Enable vehicle transport on multiplay/skirmish

[Zarel]

your re-balance efforts [...] fall within the realm of micro calibration presupposing pumpkin's macro calibration balance was with out serious flaws, which is not the case.

your no-no's are in essence band-aids to those serious flaws in pumpkin's macro calibration balance. to my mind that is the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse. to rigorously address wz's balance problems you really have to go back to macro calibrations. sadly that is unlikely to happen because it would entail coming up against the sacrosanct canticles lumped conveniently into the phrase - preserving good 'ol wz. thus you are left with these macro calibration bandages in order to proceed with the less controversial micro calibration balance efforts. the conclusion to that procedure is less than auspicious to be honest without any intent on my part to be slighting of your work and the intensive, rigorous, mp play testing this effort surely involves.

My goals aren't so much to preserve Pumpkin's balance, but rather not to decrease the "interestingness" of balance. "Only cyborgs can be airlifted" is more interesting than "everything can be airlifted".

[zoid]

Also, although it's not realistic, perhaps vehicle transports wouldn't be able to carry trucks. Yeah, it doesn't make sense, but it ensures that cyborg transports will always be useful.

And still, tactical airlift means airlifting trucks, which is a balance no-no. And airlifting non-cyborgs in general, which is a balance no-no. A landlocked ground transport (or hovercraft transport) could be possible, but that's as far as I'll go.

In the campaign Pumpkin was smart enough not to make transports that could fly all over the map. They added a limitation that everyone seems to be forgetting - the Landing Zone!

Trucks could build an LZ after driving to a location, then transports could use it to fly in troops. If the enemy is wise they will raid the location and quickly lay waste to the LZ, however.

Yeah, it would be a radical rebalance. It probably won't work in MP. But it would be cool.

[Zarel]

In the campaign Pumpkin was smart enough not to make transports that could fly all over the map. They added a limitation that everyone seems to be forgetting - the Landing Zone!

Trucks could build an LZ after driving to a location, then transports could use it to fly in troops. If the enemy is wise they will raid the location and quickly lay waste to the LZ, however.

Yeah, it would be a radical rebalance. It probably won't work in MP. But it would be cool.

...this is a very good idea!

I like this idea.

[winsrp]

yeah landing zone sound cool... you would need one at you base to park your transport and load stuff... and one somewhere else to drop stuff... if you play MP and you friend builds one, you can move your transport to his base to provide some extra units.

You would also be forced to build an protect your landing zone near the enemy area in order for the transport to get there... if it gets blown up in the middle of the transport trayectory, it would just turn around and go back from where it came from... I like it..

Zoid... you are a genius.

[Moro_Nick]

My goals aren't so much to preserve Pumpkin's balance, but rather not to decrease the "interestingness" of balance. "Only cyborgs can be airlifted" is more interesting than "everything can be airlifted".

i agree with Sid Meier who first stated it many years back like so: "A game is a collection of interesting choices".

zoid has reminded us how pumpkin followed that maxim in their original implementation of the big transporter. the challenge here is that these conditions are readily scripted in campaign mode but in mp mode it's not as straight forward. this insight applies to ANY mechanic that works in campaign mode but was never implemented in mp. the differential falls squarely in work-load to make it happen effectively.

i see a game like wz as a series of choices, ending definitively with victory or defeat. to be brief, i see imbalance as any mechanic that leads predictably to only one choice to assure victory or, more broadly, a very narrow set of choices which render the whole corpus of other possibilities irrelevant to victory and thus making the gaming experience boring rather than endlessly re-playable after but a short while of familiarity exposure to the mp experience. one of the consequences of wz's unit customization mechanic is that it obfuscates these shortfalls by introducing a complex of choices that where never fully macro-balanced, let alone micro-balanced. this is the real reason wz never took-off in general popularity and why it has never made any top 10 list of all time great strat games over the last decade. wz is more a diamond in the rough than a lost gem of the rts genre.

[zoid]

...this is a very good idea!

I like this idea.

yeah landing zone sound cool... you would need one at you base to park your transport and load stuff... and one somewhere else to drop stuff... if you play MP and you friend builds one, you can move your transport to his base to provide some extra units.

You would also be forced to build an protect your landing zone near the enemy area in order for the transport to get there... if it gets blown up in the middle of the transport trayectory, it would just turn around and go back from where it came from... I like it..

Zoid... you are a genius.

Thank you.

Regardless of whether Landing Zones ever appear in MP, it would be nice if some LZ functionality was available so modders could add them in if they wanted. I'm probably just dreaming though.

[winsrp]

first we dream, then we make things happen.... not the other way around.

[Olrox]

is it possible to limit the transport's capacity?
If so, a capacity limit to the normal vehicle transport could be implemented so that more balancing can be achieved. I also love the idea of buildable landing zones.

[XboxJosh]

I must concur, I think the LZ idea is a work of pure genius!

[Mysteryem]

Perhaps there could be capturable LZs that can be placed aroub maps by mappers.

I was also thinking that some of the rules from the campaign, such as when an LZ becomes compromised, could be edited for use in multiplayer aswell.

[rkhayrov]

I believe that MP vehicle transport was already discussed and the idea of buildable LZ was brought up then, too. At least I was going to suggest this very thing after reading the first page of this thread
Oh, yes, here it is, more than two years old.

I think this would be very valuable addition to the game. Full-scale multi-stage landing operations, yay!

[Olrox]

omg, place Green blip thingies like oil resources at bases and strategical locations - That sure would be amazing, would add a real must of fighting for strategical locations. Right now, we have a few strategical locationson some maps, which have additional power or give access to different places. Making LZs at these locations would allow deploying forces at vantage points, and that would make for a much more intense gameplay experience, I think. Because the way it is, I don't feel like building numbersome defenses for 2 oil derricks, which I can strike back and recapture rather than spend power with static weapons. But LZs would be so much more interesting, because then you would really have to protect them if you want to use them.

[Olrox]

I think it should be 3x3. :rolleyes:

[KukY]

Yeah,3*3.
But i think that the simple one from Campaign would be better(maybe just adding LZ sign...).
The one you made looks great but it's too much like other buildings,like there's a mall under it...
Maybe it would look good as a Repair Facility.
On picture:x(green) would be place on what would be tower and repair turret.and units would drive over blue areas,and on red areas maybe some barrels or something,like in factories.
What do you think?

[Olrox]

Yeah,3*3.
But i think that the simple one from Campaign would be better(maybe just adding LZ sign...).
The one you made looks great but it's too much like other buildings,like there's a mall under it...

the simple one from campaign is just floor texture. I really think we were talking about structures
I was thinking about coordinate transmission systems & repair systems (they would be repaired just like VTOLS, right?) to be underground.
BTW, I swear, there isn't a mall under that, cyborgs don't have time to go shopping
Most of wz's buildings are intended to be occupied pre-collapse military bases buildings, and usually those use partially or completely underground instalations for better protection. Those coordinate transmission and repair systems should be well protected, I think
But anyway, I also think that it should be a bit more flattened, but always keep in mind- I've made that model in 20 minutes while my boss was searching for something for me to do, at work. So it is just that...

(miles away)

...far from being a final model. We'd need all the codes and such magic thingies that the devs can do. And they must yet decide wether to implement it or not, also.

So let's jsut keep improving and hoping that it IS implemented, because as I said, a LZ placement area would be something definetely worthy of defending with everything you've got, would add more competition for territory. Which is, obviously, one of the prime objectives of war - conquesting territories (with their strategical resources or position).

(oh my, you've edited the post, didn't you )

I don't think that a tower would make sense - the landing zone must be flat or provide docking mechanisms. By the way the transports are shown in the game's videos and ingame campaign, it looks like a flat landing zone kind of vehicle, not a docking vehicle. I also thought about making such tower, but ended thinking about what I've just mentioned