Random SuperWeapon/MegaVehicle Ideas

[GuvNuh]

I'm a big fan of the Big Kill, and I thought i'd start a thread to get y'all's thoughts on it. I l ike the general idea of superweapons and megavehicles-thermobaric bombs and capcom-style super tanks. More importantly, i like the prospect of blowing them up.

So, no matter how insanely unrealistic, overpowered, or unrelated, or improbable, i'd like to hear some of the superweapons or vehicles you'd like to see in a MMO like planetside. General or detailed, i enjoy it all. Here's a few of mine-

The flying fortress-I loved an old xbox/pc game called crimson skies because it let you control and fight giant zeppelins decked out with over 20 turrets on the larger ones. Imagine something like that ramped up for futuristic sci-fi fighting with a thousand people+ duking it out. some hovering monstrosity that just glides in and opens up with fifty turrets while spawning aircraft(manned) continuously. something like that you'd have to take out a number of it's twenty or so engines to crash it.

The LandKrawler- My basis for this would be the Imperial Guard StormLord Baneblade Tank. If you've never seen a warhammer 40k baneblade, find a pic, pretty badass tank to begin with. Anyways, something half the size of a football(american) field with 4-5 really big guns taking teams to operate, a dozen plus single man turrets, and space on the deck for 20-30 guys to fight ontop of it.

WMD's- i kinda like the idea of being able to torch a square mile of battlefield and everything inside it. I am not against high level outfits being able to call in powerful ordinance. Carpet bombings(could do this through mission hud anyways) Thermobaric Bombs, anything developed on a scorched earth policy is fine with me. Heh, imagine releasing aerosol LSD over a square mile of active fighting. I bet it gets real interesting down there real fast.

Bombardment-There's a crapload of debate on whether or not artillery in game is a good thing. Personally, even if we dont have a specific vehicle, what's wrong with being able to pop smoke and call in an ordinance strike from emplaced weapons at the nearest friendly base? could just have a few missile silos or some built in artillery/mortar implacements that react with random area shelling when troops pop artillery smoke. have the base weapons on a recharge timer that applies to everybody, that way can only call it in every so often, no matter who you are.

Drilling pods-cliche'd, but when 100 people burst from the ground in those transports like from G.I. Joe, right in the middle of yer base? Yeah, that might be fun, especially when the drilling vehicles have turrets.


Who doesn't like Transformers?-How cool would it be to be able to smash a couple prowlers or magriders together to create bigger, better Prowlers and Magriders?

Allright, lets see what you all can come up with.

[Xyntech]

I don't have an idea for a specific vehicle that I would like to share, so much as an idea on how to spawn them and limit their numbers. Once spawned, I think that the vehicles should be powerful, but balanced. Acting more like a mobile tower than anything. They should be capable of great things, but should require being defended like a base or tower does, to prevent the enemy from breaking in and destroying them from the inside, or god forbid taking control of them.

Just because something is hard to get doesn't mean it should be overpowered though. It has to be useful to make it worth the effort, but the game should be designed so that a side without one can still quite reasonably beat a side with one, and the game should be balanced around the possibility of all three sides having a few of them active at the same time.

So with that preamble out of the way, here is my basic idea on limiting their numbers.

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The super vehicle should not require an outfit to be involved in spawning it. An outfit will be useful, as I will elaborate on later, but it should be theoretically possible to spawn one without any outfit involvement at all.

What will happen is that a player will place a small device on a valid spot on the ground (large, relatively flat open area away from any bases or structures, no more than one of these devices placeable every x amount of meters, only can be place on contestable terrain, etc). Once the object is placed, it will form an indestructible force field around itself and begin constructing the super vehicle. The forcefield will start extremely small and grow larger as the constructed vehicle gets larger inside of it. Nobody can go in our out of the forcefield, friendly or enemy.

The only way to stop the construction of the vehicle will be to hack the shield and defend the hack until it goes through and destroys the project. This will create a metagame involving hunting down enemy super vehicles while they are under construction and defending your own super vehicles as they are built, resecuring any hacks that the enemy places.

The way that progress is made on the construction of a super vehicle is through ordinary gameplay. Any time the player who started the project kills an enemy, or heals a team mate, or captures a piece of territory, it will increase the progress of the super vehicle. Idling, or logging out will not help the construction in any way and without assistance, the construction will remain at a stand still.

Now, since sooner or later everyone will be able to make one of these things, it should take a long time to finish them. I mean a LONG time. As in literally WEEKS for a single player to finish the project by themselves.

The key here will be that one player doesn't have to do it all by themselves. While the player who places the device will have highest authority over the control of the vehicle, anybody who wants to can pledge their support to the project and help build it quicker through their own regular gameplay. This pledge would require no resource expenditure. The only cost to a player is that they can only work on one super vehicle at a time, so if they pledge to work on someone elses vehicle, they can't work on their own or any others.

This is where outfits would come in. They won't be required, but it will doubtless be common for an outfit to work together to build a single super vehicle. Even more effective will be when multiple outfits band together on a single project.

Having enough players working on a project will reduce the time it takes to build from months to hours. There should be a diminishing return on the construction speed increase as you get more players, so that a super vehicle can never be completed too obscenely fast, but more players will always equal faster construction times.

Here's a brief mock up of the construction times I envision, although adjustments should obviously be made to maximize balance.

1 players = 1.5 months (never gonna happen, territory changes hands too often)
10 players = 1 week (impractical to defend for that long)
100 players = 1 day (possible for a lot of outfits, but will take a lot or work to defend)
1,000 players = 3 hours (impractical to organize that many players, may happen on rare occasions)
10,000 players = 20 minutes (Will this many players even be on one empire on one server?)

Obviously you would want to have some sort of reward for successfully completing a project you helped on, since only the original person who started it will have full authority over it. Maybe you get some sort of XP boost for as long as the super vehicle stays alive. Maybe you get first dibs controlling it's turrets over someone who wasn't involved in it's construction. Maybe players who worked on it get some perk for spawning into the vehicle.

It's not a perfect idea, but I think it would go a long ways towards effectively limiting their numbers while still making them possible to acquire. The biggest downside would be that a lot of players would never get a chance to control one, but if they have a lot of guns that you can control and are relatively slow moving, this may not be the biggest let down ever. Anyone would still theoretically be able to make one, it would just be difficult to get that many people to help you if you are just some random dude. These super vehicles should be social vehicles that require a lot of people to man them, so requiring a group effort to build goes right along with that. Having hundreds of players who helped build the thing will also hopefully mean that you have hundreds of players who want to defend the thing once it's built, which will be a critical part of keeping them safe from attack and invasion.

Obviously the enemy should be given a fair chance to try and stop construction, so all enemy super vehicle projects should appear on the map. To avoid players spamming a bunch, with only one person working on each to hide the one(s) that have a lot of people working on them, ones with more people working on them and ones that are closer to being finished should appear larger and more obvious on the map. The placement restrictions should also prevent too many being spammed in too small of an area.

Maybe it would work, maybe not, but it's the best I've been able to come up with for spawning a super vehicle. At least one that could affect gameplay. Any of the air cruisers/space ship ideas that don't involve acting as a spawn point or assault platform could be balanced more loosely.

Begin the picking apart! I'm sure there are a lot of angles that I haven't thought of, or that I didn't remember to cover in the post.

[DviddLeff]

When I heard about the Warhammer 40K MMO I had visions of a PS like game and that took me to thinking about dropping a squad of troops onto the roof of a titan and taking it out.

What I would like to see at some point in PS is both ground and air based variants, which are essentially mobile bases.

For the airborne base I see somethign like BF2142s titans to do the job, and I detail my exact ideas here (scroll down until you get to "Outfit Cruisers").

For a ground based one I would like to see a slow mobile base which has to be deployed to work.

Super weapons however I see as being a bit lame; its a simple win button that does not have counters. Anything that can kill should have a realistic counter, something that the comparatively weaker OS broke in the original game.

[GuvNuh]

Like the concepts so far, and i agree with xyntech on the general impracticality of superweapons and titan-class vehicles(think i'll just start using that phrase) and i definetly agree that if they were to be allowed in regular gameplay they should take a god-awful long time to build, simply to control their numbers.

Ideally, and i'm stealing this idea from a thread i did earlier- I think such things would be better put to use as event-specific items. something you can pull out for maybe a week or 2 spread out over an entire year. I know for a fact that when you include something like that in regular game it tends to break gameplay, so i like the idea of only being able to pull them once in a great while, kinda like a pat on the back for being so badass the rest of the time.

I think it would help keep titan class vehicles and superweapons exciting and fun if it was like a holiday when you got to pull them, as i know it would get old fast if you saw these things on a regular basis.

seriously though, i would love to drive and assault a warlord class titan(another 40k ref.) At that point it's like attacking a piece of the planet. It's too damn big to go after with conventional weapons or tactics. The idea of something so monstrously large and powerful that it would take 1,000 soldiers from three factions to kill it....well, that's a fascinating concept to me.