Sunday, September 11, 2011

AW, oh the power at your disposal....

Comming up with a different play style based on the side-faction you pick when playing EF while keeping a common starting point isn't always as easy as you would think. For example, if you wanted to compaire EF-UC to another faction already in the game the closest choice would be GDI. Both sides focus their powers on reinforments and both sides use their baseline units to win the game. However EF-UC has access to other, more advance technology making many of thier units stronger than GDI's and EF also has access to a few other "specialty" powers that give them a bit of NOD flair. GDI on the other hand sticks with classic, proven technology with low costs allowing them to slowly overwhelm their opponents.

The AW force that is currently being added in however is much closer to a mix between Scrin and NOD than any resembelence to GDI. AW's powers fall into two categories, global and reinforment. AW units also fall into 2 different categories, basic and gundam. Where UC's gundams can not be directly built most of the time and are seen as "commanders" on the field AW's gundams are their bread and butter of troops. Their gundams may not be as strong as UC's but you get more of them so that should be a fair trade off.

AW's powers are actually what I want to focus on here. If any of you have watched After War Gundam X you know that there are a lot of different newtypes in the show that do different things. Our plan is to base the powers that you get as an AW player off of those powers.

The powers we're currently planning on having avalible are as follows.

1. Vehicular Hold - Freezes ALL vehicles, aircraft, and mecha on the battlefield in place for 30 seconds. This will not kill aircraft that must keep moving. These units will still be able to fire, they just can't move.

2. Planetary Vision - Reveils the entire map for 30s.

3. DOME Defense Deployment - Drops a DOME Defense Canister to the battlefield with 4 DOME bits attached to it for defensive or offensive support. This structure can be placed ANYWHERE.

4. Bit Deployment - All rank 4 Gundams or Cyber Newtype Gundams will deploy 2 bits for support purposes.

5. Colony Drop - Drops 3 to 5 massive colonys randomly on the battlefield, ushering in the next phase in AW technology. These colonies will do massive damage to whatever they hit. The areas around impact will then have a few "capturable" gundam husks lying around along with some enemy Zeonic forces. These Zeon forces will attack ANY forces that come near them, be them the players or the enemies.


I'm sure there are a few things you can notice from this. The biggest being that there are not very many powers avalible to AW. Another is the Colony Drop. AW is the space force for the Earth Federation. Zeon is a primarily space based force themselves. This "power" is to show the fact that if AW wish's to deploy it's most advanced mobile suits (Gundam Double X, Gundam X Divider, Gundam Leopard Destroy, and Gundam Airmaster Burst) that Zeon will try to stop them by doing what Zeon does best. So this isn't as much of a "good power" as a choice, do you take the risk that your going to drop a colony on yourself trying to get more powerful suits or do you try to win without them? If the enemy is at your front door about to kill you do you use this as a deterrent and try to distract them? Once the colonies have fallen do you go out and try to capture these discarded, broken mobile suits and fight Zeon or do you let Zeon act as a buffer against your enemy? The possibilities are quite amazing IF we can get this stuff to work right.

What other powers do you think AW should have? Your thoughts are always welcomed.

7 comments:

Alan said...

Each week I come back to this blog hoping to see something interesting and you never disappoint. Sound great and I am eagerly awaiting the next release.

-Alan

ยรรยง มงคลจันทร์ said...

I will wait for the the next ralease.

blobsndrees said...

the colony drops sounds like a fun idea but if one drops in your base its all over for you while if one drops on the edge of the map, it doesn't even do anything. how about making one huge colony dropping into the center of the map which causes 70% dmg to all units and buildings in the map, making the colony stay in the center of the map so that units can no longer build or cross the area and getting zeon drop pods continuously flowing out to attack all forces for the rest of the game.

blobsndrees said...

Also for the fins, will they be auto built or do you have to manually upgrade them? it would be tough to do the upgrade for each gundam in the middle of flattening an enemy base.
Also, will the fins that are destroyed respawn by themselves or will they be restocked at the gundam factory?

Vega said...

Everything sounds promising. Can you play multiplayer with this mod?

azuza001 said...

The fins, are you rendering to the bits? We are still working on the timing issue but at the moment it looks like what will happen is you fire off the 'summon bits' power and al bit capable units on the field will have the appropreate boys drop in. Once the bits are there they will function like any other unit.

As for multiplayer yes, this mod is mainly focused on multiplayer and skirmish AI work and not on the campaign. I honestly don't even know if the single player campaign will work with the mod, never tried.

Alan said...

I tried campaign with the 9D alpha I found I was slaughtered (I can't remember which campaign I was doing I think it was nod)

-Alan