Simple Weapons Upgrade possible?

[ouch]

I'd like to chime in here as I've played warzone since it came out and would hate to see something bad happen to it...

Anyway, I use the recycle feature quite a bit, and I see it only needs a few tweaks here and there.

What tweaks? well...

1. more resources need to be given back. Currently it's not really worth the effort to recycle viper-wheels vehicles as you only get back like 5 resources of the 40 something it cost to build it. I imagine a day when the recycle efficiency is thrown in the research tree. (possibly bridgeng the power, and repair speed techs)

2. the unit experience effects need to be amplified/tweaked slightly. Currently you can't see much of a difference unless you get around 300 or so kills.

3. I would like to be able to select which factories produce the experienced units. This would be simular to assigning factories to a commander. Currently when you upgrade units you have to stop ALL production everywhere. (were talking cyborgs, vtols, EVERYTHING) For fear of giving your old commanders experience to a hover-bug-truck or something...

[Rman Virgil]

I'd like to chime in here as I've played warzone since it came out and would hate to see something bad happen to it...

Anyway, I use the recycle feature quite a bit, and I see it only needs a few tweaks here and there.

What tweaks? well...

1. more resources need to be given back. Currently it's not really worth the effort to recycle viper-wheels vehicles as you only get back like 5 resources of the 40 something it cost to build it. I imagine a day when the recycle efficiency is thrown in the research tree. (possibly bridgeng the power, and repair speed techs)

2. the unit experience effects need to be amplified/tweaked slightly. Currently you can't see much of a difference unless you get around 300 or so kills.

3. I would like to be able to select which factories produce the experienced units. This would be simular to assigning factories to a commander. Currently when you upgrade units you have to stop ALL production everywhere. (were talking cyborgs, vtols, EVERYTHING) For fear of giving your old commanders experience to a hover-bug-truck or something...

* Hmmm... very savvy. I like.

* Also goes into the "Re-balancing Bin".

- RV

[EvilGuru]

I already see a big exploit there !
People might build the cheapest tanks possible just to recycle them straight away and use those build points to spam out über tanks at amazing speed.
However I like the idea that recycling gives more bang for your effort of keeping them alive.

There is no exploit. As the system is not 100% efficient. You only get back half of your power and half of your build points. So you are always at a net loss. Think it through and you will get what I mean. Cheap tanks do not get you very many build points (as there is a close, but not exact mapping between build points and build power).

As a result you are always worse off.

1. more resources need to be given back. Currently it's not really worth the effort to recycle viper-wheels vehicles as you only get back like 5 resources of the 40 something it cost to build it. I imagine a day when the recycle efficiency is thrown in the research tree. (possibly bridgeng the power, and repair speed techs)

Kreuvf suggested recycling research as well, to increase the efficiency of it. So you might get 3/4 of your power and 3/4 of your build points back (currently is 1/2 or 50%). So if a Viper Wheels costs 40 you currently get 20 back assuming it has 100% HP.

If it had 50% HP you would get (40 / 2) * HP%, or 10.

The unit experience effects need to be amplified/tweaked slightly. Currently you can't see much of a difference unless you get around 300 or so kills.

I have some big changes planned here. Think: harder to hit, do more damage, more accurate. Currently it is just take less damage. By making units something worth keeping around it should hopefully make spamming less attractive, as you are feeding your opponent.

I would like to be able to select which factories produce the experienced units. This would be simular to assigning factories to a commander. Currently when you upgrade units you have to stop ALL production everywhere. (were talking cyborgs, vtols, EVERYTHING) For fear of giving your old commanders experience to a hover-bug-truck or something...

Sadly I do not see a way to do this without adding another GUI menu/button, something which I am trying to avoid (the UI is cluttered as it is).

I do have another change planned for commanders! Currently you can assign one commander to many factories, but not vice versa. So if your commander is full all of the factories supplying him block. So I plan to make it possible for a factory to feed multiple (up to 5) commanders.

I am unsure when I will have all of this done as I am currently re-working the netcode (which is a higher priority for 2.1). However, sooner or later, I will get around to adding and tweaking the aforementioned elements.

Regards, Freddie.

[kage]

There is no exploit. As the system is not 100% efficient. You only get back half of your power and half of your build points. So you are always at a net loss. Think it through and you will get what I mean. Cheap tanks do not get you very many build points (as there is a close, but not exact mapping between build points and build power).

actually, it could be an exploit, depending on how you handle the buildpoints -- if these buildpoints reduce build time (as opposed to decreasing cost), then you could just get near the unit limit and start farming units -- then you have a bunch of lancer bug wheels guarding your base while you set up your main force to hide in waiting to attack the enemy base -- as the enemy wastes your lancer bug wheeled units, you just just use all those free buildpoints to (almost) instantly build tank after tank, using your new, very powerful replacement army to lay waste to the attackers, while sending your other (hiding) army to assault their weakly defended base.

[EvilGuru]

actually, it could be an exploit, depending on how you handle the buildpoints -- if these buildpoints reduce build time (as opposed to decreasing cost), then you could just get near the unit limit and start farming units -- then you have a bunch of lancer bug wheels guarding your base while you set up your main force to hide in waiting to attack the enemy base -- as the enemy wastes your lancer bug wheeled units, you just just use all those free buildpoints to (almost) instantly build tank after tank, using your new, very powerful replacement army to lay waste to the attackers, while sending your other (hiding) army to assault their weakly defended base.

At *best* it will build 2x as fast. As the number of build points a factory will use is limited to 50% of those required. So it will never be instant.

If you are at a point in the game where: you have power to burn (as recycling will only get you half of your power back), are at your unit limit and have nothing to research/build then you are probably doing something wrong. I can not remember ever being in that situation.

Might be easier to explain if you treat build points like power; just a different kind. You can not cheat by recycling your units to get power, and the same logic mostly holds for build points; with a few extra restrictions in place to prevent instant building.

Regards, Freddie.

[gypakk]

Sadly I do not see a way to do this without adding another GUI menu/button, something which I am trying to avoid (the UI is cluttered as it is).

Button for what purpose? In vehicle context menu there are two buttons for starting the recycling process: "Return for Recycling" and "Recycle". As far as I know, the second button exists for safety reason only (you must click both buttons sequentially to start recycling).

One Recycle button will suffice. The other button can be used for Upgrade. Of course, the Icon should be changed, but I think, that's not a big effort...

[RBL-4NiK8r]

Well as far as I recall all you needed to do was Control-A for the unit that you wanted to get recycled and then Control-R to send them all back, most of the time I would build a Cyborg Factory near the mass of units I am getting rid of and let them go there, instaid of sending them all the way back to my main base. As it was you hardly used recycling that much in MP game unless you started on T1 and it went into a major Turtle fest. Also you run the risk of being attacked just as you go to recycle so this was never a good idea unless you knew you had the edge over the other side.

Now back in the early days of the demo, and a little bit after the games release, one of the tactics for T1 Rush on the Rush map was to build your HQ and after you got MG's reseached you would recycle that along with the Research Center this would give you the extra power needed to make 2 or 3 more MG viper tanks and get them to the other persons base before they knew what hit them, most of the time you could win a game in the first 5 mins with 4-6 MG vipers. Granted this was one of the reasons I liked Mountain better then Rush because most games lasted longer then 5 mins. Oh and the other trick was if you knew someone was going to Rush you with MG vipers in the first 5 mins, and you wanted to screw them over all you had to do was add Scavs to the game and there little army would be toast, and a good chance they would not see them because they took down there HQ.

I really dont see why there is such a big deal with recycling, it worked just fine when you needed it, but it was always risky when you did, I will agree that setting up unit rank would be a nice idea, but there again is more of a problem because in MP games rank didnt mean sh*t for the most part because most of your units never lasted long enough to get any rank worth a damn.


4nE

[ouch]

well if you have quite a bit of time to kill. you could take advantage of the modularity of the units in warzone. So for instance you recycle a viper-wheel-light machine gun, and you would get those components in a "parts bin" of sorts. that way if you wanted to later build a viper-wheel-heavy machine gun, you would have the wheels and body built already, and just need to build the turret.

This would take advantage of the fact that all the components already have thier own build cost/rate stats.

but this would take forever to impliment as you would need a seperate menu somewhere just to organise and scrap parts you don't want. (I'm thinking like a copy of the build menu or something.)