Victory conditions
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The Lighter Side of Pessimism Join Date: 2002-03-02 Member: 263Members, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
The Lighter Side of Pessimism Join Date: 2002-03-02 Member: 263Members, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
This is prompted by a point raised in this thread: Improving gunplay and late-game
What other victory conditions could NS2 have?
One idea I've had is to track tres flow, and then use the time spent with a better res flow to determine the winner. e.g. your team wins after they've either maintained a 2:1 lead in res flow for 5 minutes. This would be similar to how in Age of Empires 2 you can win by building a Wonder and then defending it for 500 years.
The game is won when your economy outperforms the other sufficiently, but the victory depends on total destruction of the enemy team which can take far too long.
What other victory conditions could NS2 have?
One idea I've had is to track tres flow, and then use the time spent with a better res flow to determine the winner. e.g. your team wins after they've either maintained a 2:1 lead in res flow for 5 minutes. This would be similar to how in Age of Empires 2 you can win by building a Wonder and then defending it for 500 years.
Comments
Alien wonder:
Organic Statue of Gorge The Builder
Marine wonder:
TSA Galactic Triumph
Each would cost 100 Tres, and would require 5x times the build time of CC/Hive.
Going by the lore of the game the aliens must be wiped out 100% because they are an parasite race and cannot co exist with humanity. In a respawn type of game where you must destroy an enemy base, I dont think there is any other way to complete the objective other than to spawn kill them.
Easy: Add a secondary win condition for marines. Give them some expensive (>100 res structure) that features a time expensive upgrade (>3 min) which, if completed, casts EXTERMINATUS on the map and ends the game.
Similarly, aliens at biomass 12 could go into overdrive mode, buffing cyst health to 2000, increasing their infestation spread and maturity rate tenfold, and making infestation damage deal the same damage as bilebomb. That way, the unholy biomass can just grow over marine base and end the game.
These ideas are flawed and not balanced. But you get the spirit of it. Personally I'm in favor of the first approach: Provide some tangible thing that lets the enemy team know shit's going down and that gives them an objective to take down/focus on. Ideally make it so a timer appears on their screen telling them how much time they have left, or make it create a beacon like noise or something - just communicate that they need to get their shit together now or the game ends.
Although I guess thematically, something like the second approach fits better.
I'll give it some more thought and write a better response when I'm not just rambling along
I don't think this additional win condition is meant to be the "game-ender", but instead more of a last resort. It can be something you work towards, and the stealing of points mechanic gives a losing team a comeback mechanic that flows nicely into existing strategies.
The number of points needed for victory could easily be made map-specific. Veil might need this to be 400 points, for example.
Time limit on matches? I dont necessarily like that since some of my favorite matches lasted 3 hours +. But maybe after 40 or 60 minutes whoever has the most structure points + CC's taken wins.
If you want to try a time limit, consider trying siege.
I know a lot of people like long games, but not everyone likes long games, or has the time to play long games. I used to like long games myself.
It would fracture the community a bit, but I don't think that is always a bad thing, but I hope NS3 has different game modes by design. Classic NS like gamemode, a combat like gamemode, siege like gamemode and more included in the base game.