Ok, so I had some time to sit down and put some gameplay stuff down on paper. The purpose of this document is to put forth ways of reworking the tremulous gameplay to: a) make unvanquished its own game and, b) make unvanquished more accessible to newbies than tremulous was.
Topics:
1) The reward-system needs to be reworked so there is more to making progress than killing
- Strategic objectives/resources required to win games.
- Individual rewards need to align incentives between the team and the individual.
2) The class system should be reworked to resemble an RTS.
- Unit/counter-unit
Basilisk > CQB > Marauder
Marauder > Scout > Goon
Goon > Assault > Basilisk
3) Automatic building
4) Unbaked ideas
- Alien vampiric healing
- Alien Traits
- Leadership
- Stage 3
1) Rewards
Back in the day I played a lot of battlefield. It was great. It required a lot of teamwork and everybody could take part. The worst you could do is not contribute much to the team effort, there was no feeding that made the enemy stronger, no enemies that got exponentially stronger for every one of your deaths.
For those not familiar with the battlefield concept each team starts out with a countdown counter. When your counter hits zero, you lose. The timer can be stopped by controlling more than half the map; the less you control the faster the counter runs out. Each death knocks off a point from the counter. I think we can rework this system to work for us.
Team objectives/rewards
Let’s define the human resource as <insert good name of energy source>. The alien resource is whatever organism naturally feeds off of the <insert good name of energy source>. Since the humans came to this part of space to harvest the energy they were sure to come into conflict with the aliens.
Each team starts out with a limited supply of their respective resource. The initial resources will not carry a team far, maybe only about 5 – 10 minutes. To get more they have to harvest the extra veins that are spread around the map*. This could either be done by building some structure on them or just by being in the area for long enough. Like any other RTS game the resources per map are finite. Once the raw materials run out both races go about their business elsewhere, there is no longer any point in hanging around. Larger maps would need more players and more harvestable resources.
The resources control everything your team can do. You need a lot of resources to build structures**, a small amount to bring in reinforcements and perhaps even a small amount to equip your team. The game ends when one team runs out of resources. Either they can no longer afford to be there or the area has been fully exploited. Either way they are done. There is no longer any need for sudden death. The worst case scenario is you have a long drawn out stalemate where you kill each other off to the last man. Each spawn costs the team resources.
Individual Rewards
This is a tricky one and I wasn’t able to come up with a complete idea for this section. How do you reward individuals for their contribution to the team without making them overpowered or encouraging annoying behavior? From the newbies point of view people got too powerful too fast in the beginning of the game. Somebody else getting killed was enough to knock you out of the game. So how do we do it?
- Do you reward them for capturing control points? That would leave newbies out in the rain.
- Do you reward them for kills? That promotes killwhoring.
- What about damage to enemy structures? Maybe but this is also not something that will benefit newbies greatly.
- Get rewarded for damage done outside your own base?
- Get no individual rewards at all? Instead the whole team gets rewarded when they capture a control point.
2) Class System: I would like to redo the class system all together. Every class should be useful throughout the game. In most RTS games you have unit-counterunit combinations that force people to use different tactics to get where they want to go. The classic age of empires example is how Archer > Heavy infantry > Cavalry > Archer. Even if the other guy is a higher level if you happen to have the right counterunit you can still do some damage.
I think we can carry this over to unvanquished. Units that deal one type of damage are vulnerable to another. For my example we’ll say Stealth > Brute force > Agility > Stealth.
For the aliens the classes would go:
Stealth = Basilisk, Agility = Marauder, Brute force = Goon
On the human side it is not quite that clear cut. The best I can come up with is to have light armor, medium armor and heavy armor classes that correspond with the alien classes. Each class of human has one or two specialty “counter” weapons and access to some of the neutral weapons that are not strong against anything in particular.
For humans the classes would go:
Stealth = Light infantry a.k.a. The Scout, Agility = Medium infantry a.k.a. Assault Trooper, Brute Force = Heavy infantry a.k.a. CQB Specialist
Here is an example how armor choice could influence your access to other gear, specialist counterweapons are marked in bold:
The Scout = light armor, light helmet with radar****, rifle, pulse rifle, lasgun, mass driver, lucifer cannon, timed detonation charge. Generally stuff that makes it strong vs goons, with maybe some crowd control/mobility limiting abilities
Assault Trooper = medium Armor, medium helmet (no radar),jetpack, grenades, extra ammo, rifle, shotgun, pulse rifle
CQB Specialist = heavy armor, rifle, shotgun, flamethrower, chaingun, grenades, fuel grenades that create a powerful combo with the flamethrower
Combining the human and alien counters we get:
Basilisk > CQB > Marauder
Marauder > Scout > Goon
Goon > Assault > Basilisk
To make all of this work serious tweaking would need to be done. The human weapon system would probably have to change so you have 3 basic damage types, each good against a certain alien class. The Basilisk needs to become a lot stronger, perhaps even gain poison and slow abilities by default. The Goon needs to lose some mobility and the marauder is pretty good as is.
If we hang on to the advanced forms of the alien classes I would like there to be more variation involved. I’d prefer that the player chooses to focus on one of his existing abilities instead adding new ones. The basilisk for example could become a crowd control specialist or a dualist. The Goon could focus on tanking or damage dealing. The Marauder could focus on either primary or secondary attack.
3) Building game modes
I have no problem with building in general but I feel there should be a choice. Especially in public play you will have a hard time finding people motivated enough to build in every single game.
If development shifts towards strategic objectives I think it would be a good idea to have the option for the computer to automatically throw up a few buildings when a strategic objective changes hands. Especially with smaller matches having to manually build the bases could become tedious over time.
Here’s an example: Mode 1) Full control over all structures on the map. Mode 2) Control over the structures in the main base. Mode 3) Control over the forward structures. Mode 4) No control over how buildings are built on the map.