Ammo Crate & Medical Crate - Team based commander supply drops
IeptBarakat
The most difficult name to speak ingame. Join Date: 2009-07-10 Member: 68107Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
The most difficult name to speak ingame. Join Date: 2009-07-10 Member: 68107Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
In an interest to cut down costs on the ever growing battlefield, TSF researchers have developed new support options for Commanders of any large scale assault. Introducing..
Ammo & Medical crates, these crates function relatively similar to your tried and true regular ammo or med packs but on a much larger scale.
The Ammo & Medical crates are designed and packed tight enough to supply your entire team before needing to phase back, and before you get any funny ideas soldier, the crates are equipped with an ID locking mechanism to prevent people from hoarding it all for themselves. Each Marine gets to use it once.
So you're probably wondering how much this thing is going to cost? Well good news soldier, these crates only cost 5 T.Res each. At the same price as 5 ammo packs or 5 med packs, you can drop a crate that can supply your entire team for small scale spec op missions and large scale assaults.
Flavor text aside, ammo and medpacks don't scale at all with playercount. With the intention of keeping the ammo/med packs functioning the same as opposed to going a different route like an area heal effect which would make using it on a single marine more costly, I decided that just adding a whole new set of items to support larger playercounts would help solve the issue. As the packs are currently, if you tried giving your team of 5 marines one medpack each it would cost 5.Tres, once you start doubling or even tripling the size of the marine team the cost to support your team doubles or triples as well. So while the crates might not have much use in your standard 6v6 or 8v8, 10v10 or 12v12 and beyond will see a significant cost savings to reduce the strain of higher playercounts on the marine economy as the crates will always cost as much as it would be to buy a team of 5 marines one pack each. If the costs are still too high, I recommend moving the crates down to 4 team resources.
This was proposed in mind to alleviate the cost of supporting higher playercounts while keeping the strategies of low playercounts relatively unchanged, which in theory should help bring larger games closer to smaller games in terms of strategy and commander support.
Thank you for reading, feel free to critique or otherwise tear it apart
.
Ammo & Medical crates, these crates function relatively similar to your tried and true regular ammo or med packs but on a much larger scale.
The Ammo & Medical crates are designed and packed tight enough to supply your entire team before needing to phase back, and before you get any funny ideas soldier, the crates are equipped with an ID locking mechanism to prevent people from hoarding it all for themselves. Each Marine gets to use it once.
So you're probably wondering how much this thing is going to cost? Well good news soldier, these crates only cost 5 T.Res each. At the same price as 5 ammo packs or 5 med packs, you can drop a crate that can supply your entire team for small scale spec op missions and large scale assaults.
Flavor text aside, ammo and medpacks don't scale at all with playercount. With the intention of keeping the ammo/med packs functioning the same as opposed to going a different route like an area heal effect which would make using it on a single marine more costly, I decided that just adding a whole new set of items to support larger playercounts would help solve the issue. As the packs are currently, if you tried giving your team of 5 marines one medpack each it would cost 5.Tres, once you start doubling or even tripling the size of the marine team the cost to support your team doubles or triples as well. So while the crates might not have much use in your standard 6v6 or 8v8, 10v10 or 12v12 and beyond will see a significant cost savings to reduce the strain of higher playercounts on the marine economy as the crates will always cost as much as it would be to buy a team of 5 marines one pack each. If the costs are still too high, I recommend moving the crates down to 4 team resources.
This was proposed in mind to alleviate the cost of supporting higher playercounts while keeping the strategies of low playercounts relatively unchanged, which in theory should help bring larger games closer to smaller games in terms of strategy and commander support.
Thank you for reading, feel free to critique or otherwise tear it apart
.
Comments
This way it wouldn't be reduntant to the armory, and it would be a choise a player makes to make pushes more effective. It would also be a nice pres sink.
I'm not sure if the same mechanic should be applied to medpacks however. At least not with the same timings.
Can you give some examples to how the aliens would be at a disadvantage? They are already advantaged because alien healing scales pretty well in comparison to marines.
Plus a downside you might not have considered is these crates don't have as direct of an effect as individual pack support does due to with the nature of crates you just drop one in the general vicinity and have all the marines walk to it, which would cut down on the 'hand of god' effect.
While I was thinking about the possibility of something like that, my suggestion is more for getting commanders of larger games to provide support again. In regards to being redundant to an armory, crates would have the benefit of being dropped in combat zones which would cut down on the need for having an armory in every corner of the map. Keep in mind that although multiple marines can use them, they still have the functionality of a single ammo pack or medpack and are purely meant for use in higher playercount servers.
However, If you want this to implemented into vanilla, you have to make it so, that it makes sense for the other player count servers as well. You can't just write "this makes sense on larger player slot servers" into the supply crate tooltip, if you know what I mean.
It would just be a huge ammo pack, or an amory that doesn't need power. Neither really makes sense on lower slot count servers.
Another thing is that you actually want this hand of god effect in a push. If you are inside the hive room trying to kill it, you shouldn't need to search the supply crate and run to it in order to get ammo. You need to focus on shooting, otherwise everything clusters around those kits and gets killed.
However, if you make it a player investment, you could make it stronger than the usual armory, without rendering neither ammo packs, nor armories useless. It could work inbetween.
Outside of ns2large it would make sense to buy one, if:
1) you are really low res towers and still want to make a push (good for come backs)
2) you can't trust you commander to support you
There isn't anyone saying you couldn't use them in smaller games, it would just serve and cost the same as 5 individual commander drops stacked on top of each other that each marine can only use once.
The hand of god effect is really nice for marine pushes of course, but it's also been one of the largest issues brought up with new player confusion in regards to invincible marines and whatnot, so the crates having a clear downside with a reduced hand of god effect would help mitigate some of that frustration.
My issue with making them player deployable is that it doesn't do anything to fix the lack of commander support on higher count servers, and that your suggestion sounds more like a portable armory than mine does. On top of that, it would further punish players who wanted to save up for anything else if they had a commander that either wouldn't or couldn't provide support.
No, it isn't. You can't just build the power node & armory when you're pushing a hive. It is not the same as dropping 4 packs of ammo right onto your marines.
But then again, you're playing ns2large fine on hardware from 2001, so anything might be possible.