Cruiser Command

So we were talking in Teamspeak about buffing the Science console to make it more engaging.

I came up with the idea of letting the science shoot homing target buffs towards allied ship. Basically imagine the science console would send out buffs like cargo drones (that can't be shot down). When they reach the intended ship, it buffs them in some way.

This is interesting for a bunch of reasons:
* It allows people who die in a small ship to do something engaging while on the ship. It makes them feel like they're still in the battle since they can unlock the camera and help out in the small ship battle.
* It naturally puts in a skill part to it since you have to estimate when they'll need the buff it and send it 30-ish seconds in advance or such. Unless it's a defensive battle nearby the BC.

So what would these buffs be? I don't know! Repairs? Movement speed? Energy? Spell? Black Hole?

Heres some ideas for abilities

Second Chance - Person affected by this ability, when the killing blow is dealt (aka, they are going to die) they get 100 health back, and the buff is removed.
Volatile munitions - any projectile fired from that ship now does aoe damage, (increased for destroyers, and applies to subjucators in the form that their automatons now do AOE, and minelayer healing does aoe...but not their mines...that can be intended for something else ) and for miners and chompers, any asteroid/ship they mine/eat will explode. *those astroids are rigged*
Formation tactics - any allied ships near this targeted ship will increase its damage, health, energy regen, and speed by 5%....*keep your enemies close, but your allies closer!*
Enhanced Capacitors - increases Total energy by 500 and increases energy regen by 1

depend on how easy to spam they are

Mini-ionic - much smaller speed boost, shorter too. might be just what he needs to catch up/run away

AoE EMP - Same as wraith emp except AOE and affect allies too. 3 second cast.

Cloak - 3 second cloak. just enough to maybe juke an enemy

Shield - 2 second invulnerability. that's 1-2 missiles dodged.

Energy shot - +30 energy

Hardened hull - 5 seconds without any ramming damage. time it well for easy kills

Ping - detect invisible enemies around you for 10 sec --> also a nice way to make invisibilty more present without making it OP

Life leech - Life leech. I'm getting lazy

Frozen attacks - Slow enemy. OMG are those Dota2 attack modifiers?!?

Desolator - Reduce enemy armor by -6 each attack. Okay now I'm not even trying to hide it anymore

I lost interest in finding more. going to bed. too drunk.

This is a really cool idea, IMO. One of my favorite games was Battlezone (1997), it was basically a first person strategy game. One of the buildings you could construct was an armory, it allowed you to purchase items that got catapulted onto the field. Using that idea, there are three ways you could deploy buffs and items, I figure:

- Item is a power up which is deployed to a location and can be picked up by either team
- Item is a sent to a player and consumed as soon as it gets there
- Item goes in players inventory

As far as gameplay goes, these items can't be so powerful that it is preferable to have someone on science full time as opposed to flying a ship - then we have the same issue that upgrades have, where there is a somewhat boring but very important position that must always be filled.

Some ideas for items:

- Emergency cloak - invisibility for 6 seconds
- Sensor overload - Detect invisible ships, vision + 50% range for 15 seconds
- Deploy turret - Puts a automaton like thing at target location where there is vision
- Gravity well - causes an effect like the chomper gravity pull, could be used to make a wall of astroids while leaving an area, or to disrupt enemy ships
- Deploy flares - adds 2 flares to ships inventory
- Sensor Buoy - Deploys a drone which provides vision of an area for 3 minutes (use it on the kerm!), is hard to notice but destructible like mines are

Also, and this is kind of maybe too difficult or unnecessary an idea, but wouldn't it be cool if science console could manually order AI drones what to mine (change their current targets or order them to return home)?

Heres some economic ones.....

- Allows miners to mine 2 things at once for 30...or 60 seconds
- Allows chompers to gain double the resources they chomp per astroid for 20 seconds
- gives chompers to consume 50 resources from astroids in an AoE once per buff
- Allow miners to vent different colors from the ore they currently have
- Allow miner scans to last much longer
- Allows chompers to chomp while moving for 60s, (chompers may not chomp ships while moving)
- increases miner mining speed by 6x when they use accelerated mining speed (up from the normal 3x)

Id suggest moving the tractor beam over to the science console..

It would also be nice if the power transfer could store "charges" - similar to how the repair kits work, i.e. you gain a charge every X seconds, up to a max of Y charges (can be upgradable)

perhaps some sort of targeted scan ability (think like orbital scan from ladder) that can target an arbitrary point on the map and detect ships/minerals (perhaps even mineral type)

If we're making the science abilities homing and long range, I might just make the power transfers work the same way...

Ya but the power transfers are really strong once upgraded compared to the science abilities which should just be augments for a short duration

Dreadnought wrote:Ya but the power transfers are really strong once upgraded

to be fair, they are an expensive upgrade, and the amount of time they are wasted (docking ships, AI miners, etc.) does limit their usefulness.