Buildable Defense Structures

[Tarvin]

I thought of this the other day when playing on a map with no base defenses and was inspired to post them after seeing Riou Insuiko's topic, which everyone should also look at viewtopic.php?f=26&t=74711

The overarching description for them and how they work as is follows:

A turret is purchased by an engineer as a secondary weapon.

The engineer takes the turret and places the base at the desired location.

The base has a countdown similar to beacon placements to increase deployment time and deter players from setting them up in enemy buildings.

Once the base is placed the repair gun must be used to 'build' the turret and make it active, again, to increase deployment time and deter players from building them in enemy buildings.

The turrets can be damaged and repaired just like players. They would essentially be AI infantry that are stationary but look like turrets in terms of function. They do have to reload when their clips are depleted but have infinite ammo. When destroyed turrets are simply gone and the destroyed turret would no longer count toward any limit allowing a new one to be purchased.

I suggest a separate limit for turrets from the mine limit that can be set by server administrators in the way mine limits can be set.

Turrets would have the same stealth detection capability as players and would only be able to fire on cloaked units when they are close enough for the shimmer to be seen.

GDI & NOD:

Gun Turret: It is essentially 3 automatic rifles put together and fires on any visible targets. This is the base turret and may be cheaper than the other variants.

GDI:

Grenade Turret: Just as the name suggests it's a deployable turret armed with the GDI grenade launcher for anti-vehicle capability but shorter range than the Gun Turret.

NOD:

Flame Turret: Deployable turret armed with the Nod Flamethrower for anti-vehicle and close quarters defense. The grenade launcher does have longer range but the Flame Turret has persistent damage as it fires constantly.

[Truxa]

I actually like the idea of turret placements. The problem I see is the following though:

During offline matches, while being a spy, the enemy AI ALWAYS shoots at you, rendering the spy useless, unless ofcourse, GDI has a SBH Spy. Dont know if it's also true for online matches with active AI's. This will make GDI spycrate camping through and through for the SBH spy and Nod will not, due to the fact they ONLY want a class-crate or money crate.

I dunno if that's been fixed yet though.

I remember a mod on C&C Renegade in which you can purchase the Nod Turrets and place them anywhere you fancy!

About your deterring the turret placements inside enemy buildings, just simply make them unable to be build in buildings (due to size limitations and the likes)

Reason for this, Nod has VERY effective SBH-TimedC4 rushes. If you are able to build AI turrets near the MCT in your OWN building, it would affect that type of play to such an extend, it's not right.

Furthermore, I'd also add the limitation to be unable to build turrets too close to the buildings. Infiltrations should still be a viable. Turrets placed in key-area's to deter infiltrators is all nice and good, but shouldnt prevent it completely.

Last thing: AI's have a tendency of shooting constant headshots even at max-range. The Gun turret holding 3 rifles seems to me a bit too OP. 3 guns headshotting at automatic rifle range ... hmmm ... They would be too OP on maps like Walls: Flying (at the sides, covering the tunnels and sides)

[Tarvin]

Good point on the possibly being OP. I forgot about what it was like when I was playing single player skirmishes. AI units are monsters when it comes to headshots. Bump the Gun Turret down to two maybe? They would still need to be a viable defense and so couldn't be nerfed too much.

I like the limit on not being able to place them in buildings. I think the build and deploy times are still useful to dissuade building them in enemy bases though because if you're killed during deployment you loose the turret or the enemy has a chance to steal it by having one of their own engineers finish construction providing they aren't at their own turret limit.

One other thought I just had is that turrets may not give anyone credit for kills. It would limit spamming of turrets possibly and keep deployment focused more on what would benefit the team the most as they would actually cost.

Deconstructing may be something that's needed as well so they can be relocated away from destroyed structures to where they are needed most.

[SFJake]

I actually like the ideas of being able to build turrets.

The main idea for turrets should be "alarms" and just general deterrence.

I think the best idea is to make them midly effective and quite easy to kill. The turrets have light armor, therefore everything damages them, and they have little health, maybe less than a buggy.

Lets look at potential stats.

---Gun Turret---

Cost: 250 credits

Weapon: Machine Gun (10 bullets per seconds, 10 damage per bullets, does not do headshot damage and bullets can be dodged at a distance if moving sideways)

Health: 200, Light Armor

You might think this is weak. Its not. Its incredibly powerful. Its something you can leave out and that will warn you when intruders come around and force them to give attention to the turrets, a turret that requires no players to distract.

I'd love turrets like these, but they just sound too powerful at stopping infiltrations.

They could be given a small range and a delay before spotting an enemy, but again most maps aren't designed for this and its still too easy to palce godlike turrets that warn you to all potential infiltration attempts.

I think only the new, overly gigantic maps would benefit from turrets, since they are WAY WAY too hard to defend.

While maps like Walls would be unbalanced with them.

So maybe turrets could be added exclusively to maps like Lakeside?

But really, turrets would change the gameplay VERY heavily no matter how you consider them and that might just be too much for this remake.

[Tarvin]

I think the most important thing that would keep them from throwing off balance would be that they could be limited by the server administrator. For smaller maps this would probably require the ability to limit turret populations by map and not just a blanket server setting. That way, on the small maps like Walls the limit could be something like 2 turrets while the large maps like Lakeside would have higher limits.

My original thought is that they would have a different limit when it comes to health. Rather than being easily dodgeable would only have health about twice that of standard infantry but that might be slightly too low.

I think it would be a rather simple task to put them into the game as much of what is needed except the model is already in the game in some way. The coding for the beacon being placed, the actual action of it, could be used to place the base of the turret (or the countdown could be increased and the build step could be skipped but I like the thought of enemies ambushing and finishing a turret as their own.).

The AI already in the game could be inserted as is to handle shooting and such.

The model from the weapons could just be inserted into the body of the turret which wouldn't be very complex.

The range of weapons could just be decreased if they prove too powerful or damage balance too much reducing the tweaks needed to balance them into the existing game.

Besides the body of the turret and the base the only new asset this may require is the build function that would cause the turret to 'appear' out of the base. It would essentially be the disarming function taken from beacons and triggering the actual turret to appear when the construction is finished.

The only difficulty I can think of is determining which team a turret becomes active for if let's say, a GDI turret is finished by a Nod engineer or vise versa.

Edited March 12, 2015 by Guest

[Ryz]

Turrets would be it!

Why:

- Extra defense

- Handy when AGT / OBY is down.

Suggestions:

- also make an anti-air turret

And I would love to see a turret placed near the enemy MCT. If you get there and nobody spots you it's just their bad

[Tarvin]

As an anti air turret I could see a rocket soldier's rocket launcher as a Rocket Turret. The turrets aren't mobile and don't have an extraordinary amount of health so they would be easy for decently strong vehicles, ie light tank and above, to take out. Rockets from this weapon are also far from a sure hit as I've seen people dodge them plenty of times.

For turrets in general placement would have to be strategic because with light armor Havoc and Sakura could take them down without much difficulty at range.

Looking back at previous posts removing headshot capability from the Gun Turret would probably be a must since it would have 2-3 times the power of an Automatic weapon. Although, also thinking about it further, a Gun Turret that uses a minigun model would look far cooler than multiple Automatic Rifles put together. It would already have about the right power level too if I'm not mistaken.

[Tarvin]

Just thought of another buildable defense structure that could be GDI specific but would have it's own limit set at one. Meaning regardless of the turret limit only one of this could be used and would have it's own entirely independent limit.

Cloak Disruptor - Disrupts the cloaking of any stealthed unites within its effective radius. Operates in pulses rather than constantly resulting in moderate detection that can still be bypassed with proper timing.

I believe this would fit in nicely and is cannon given how much GDI invests in detection technology as the franchise progressed.

[boxes]

[HaTe]

Tarvin, I want you to take a look at this:

http://pastebin.com/kQRSHRTV

It's a new mod idea concept that I wrote several years back for Renegade (before I had even become apart of Renegade X and knew what it was about). I think you'll specifically like III, which is Buildable Support Structures. This was an entire new mod idea, so the ideas are adjusted to fit with each other and so it would of course have to be edited for Renegade X purposes, but your idea had me thinking back to when I had wrote this up. They're also all taken directly from C&C games and the original word document I typed this in included pictures, but oh well.

[Tarvin]

At CampinJeff

Are those images you made according to my ideas there? I think it looks great either way.

Not sure about the thought of things to carry your own health and resupply into the field though. I think having structures in the field would work best. Check viewtopic.php?f=26&t=74775

At HaTe: Seems like we are both on the same page quite a bit there.

[boxes]

At CampinJeff

Are those images you made according to my ideas there? I think it looks great either way.

Not sure about the thought of things to carry your own health and resupply into the field though. I think having structures in the field would work best. Check viewtopic.php?f=26&t=74775

At HaTe: Seems like we are both on the same page quite a bit there.

The sentries, yes. Just putting this here to show that the devs have already thought of purchasable turrets and is being considered for later releases (maybe, they've been pretty silent about it).