Sunday, March 17, 2013

What makes each faction unique?

First, I apologize for not posting recently.  I have family staying at the house and that takes away from mod-work time.

So, with that out of the way, what does make each faction in the game unique?  Is it just the units?  Or is it the ability to use certain tactics better with certain factions?  Or is it the way that faction produces and uses the economy?  I would say all 3 myself.

Doug and I have been working on some more slight changes and tweaks as we move forward and this is what we're currently looking at.

GDI Faction -
-Produces cash from infantry squads
-Has the SDI for direct reinforcement capability or deep strike capability
-SDI and Mk4 units grow stronger and deal more damage the weaker they get, becoming better at dealing with the current threat against them.

NOD Faction -
-Produces cash from harvesters
-Has stealth for surprise attacks
-Hit-and-Run capable units gain a major speed boost after attacking allowing for quick guerrilla tactics.

Scrin Faction -
-Scrin harvesters die after 5 minutes, once dead they spawn a blue tiberium field at their location.  A new harvester will spawn at the refinery when they die.
-Scrin units that have shields will have their shields re-form after 2X their build timer has passed unless it is a capitol ship in which case it's a direct 1-to-1 reform time.

EF/UC -
- UC Big Tray expansion units produce cash through drops.
- UC have unique defenses, working much like a 2nd commander where you simply place the structure down and the structure will produce it's own defensive mecha that will work like a counter-attack force to any enemy attack, meeting the enemy in the field and attacking there instead of at the base.


Now obviously these things are subject to change but we're going to try UC this way in the next release and see how it go's moving the extra cash generators from the powerplants to the big trays.  Maybe it works great, maybe not, but we won't know until we try.

From the looks of it you can see how each side is different.  GDI has a more forward approach and needs to use everything in it's arsenal to reach maximum performance output.  However if it does it can really bring the power to bear against its enemies.

NOD with its stealth and hit-and-run units can really choose when and where it will engage an enemy.  And with each base producing stealth from the power plants it can hide a huge force and you won't even know what your walking into.

Scrin is an assault force, with a massively powerful air and ground presence they can not be ignored.  With regenerating shields you have to be sure to kill them and not just leave them wounded otherwise they can be very difficult to deal with.  And finally with their harvesters generating their own fields they can literally make a lot more cash from a single field than a normal player could.

Finally you have UC.  With their unique defensive force setup you will be able to focus on attacking an enemy and have less to worry about with base defense.  And with the Big Trays producing cash the more you expand the more you make.  Its a pretty straight forward design but one with a lot of potential.

As always if you have a question or opinion please share it.

3 comments:

Alan said...

Looking forward to the next release. Question about the UC defensive forces, if you put down say an AA Turret and it has GM Snipers to help it out if those GM Snipers get destroyed will the AA Turret replace them automatically or will those need to be replaced by the player?

Unknown said...

sorry for the long delay on a reply. The idea originally would be what you say but in practice we are having issues with getting the defense to fire it's own weapon AND send out the additional units so it looks like we're going to make it so that you get defense that either work like bunkers that send out the forces to fight or like they do now, just an anti-air defense. The only times it does work right is in the example you made, if the AA guns only target air and the Snipers only target ground it works fine.

And the AA turret would replace them automatically.

Unknown said...

why the hell am I unkown? Lol stupid blogspot. This is azuza. :p