Holding Beam & Tractor Beams

posted on April 20th, 2010, 12:47 pm

Well, I had the idea and wanted any opinions, whilst being bored I was thinking of how I tried to make maps and how it was absolutely pointless to place anything but blue and green because others obscure and confuse the games pathing plus they are useless as noone will ever willingly or unwillingly go inside of them. So this brought me to the idea of firstly re-implementing the tractor beam on all support ships and all construction ships with the normal draggy tractor (towing) beam for ships without working engines so if you're lucky enough to get their engines offline you can drag them in-to some nasty nebula.

Now this brought me to my main idea since the borg don't really use tractor beams then it would have to be incorporated in-to the holding beam which forcibly disables engines, allowing it to also drag the ship as it moves.  As evidenced in Scorpion. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjWGlHjKSw&feature=PlayList&p=10D6362F3196070D&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=41[ 2:59))

This pathes the way to actually using nebula to your advantage for all races, increasing the value of support ships and dragging the enemy cruiser in-to a cosy red nebulae for him to die while the Borg can grab one ship at a time and drag them in-to a nebulae or even back to base for a ganking (especially useful with Unimatrix feature) Before you may say this is over-powered however remember how much special energy holding beam costs making it rare to actually make it with them back to base and more likley to a nearby nebula or dragging it back to the assistance of another ship/s.

Changes to Nebula

While we're speaking of Nebulae I had the idea of also making the nebulas more tactical (I have to throw in some of the crazy ideas here okay, you may even laugh as much as I do . )

Tachyon Nebula - Hides all ships inside, disables sensors. Any ship which enters tachyon nebulas unable to cloak for a while due to the absurdly high irradiated hull with tachyon particles. Due to the immense amount of energy in tachyon particles special energy aboard ships regenerate much more quickly.

Crazy idea for Tachyon Nebula: When the ship enters the nebula the ship is so irradiated by tachyons that weapons fire inside the nebula will cause a violent reaction sending any ships inside to disappear, sending them through time to appear minues later.

[Dave Denton]

posted on April 20th, 2010, 6:42 pm

Last edited by Dave Denton on April 21st, 2010, 12:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

  I think it will be nice for the game to have a beam that tows friendly vessels, and assimilates enemy vessels while towing them or just holding them in the same place while they are assimilated, depends if the ship that assimilates is moving or not.
That would be a really nice thing to have as Borg. It will also make the first canon tractor beam out there, that stock Armada 2 never had.

posted on April 20th, 2010, 8:10 pm

I'm still really against the Holding Beam becoming a moving tractor beam, because of how easy it would be able to abuse this to force your opponent to follow you into, for instance, a Mutara nebula, or into a base - or risk losing that warship unconditionally  . I guess I really see it the same way as the Charg'H's combat tractor beam though. These weapons are meant to hold the enemy in place, not to drag it all around, as you must imagine that the engines would be useful some how 

Incidentally, if you look on the todo list, tractor beams have made it back in for construction vessels

posted on April 20th, 2010, 8:18 pm

Well I'll wait to see what the Devs do with the whole Borg revamp