Sentry Battery Ammo Dispenser
Blasphemy
Join Date: 2008-05-02 Member: 64201Members, NS2 Playtester, Subnautica Playtester
Join Date: 2008-05-02 Member: 64201Members, NS2 Playtester, Subnautica Playtester
<div class="IPBDescription">Or SBAD</div>Figured this idea should be in the Ideas and Suggestions section.
As a preface, I would suggest the Sentry have weak health values so they go down in a few bites. Damage values adjusted to wound players enough for a Marine to kill, but to also be able to kill aliens who ignore the sentry entirely. Much like how TF2 handles Mini-Sentries.
The idea is as such:
<ul><li>Sentry shoots a certain amount of ammo. Has small to moderate ammo storage.</li><li>When Sentry runs out, it must be resupplied to fire again.</li><li>Sentry Batteries would automatically generate ammo and can resupply nearby Sentries.</li><li>Sentries would be fairly cheap to purchase, Batteries would be more expensive.</li><li>Sentries cost ~5 and Batteries cost ~15-20. (Remember that Sentries are useless if they don't have rounds to fire.)</li></ul>
So the idea would be that Sentries would be a fairly cheap fire support. You would buy one for fairly cheap, and they will build quick, shoot okay and then run out of ammo. There would be enough ammo for a Sentry to shoot ~4 seconds, but then it would need more. With this in mind, you could place aggressive sentries on forward positions as a fast attacking strategy, while not being very sustainable long term. (Remember back to Aliens with the two sentries and the ammo counter.)
When a Commander drops the res to place a Battery, then the Sentries would fulfill a defensive support role. It would be a sustainable defense, but not for prolonged engagements. If an alien were to keep jumping around and making the Sentry spill all its bullets, it would eventually draw more rounds than the Battery could resupply, and would again run out.
If one wanted, we could also merge this with the "Marine Personal Sentry" idea where the Marine could buy a Sentry with his own money. It could be tuned so that you can pack up the Sentry when you want to move it, and possibly even make it so you can slowly resupply the Sentry's ammo with the Builder tool if the Commander doesn't want to drop a Battery in that area.
I believe this would be an appropriate dynamic to add to the game to make it so Sentries have the role they were desired to be, without being an immediate attraction to turtling.
As a preface, I would suggest the Sentry have weak health values so they go down in a few bites. Damage values adjusted to wound players enough for a Marine to kill, but to also be able to kill aliens who ignore the sentry entirely. Much like how TF2 handles Mini-Sentries.
The idea is as such:
<ul><li>Sentry shoots a certain amount of ammo. Has small to moderate ammo storage.</li><li>When Sentry runs out, it must be resupplied to fire again.</li><li>Sentry Batteries would automatically generate ammo and can resupply nearby Sentries.</li><li>Sentries would be fairly cheap to purchase, Batteries would be more expensive.</li><li>Sentries cost ~5 and Batteries cost ~15-20. (Remember that Sentries are useless if they don't have rounds to fire.)</li></ul>
So the idea would be that Sentries would be a fairly cheap fire support. You would buy one for fairly cheap, and they will build quick, shoot okay and then run out of ammo. There would be enough ammo for a Sentry to shoot ~4 seconds, but then it would need more. With this in mind, you could place aggressive sentries on forward positions as a fast attacking strategy, while not being very sustainable long term. (Remember back to Aliens with the two sentries and the ammo counter.)
When a Commander drops the res to place a Battery, then the Sentries would fulfill a defensive support role. It would be a sustainable defense, but not for prolonged engagements. If an alien were to keep jumping around and making the Sentry spill all its bullets, it would eventually draw more rounds than the Battery could resupply, and would again run out.
If one wanted, we could also merge this with the "Marine Personal Sentry" idea where the Marine could buy a Sentry with his own money. It could be tuned so that you can pack up the Sentry when you want to move it, and possibly even make it so you can slowly resupply the Sentry's ammo with the Builder tool if the Commander doesn't want to drop a Battery in that area.
I believe this would be an appropriate dynamic to add to the game to make it so Sentries have the role they were desired to be, without being an immediate attraction to turtling.
Comments
One thing to mention about this ammo system is that I believe it could be very compatible with the "Personal Sentries" idea if we were to go down that path. Personal sentries that Marines would bring to the battlefield would be good in a reinforcement state of mind. It would provide a lot of volume and personality to a rather static entity, as well as to flesh out a "Mechanic" kind of role for the Marine to play. Remember that people already buy welders in order to keep Exosuits alive. This gives them an early game role.
Say for example a Marine finds a secondary hive getting built and wants to engage, but can't on his own. Also imagine there was a second marine coming down to meet up with the first (maybe they were friends in a pub game). That second marine could have a welder and a Sentry slung around his back that he brings and deploys when he arrives. Obviously those two marines should not just be able to kill the hive outright, but they will be a very dangerous priority to the aliens that could have possibly been overlooked by sending one or two skulks.
Another example is on a front that getting pushed back from alien aggression. The Marine could deploy his personally bought sentry and deal a lot more damage than if he were on his own. Permitting this Marine would survive these frequent engagements, here is a tree of possibilities of what I believe could be very possible in a match.
1) The Sentry runs out of ammo.
<ul><li> The Marine could be able to slowly resupply the Sentry's ammo reserves with the builder tool.</li><li> Sentry would be in a disabled state while this is happening.</li><li> The Marine would need to be protected in the meantime by other teammates as he cannot defend himself.</li></ul>
2) The Sentry is nearly destroyed.
<ul><li> The Marine would have to repair it. Situation would be the same as if he were resupplying.</li><li> Chances are the marine would have purchased a welder to use in conjunction with the Sentry to keep his investment working.</li></ul>
3) The Sentry is critical: Out of ammo and nearly destroyed.
<ul><li> The outcome of this is very dire.</li><li> The Marine has only a handful of options: Pack up and retreat to safer ground, or try to keep defending a losing battle.</li></ul>
3a)Retreat
<ul><li>Marine packs up the sentry and makes an attempt to get to safer ground.</li><li>Carrying a sentry would most likely slow the Marine down. He would probably move faster with an empty sentry than a fully loaded and repaired one.</li><li> The Marine is the most vulnerable at this point in time.</li><li> Without friendly support, the Marine would most certainly perish.</li></ul>
3b)Defend the losing battle.
<ul><li> Maybe there is no chance of retreat. The Marine is forced to keep himself alive through whatever means until reinforcements can arrive.</li><li> The commander can drop health and ammo as he does usually, possibly enough for the marine to keep those Aliens back.</li><li> Chances are the marine will die.</li></ul>
4)The Commander drops a Dispenser (SBAD) next to the Sentry.
<ul><li>The Marine constructs the Dispenser.</li><li> The Sentry now can shoot much for a much longer period.</li><li> The position will now be much easier to hold.</li><li> The Marine may have to keep manually resupplying the Sentry if the Dispenser can't keep up.</li></ul>
I don't think carrying the sentry should slow a marine down. That seems like trying too hard to make the game "realistic" where just keeping it fun will do. Besides, you see how compact TSA's structures are in general; a sentry being one of the smallest structures could likely be carried by a marine with little encumbrance.
I also don't think that sentries should require manual ammo reloading. Most marines probably aren't going to want to spend the time/effort to manually reload sentries constantly when they could be doing other things and I think they would find it slightly annoying to have to contantly be checking sentry ammo. Likewise, the commander isn't going to have sentry batteries high on his priority list is he's on a tight res budget.
The real balance comes in the defensive and offensive capabilities of the sentry itself. Should one skulk be able to take down a sentry, one on one? Absolutely not. It would take at least two I would think, and the sentry should be fairly weak to damage while at the same time packing a pretty good punch. Enough to kill a lone skulk on it's own, because if it can't even do that then it's not worth the resources.
Sentry farming and turtling are obviously issues that UWE wants to avoid. The easy solution to this is to create a radius (similar to the overlap radius of Cysts) in which two sentries cannot be placed. Roughly the closest distance they could be placed to each other would only allow two of them to shoot at a single target if it was right in between them, to avoid any overwhelming damage stacking.
Finally there needs to be a scaling element for sentries. Since these sentries as I have described them would not stand a chance against anything more than 1.5 skulks, it's going to need an upgrade for mid and endgame opposition. When the sentries first become available (I would say at a cost of 15 P.res after being researched by the commander) they will be a substantial deterrent for early game skulks, which are slow and unprotected. Later the skulks will acquire leap and be able to close in and have less trouble taking it down. But when the Fades and Onos start coming around, this weak sentry will do nothing. That's why the commander will simply have the option to upgrade sentries individually, making them significantly more powerful. The upgrade will take time and render the sentry inactive during that time. How much the sentry would be improved is debatable, but it should be enough at least for fades and lerks to have to worry about it. Onos should always be able to laugh off all but the most brutal of onslaughts. Also, to avoid having an upgraded sentry too early, that should be an additional tech that must be researched in the arms lab.
Another route for scaling is for L1-3 Weapons and Armor to also improve those respectively on the sentries.
If UWE wants sentries to be offensive, I can definitely see these personal sentries being used to try to block the exit to a hive early if the aliens allow it to be set up and don't work together to eliminate that particular threat.
The res budget thing is exactly why I believe the ammo system and SBADs would work. I think it should be a hard decision on whether the commander would invest in sentries or shotguns on a tight res budget. After all, decisions are the actors of strategy.
Sentry effectiveness in my opinion should be relevant to the positioning of the sentry. While the damage values would obviously have to correspond, I believe that a well placed sentry should definitely be more effective than a poorly placed one. Ex: Placing one looking down a long corridor vs. a closed tight corner. I have no problems with a sentry being able to kill a skulk, and I particularly agree that two skulks or a skulk with leap should be a danger to a sentry too. But placement should be a load of difference. But it will probably be fairly difficult to strike a balance of too much or too little maintenance on a sentry, which is probably something that will have to be iterated upon over multiple builds.
I don't mind a radius zone influencing sentry placement, but I believe it should be something the player should determine, rather than a game hard rule. Influential factors would be a bile bomb or Onos stomp being something the player would consider before placing a Sentry alongside another.
A scaling element for sentries is a very interesting concept. Having sentries scale relative to Weapons and Armor level does sound like something that would work ingame. I fear it would make sentries less effective early game, but making them effective late game is fairly debatable. Are they too strong against the weaker lifeforms? Are they too weak against the Fade/Onos? This sounds like something we would have to test to find out the answers rather than pure speculation.
I'll post the video of the mockup here too.
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Here is the video description:
<!--QuoteBegin-"Youtube Video Description"+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE ("Youtube Video Description")</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Messing around with the Spark Cinematic Editor. There is quite a bit of missing functionality in comparison to programs such as Source Filmmaker, but it serves its purpose fairly well.
The idea behind this video is to visually represent the alternative idea of Sentries, where Marines would purchase and deploy them instead of the Commander. The idea was originally intended to serve as a way to deal with turtling.
While I believe this idea is flawed in concept for that particular reasoning, I do believe this would be an attractive alternative to purchasing a better weapon such as a shotgun or flamethrower. It would also give a "mechanic" style of play more of a role in the early stages of a game if the Marine were to purchase a welder in conjunction.
Another idea I believe would work with this would be a return to the ammo system. Methods of re-arming a sentry would involve either manually installing more with the build tool, or having a commander drop an SBAD (Sentry Battery Ammo Dispenser) to resupply automatically. The SBAD would be fairly pricey in comparison to the price of a Sentry, and would therefore be the controlling factor in marine defensive capability.
Considering how the Sentry would be fairly useless once its ammunition is spent, I believe the SBAD idea combined with the Personal Sentry idea to help with the longstanding problem of marine hardshelled defense, without damaging Sentry effectiveness or role.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
With regards to Sentry reloading, rather than manual reloading/battery placement what if Sentries just slowly regened ammo over time? SO a Sentry can store, say, 60 seconds of continuous firing. Whenever the sentry is not at capacity it regens one second's worth of ammo every 15 seconds or so (numbers for illustrative purposes only). No reloading or what have you required, it's just an innate aspect of powered Sentries.
So Sentries remain useful for defending against individual aliens, or against infrequent medium-scale attacks, but if the Aliens maintain a steady, continuous assault on an entrenched position then eventually there just won't be any bullets left. This would allow the base effectiveness of turrets (rotational range, accuracy, DPS etc) to be increased to an effective level without running into the impenetrable turtle endgame scenario.
Say each Sentry draws from a Battery's energy pool, 1 energy per bullet with 100 max energy (numbers can always be tweaked). A single Sentry can fire for a long while, but as you place more Sentries around a single Battery, energy can quickly run dry at high traffic locations. There comes to a point where an ideal number of Sentries per Battery can be determined, based on how quickly energy can regen + Sentries drain ammo.
Great idea!
EX: 6 sentries in a base with ammo generated by 1-2 batteries vs. 6 sentries on their own.
They will function the same until they run out of ammo, but the first set will take a lot longer to get all the sentries back up in standing order in comparison to the second set. This I believe to be necessary in order to make the choice of using a lot of sentries less appealing, therefore making it so it is possible you won't see as many sentries in a match.
@PsiWarp + Gravity Grave: That is definitely the idea with the batteries. It doesn't sound too foreign through code actually now that you guys mention it. Just take some ammo code from a rifle, and some code from the armory and stick them together with the sentry. Obviously it would involve a lot more coding magic, but the basics are there.
Sentries should return to their original purpose - base defense, or supplemental defense for a forward position. Skulks and lerks (especially lerks) will now think twice before running in, but fades and onos can pretty much bypass or ignore them. Get a gorge with bile bomb and a sentry farm will be taken out with three bombs.
As I've already mentioned, I strongly support the idea of personally purchased, carried, and deployed sentries. But I don't believe adding any additional mechanics(ammo that must be replenished, and a governing structure) to sentries makes the game any more fun to play. It also isn't necessary to prevent sentries from being unbalanced. The balance can be achieved through changing simple numeric values like fire rate/range, damage, health, etc. The devs should ultimately be striving to make this game as fun as possible and expand the fanbase. What is more satisfying than as a marine, buying a sentry from the armoy, placing it just outside your base, and then going off and building an extractor in a different part of the map and suddenly seeing a kill being awarded to you from the sentry taking down an unsuspecting skulk. On the flip side of that, I've noticed that the marines will leave the majority of their power nodes/extractors completely unprotected (in public games at least), leaving skulks free to take them out with the only potential resistance coming from a marine that happens to be passing through, which makes the gain/loss of several locations on the maps a dull ordeal.
1. Marines Build Node/Extractor, leave
2. Skulk or two runs in, destroys node/extractor, leaves
3. Marines pass through, take out harvester/cysts if there, rebuild node/extractor, leave again
4. Repeat
Of course that only applies to areas that the marines aren't focusing their offensive on.
But, with the personal sentries, marines can definitely feel like they are contributing to the team by protecting certain areas, whether it's where the team is focusing their efforts or if it's a lone extractor that the team can't afford to spare any bodies to defend. Likewise, an alien can gain a similar sense of accomplishment by being the one to take out sentry defenses, allowing the team to move through the room and clear it of marine structures. I agree that the placement of the sentries is a big factor in their effectiveness and I think that is something that would play more heavily in competitive play, as opposed to pubs where simply being present would be a deterrent to less experienced players.
I'm sorry...I got carried away as I was thinking more about this, and kind of went on a tangent from my original question, but I feel like these points are worth consideration/discussion. The bottom line is: Make sentries tactical, and simple to use. Then, for more advanced players who have a greater understanding of the overall strategy involved in this game, the placement of sentries can be placed with strategic goals in mind that will give the marines the best advantage in the scope of the entire round.
The idea is intended so massive amounts of sentries are still possible, but they will only work in the initial stages of the battle. After a short while, they will shut down until someone can re-arm them, which is probably not going to happen as frequently if the aliens are in the final stages of pushing the base. This is also so lerks and fades could blink around and possibly waste most of the sentry's ammo before easier to hit and possibly easy to kill targets such as the Onos or Gorge come into play.
EX: 6 sentries in a base with ammo generated by 1-2 batteries vs. 6 sentries on their own.
They will function the same until they run out of ammo, but the first set will take a lot longer to get all the sentries back up in standing order in comparison to the second set. This I believe to be necessary in order to make the choice of using a lot of sentries less appealing, therefore making it so it is possible you won't see as many sentries in a match.
@PsiWarp + Gravity Grave: That is definitely the idea with the batteries. It doesn't sound too foreign through code actually now that you guys mention it. Just take some ammo code from a rifle, and some code from the armory and stick them together with the sentry. Obviously it would involve a lot more coding magic, but the basics are there.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->I agree that some kind of spam-limiter would be good, and it being a reduction in regen rate based on the number of sentries present rather than a hard limit is also good, but I'm not sure if batteries are the answer. If multiple batteries in an area stack then all you're really doing is increasing the cost of a sentry by a batteriesworth of tres. If they don't it's a bit counterintuitive.
Instead, what if it was based off nodes? Regen rate is based off the number of sentries running off the same node. Batteries can then become emergency reloaders, having a set quantity of ammo per battery which will either speed up the powered sentries in an area until it runs out or power a sentry in an unpowered area for a short quantity of time.
But, Blasphemy, I just reread part of your response to my first reply in this thread about players determining the radius and the advantages/drawbacks to having multiple sentries.
So what if the sentries were based on their own power-usage system? When there is only one sentry, it can draw maximum power from the power grid and do full damage, fire at full speed, etc. Put down a second sentry, and the effectiveness drops down to about 60% maybe. Add a third sentry and the effectiveness of each drops to 30-40%.
With that scaling you can have the advantage of a single, powerful sentry without spending a lot of res. Adding more sentries will only be increasing the overall damage by 10-20% of so rather than 100-200%. This not-overpowered increase in effectiveness, plus turning one target into several makes the additional resources spent potentially worth it, depending on the situation.
The last issue that comes to mind is if a sentry goes down among several, would the other sentries immediately increase in power? The best answer for that is no, and that as long as those sentries continue to fire, they will not gain the power from the sentry that just went down until they have a chance to "rest."
The short version is that burst damage is easier to balance. If you can output enough damage to kill one skulk in 12 seconds without stopping it's hard to work out how actually "useful" that is. If there's a continuous wave of skulks coming by every few seconds it's way more useful than if skulks are coming by every five minutes. So what do you price a turret around, tres-wise? Do you price it for something that kills 5 skulks a minute or one skulk every five minutes? High-variability of usefulness is absolute murder to balance for.
And it's not just the variability that's a turret problem, it's also what the variability favours. Since more aliens = more useful, Turrets are always going to be the most useful in a Turtle situation, because a continuous alien assault is going to be the one with the highest number of targets. If you've priced Turrets for Turtle-level usefulness then Turrets are only useful for Turtling. Placing them when not in a Turtle situation saps Tres from useful areas, increasing your chances of losing ground and ending up in a Turtle scenario to begin with. If you price Turrets for non-Turtle use then they become brokenly good for Turtling, meaning if Marines are losing then a Turtle scenario is pretty inevitable.
Moving on, there's the issue of a balancing how long should it take a Turret to kill a Skulk in the first place. 15 seconds? 30? 5? If it takes too long then Turrets are just point-farms, since your skulk can just stroll up and chow down at his leisure. If you up the damage to decrease the time-to-kill then you're not just killing each skulk faster, you're increasing the total number of skulks-per-minute in a rush situation dramatically.
Now let's look at Burst damage (numbers for demonstration purposes only). Keeping it at one skulk for 12 seconds of fire, but with a max fire time of 60 seconds and a five minute load time (either because of an automatic reloader or because that's about how long it will take a Marine to get there with an ammo pouch or whatever) to fully reload. The amount of variability has gone down dramatically (while still having enough present that a good commander will get more out of his turrets than a bad, obviously). A turret is now operating at peak capacity as long as it gets at least five skulks every five minutes, whether they show up one every minute or a group of five all at once or one followed by three followed by another one. This makes it much, much easier to price a Turrets usefulness in the hands of a competent commander.
Since the skulks-per-minute of a turret is limited by the reload time rather than the number of Aliens present the exponentially-more-useful-in-turtles problem mentioned above just... goes away. Ammunition on it's own doesn't quite cover the "more turrets = better" scenario, but certain implementations might, and it solves plenty of other problems on it's own!
Finally, and possibly most importantly, the amount of Dev control over Turret effectiveness has increased dramatically. As it stands the Devs basically have a sliding bar labelled "DPS" to play with, which is not enough variables to attempt meaningful balance with. Ammunition adds two further bars, "Maximum Capacity" and "Cost to Reload"("Cost" can refer to "time" or "pres" or "tres" or even intangibles like "player attention"). By moving these bars in relation to each other it becomes possible to manipulate Turrets into something actually usable. The easiest example of this is the time-to-kill problem listed above; with ammunition included this becomes trivial. Just increase the damage while proportionally reducing the ammo capacity, leaving the Cost to Reload alone. This leaves the skulks-per-minute almost untouched while drastically increasing how quickly individual Skulks falls down faster. Skulks falling down too fast, tweak them the other way. Compare to how it works at present; it's not just harder to tweak time-to-kill with little follow-on consequences, it's actually impossible.
I had a few other things that ammunition makes easier but I'm already getting a bit tl;dr. Please note that here I'm discussing the general concept of ammunition not any specific example listed so far (which is why I used "Cost to Reload" rather than "Time to Reload"). I have personal preferences but the above applies to most possible implementations. Ammunition is also, as was said in the OP, not incompatible with the "personal sentry" idea. e: though you're right in that the proposed implementation in the second post is mad fiddly.
<!--quoteo(post=1983465:date=Sep 26 2012, 03:54 PM:name=Blasphemy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Blasphemy @ Sep 26 2012, 03:54 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1983465"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Nodes are too basic. I was discussing this in the other thread and the location volume to a particular room would have to scale the number of sentries dynamically for it to work. Otherwise one node could cover a small room while another node could be for an absolutely mammoth sized room. This dynamic scaling would be fairly difficult to determine as well, especially when the larger a room gets, the probability of complexity increases.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That's a fair point. Can't really argue with it. My preference would be for Sentries to have a certain amount of slow, automatic ammo regeneration which Marines can increase through expending effort in dire situations.
Or possibly a more simple explanation which is more in line of your idea is of the floor power grid effect showing strongly for one sentry, and the more sentries are nearby, the weaker the effect is. Maybe some little LED lights sometimes powering down or flickering the less power the individual sentry gets.
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Of course, the SBAD ammo idea will probably have to address these same concerns, but it will probably have an easier time doing so. Maybe it could show an ammo counter hovering over the sentry when a marine looks at it. "235 Bullets" or something like that. Individually this is a fairly accurate indicator. But what if there is a volume of sentries nearby? Now you would either have to look at each sentry individually, show the ammo of all nearby sentries close to the one you look at, or just have all sentry ammo counters permanently visible. Obviously the more ammo counters you can see at a time, the easier to determine which sentries need ammo, but the more cluttered your HUD will become.
This may have problems with the new client side damage indicator that was introduced in build 220. Now it would be very easy to confuse ammo remaining in the sentry, with the damage you do, and the ammo you have left in your own gun. So how about a progress bar? This removes the need of knowing individual bullets and performing bullet calculations, so they could be set to use a purely percentage based calculation model.
A third approach (and my favorite of the bunch) would be to avoid the HUD description approach entirely and use a model based method in which now the Aliens could determine how much ammo is left in a sentry. If you notice on the front of the sentry just above the revolving barrel, there is a little blue light. What if it was possible to change colors depending on how much ammo is remaining. Make it so Blue is 60% and above, Yellow is between 20% and 60%, while Red is 20% and below. The commander could still get the exact ammo statistics when he has a sentry selected, but everyone else just has a rough color indicator.
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@Splicer: I have to say, that is very well written post. It brings up an excellent point which I had not fully considered, which is also coincidentally something which would probably really appeal to Charlie. The sliding bar part is definitely a persuasive reasoning for the idea. Although the extra variables could be considered over complicating the solution, it does provide us more places to tune the quality and function of the sentry with much greater control. I am curious as to what else you were mentioning that ammunition makes easier.
What type of methodology do you suggest with individual sentry ammo regeneration being increased through expending effort? Is this an upgrade you would research through a structure such as the robotics facility or arms lab? Although the jump isn't too large from the current state of sentries using batteries to my suggested SBAD idea, individual sentry regen without batteries does simplify things and would make it easier for a player to understand, or possibly even not even need to bother to understand as this would be all commander-side.
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Just to return to the new idea I pulled out: Sentry front light should change color according to how much ammunition is left. Make it so Blue is 60% and above, Yellow is between 20% and 60%, while Red is 20% and below. When the sentry runs out it will just disable as if it were to lose power, still using the red light. This method allows both the aliens and marines to see how much ammo a sentry has from a distance, without having to study it for an extended period of time.
Adding onto that idea further, if a marine were to manually reload, it would be as such.
<ul><li> If the sentry was completely depleted, it would be "shut-off" the Marine would have to restore it fully to 100% before it would turn on again.</li><li> If the sentry had some ammo left, the marine could restore it to wherever he sees fit, but the sentry will not fire, nor scan for targets during the resupply process.</li></ul>
At the moment I'm staying away from specifics and just pushing to sell the general idea of sentry ammo to the devs and the community, except to say that manual reloading as the primary method of reloading sentries would lose a lot of the listed benefits. If I was implementing these things myself (which I am obviously not) I'd set turrets to:
Sentries can store X 1 second bursts (or 2X 0.5 second bursts or whatever)
Sentries regen one burst every Y seconds.
as this is the limited ammo/ammo regen in it's most basic form. Then I'd run that for a patch or two and then look at maybe adding additional base mechanics (Scaling regen based on number of turrets present? Supplementary manual reloading? Personal turrets?). The best way to kill an idea is to try to stick everything on at once, as the more things you add the more likely someone is to find something they want to dump all over.
e: I'm not saying any of these ideas are bad, just that if personal turrets, damage scaling, and ammo regeneration all in one suggestion then anyone who doesn't like any one of these components, or even just your implementation of one of them, is going to come in and dislike your idea. If you limit the bells and whistles then only posters who dislike the core idea will try to bury it.
That said:
<!--quoteo(post=1984090:date=Sep 27 2012, 11:49 PM:name=Blasphemy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Blasphemy @ Sep 27 2012, 11:49 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1984090"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Just to return to the new idea I pulled out: Sentry front light should change color according to how much ammunition is left. Make it so Blue is 60% and above, Yellow is between 20% and 60%, while Red is 20% and below. When the sentry runs out it will just disable as if it were to lose power, still using the red light. This method allows both the aliens and marines to see how much ammo a sentry has from a distance, without having to study it for an extended period of time.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> seems to be an uncontroversial and very flavoursome addition.
e2: The no re-firing until full thing I'm not such a fan of (See what I mean? ;) )
Fixed just for you Splicer.
Unless that was deliberate in order to bury an idea you don't like in which case good job! (this is a joke).
Despite that, I hope that the thread was noticed by someone and that something fairly close to what has been discussed here can be implemented in future builds.
But yeah, given that the general discussion thread was locked because further pre-1.0 sentry changes are out I hope someone developy came away with "Maybe this ammunition idea might be worth looking at later".