Temporal Damage

posted on June 19th, 2005, 6:19 pm

The following is a little idea i tohught up that could be added to FO when the Iconians are (since it might affect them the most). I wanted to pass it by you too see what you think about it.

Temporal Damage essentially is a resource that no player collects or sees. It has no plysical prescence on the map, and is useless in that respect.

However, the ammount of Temporal Damage is increased every time a ship uses a temporal-based weapon (such as the Premonition's statis field). If Temporal Damage reaches certain levels, then things start to happen randomly on the map. Some possible examples are:

• Moving Distortions that destroy ships and/or kill crew or systems
• Ships are suddenly "teleported" to random locations
• map phenomena (such as nebulas and asteroids) are moved, added or removed

All in all, some very nasty things. However, Temporal Damage does slowly decrease over time, and when it gets lower then the certain levels, the distortions dissapear. Also, races that specialise in temporal technology (such as the Iconians) could have special weapons to remove distortions, and build ships and/or stations that can increase the decreasing speed of Temporal Damage. They could also have ships and/or stations that tell the player how much Temporal damage there is

In essence, the idea of Temporal Damage is to introduce another strategic consideration. It serves as a consequence of overusing temporal weapons, meaning people have to weigh their options and decide whether to take the rist. Though this might cause balancing problems for races that have lots of temporal technology, this could be answered by making temporal weapons stronger.

Anyway, its just an idea, and is more than open to suggestions. What do ya think?

posted on June 19th, 2005, 7:25 pm

great idea, well thought but 2 things:

1)no race is using temperal weapons. the feds don't have the promonition.

2) if temporal damage can be made, i think takes up alot of processing power of a PC and i don't want to think about what happens in multiplayer games

posted on June 19th, 2005, 7:48 pm

Well I really doubt that can be done with A2 engine, all in all a good idea

posted on June 19th, 2005, 8:58 pm

1) the feds DO have the premonition... so long as you add it to the shipyards yourself. has an awesome temporal distortion visual effect.

2)these are nice ideas but sound a little too much like a superweapon which people round here dislike cos of balance issues or whatever. if people are sceptical about a cloaking station then i can't see something this powerfull catching on a shame really.

3)if it can be done i'd imagine, as roach said, lag would be horrible and would completely destroy any multiplayer (or instant action) games

posted on June 20th, 2005, 8:49 am

not really, (lag issue) if you remember it was in Red alert one, or somthing like it, everytime you used the chrnosphere a temperal thing was created that randomly moved around the map destorying what ever came in to it.

not really (womd issue) you have no control of it, if it is random it could apear in the middle of your base blow up five ship yards and a star base and disapear, thats not excatly helping you now is it? But then agin it could move through the enemy base, its a gamble.

I personaly like the idea, and yes the prem is avaliable for the feds, its an unuseal item in the map maker, it can aslo be built using the mickinly yards also in the map maker.

posted on June 20th, 2005, 11:45 am

you can put the premonition into any shipyard, its not in the mickinley yards unless you put it in there: steamrunnerA , nebulaA, galaxyA, descentA are what are in there by default. the difference between them and the ones at sf command is they also require resources not just crew/credits. and i reckon lag will be an issue, particulary for people with slow computers, or even just comps a few years old (mine). i still consider mine a very decent computer but its no longer top of the line like it once was. i play with graphic options set about 3/4 the way up so id probably have to put that down to at least half to avoid any slowdown

the way Eufnoc describes it sounds slightly better but it just seems too unstable an element to bring to fo, what race in their right mind would deploy a weapon which has just as much chance of destroying themselves as their enemy . also sounds terribly complicated to implement, so id imagine it may be quite buggy too.