Make mexes and other buildings float, so that water = exactly the same as land (Cant make factories float though im pretty sure, so oh well).
Make all flashes and convehs (and com) hovercraft with a large slope tolerance (super-insane-high, if you like, so they run over all terrain as if its nothing).
No winds.
Hey presto, comet on every map.
Ive actually had an idea like this for ages but was too lazy to bother. Hey you know what, given the tried-and-proven gameplay and the very few number of units, we could totally make an origional content mod out of this.
i could do that, i already have enough content to make a flash/gator-spam mod on my hdd.
its a question of demand... do people *actually* want this?
No. Of course they dont. Nobody plays anything but BA and XTA. You dont make mods for people to play them, you make them as an intellectual and artistic exercise.
I wonder if you could use Lua to flatten the map partially, with some randomized noise left on the terrain... then you could actually emulate Comet more accurately.
neddiedrow wrote:I wonder if you could use Lua to flatten the map partially, with some randomized noise left on the terrain... then you could actually emulate Comet more accurately.
it shouldnt randomize it, it should just flatten it to 10% of its original scale
of course it still depends on the map, but on the large majority all the oceans would become shallows and pretty much all slopes would become drivable
I actually contemplated a similar project, but taking it one step further - eliminate the middleman of the energy-economy. Just expensive solar-style-folding mexxes that also generate 0.1 metal, and effectively unlimited energy, and blow up somewhat huge. Thus, you can spam mexxes, or you can build them on metal patches for extra metal.
And yeah, the units are LLTs, radar towers, flashes, conmechs, and mobile arties.
Really, it becomes similar to Kernel Panic, but with static turrets and TA's infinite-economy.
At that point, the question is whether to use the factory as a commander, and have it be the only unit builder, or to include a commander-unit and allow the player to build factories.
Of course, pondering it over, I ended up dreaming up a fun little paper-rock-scissors setup for my little "simplified mod":
1) low-altitude-gunships, which omgwtfpwn artillery, - these fill the flash role, with short weapon-range.
2) artillery, that omgwtfpwns turrets with longer range,
3) turret towers, which omgwtfpwn gunships using longer range and blast-radius,
Other units would be:
4) all-terrain-missile-hovercraft (non-strafing gunships), which are jack-of-all-trades, faring equally against turrets, artillery, and gunships. They also carry depth-charges to target underwater units.
5) Comm - a super-gunship that can only target gunships (and its weapon takes metal to fire).
6) amphibious all-terrain construction vehicles.
Cool mexx/solar/maker hybrid unit
9) radar-towers
10) heavily-armoured-peepers.
So the game becomes RPS on land, and purely gunship-battles over water. To build across water, you send amphicons. To pick off amphicons and underwater mexes, you use all-purpose hovercraft.
Imho, this distills the "flash rush"/"gunship-swarm" gameplay into any terrain.
Firstly, energy offers an important limiter to the metal economy, especially on a map like comet. With a large amount of reclaim and many mexes, if you expand too quickly or reclaim too fast or otherwise get a glut of metal, you need to spam solars (which cost a lot of metal) in order to spend it quickly.
Thus you must balance your potential spending power in both nano and solar (And remember that solar takes nano and metal) with your metal income, or be in danger of stalling (which turns your LLT's off among other things).
This, along with the cost and vulnerability of nano (The third resource) prevents a player from too rapidly expanding his economy, meaning that a players spending potential scales slowly over time.
