Land of Chocolate
| Posted: 2003-12-12 13:21
Quote:
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On 2003-12-11 02:55, SmellyTerror wrote:
A Dread just has a brief moment to swear while everything falls to bits.
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Uh.... Faustus dosn't want any one weapon that can insta kill...
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Demorian
Fleet Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: October 06, 2001
Posts: 3406
From: Charlotte, North Carolina
| Posted: 2003-12-12 13:25
Sounds neat. I have one problem with it:
EVERY SIXTY SECONDS? Are you insane?
Try every fifteen-twenty minutes. A weapon with that much power cannot be discharging every freakin' minute.
-Dem
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Quinsisdos^4
Vice Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 11, 2003
Posts: 199
From: Cornwall, UK
| Posted: 2003-12-12 13:30
True Dem, unlike the game where this comes from, 20 Dread Fleets are a tremendiosly rare occurance in DS, so I'm with Dem on this one, increase the reload time to 30-60 mins
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Gideon
Cadet
Joined: September 14, 2001
Posts: 4604
From: Oregon, USA
| Posted: 2003-12-12 13:41
This is not in direct reply to the idea of a large planetary weapon, but is in reply to the way in which such things are presented.
The old divisions of areas by server no longer exist as of the next version. Furthermore, artificial limitations such as "one per planet",etc sort of suck.
Think in terms of natural and organic limitations using the in game mechanics.
For instance, if a planetary super weapon takes 200 power, then that seriously limits the number of such weapons that can be present on a planet at one time. Population requirements can also be used, in order to build powerful devices that are natural to being used on planets with a larger base population. Planets like Terran planets, which will need some sort of boost if they are to be the best planets for shipyards.
Try to think of things in these terms.
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[ This Message was edited by: Gideon on 2003-12-12 13:42 ]
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Antdizzle
Joined: February 07, 2003
Posts: 860
| Posted: 2003-12-12 14:29
honestly i hate this idea(sry) but i don't want to be facing that in the MV with a fully modded dread/station it would ruin the game. and i don't think you would wanna face it either (keep up your ideas lots of them are good)
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