So you've just dug into the enemies brain room, and sent several rounds into his brain jar causing it to explode in a shower of blood, glass, and brain suspending goo. Now even while brain jar fireworks look awesome, that brain you just killed had complete control of every one of its mindless drones' coordination and movement. Now if you just put a bullet in it, whats keeping your last 3 sentries standing and that dropship in the air?

My suggestion, is that when your brain dies, the actors remaining on your team should fall flat on their face like the brainless lumps of body they remain as. Whatever force is is keeping them upright should dissapeer. Much like a soldier dying from bleeding to death. The engines of dropships and rockets should cut out and have them crash back to the earth. Either that, or much like a remote control toy that has lost its signal, its postioning of its control axises can be random and unpredictable. A rocket could suddenly be locked on Up and Left until it summersaults into the ground. It could be made very interesting if say a dropships left engine was set to minimum throttle and the right one to maximum, causing it to roll across the level untill it hits something hard enough to explode or break an engine.


As it is my current estimate of how all this ingame technology works is the following:

You brain is the center of a basewide wireless network. It receives sensory information from all its units (cameras, eyesight, hearing, smell, pain, balance, feeling, aircraft speed, facing and altitude, perhaps even bunker door status) and is able to control all of the muscles, servos, engines, jetpacks and such used for movement. Everything right down to the finger that pulls the trigger, so its controlling their ankles aswell keeping them upright by reading off their cochlea. Perhaps the brain even opens/closes doors or goes to the extreme of balancing the chemicals in its own tank water. Understanding robot and ship controls is a gimmie, however in human (or alien) clone/slave brains, I think that the slave brain would perform subconcious tasks such as breathing and organ function, eye dialation and focus, sweating, and perhaps some reflexes. Maybe not reflexes, as it could lead to movement input conflicts with the base brain. While in gameplay you only control one unit at a time, I dont think thats how it actually works. Your brain is most likely heavily tech and chemical assisted and powerful enough to control many bodies at once. Not to mention much more intelligent as our evolutionary path would suggest.

I'd very much like it if Data could go into detail on how things are run. This is a very interesting future.

I also quite like the idea of capturing clones. If your brain dies, they all fall over, so as long as they dont split their head open on a rock they'll still breath and be alive.. You'd have to pick them up before they starved to death or got sores and swelling and became physically useless. They'd be just like the spoils of victory we've had for centuries. Rather than swords, guns and vehicles, we steal soldiers. (oh, and some guns and vehicles, maybe...)

Well the thing is, most people would prefer data did other stuff like custom wounds as opposed to cosmetic effects such as this...

but all he has to do is take away all the HP of the actors on the losing team.

Well, since there is most likely that it was a Neural copy, you'll have to make your nearest copies take command of said alienated clones.

You can do this with a Lua-based scene, and a custom win condition.

Cool idea, I think somebody should really do it.

Good idea, would make more sense... would be fudge awesome!

Two things:

1. If you gib them right, the coalition soldiers have a brain.
2. I would rather see different things in upcoming builds than this, such as Lua for weapons.

I do like this idea, however.

They have a brain, yes, no one ever said they didn't.

They're not in control of anything beyond the most basic biological functions, though. Probably breathing and eating, if they even do that.

As far as CC canon goes, having the clones drop dead would be neat aesthetically but not make the most sense. Having them suddenly switch to your team would make somewhat more, or you could have them simply go braindead and stand there.

actually, if they switched teams when you destroyed the enemy brain it could add a new element to the campaign. Say you had a stockpile of troops for every mission, and these could be added in the start of any mission for free without delivery, when you finish a mission any of the enemy's actors are added to your stock pile for use in the next mission. This could add an extra dimension to the game. You could kill all of the enemies and destroy the brain to win easily but not get a large supply of backup next mission, or you could try and sneak into the enemy base and destroy the brain without killing anyone and get a large bonus to your stockpile (of course this would be much harder). Another tactic could be to get the enemy to deploy lots of troops and then destroy the brain.

It would mean that the player would have to think of different approaches and the rewards/losses because of them.

I thought they all DID go brain dead and sorta stand there like idiots when you destroyed the enemy brain. The dummies are machines. They've still got whatever fuel they use in their bodies and likely can still sorta function but can't move or do much of anything. The clones/Ronin, as Grif said, would likely just stand there like the idiots they're supposed to be.

Actually, if the Ronin are the "ragtag" faction Prom proposed on IRC, they have functional brains; if you destroyed the overlord they might become normal citizens. Dunno what they'd do, but it might or might not include attempting to kill your troops.

So I'm assuming (as I wasn't there when Prom said this, nor am I on IRC at all) that the ragtags are like humans as we know them now? Like us?

Ragtags are lower-class citizens (those who cannot afford to move past organic bodies) who are "recruited" into the ranks of the faction by the promise of money. They, of course, end up losing their free will and probably dying horribly at the hands of nameless faceless armies of clones controlled by disembodied brains.

It's a pretty bleak future.

Well, you're probably seeing some of the worst out there in the Cortex Command universe.
A newly discovered unconquered planet full of gold, the epitome of greed-based violence.

It's like a alien observing starving children off in Africa and pitying the entire earth, you're not seeing the whole picture.


Anyways, yeah. This would be a neat feature to be integrated into skirmish mode, and a simple one that wouldn't take much time, I would think.
But I don't think it should be hard coded in general.

For anyone that knew Lua worth a damn it'd be easy to add for missions, but obviously I'm not one of those people, as I'm somehow making more errors every time I try to fix an old error of my flawed attempt at adding this feature to the zombie cave script.
Lua syntax isn't easy to learn by examples and experience alone. docs plox