Changing Nanites to be more interesting

posted on May 27th, 2010, 12:58 pm

with the last few FO-Patches every faction got some ways to get something out of their battles. ranks, and even supplies for Klingons.
Everyone besides the borg. the fact that every ofther faction would get benefits for fighting constantly lead to severe unbalancedness. So here is my little idea to make the Borg fighting a bit more rentable:

The new and improved Nanites. they would get changed some bit, and maybe they could also be added to the 2x vinculum dode, to make this advantages avaiable in earlier game.

Stats:

Special Attack Nanites
Costs around 1000 Energy when fired from a cube & diamond, for dode it would at least draw all special energy.
Creates a swarm of Nanites in the target area.
Now here comes the clue: the nanites are under your control!
They look like a dense ball of flies when moving, and after casting they rapidly close in from the Host ship(as if it was fired like a cannonball)
The Nanites have
0 Offense
10-15 Defense
10 Special
also they are miner-type ships.
While they have no normal attack, they have the special attack "Swarm"(or assimilate or whatever)
the attack is activated and aimed at an enemy ship, the nanites break formation and begin to swarm around that ship, damaging the hull (maybe with a modified Building-bee animation)
While they do that, their Dilithium tanks are being filled, until the ship dies (the maximum is 500 dil)
you can also manually stop the process, but you then have to tolerate a little cooldown.
While swarming the regenerative abilities of the nanites are highly increased and the are only manually targettable(like the dominion mini sensor).
if the enemy ship is destroyed or you cancelled he action, the nanites reform to their cannonball from, whee they are treated like normal ships. the dilithium can be dumped at the nearest mining node to finally get your resources.

of course this way it would be unbalanced, because you could just sit in your base and spam nanites, but because of the small size of nanites they are not fully able to get enough energy for themselves, meaning that they always lose (special) energy, until the energy hits zero and the nanites die. The only way to keepo them aive is their swarm mode, which rechargs the special energy(e.g. a brel could restore about half of the special energy).


so, what do you think about this little idea?
mybe it could make borg battles more interesting and rewarding, especially for the micro-loving people.
this could also make pretty interesting decisions, for example if one should attack the next ship and risk losing the 200 dil that you already have in your tanks, or being a coward and rescuing the 200 dil while you still can.


phew, i have the feeling thats was waay to much text

posted on May 27th, 2010, 1:06 pm

Interesting. This would be sorta like the resource extractor. But the default resource it gives is metal. Meaning that you'll have to improve the coding or else you'll get a huge load of "Connections".

posted on May 27th, 2010, 1:24 pm

Interesting. This would be sorta like the resource extractor. But the default resource it gives is metal. Meaning that you'll have to improve the coding or else you'll get a huge load of "Connections".

couldnt the mining code of the normal resource assimilator be used?

posted on May 27th, 2010, 2:21 pm

If this was added, some alternate way for the other races to get extra resources should be added to keep things balanced.

posted on May 27th, 2010, 4:25 pm

well,m the way borg collect resources is already skewed from the other races, getting larger amounts, but in bursts with longer delays between them, whereas all the other races can essentially set up a supply train of almost constantly increasing  materials with their freighters. I proposed something similar in another thread, letting s.cubes have a "harvesting beam" to hack up derelict ships to gain up to 1/3 of their original materials  costs, no difference here really. its not a bad game play idea, but you'd essentially have to code the nanites as a ship, one that could occupy the same space as a enemy vessel... would have to ask the mod team if such a thing could be done with the current engine...

plus, nanites couldn't be permenant thing, since interstellar radaition is hella harsh on electronics, and like any cloud of locusts, its individual members would eventually die away or malfunction. Hmmm, chance of nanite failure, or even nanites going rogue?

posted on May 27th, 2010, 4:56 pm

yep there are some plans to change nanites to be more interessting to use. ideas are always welcome

posted on May 27th, 2010, 6:47 pm

plus, nanites couldn't be permenant thing, since interstellar radaition is hella harsh on electronics, and like any cloud of locusts, its individual members would eventually die away or malfunction. Hmmm, chance of nanite failure, or even nanites going rogue?

that what the special energy drain was meant for; if the nanites don't find a new target fast, they will cease to function because they cannot recreate new nanites to replace broken ones

so gameplaywiise that the nanites die when special energy hits zero and they can only recharge while attacking(using te ships scrap to replicate)

posted on May 30th, 2010, 10:46 am

yep there are some plans to change nanites to be more interessting to use. ideas are always welcome

Reminds me of CNC 3 with the scrin swarm, really a good idea and it fits best with optimize in my opinion, having stronger resource collectors, reduced costs etc this fits in perfectly.  Maybe the same for assimilate but they assimilate the ships they attack, when shields go down the ships gets a debuff with a plathora of system failures as nanites cause havok with the ships systems and assimilate the crew maybe 1 collective connection as a reward per ship?

Also if we're taking inspiration from other good RTS how about some form of civilian neutral and garisonable buildings/fortifications in FO like the civi buildings in CNC? Plenty of ways of doing it, abandoned sensor relay stations, abandoned starbases, abandoned mining stations on moons.

posted on May 30th, 2010, 10:48 am

Civilian and mercinary units are planned. They're not made yet, so the ideas phases should still be open.