Making the bang bus more popular

[kaffis]

Galaxies might be a little too durable, for starters. In Planetside, they were legitimately able to penetrate enemy lines pretty deeply and pretty reliably. I think I'd shy away from reducing armor, but there needs to be more evenly distributed anti-air, rather than just clusters of threatening anti-air around active engagements.

Making some automated (CE? Base defenses?) AA would work towards removing a Galaxy's carte blanche license to fly around behind enemy lines all it wants, without making a single user with an AA able to rip it apart in a single-pass flyby.

In addition, I think the way to more generally make ground transport useful is to make them the transport of choice for *loading* troops in hot zones. Make Galaxies very vulnerable during landing and take-off, and give people reasons to want to get in a transport in areas other than secure, friendly territory, and you're in business. Right now, the only time you get into a Galaxy (or most any transport) is when you spawn, and when you've cleared and captured a base.

[NapalmEnima]

Heavy duty AA that didn't track very well would do the trick just fine. Not so effective against the zippy-zippy craft, but able to BEAT THE TAR out of Galaxies.

I wouldn't have any problem with an AA gun that could take out two galaxies at full speed before they got over their target.

The options then become:
1) Take it out. Another fun thing for infiltrators to do. Maybe arty, whatever.

2) Bring along enough bodies that you can afford to lose the first two air transports.


Yeah... speaking of arty... make bases choose between the Heavy AA and a nice artillery piece. Not the end-all-be-all, but something capable of bringing a serious hurtin'. One shotting infantry (over a fairly wide area) that were out in the open sounds quite reasonable for a dedicated AP round. Ditto for dedicated AV. If you sit in one spot long enough for the round to actually get to you, and its a round designed to take out whatever you happen to be... it should bloody well take you out.

Now there's a cool command ability: Fire Mission.

"Please blow the tar out of coordinates X,Y. That round was a little short. Okay, dead on. Fire For Effect"

And watch stuff go kaboom.

The down side of arty is that its not all that much fun to Actually Do. You just point at some spot in the sky and pull the trigger. Not very satisfying.

Two possible solutions:
1) Make it more interesting. A: Wire guided missiles. B: Shell cams
2) Phat Lewt (or BEP in this case). Blowing up lots of stuff should pretty much rake in the BEP, but then that's kind of a given. Just don't reduce their BEP because they're slaughtering folks "the easy way".

So make it more fun, or make it "pay" well.

[kaffis]

I think artillery as you describe would rouse complaints of being "spammy."

Perhaps if the ammunition for such a thing would tie into the resource system, the incentive to spam doorways (or whatever the equivalent would be) would be restrained and curtailed.

[waldizzo]

The resource system may come into play here. Maybe a galaxy will be way more expensive than a bang bus or require some rare resources which the bang bus does not.

[Valdae]

Originally Posted by waldizzo

The resource system may come into play here. Maybe a galaxy will be way more expensive than a bang bus or require some rare resources which the bang bus does not.

Logic ftw

[Hamma]

Aye and a very good point

[kaffis]

Originally Posted by Hamma

Aye and a very good point

That I made back in post #7 in this thread...

But yes, that's the quickest, dirtiest way to do it.

I don't believe that it should be considered the only step to solving the problem, because forcing a clearly inferior choice onto the user solely due to resource scarcity or vehicle unavailability is somewhat clumsy and doesn't promote having the most fun for the players.

Think of it this way. If you'd always rather have a Galaxy, the Sunderer (or other ground transports) isn't very glamorous or enticing to cert or specialize in. If Galaxies are difficult to come by, and you have to "settle" for a Sundy, then the people who are pressured to cert up in Sunderer driving are going to feel resentful that it's necessary, and wish their outfit (for example) didn't already have too many Galaxy pilots and "needs" Sunderer drivers instead. He's never going to be particularly happy about driving that Sunderer, even if it's damn useful for him to do so.

Likewise, the Galaxy pilot, who has a blast because the Galaxy is always useful and is thus a well-respected and glamorous role, runs the risk of either not getting to use it very often (and thus spending a lot of time doing "unfun" things that he didn't sign up for and dedicate certification focus to) if it's constantly locked out by special pre-reqs, OR, if it's simply limited by high resource cost, he's going to have his enjoyment of flying the Galaxy dampened overmuch (if it's a steep enough cost to make the Sundy attractive in comparison) by the stress and pressure not to get it blown up. And that same stress and pressure will dissuade new pilots from learning to fly one, or cause rookie pilots who do make mistakes and cost their empire innumerable precious resources to receive resentment, if not outright ridicule and hostility, from their empire-mates for wasting those precious resources.

As such, while resources are a good option for a contributing factor, I think it's important to have core game design tradeoffs that make alternatives to the Galaxy attractive in their own right, as well. Resource availability is a stick; designing a game with only sticks and no carrots to incentivize behavior (or diversity) doesn't make for fun gameplay.

[waldizzo]

Didn't someone say somewhere that vehicles will not be as disposable as they are in PS1? If this is the case, it may also increase the use of other kinds of mass transport besides the galaxy.

[Talek Krell]

Somebody said something a few pages back that gave me a thought. One of the things the sundy will need is an extremely powerful engine. With the new physics and vehicle handling it should be allowed to plow straight through a blockade without losing a lot of speed. Otherwise you could keep it from crashing a gate by just parking a lightning in front of it.