An Opinion - The Shortcomings of C&C Mode

[Agent]

Everybody here has played C&C mode, presumably quite a bit. The game mode certainly has its strengths, but after spending over 1900 hours in-game (either playing or testing), I would like to finally write down what I've concluded are the most significant and fundamental flaws to this mode.

Subtractive Gameplay:

What I mean by subtractive gameplay is the removal of game elements as a form of progression -- weakening your enemy. In C&C mode the objective is to destroy each of your opponent's buildings, which each serve a particular function. Losing a building greatly weakens a team, and removes content from the game over the course of the game either by restricting purchasable classes and vehicles, or by directly weakening the economy. Renegade X improves on this area by lowering the severity of the penalties (you can still buy APCs on a cooldown after losing a vehicle factory; you can still buy low-tier advanced infantry after losing an infantry factory; you still have some income after losing the Refinery; class costs are increased by 50% instead of 100% when losing the Power Plant), but still continues to rely on this as a bastardized form of progression. Instead of gaining advantages for yourself and becoming stronger, the focus is to inflict disadvantages and make your opponent weaker. As a result the game frequently devolves into prolonged stalemates where players don't know what to do because there is nothing either team can do. Surrender and map change votes only help when all hope is lost, which happens because...

Recovery (Counter-Subtractive) Mechanics:

Renegade doesn't have any recovery mechanics at all for buildings. Any death is a form of subtractive gameplay and should be recoverable, just as a lost tank or infantry can be repurchased. In RTS games where buildings are destroyed regularly, you can replace them and continue progressing towards your goal of defeating the enemy. These simply don't exist in Renegade. Since we have static buildings (they don't disappear when destroyed), the only practical way of implementing this would be to make buildings directly recoverable (such as through a mandatory team-wide economic penalty until the building was rebuilt). This would help resolve the aforementioned situation where there is nothing a team can realistically do, because now the team can not only recover from their setback, but they can actively work towards that goal (i.e: gather and contribute funds to the project). This would add something that Renegade also lacks...

Tertiary (Active) Objectives:

With "destroy the enemy base" and "defend your own" being the primary and secondary objectives respectively, there are very few tertiary objectives. In Renegade there are 2 tertiary objectives you can accomplish -- capture the Silo (additive objective), and destroy the enemy harvester (subtractive objective). This forces players to focus on the primary and secondary objectives, which eventually becomes dull and players begin to feel like there's nothing they can really do because there is nothing else they can do to support their team. With additional tertiary objectives, players have more to fight over and field control becomes more important (one example of a possible objective might be "destroy the Scrin Mothership", and give the killing team some sort of damage upgrade such as rail gun technology). Examples of tertiary objectives in other games might be the Dragon and Baron in League of Legends, leveling up and gathering items for your hero in WarCraft 3, or Wonders in Civilization. Each of these games implement additive tertiary objectives, which is what Renegade needs in order to create more...

Additive Gameplay:

What I mean by additive gameplay is the introduction of game elements as a form of progression -- strengthening your team. The only forms of additive gameplay are passive economic growth, and the Silo (which further supports passive economic growth). Veterancy (which can be passive or active, depending on implementation) is being worked on, and is an example of an upcoming additive gameplay element. Additive gameplay includes additive-type tertiary objectives (active progression), as well as any other additive progression (such as passive progression). Since keeping players engaged is important, additive gameplay is most commonly implemented as tertiary objectives, because it forces players to actively participate in the game and creates contest. Other forms of additive gameplay might be base building or tech trees.

There are other flaws in Renegade of course such as unintuitive mines, little death penalty (short spawn times), or lack of a continuous gold sink ("what do I do with the 20k credits I've accumulated on Islands!?"), but this list covers what I believe to be the most fundamental issues that should be actively avoided in other games / game modes. Ultimately this can be summed up as "stalemates happen because there's nothing to do except camp".

I've also discovered that the Tiberian Sun soundtrack isn't too bad to listen to while writing (

).

That's my rant of the day,

Jessica

[Xtractor]

Are you suggesting to Bring more mechanics into RenX ?

Do we have to Be Necessary a C&C mode ..can we be just a RenX mode?

Including any Mechanics we want ,mixed together.

I sure would like to see Buildings rebuildeable ,mb only at the orginal place of the destroyed one.

And any Side objectives like buidable bridge or other cool stuff community/Devs might think of.

[Agent]

It's more-so just me ranting and getting my general thoughts down into mostly coherent words and to provide a general commentary of why C&C mode gets stalemates. There's definitely a few things that would be nice for Renegade X, but I don't anticipate actually implementing them.

[Xtractor]

what kind of things ^^? Anything simple we could do to begin with?

[voltex]

Well I have to say I agree with pretty much everything you've said but I would like to add that map design and also the lack of teamwork contributes heavily to stalemates. It can sometimes take 10+min to get people to actually commit to a plan and when it fails once they all give up and go back to doing their own thing which isn't the games fault its the players, I even see this in PUG's alot and I just cannot understand why people play a team based game and don't listen to anybody or contribute to the team. Yes I'm looking at you solo sbh nukers.

p.s. I love the Tiberian Sun ost, even still have the CD that came with the game

[LavaDr4gon]

Halo, CoD, Battlefield, MOBAS. There's a lot of reasons why people play independently rather than work with the team. "I'm the better player and if you don't do what I do you're a noob."

Edited May 25, 2016 by Guest

[Quinc3y]

Good post, Jessica.

About stale mates and lack of teamwork: I think both are the results of the current game state that doesn't promote teamwork. It is too easy to defend, too easy to stop a rush and too difficult to destroy a building from the outside. 1-2 campers can usually stop a rush of ~10 people.

That's why I usually end up playing solo/sneaking, because I know that this is most often the way to win. There is no incentive for me to participate in rushes and communicate with my team other than spamming "get tanks" and "mines".

There's plenty of ways to change it, Jeff mentioned some in the other thread. I think this should be the priority for now.

For more tertiary objectives, I saw a lot of cool tech buildings being worked on. That's something to think about, perhaps also adding them on the old maps/replacing existing boring silos.

For recovery options, I agree that making a comeback after losing a building is too difficult now, especially when you dont have any sneaky people in team. But remember that the team that destroyed a building should benefit from that as well. It's very difficult to find the balance here.

[tekgunman]

If I have a plan that I know will work but the team would rather do their own thing or not listen, I have no problem doing my own thing too. I do try for a while to get the team together but you know what they say, you can lead a horse to the water, but you can't make him drink it.

[CoreDefender]

Cudaker said:

what kind of things ^^? Anything simple we could do to begin with?

This is why we need more buildings for use on various maps in the game.

Edited November 4, 2016 by CoreDefender

[MrSeriousOak]

For more tertiary objectives, I saw a lot of cool tech buildings being worked on. That's something to think about, perhaps also adding them on the old maps/replacing existing boring silos.

There needs to be more reason for the loosing team to claim the field (and maybe more of a benefit for the loosing team if they do claim it?).

E.g:

The silo can produce more credits/sec if the ref is destroyed, and/or it can allow the team w/out WF/strip to purchase their original vehicles at a higher price?

[Xuanne]

I think the Construction Yard should allow you to rebuild any building for a hefty price (maybe 5000 creds?), and the building will take some time to fully rebuild (1 min?), during which it is vulnerable to damage. Any damage dealt while rebuilding will be reflected in its health component, to a minimum of 10% health upon completion.

Sent from my GT-I9506 using Tapatalk

[boxes]

Reducing the penalties on destroyed buildings was not a step in the right direction, I'll start with that. I can go on and on about this, but all it did was make the game much more annoying for the better team to win. It went from not worrying about vehicles after blowing up the WF to "oh crap there's 10 APCs turtling their base". This did not help much with comebacks as it did with making the game more stalematey.

[Kaiser739]

Reducing the penalties on destroyed buildings was not a step in the right direction, I'll start with that. I can go on and on about this, but all it did was make the game much more annoying for the better team to win. It went from not worrying about vehicles after blowing up the WF to "oh crap there's 10 APCs turtling their base". This did not help much with comebacks as it did with making the game more stalematey.

Agreed. Losing a building should really hurt a team. It was fine the way it was pre beta 4 - if you lose WF/airstrip, you have access to no vehicles at all. No Barracks/HoN - no advanced inf, not even low-tier. No ref - very, very low income.

It will teach the team that lost a building to defend their base better next time and encourages players to infiltrate/rush (-> teamwork!) because it is actually rewarding and there is an advantage to be felt.

I feel like there were way more organized rushes in earlier versions of the game than there are now and I'm fairly certain that is (mostly) down to these changes.

Making buildings recoverable would totally be detrimental to the game IMO. It would only become more stalematey. It would also enforce less teamwork because players would be asking themselves, "why should we even destroy a building if they can just bring it back?".

[XD_ERROR_XD]

Reducing the penalties on destroyed buildings was not a step in the right direction, I'll start with that. I can go on and on about this, but all it did was make the game much more annoying for the better team to win. It went from not worrying about vehicles after blowing up the WF to "oh crap there's 10 APCs turtling their base". This did not help much with comebacks as it did with making the game more stalematey.

Agreed. Losing a building should really hurt a team. It was fine the way it was pre beta 4 - if you lose WF/airstrip, you have access to no vehicles at all. No Barracks/HoN - no advanced inf, not even low-tier. No ref - very, very low income.

It will teach the team that lost a building to defend their base better next time and encourages players to infiltrate/rush (-> teamwork!) because it is actually rewarding and there is an advantage to be felt.

I feel like there were way more organized rushes in earlier versions of the game than there are now and I'm fairly certain that is (mostly) down to these changes.

Making buildings recoverable would totally be detrimental to the game IMO. It would only become more stalematey. It would also enforce less teamwork because players would be asking themselves, "why should we even destroy a building if they can just bring it back?".

I'm still for the opinion that a destroyed vehicle or infantry factory should make their prices increase by every purchase by a set amount. Because let's be honest here, every setback you take promotes camping in some way, but indeed it's to easy to camp at the current situation.

Camping on the long run should be not be viable on the long run, and definately discouraged. If you don't do anything useful with the last vehicles that you can buy, It's your own fault for losing the game. However, i feel like recent changes have been trying to accomodate to two different game modes entirely, AOW and Marathon. But they simply don't mix. I think that Marathon and AOW itself needs a change before we can work on other gameplay mechanics. Many pro-marathon players feel like AOW is unfair because it allows teams to win that obviously would have lost in a Marathon battle (by camping). pro-AOW players don't like the fact that campers (possibly caused by that their team has been crippled) allows the game to go on for far too long.

So what about this? Why not extend the time limit by 10 minutes if a building gets destroyed, to allow a team that worked his butt of to destroy it a fairer chance to end the game they want it? Should make camping a less viable option.

But what if the campers still win? What I often see is that the people complaining about camping, are the ones that give them free points by hopelessly attacking them (we're still talking AOW here). In the original game (I don't know the numbers in Renegade X), you need more than 30 free infantry kills (!) with a 1k character to earn back the points you would otherwise have given them for dying once. When I see a camping team, i camp myself to bait them into taking the field and counter-attack. If they don't take the bait I instead destroy my own vehicle and trade my character in for the sweet freedom of a soldier.

But what about marathon? Well, a while back i've heard about RypeL working on something to make the game more evolving but why not chip in my own two cents here aswell? We could do something with polls, After an hour every 30 minutes you could make a poll which gives everyone 1000 credits. Or, you could make building health degrade by 1% a minute after 30 minutes to a minimum of 20%? But i still think that my first suggestion, making every purchase more expensive than the previous one is a really good alternative.

What do you guys think?

[RoundShades]

My favorite suggestions were:

1) At team score of 20k, every 1k of score increases damage 2%. Eventually, the lethality to buildings breaks the threshold. Teams with even score, have nearly even odds to increase damage threshold. Camping teams, risk not being able to apply their damage threshold. Even so, score needs rebalanced less in favor of camping.

2) Building simply get less armor and more health. Thus, a single timed c4 breaks the armor, tanks get through it easier, even chipping it by alternating buildings is easier if you even get down to what old armor would be 20%, you'd already be doing permanent damage. You could even display it as 100% armor and 150% building health if it helped convey it by scale, or 80% and 120%, or 40% and 60%. You know, whichever.

3) I am in favor of other's ideas for Veterancy, same reason as #1, increased lethality to a structure, as long as veterancy is done right and can actually threaten a structure.

4) I am also in favor of other's ideas for changing repair rates for hotwires to 90% their current repair rate and engis up to 120%. That way, repair rates aren't a massive difference, being 1.2 for engi and 1.8 for hotwire/tech. Lower repair even at max, slightly higher repair when crutched (not that engis are effective ingame atm anyway, just barely functional)

[Agent]

Reducing the penalties on destroyed buildings was not a step in the right direction, I'll start with that. I can go on and on about this, but all it did was make the game much more annoying for the better team to win. It went from not worrying about vehicles after blowing up the WF to "oh crap there's 10 APCs turtling their base". This did not help much with comebacks as it did with making the game more stalematey.

It is not a comeback mechanic, though it does lessen the severity of "there's nothing I can do so" by lowering the penalty associated with building destruction. It still however does not give the team any way to work on fixing their problem of missing a building, hence why recoverable buildings would be far more ideal and substantial solution. Teams need a way to go back to their start point. As far as implementing recoverable buildings, this is how I'd likely try to work it:

There'd have to be a "construction time" associated with buildings so that the team doesn't just instantly rebuild their structure in addition to a financial cost (10,000 credits?). This financial cost might be covered by automatically diverting 1 credit per tick from players towards the most recently destroyed building, and also allowing players to contribute as they wish. If a full team just waits it out, it may take 10 minutes to gather the funds and construct the building (have the construction time set to 5 minutes, but halt when there are no funds to work with).

What the above means is that if you destroy an enemy refinery and they don't actively contribute anything, their economy is shutdown to zero income for 10 minutes because their remaining income is being automatically redirected to rebuilding the refinery. If you destroy another building after that, then that one doesn't even get started on until after the Refinery is built (C&C doesn't believe in simultaneous building).

However without encouraging players to leave their base and actively accomplish some objective (gather supplies/tiberium) to expedite the structure rebuilding, this still ends up being a mostly passive comeback mechanic. It doesn't fix the fact that the team will have little to do while their building is dead. You must give them something to do that will clearly help, other than bashing their head against the wall of tanks/snipers.

As I mentioned, there's more than just one flaw to C&C mode -- there is no single thing that would resolve all of the game's problems. You can't build a game entirely around subtractive gameplay and not expect stalemates, because you'll constantly end up in situations where players just go "there's nothing I can do" and camp. Things like overly severe penalties for losing buildings (and not giving any way to fix them what-so-ever, or not giving any way to actively contribute to fixing them) just exacerbates the issue.

[Profane Pagan]

Agent, I agree with you. However I do belive there are other aspects as well.

First: Voltex and others mentioned the responsiblity of the team. And apart from the map design they blame the bad teamwork for the stalemates. But this is partially true, because Renegade x is heavily relies upon teamwork. This is it's core game mechanism. The same approves for MOBA games as well. You can have great characters, without a good teamwork you are lost (I don't like MOBA games). However in RenX the maps are separated into at least 3 main divisions: GDI base-field-Nod base. It is not like any other arena shooter in which the players own nothing from the environment, they are just running up and down. In RenX the teams are pushing each other back and forth in a longitudinal pattern. Because of this homebase system, the importance of the defense is imperative during the game. Agent has perfectly presented the problem with the introduction of the substractive gameplay explanation. But!

Second: "unstoppable force meets immovable object"

I hear you complaining about camping a lot. Camping is obtaining a strategically important location of advantage. This is a pejorative word, describing someone who doesn't have the decency to join us in the noble fight. However when one team lays siege upon it's enemy, how could you expect from the besieged team to conduct a successful sortie? Moreover on many maps there are only handful of entryways. They need their buildings, because basically in that moment they have no chance to come back from a blow (so bulding repairment is a good idea). When the 3/4 of the attacking team is represented in a siege, the defenders won't leave their posts. This isn't called camping, this is turtling. Heavy defense with little or no offense. Usually turtling refers to multiple players. This is the nature of this gametype: When unstoppable force meets immovable object, two good teams can't deal with each other. Also, such turtling usually occurs at the entrance of the bases. Even if the designers move places of interests to the intermediate battlefield, the majority of the fights will still be held at the gates of bases. Ren x is not only substractive, it is also linear in the sense of military movement.

Third: recently I have read an interesting review about Owerwacth. In the article, the journalist asked, what makes a good FPS? He stated, every big franchise started when players had the freedom to invent their own tactics, and choreography. I am speaking of personalized gameplays which was not planned by the developers. For example players invented rocket jump in the Quake series, in Medal of Honor players were leaning right and left while running in order to avoid headshots.In Counter strike players learn a lots of movement combos. Good FPSs are granting freedom. Renegade X is a good game, but it won't grow, if people won't be able to approach the fight in many various ways. I can't tell you if we need more buildings (I like the idea tough), I can't tell you what to do, I can only say, in this condition, the game usually favors almost only full frontal attack, if the attack is conducted by the majority of the players. We might need a more better way of communication system (I am like a broken record, I know). Was it interesting? Was it new? I don't know, thank you for reading.

[RoundShades]

Could Silo's be the only way to recover a dead structure? That would give them purpose in the game. Also, a reason to leave base. Maybe also give silos an offensive ability as well.

Then, just stick them in stalemate maps. They mostly already are anyway. 5th way i'd support wholeheartedly.

[Axesor]

The game heavily rewards defenders. If the whole team is focused on defence, it's nearly unbreakable.

I say, lets take example from RTS C&C: if somebody attacks a building, an opposite team usually sends all his forces to destroy the threat. I say, let the building be auto-repairable, without possibility to be repaider by player. Give it more Hp over armor. When somebody attacks a building, he automatically appears on the radar with big pulsating red dot. Make the game offensive oriented. Now it's like "building is under attack :3". NO! it should be alarm, explosions, voice like from army guy voice from dead space 2 "ELIMINATE A THREAT OR YOU WILL DIE!!" Mobilize all the units to destroy the threat, becouse everybody would know where the threat is.

Yes ofc, this would break some current system that should be reworked anyway *mining system*.

Repair back destroyed building: IMO if the team loses building and is able to defend the silo for.. lets say 5minutes, they should be able to get their building back. "Construction time" would be this 5 minutes counting down and when silo is lost, CD resets.

This is how I imagine RenX. Offensive oriented. This is why I originaly started, I saw explosion, action, team progress.

You know, the game can still be team based with feeling of independency. Imo, you have tried to make the game that much team based that it's excessive now.

[Xtractor]

wondering what it could do if :

When a building is under attack , a tech come in that building core terminal and actived the repair (the wrench on top of building will go on) and he could leave the building and go in offense .when the repair is done wrench disappear and the same will have to be redo under another attack .Same principle as in RTS

[Cherno]

I kinda like the idea of holding the silo for 5 mins to get back a building.

[Guest Gliven]

If the devs decide on making buildings recoverable. I would rather have the hotwire/tech/engineer do the construction. 10,000 creds without power plant, 8,000 with. Everyone can donate creds towards building cost. Then it takes 1 engineer 5 mins by themselves to re-construct by shooting the mct, maybe down to 2 mins if you have 3 engies at the same time? max 3 engineers?

capturing the silo to recover buildings sounds stupid, sorry who ever suggested it. Maybe a different tech building....but not a silo.... i would rather not have a silo on every map.

Another idea would be to bring the Commander mod from the PUG to the base game, and make it so that only the commander can recover buildings. The commander can buy a non-refillable item?

[RoundShades]

If the devs decide on making buildings recoverable. I would rather have the hotwire/tech/engineer do the construction. 10,000 creds without power plant, 8,000 with. Everyone can donate creds towards building cost. Then it takes 1 engineer 5 mins by themselves to re-construct by shooting the mct, maybe down to 2 mins if you have 3 engies at the same time? max 3 engineers?

capturing the silo to recover buildings sounds stupid, sorry who ever suggested it. Maybe a different tech building....but not a silo.... i would rather not have a silo on every map.

Another idea would be to bring the Commander mod from the PUG to the base game, and make it so that only the commander can recover buildings

Well, I mean, the only maps that need it for sure, are Under, Field, and previously Gold Rush, but now not so much Goldrush, and then Tomb also, so... oh... wait... all those maps already have them, that is cool, isn't it?

[Guest Gliven]

like i said....I'd rather not have a silo on every map....as in taking them out for a different tech building. You could even place a capturable mct in a plain old bunker.

Also you do realize i play the same game you do....you don't need to tell me which maps have silos. I play the game almost every day.

[Guest Gliven]

your scenario...the team that controls the silo will get extra creds AND the ability to re-build structures. Why not split that shit up so it doesn't make it so easy.

[epicelite]

What if like...

Repairs are less effective, the less buildings you have? So you can have the losing team with just a power plant camp inside of it and repair it to near invulnerability for an hour minutes?

[j0g32]

very interesting discussion - I think there were some good points mentioned, and I would like to try to summarize and combine some of them.

Stalemates arise mostly from single-entrance/bottleneck/tunnel map design of the original maps and the imbalance between dealing damage to buildings (exterior) and repairing it from inside (being in cover from shells).

I think the developers have done a good job to counter some of those mechanics:

• additional sneaking paths in Under, defensive platform in Field, plus smoke/EMP grenades to cover infantry rushes and disable mines
  
• capturable silos that can compensate for a lost refinery, however the defending team has to stop turtling in its base in order to acquire those resources
  
• airstrikes to break stalemates
  
• health/armour: permanent damage to buildings which rewards attacks when firepower was not sufficient to wipe out a building

IMHO, the latter feature might, however, give even more incentive to immediately repair a building under attack, in order to avoid permanent damage and eventual loss of the structure.

Thus, as soon as a building is under attack 5+ Engineers sprint to said structure, and will then easily out-repair a bombardment. Which renders a siege less attractive in the first place...

Axesor already mentioned that in the original RTS C&C you would try to eliminate the thread instead of turtling, because the ability to repair your structures is limited to a certain rate. Similarly, epicelite proposed making repairs less effective.

I would therefore suggest to cap the maximum rate of building repairs,

either that (1) only a max of 3? engineers/hotwires can repair simultaneously and any additional repairs are irrelevant (you would get a message: "max. repairs reached")

or that (2) the first engineer/hotwire has a repair rate/multiplier of 100%, the next 50%, 25% and so on (would be more difficult to implement).

I prefer the first option, for it resembles more the original C&C feeling, and gives a clear incentive not to over-repair, but to eliminate the thread by a counterattack.

If the distinction between armour and health would then still be necessary depends likely on the ability to rebuild structures:

Agent mentioned the subtractive nature of the gameplay which makes it difficult for a team that has lost a building to recover and comeback. Some argue that this is supposed to be a punishment for bad teamwork/defence, fair enough. And that the severity of this punishment is diluted by airdrops and low-tier infantry although respective buildings are destroyed. Again, I think the intention of that feature is giving said comeback option partially, but I also agree with the criticism.

Generally, I like the idea of rebuildable structures. In fact, I am up for all out base building RTS Style, and I secretly hope that this whole discussion might spur the support for such development efforts

Anyway... ^^

I think a high price in the range of 10-20.000 credits would provide enough economic damage to the team that lost the building. Building time would not be necessary imo, as it would already take some time for the team to gather those resources and devote to the re-construction.

I could imagine that every player could go to the MCT of the destroyed building, a tool-tip message would show up: "Press [E] to donate 100 credits to the Refinery construction fund."

Building "sponsors" would give credits and be rewarded with score-points for their team-contribution.

And when aiming at the building the "Destroyed" sub-title under the health bar could be replaced by [ 100 / 10.000 ] - only visible for the team of course.

If the refinery was destroyed then clearly the team has an incentive to go out in the field to cap and defend the silo to gather more resources for the reconstruction - no need for new tech building for that purpose imo. Maybe the credit rate of silos should be even increased for that matter.

When the necessary funds are reached the building is re-erected with 100% health but 0 armour, and engineers can go in and repair.

The commanders job would it be, to co-ordinate and prioritise the funds.

With this suggestion we would have:

1) higher likelihood for a successful attack by destroying a building (max. repair cap)

2) sufficient damage to the team losing a building,

3) potential comeback / complete restore, given that

4) the team puts in enough manual teamwork and does not waste precious resources, by defending what is left and reach out for additional resources.

What do you think?

[TK0104]

My ideas for making this game better:

1) Bring all buildings back so mappers have more choise which buildings they want in the map

2) Bring back Side-arms back and reduce it's power. It is nice people can choose which weapons they want

3) New purchable items like a placable Gun Emplacements

4) Weapon Drop (with pick-up system of Black Dawn so you don't have a HUUUUGE arsenal of weapons)

5) Return extra Characters (Locke, Kane, Tiberium Mutants, Petrova, Mauce, Chef, Logan)

6) Return extra vehicles (Pick-up truck, Chameleon)

7) Return the different suits/outfits for 1000 credit characters (Havoc, Sydney, Mobius, Sakura, Raveshaw, Mendoza)

8) Maybe RxD Maps

[Profane Pagan]

What do you think?

Your post was perfect j0g32! I absolutelly support your deliberate ideas!

[Flamezz|Ninja]

I think there's a lot of things that contribute to stalemates. lack of teamwork, lack of resources. But I've seen situations where one team had all but one building destroyed, and through collaboration/skill was able to come back and win the entire game. But other times depending on the situation, getting past defenses or campers on a particular map is impossible. usually a bunch of engineers/techs hiding inside a building and fending off prolonged attacks indefinitely.

I think one of the big problems is the games over-reliance on economy. I would much rather see a system that favors strategy, collaboration, and skill, rather than just sitting there mindlessly attacking or repairing for the sake of getting points. I feel like a potentially interesting mechanic for this could be fragmentable buildings/ environment / vehicles. like what if hitting a particular spot on a building over and over with an arty was able to punch a hole through the wall? Or collapse a ramp? Maybe if you hit that rock over a tunnel the whole tunnel could collapse? or you could blast a hole through the side of the barracks with a bunch of C4. This would add a whole new level of gameplay as alternative routes (besides the designated entrances & exits) could be made. Picture the scenario where a rush occurs, a building surrounded by 6 flame tanks and a bunch of hotwires inside repairing. this could go on indefinitely. it rewards no one. Nod gets no reward for organizing a rush, and GDI is encouraged to just sit inside the building and repair. Say GDI is winning and all they have to do is wait till time runs out and they'll win the game anyways. but what if during an attack the building were to fragment around them? suddenly infantry can enter through new holes in the wall, the hotwires are now exposed to the fire from the tanks. This would encourage collaboration and open up opportunities for infiltration

Or how about for defense purposes.. What if a tank running over a proximity mine blows the tread right off of it? now all of a sudden that tank cant turn left, or what if you could collapse a tunnel or block an entrance into the base? suddenly strategic placement of mines and clever strategy could help defend your whole base from attack even if you're low on resources and losing. Or what if you could snipe the pilot of that orca flying overhead? or hit the driver of the humvee? Suddenly skill and accuracy is rewarded. What if that arty thats been sitting there point whoring for the past 5 minutes.. what if you could come up next to them and "break in" to their tank and steal it from them. Suddenly the ability to sneak up on someone is rewarded and not the point whoring

This idea literally just came to me, So for all i know its a terrible idea. lol. But it seems like increasing the interaction with the environment could add entirely new levels of Infiltration/ defense strategies. And would add rewards for strategy/skill even if a team is losing

Other shortcomings I've percieved. I think RenX would see a huge upswing in collaboration efforts if it was able to integrate it's own voice communication. I dont know anything about the technical details on doing that, but if you could just pop on a microphone and talk to your team without having to go through teamspeak that would be amazing.

I think it would be cool if there was a "team credits" where money could be easily pooled for purposes of rebuilding buildings, getting new base defenses, etc. etc.

i also love the commander mod we use in PUGs. i feel like something like that should be standard in every game

Just my thoughts. see what you guys think

[boxes]

The biggest issue with the game right now is how easy it is to stop rushes that focus on external damage (tank rushes, gunner rushes, etc). One simple 350 credit adv.engie cancels out so much damage, and it's because of them why stalemates exist in this game. I can suggest various things, some of which I've already brought up:

1. Reduce repair rates on MCTs from 2x to 1.5x so it'll be easier to break through building armor while it's being repaired.

2. Reduce building armor by 20% so it'll be harder to save a lone building under siege. Remote C4 MCT damage should be brought to what it was before.

3. Change how building armor works so that when attacking a building, armor protects 99.5% damage done to health instead of 100%. This works until building health is 0%, which until them a team must break the armor in order to destroy the building.

4. Make the repair guns behave the same way as repair tools except with faster recharge rates and capacity. Dealing consistent damage to a building will eventually cause repair guns to dry out, giving attackers an opening to deal serious damage if the defenders don't bother responding other than holding down m1 on the mct.

[Canucck]

Marathon is skewing people's view of C&C mode. It was made to end in 25-40min. I think ~40min is about the limit for the majority of players on marathon servers anyway, if a map shows no sign of ending you can easily see a huge turnover in players after that point.

Rebuilding shit is the worst thing that could happen to C&C mode. Games need to end. Go next

[RoundShades]

4. Make the repair guns behave the same way as repair tools except with faster recharge rates and capacity. Dealing consistent damage to a building will eventually cause repair guns to dry out, giving attackers an opening to deal serious damage if the defenders don't bother responding other than holding down m1 on the mct.

I think the best way to balance high level repairs, is to make the current advanced repairgun, have a limit to how long it's advanced. After you repair too long, it repairs at rate of a weak repairgun until you have some time to recharge it.

Ask for the game itself, the structures not fully repairing is good, I think the game simply needs a limited health objective (less armor and more health on structures), and higher stakes late-game (veterancy or upward scaling damage). Could also use a comeback mechanic (like longer respawn times for stronger teams or players, like in most mobas).

I am not saying "make it a moba". I am saying "use what makes sense", take a few game mechanics but not fuck with C&C mode.

[Profane Pagan]

If you reduce repair rates, if you reduce building armor, or if you implement cooldown in repair guns, you will force more players to spend more time inside the building, repairing the MCT.

If the repair gun is slower, that means more players will join to repair the MCT. If the building is more vulnerable than usual, the teams will be more defensive.

Agent mentioned the drawbacks of the substractive methodology. If you want players to be more offensive, if you want to prevent turtling, then you have to give bonuses instead of reducing, nerfing everything.

1: You want to prevent players to camp around MCT? In critical situation, you can do nothing apart from repairing. So give them gun emplecaments which can be set up on buildings or around the base. Just give them side-quests in the event of sieges.

2: The next idea might contradicts Renegade's arcade-ish nature a bit at the first glance: during a heavy siege a building should fall apart in various places. If it suffers heavy damage, pipes inside and outside could tear up, core reactors could overheat, tiberium container could leak, poisoning the repair crews.

Players would be obliged to repair the various damages, or there would be bust. Thus they have to run up and down in order to prevent the destruction of the building. I am not talking about destroyable models, like in Battlefield 4. Think about the situation on board of a submarine when it receives heavy damage.

MCT would funcion as a shield generator and overall health generator, however the appearing malfunctions would operate as "c4 explosive devices", with countdown timers.

In my opinion this is a much better idea, than the nerfing of repair tools and building healths. Reducing is the lazy way. The game needs to enhance the player experience.