My last post describes 2 more damage factors that would be great to have (penetration and bullet creating an additional predefined wound).

I think a heat system would be cool. Not necessarily overheating guns, but having actors lose health in high heat, or even burst into flames in extreme cases. Jetpacks and certain heavy weapons could heat up actors and nearby grass, etc, also. HeatDamageLimit, and SceneHeat could be defined in the actor and scene .ini files, respectively. It'd be awesome to have a flamethrower that lights all of the grass on the map on fire, due to the heat spreading, and would open up a new reason to have a good bunker. Air-conditioning. On certain extremely hot maps, destroying the opponent's AC could be a huge benefit to you, since it would make their base just as dangerous as outside.

That would also add the option of night vision, just for the heck of it :3

Talking of AC, CC needs more infrastructure. Perhaps you could have to create barracks and cafeterias, but i'm not sure how barracks would work out as most of your troops end up splattered around the map.

How would cafeterias work out either? It's not like I'm keeping my troops alive long enough to give them a decent last meal. If my troops want something to eat then they can go to town on the dirt.

Well i didn't think that through.
But it still needs more Infrastructure in some way.

>Pete


You got a point, and a damn good one if you ask me.

However, I beg to differ. Perhaps the arbitrary nature of the said values could actually be beneficial, as it allows for a greater control over an actor's behaviour in different situations.

For example, when coding an actor, I take two aspects into account when setting the GWL: the actor's total health and the health reduced by each wound. Let's take an actor with 100 health, and wounds that reduce health by two points each. Therefore, it would take 50 hits for the said character to die. I would then set his GWL to a little higher than that number: something around 53-4. That way, the actor would simply bleed out when killed normally, but if the finishing blow is dealt by a high-powered weapon, such as a shotgun, he will explode in glorious bloodiness.

That, of course, applies to a very default actor. Lowering the GWL generates more volatile objects, with a higher chance of gibbing than settling: a rocket or a nuclear-powered robot, for instance. The opposite is also valid: a higher wound limit causes actors to have a more stable and less explodey behaviour: ideal for a normal robot or dummy, which, due to their increased structural strength and lack of flammable/explosive parts, would be more prone to shorting out and settling than making their insides rain all over the place.

With careful adjustment of the sharpness and material values, as well as some tweaking of the wound damage total, it is possible to create reallistic penetration/damage behaviours.

A human actor, for instance, should have a drastic difference between EntryWounds and ExitWounds: the first are most likely flesh wounds, while the latter imply organ damage of some sort. That, combined with low StructuralIntegrity values for flesh, would generate two results. One, that it would pay off to use a high-penetration weapon against a human, but also Two, that it would also be a good option to use a weaker weapon with a high fire rate, as even lighter rounds would probably be capable of generating wounds.

A dummy, on the other hand, is more of a solid-state actor, being made of carbon-fibre and the like: even if the shot does penetrate, there is not much inside for it to hit. That way, the Entry and Exit wounds should have similar values. Therefore, a high-powere weapon would not be nearly as useful against it, as it would only deal an extra wound, but no bonus damage. The StructuralStrenght should also be increased, reducing the effectiveness of lighter weapons. Taking all that into account, a more balanced weapon, with a good penetration/fire rate ratio, would be ideal against a dummy.

And finally, a robot. It's made of metal, so it should have a high StructuralIntegrity, making light weapons nigh useless. The EntryWounds would also deal less damage, as they're probably just hits to the outer armor. Exit wounds, however, should be positively catastrophic: chances are that some circuit board was destroyed or at least damaged. So using a high-powered weapon is most likely your best choice.

See? In three paragraphs, we've already developed a basic strength/weakness ration between the basic unit kinds. Let me convert it into a chart:

**************************************************

Actor | Weapon: -Antipersonnel- -Basic- -Armor Piercing-
-------------------------------------------------------------
Human | High Dmg Medium Dmg High Dmg
Dummy | Low Dmg Medium Dmg Medium Dmg
Robot | No Dmg Low Dmg Very High Dmg

******************************************

Expanding into that, you can balance the entire game.

Yes, I take balance extremely seriously. Sue me.


EDIT: Heck, EVERYONE ninja'd me!

I really agree with that damage system. If I chose the dummy faction it'd be for the reason that I'd feel powerful because of fighting a faction that uses anti-personell weaponry, as well as choosing my loadout to be effective against that faction. It would add a great tactical element and a world of modding possibility.

Areku, I can't really argue with that, but not all modders are going to go to the same levels of diligence when balancing their actors/weapons.

Also, weapons still need to be able to influence wounds, otherwise 5.7 rounds (designed not to exfiltrate the target, but tumble around inside, severely ♥♥♥♥ up their organs) for example, wouldn't be able to be accurately modelled. They should be able to do 1.5 of the exit wound damage, without creating an actual exit wound.

An idea for the tutorial I had, was that it would be split into 1 + [number of factions] tutorials.

The first one is a general tutorial that teaches all the basics of the game. Moving, switching, shooting, buying and inventory would be learned here.

Those tutorial vanilla units Promster designed for it would be PERFECT. I love them.

The rest, are like a commercial of sorts for each faction, an introduction.
These small "semi-tutorials" introduce the player of each faction in the game, how they fight, what tactics do they use, what kind of tech do they offer and how their bunkers are built and what systems do they have in them and how to use them.
They work like interactive commercials where the player is guided by a text like in the tutorial mission and witnesses all the cool stuff first hand. Its like he is the main star of the commercial.

This is because each faction will be very different from each other in terms gameplay, technology, tactics and overall habits they have. While these things can be learned by playing the game, they are still fairly complicated concepts that would be great to teach the player before he goes into live action.

The Mu-Ilaak were probably native to the region long ago. I'll be keeping them somewhat vague intentionally.

I haven't posted any guns on DA that I know of. Are you referring to the conical round magazine weapon
that I did as part of my LaserSquad/Xcom project? I was thinking about that old concept when I drew the guns.


I think I've proposed (and detailed) a new damage system at some point (ages ago). I'd like it to be more fuzzy. It's a tricky thing though,
finding a good abstraction for ballistics like armour penetration, tumbling, tissue crush, tissue stretch/temporary cavity, permanent cavity,
fragmentation penetration depth, nervous shock, yadda yadda. And that's just for human anatomy.

I've heard that some bullets are actually made to not produce severe nasty wounds, but rather to take down the target in a 'humane' way
(which is kind of strange). In the CC universe, you might not have to worry about what kind of nasty wounds that you inflict, since the victim
is probably not in the body anyways.


No, I haven't drawn any TradeStar forces. I'm not sure if they have any, since they can buy anyone or run them bankrupt. I'm still trying to
work out that part of the fluff.

I'd like to give each of the factions that I've worked on some bunker modules with mounted weapons, but nothing so heavy that it dominates
the playfield. Ceiling turrets is a great idea for indoor stuff.


In Sweden, I think that you need a weapons license to buy and handle certain kinds of weapons. In character of the CC universe, this would
have to be something like buying licenses or privileges from the TradeStar and/or various corporations to use their facilities and stuff.
We've discussed the idea to have unlockables a bit earlier, and iirc, we concluded that... It's a cool feature, but feature creep at this point.

I've been wanting to put some furniture/infrastructure into CC, even if it's a bit silly and out of character, yeah. Maybe it can be done by using
the hideouts of the Ronin/ragtag faction... because they are a bit more human and lowtech. The drop crate was supposed to be a weapons locker.
I've been drawing CPU's because I want some factions to use them for AI control. Kill the CPU and your non-brain controlled guys goes limp.
Turrets are a kind of a furniture too. Then there's the static resource mining things which we've been thinking about.

I've been sketching on an intro and extro and... midtro for the current tutorial. I need to redo a lot of the assets, and that's quite a bit of work.
In my story/scenario ideas, you'd get to play as all of the factions, seeing their PoV, a bit like how the StarCraft 1 story was presented.

Two things occurred to me on that last post.

Firstly, when I think of Tradestar, I think of a small elite corp of soldiers that are tasked with protecting the Tradestar company (doing its dirty work, protecting it from disgruntled clients, etc). Even if they can bankrupt factions or place an embargo on them, they would still need a defense force, and I imagine it as the best money can buy.

Secondly, maybe there could be some special units that don't function as brains, but still have brains. So if your brain is defeated, you could still have one or two sentiment units that could still try to get the job done without the main brain. However, having your main brain destroyed would severely limit what you could do. You could no longer buy things from Tradestar, since all they sell are brainless dummies and meatbags and such, and their crafts are also linked to your main brain(?). So it's really like a last ditch attempt to complete the mission.

True, that. Well, 'twas worth a try.

Tomaster, I assume that Tradestar has a monopoly on either production of clones and weaponry, transportation between planets/galaxies, life support systems, or on all three.
As such, you'd be batshit crazy to try and ♥♥♥♥ with 'em. Seems that with their obsession for gold, they are just creating an artificial economy to extend their reach to new planets. As for why they let different factions battle it out, perhaps that is to select; via survival of the fittest, the best designs and most effective commanders?

I do love the idea of clones that have brains, but can't order anything from Tradestar. Perhaps they could retake the brain chamber, to manually regain control of communications? It would be especially good if you could then only switch between any sentient clones.

I always saw the Ronin as being the last of a human resistance. Maybe one of their final missions would be to try to take down Tradestar in an attempt to end the monopoly?