My idea for additional structures

[Riou Insuiko]

My goal of this topic is to both receive feedback from the Renegade X developers as well as the community at hand. I have had the idea juggling around in my head for a while now. There are two additional structures that I would like to see added into the standard online multiplayer system. These structures would only be applicable to new maps that would include them, not retroactively effecting existing maps. I think that this idea would be best suited to as an official update by TotemArts, and not by a third-party modding community. Thus I am posting my ideas here to get feedback on it's viability and it's desirability.

I will attempt to provide the rough framework and general outlines of what these structures would do. There are two potential structures that I think would be worthwhile additions for online multiplayer. While these structures were both present in the original Renegade, they were not available structures online matches by default. I have seen them in the custom multiplayer-singleplayer hybrid missions that some servers hosted back in the day, but they were never used in AOW/Marathon modes. Any images found here are for the express purpose of providing a general idea and aren't my creations. These images were sourced from a simple Google image search for the relevant building name.

Construction Yard

This structure's is NOT reliant on an active power plant to function, however all effects will be respectively modified according to whether or not a power plant is alive. This structure would have a number of benefits. Specifically the following:

-All buildings will receive a 10% defense boost against all damage taken on the exterior of the structure. This will not effect damage received via the master control panel. In addition, all non-defensive type structures will have a maximum condition of 110%. Should the construction yard be destroyed, each building will maintain the extra health until it is damaged. Once the 10% boost in health is lost, buildings will be repairable normally to 100%.

-Partial operation of destroyed production structures. This would allow for the following to be purchased even when the production facility has been destroyed:

*GDI Barracks: Mc Farland, Officer, Rocket Soldier

*Hand of Nod: Chem Soldier, Officer, Rocket Soldier

*War Factory: Humvee

*Airstrip: Buggy

All of the items will maintain their respective costs to purchase if the power structure is alive. The prices are subject to the power plant's general rule of doubling costs if it has been destroyed.

-All secondary defensive structures will be replaceable. This includes Nod's Turrets and SAM sites, in addition to GDI's Guard Tower & Anti-Air Towers. These repairs should be able to be purchased from an MCT, but for simplicity's sake, they can also be initiated at the destroyed structures themselves. The cost is up for discussion. I was initially thinking that 3,000 (With PP) / 6,000 (Without PP) would be a balanced cost for these items.

This is all I had in mind for the Construction Yard.

The second structure I'd like to see is the: Communications Center

The communications center will be completely reliant on the power plant. If the power plant is destroyed, all benefits it would offer will be unavailable. The communications center will offer the following:

- Super weapon beacon adjustments. Reduce the time for a beacon to get to the 'point of no return' by 5 seconds. However the beacon will still have the same activation duration.

- Additional proximity mines. This will add an additional 10 proximity mines to the existing mine limit. This can be adjusted on a map by map basis to balance it's effectiveness.

- Players will be able to place an additional 2 anti-tank mines.

- Reduced air-strike and beacon cost by 100 credits.

- Increased EMP grenade duration by 5 seconds.

- Increased effective targeting range of secondary defensive structures by 10%.

That's all that I can think of for now. I'm very much interested in hearing some feedback regarding the idea as a whole in addition to the specific details and how they would be balanced appropriately. I'm also interested in hearing the viability of the future development of said structures and whether or not it's a possible update in the future.

Thanks to anyone who made it this far. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the thread below. Thanks!

[Ryz]

The idea's sound good, but I am not sure if there should be a focus on this. I would rather like to see some purchasable defense stuff like turrets.

Why:

- Defending 4 buildings with current teams sometimes feels like impossible (that will be fixed a bit with the fact that mines are indicated with a name from who placed them).

- Half of the players have no clue on how to play the game, add two more structures and the will be even more confused.

I am not saying your ideas aren't good, but I just think it will be difficult to add two more structures and keep the game playable. Would love to see a repairpad for example. But thx for your effort!

[Riou Insuiko]

I am not saying your ideas aren't good, but I just think it will be difficult to add two more structures and keep the game playable. Would love to see a repairpad for example. But thx for your effort!

Oh, I hear you. To be fair, I was expecting to see the repairpad in future maps regardless of whether or not my idea was feasible. It was in the original Renegade multiplayer maps, so it also belongs in Renegade X.

I hear what you're saying about the buildings, though. My initial thoughts for these structures is that they would be placed on 'mega maps' or maps in similar size to Lakeside/X mountain, where there would be space for the additional structures within a base.

There's also the possibility of substituting one structure for another. Namely a communications center for a powerplant. As we already see several maps that do not include a powerplant as is. I think that there's a place for these structures, even when new players are faced with them. It's important that the game should provide 'help' menus for online or offline play. At any time, a player should be able to hit escape, and toggle a menu giving detail on what each structure does, possibly even specific details such as typical strategies on where to place mines, etc. It wouldn't be effortless, but it doesn't seem that offering tutorial-esque information would be a massive undertaking. I'd also suspect that the benefit would outweigh the time and effort placed into it's creation.

Regardless, I don't have some sort of false hope that my proposed ideas are something that should be considered for the next beta, or even the one after. This is a future project that I'm proposing, and I suppose that the time it'd take to be developed would allow for community feedback and developer insight on how to balance and perfect it's use.

Additionally, this brings up the question of multi-player limitations. Those four buildings may be tricky to defend as is, but what if there were more players? Currently, I believe the highest player count you'll find is 20/20 or 40 total. The specifics of why that number was chosen leads me to believe that it was for server stability, but I'd question whether or not this is completely true. Why not have 30/30 or 60 player total matches? Possibly more? 50 versus 50?

[RoundShades]

Those structures are OP.

But, I like the ideas, and I always thought adding to structures might add to gameplay as well, as a "successor" should always not be a clone and keep most original gameplay, but expand onto it. For instance, never remove the ramjet, but always add grenades and structures and junk.

The Construction Yard: Would be nice if this allowed the passive repair of a structure by a whole technician's speed. Structures can still come down by c4 but only if timed right, instead of detonate and cause havoc until the other goes off.

The Communications Tower: Would be cool if this called in all non-unit supplies, perhaps this becoming the way to purchase things a la carte after a structure is destroyed, like +100 health or primary weapons like chaingun, as well as airstrikes and beacons and perhaps proxy mines. The thing is, this would damage Nod by taking beacons, more than GDI, so the proxy thing can be a balance lever. This also is a good way to strip tier 2 engis of proxy c4 because currently it is a really good idea to just make those an independent equipment instead of making the hotwire/tech so wierd and overpowered at the same time.

Hospital: Tech Building. When captured, this gives all units a slow passive autoheal of 5 points every 5 seconds or basically a full health in a minute and a half. Also adds a purchaseable equipment to the purchase terminals, a Health Pack that completely reheals you if you use it, that costs depending on "useable instantly in combat" from 150 if not to 400 if so.

Mechanic Shop: Tech Building. When captured, this gives all vehicles a passive autoheal of 10 points every 5 seconds, or enough to undo a shot of damage every 20 seconds. Also adds purchaseable secondary to the purchase terminals, a weak repair gun, the t1 engineer's repair gun that any class can use as a secondary, for 300 creds.

[Riou Insuiko]

The Construction Yard: Would be nice if this allowed the passive repair of a structure by a whole technician's speed. Structures can still come down by c4 but only if timed right, instead of detonate and cause havoc until the other goes off.

The Communications Tower: Would be cool if this called in all non-unit supplies, perhaps this becoming the way to purchase things a la carte after a structure is destroyed, like +100 health or primary weapons like chaingun, as well as airstrikes and beacons and perhaps proxy mines. The thing is, this would damage Nod by taking beacons, more than GDI, so the proxy thing can be a balance lever. This also is a good way to strip tier 2 engis of proxy c4 because currently it is a really good idea to just make those an independent equipment instead of making the hotwire/tech so wierd and overpowered at the same time.

Thanks for the response. Initially, I was thinking of a passive healing ability to structures via the construction yard, but that seemed insanely OP. It would also be extremely difficult to balance. You've got to consider that you're likely to face two separate game mode types. On marathon mode you don't have a time limit, so you could reduce the regeneration effect to a low number and still maintain the usefulness of the structure. However, if you consider that standard mode has a time limit of around 40 minutes. A low healing rate would be significantly less useful. If the building repaired, say, 1% health every 30 seconds, it would be much less worthwhile than an endurance match on a marathon server; Where the slow healing would total a much higher number over the course of the battle, given that the structure is maintained.

I very much like the idea that the construction yard would allow for very basic unit creation from production facilities. I can see how at a glance, this would seem OP, but I don't think that it is. It would allow a team to have *some* semblance of an offensive capability, even when the barracks/hon and the wf/strip are destroyed. It wouldn't be OP in the sense that you're severely limited to what you could purchase. It's still a great loss to lost a bar/hon and the penalty for doing so is more or less the same even when you have a con yard up. You'll have no mid/high tier classes. Most importantly, you'll lose the ability to purchase snipers. With the wf/strip being destroyed, you're only left with buggies. If the opposing team has taken out your strip and they still have a war factory, you really can't hold them off/defend yourself with buggies alone. With flaming c4 being removed, it's not as if you'd allow players to counter expensive vehicles at all times by suicide bombing them.

However, in regards to the communications center. It seems as though you're implying that beacons would be unavailable if the communications center was destroyed? That wasn't my initial design idea for it. I didn't want to make it a penalty-specific based structure. By that, I mean that hypothetically every single map already has a communications center off-site. Much like how some maps don't have an active power plant. If a communications center were added to some maps, and it was a penalty based structure, you would only see negative effects from it's destruction, such as airstrike unavailability and longer beacon deployment times. I thought that it was necessary to offer additional benefits such as the defense structure's range increase, in addition to the additional anti-tank mines, etc. Again, it's all an issue of balance, and that's what this thread is here for. Feedback & discussion.

[RoundShades]

Actually, to some degree the conyard idea is a bad idea because the score and credits of repairing the structure would be minimalized. You could make the team get the score from whatever the conyard repairs, and the credits are not a big deal since they could use reduction anyway and are marginally lost to a building being repaired by 6 guys taking constant damage anyway, but it is still a mild nerf

The comtower idea, yeah, basically links beacons and airstrikes and proxy mines to a structure, like classes are to barracks and vehicles to factory. Still, those could be linked to something, rather than be always available. Maybe maps without them have them always available. idk.

More interested in new tech buildings lol. Or the concept of new purchase terminal equipment in general.

[Riou Insuiko]

Actually, to some degree the conyard idea is a bad idea because the score and credits of repairing the structure would be minimalized. You could make the team get the score from whatever the conyard repairs, and the credits are not a big deal since they could use reduction anyway and are marginally lost to a building being repaired by 6 guys taking constant damage anyway, but it is still a mild nerf

Right, that's partially the reason why I was thinking that it wasn't a good idea too. An alternative could possibly be a panel in the construction yard that allows you to repair all buildings at the same time (by having an engineer beam an MCT as usual) but the repair would be divided up. For example, if an engineer repaired any structure 1% per second, on a map with five buildings, an engineer repairing all via the con yard would repair 0.2% per second on all structures. Maybe that could be an alternative? I'm not sure. It would certainly be more beneficial to repair each structure at it's own MCT, but take for example a building under attack that's a far run away. You could repair it at a much slower rate at the construction yard if it was in dire need of repair.

Just shooting from the hip with that idea. I also like the idea of more tech structures, but I think that generally speaking, the maps would need to be larger than the current standard for that to really be doable. Of course, something like Lakeside has the potential for additional tech structures. You've got the hill that's empty, in addition to a possible tech structure on the infantry only path. The only concern would be having too many different tech structures to try and control. In addition to how powerful it makes a team that controls all of them.

[RoundShades]

Not a bad idea for conyard. Instead of repairing all simultaneously, why not have the ConYard have a damage resistant mct inside for each structure? If you are inside, every structure has a mct side by side inside of it, and you can survey and repair all damage from within on any one of the other structures.

That is actually borderline OP because of the lack of presence, lack of walking distance to each one, and lack of situational confusion. It is however viable.

[LucThaz]

Maybe, the construction yard could be integrated with a repair-pad as a tech building? Gives only a good team a bonus but more important. Gives those long PP vs PP marathon matches a direct strategic target, as it could be captured and could not be destroyed.

[Tarvin]

I would love to have a repair pad again. When everyone is frantically running around it can be a pain to get vehicles repaired in the bases. That would allow people to focus on rushing back into battle rather than spamming "I need repairs" because of the threat of SBH lurking nearby.