RedShocktrooper's Suggestion Collection

[RedShocktrooper]

Right, if it's alright with you guys, I have lots of ideas and don't want to suddenly pour them into five different threads. I refuse to get into "hard stats" (i.e. exact damage and range) because then it can be adjusted for balance.

Idea #1: The Union
A new faction (hence, a new collection of three bodies and probably some research stuff) focused on Multi-Turret logic. I'm approaching this assuming we won't be breaking more than three turrets in the future.

They would have Paradigm-grade armor, Collective-grade speed, and be fairly expensive to produce. However, the upside is that they are very hard to weigh down and even their light body can mount more than one weapon, allowing for a high degree of utility with weapons. The general appearance might turn to Soviet interwar tanks - the earlier T-26, the T-28 and the SMK Heavy Tank. Also, mounting a triad of, say, Groundshakers or railguns on a single unit is not something to scoff at.

They could fall between the New Para and Collective campaigns, so they could actually see some use as tanks instead of immediately going into the "fire support" role.

Idea #2: The Light Howitzer
An 85mm gun mounted directly onto the turret. Lobs its shots, and has a longer range than mortars. However, it doesn't have the damage or punch of a proper howtizer. Very light weight, so it could probably be stuck onto light chassis without screwing performance too much. It is also in a fully rotating turret, making it a bit harder to flank.

This could be unlocked fighting against the Union.

Idea #3: The Tank Destroyer Cannons
Guns specifically meant to destroy enemy vehicles. They would be affixed directly the tank, like howitzers and mortars are, and wouldn't provide much health. However, they would reload quicker than rockets, and have a longer range than normal cannons, making them decent ambush weapons. The Light TD gun is 57mm, the Medium is 88mm, and the Heavy is 125mm.

This could also be unlocked fighting the Union.

Idea #4: Mass Production
In short, upgrades that reduce the cost to build units, in tandem with factory upgrades. Each upgrade would shave off 5% of the base cost of a unit, up to 75% at best (note that by that point, you will have probably put more than enough money into Mass Production to justify the lack-of-cost of units).

Probably should be unlocked by researching factory upgrades.

To be Continued

---

Thoughts?

[Giani]

...
Idea #4: Mass Production
In short, upgrades that reduce the cost to build units, in tandem with factory upgrades. Each upgrade would shave off 5% of the base cost of a unit, up to 75% at best (note that by that point, you will have probably put more than enough money into Mass Production to justify the lack-of-cost of units).

Probably should be unlocked by researching factory upgrades.

Thoughts?

Why do you want a upgrade to reduce the cost of units when there already are many upgrades for the power generator?

[RedShocktrooper]

Why do you want a upgrade to reduce the cost of units when there already are many upgrades for the power generator?

Actually that seems like it could be a thought, but even with the power upgrades, units can get expensive. Power Generator upgrade + Factory upgrade = Mass Production upgrade?

[Corporal Punishment]

Here are my thoughts. They are not very flattering, but you asked for them:

Idea #1: The Union
A "Union" faction centering on multi-turret vehicles apparently is a anachronism. Such vehicles were experimented with in the 1920's as a means to make a rolling fortress. But they didn't get far.
The multi-turret approach was a attempt to build a vehicle for defensive purposes, really. The idea was to stop enemy spearheads that had made it through the own front at a insurmountable obstacle that could be relocated as necessary. But in practice the drawbacks outweighed the expected (but non-existent) advantages by far: The added weight of the multiple turrets made the machines even more sluggish then the regular tanks of the era. Also, it has never been accomplished to realize sufficient coverage, meaning the different turrets blocked parts of each other's traverse, forcing the vehicle to turn more or less constantly on it's z-axis to bring whatever weapon was appropriate in a given situation towards the enemy. The result was that whatever mobility the multi-turret tanks had was, in a battle situation, eaten up by just keeping track of targets, limiting them to react instead of assuming the initiative. But even this proved futile: Hostiles would relocate faster then the multi-turret vehicle could follow, making it a sitting duck. Further, the multiple turrets provided no increase in firepower (what had been the heart of the concept) as usually only one of them had appropriate armament for a given target.
The problem of coverage was solved by the german Neubaufahrzeug, however it was armed with one main cannon turret (mounting on armor-piercing 3.7cm cannon and one 7.5cm cannon or 10.5cm howitzer for soft targets) and two tiny auxiliary machine gun turrets for anti-infantry defense that provided no significant advantage over a coaxial MG in the main turret. But the problems no design could remedy were lack of mobility (due to weight) and the enormous size (making the vehicles easy targets).
Your idea of combining paradigm-grade armor (weak kinetic, easy prey to AT rockets/missiles), collective-type speed (sluggish, can not assume initiative) and nexus-type cost (inferred from "fairly expensive", only few can be produced) with diversified armament (only one turret is effective at a time) reproduces exactly the flaws the actual multi-turret tanks had. If all turrets mounted the same weapons, however, the increase in firepower is not as significant as you imagine. This is due to reload time. Granted, the vehicle would produce thrice the damage per attack, but focused on one hostile (that is likely destroyed). But while it reloads the remaining enemies have all the time they need to kill it.
At the end of the day, by killing one multi-turret tank (regardless if it has diverse armament or not), the firepower of three normal vehicles is destroyed. But the high production costs dictate your proposed multi-turret faction to field a smaller number of units. So their forces would become decimated three times easier instead of harder because you ignored the enormous advantage that is redundancy.

Idea #2: The Light Howitzer
A light howitzer set into a articulated turret may sound intriguing at first sight. But since the turn rate of a turret is not that much faster then that of a vehicle, the advantage against flankers is minimal at best. It may even become negated by the way artillery in WZ works. Indirect fire units are effective only if assigned to a spotter. As long as the spotter does not designate the flankers as targets, assigned artillery will not react to them, articulated turret or not. But as the spotter is mostly too far forward to see flankers attacking it's artillery complement, it can not designate them. So we do not get any flanking defense from artillery in articulated turrets and must still provide it by other forces. Thus, we are left with a weaker variant of the standard howitzer that won't be used.

Idea #3: The Tank Destroyer Cannons
The tank destroyer you propose is really a obsolete vehicle. Real-life tank destroyers were developed in WW2 as a cheap alternative to what later became known as the main battle tank in a war economy hard pressed for resources.
The path was followed for some years into the cold war, the later models being fitted with AT rockets (and AT missiles when they became available), for infantry support. So, a medium body/tank killer/tracks is pretty much the 1970's idea of a tank destroyer. Through advances in miniaturization, this role of the tank destroyer is today filled by infantrymen with shoulder-launched AT missiles. In WZ, this would be a scourge cyborg.
Armored forces never, after WW2, employed tank destroyers, since the high-powered tank cannons developed in the last two years of the war and improved upon since then, closed the gap between tank cannons and AT guns, rendering the latter obsolete for armored forces as the shoulder-launched AT missile did for infantry.

Idea #4: Mass Production
The whole idea of mass production through decreasing build costs ignores several important game mechanics: First, high-end units being expensive forces the player to make a choice between quantity and quality. You can either produce a large force of simple units, relying on redundancy and accepting high losses or you can rely on a smaller number of sophisticated units, relying more on survivability and avoid losses. Making sophisticated units cheap means watering this concept.
Second: However cheap a unit may be, you're still limited to fife factories of the three types, meaning you can, even with all the power you want, produce only so many units at a time, as they have certain production time, independent from their costs. Reducing production costs does not increase production rate accordingly.
Third: The costs of units and research items is correlated in such a way that the player must balance force buildup and research intensity. Reducing unit production costs takes this challenge away as you suddenly can research and produce simultaneously.

[Stratadrake]

Reducing production costs does not increase production rate accordingly.

That is true in 3.x where power is allocated immediately. In older versions power was allocated at about 50/second, so it did have a (small) effect on production times. I remember experimenting with mods where something was very expensive but actual production time was virtually instantaneous... that was (and still is) a very dangerous combination as you can run yourself out of power surprisingly quickly if you're building too much too fast.

[RedShocktrooper]

Here are my thoughts. They are not very flattering, but you asked for them:

Idea #1: The Union
*snip*

I'm aware of how dated multiturrets would be by the year 2100, but the headcanon I had for the union is that they managed to recover the technical drawings for the really old pre-WWII multiturret tanks. Furthermore, there are really only two niches not filled by the existing Warzone factions, with the Para being hit-and-away subversives, the Collective being stay-and-fight Brute Force, the Project being a balance between the two, and NEXUS being speed and armor wrapped into one with added expenses. The Union then becomes a faction reliant on applying a lot of firepower in one place for one idea (and one way to apply more firepower to a single place is by putting more than one gun on a unit), or they become a faction that is literally the inverse of NEXUS - bad mobility and armor, but dirt cheap and quick to build.

Idea #2: The Light Howitzer
A light howitzer set into a articulated turret may sound intriguing at first sight. But since the turn rate of a turret is not that much faster then that of a vehicle, the advantage against flankers is minimal at best. It may even become negated by the way artillery in WZ works. Indirect fire units are effective only if assigned to a spotter. As long as the spotter does not designate the flankers as targets, assigned artillery will not react to them, articulated turret or not. But as the spotter is mostly too far forward to see flankers attacking it's artillery complement, it can not designate them. So we do not get any flanking defense from artillery in articulated turrets and must still provide it by other forces. Thus, we are left with a weaker variant of the standard howitzer that won't be used.

The idea was more so a howitzer which could be quickly accessed in the early game that would be more for counterbattery against mortars and other long-ranged units than necessarily for base assault; it'd also be available much earlier than the Howitzers would.

Idea #3: The Tank Destroyer Cannons
The tank destroyer you propose is really a obsolete vehicle. Real-life tank destroyers were developed in WW2 as a cheap alternative to what later became known as the main battle tank in a war economy hard pressed for resources.
The path was followed for some years into the cold war, the later models being fitted with AT rockets (and AT missiles when they became available), for infantry support. So, a medium body/tank killer/tracks is pretty much the 1970's idea of a tank destroyer. Through advances in miniaturization, this role of the tank destroyer is today filled by infantrymen with shoulder-launched AT missiles. In WZ, this would be a scourge cyborg.
Armored forces never, after WW2, employed tank destroyers, since the high-powered tank cannons developed in the last two years of the war and improved upon since then, closed the gap between tank cannons and AT guns, rendering the latter obsolete for armored forces as the shoulder-launched AT missile did for infantry.

Perhaps this is me thinking of things around Campaign mode - Tank Destroyer cannons would coexist with the Lancer and normal cannons as opposed to Scourges, and would provide better overall firepower against vehicles than both (it takes more shots to kill an enemy vehicle, but due to a faster refire rate can kill the unit quicker in a standup fight), but like Lancers are utterly worthless against anything that isn't an enemy vehicle.

Idea #4: Mass Production
The whole idea of mass production through decreasing build costs ignores several important game mechanics: First, high-end units being expensive forces the player to make a choice between quantity and quality. You can either produce a large force of simple units, relying on redundancy and accepting high losses or you can rely on a smaller number of sophisticated units, relying more on survivability and avoid losses. Making sophisticated units cheap means watering this concept.
Second: However cheap a unit may be, you're still limited to fife factories of the three types, meaning you can, even with all the power you want, produce only so many units at a time, as they have certain production time, independent from their costs. Reducing production costs does not increase production rate accordingly.
Third: The costs of units and research items is correlated in such a way that the player must balance force buildup and research intensity. Reducing unit production costs takes this challenge away as you suddenly can research and produce simultaneously.

The knowledge that making a unit cheaper doesn't make it build faster already exists in my head; and you can't simply drop a little bit of Energy into Mass Production upgrades and have a major advantage over your enemy in terms of numbers, because of the increments of 5% of base by which cost is reduced. This is more like making replacing units less costly.

[RedShocktrooper]

bump bump, I have a new idea which I feel doesn't quite merit its own thread.

NEXUS' Battleship: This could come in tandem with Naval units.

Basically: A Giant, base-sized Uber-Unit equipped with what amounts to a bunch of rapid-fire Groundbreakers (Or just nine Groundbreakers, or some sort of Rail/Coilgun artillery), with a Laser AA defense battery. The idea for this is that, on this warship, is a NEXUS core that the player has to take down (This strikes me as far too powerful for the player to get his hands on).

It could also have a level set on it as well, for a decent Battleship Raid.

[aubergine]

Rather than some sort of über Battleship, an alternative might be the ability to build floating platforms on water on to which you can build structures. The platforms would be relatively easy to build and once built would be treated as "land" with respect to building stuff on them. There could be special platform tiles that can provide lateral thrust, enabling large floating platforms to be moved - the more thrusters, the faster the movement, but it would still be relatively slow.

These floating platforms could be used to claim oil that's otherwise in un-buildable water, they could be used to create off-shore bases, defences, sensors, rearm pads, barriers (eg. to stop hovers crossing the water) or even just used as bridges to create new routes for land units.

Also, they could be a pre-requisite for building a naval base - create an area of floating platforms and then build a ship yard on them to launch ships.