I suggest making the time to build buildings dependent on the type of building (like now) and the terrain it's placed on. How good you can build on a terrain should be indicated when you try placing a building. Pros: It adds new things a commander needs to think about when setting up a base. (Is it more important to place a building on a specific location or do we only need a building of this type as soon as possible?) More interactivity with the map and increased reality Contra One more thing a mapper must think about when balancing his map What do you think?
I think it's an interesting idea actually. It would add another way to balance a map by making some areas hard to build on, and perhaps open up cliff-edge buildings or something.
I don't know how you would define this in source; but it looks like the mapper will have to make entities or something on top of the "Terrain" You could also go the way Dune did it... Where you have to build "Plates" first and then drop buildings on top of them; ofcourse you could place a building without any plates, but it would slowly get damage to half health...
Connect it to the alpha level on a blend texture, and have all your blend textures be high buildability at 255, and low at 0, then read the alpha at the placement site when you drop a building. I'm fairly sure you can do that.
i dunno, most of the most interesting matches occour where there is origional and alternative placement of buildings. I don't think you should penalise that.
However, it would be nice to discourage noobs from turtling in the ruins in duststorm. You don't have to do it, it's just an option for mappers to use.
Meh not really.. at least the way I'm thinking about it. Lets say your placing a building. Well, setup 'invisible dots' around the 4 corners where the building would touch the ground, and calculate the angles. The steeper the angles, the more time it'll cost to build. Of course that's easier said than done, but this way the maps wouldn't have to be altered in any way. And it just seems more convenient for that matter :/ EDIT: Since I'm me, I can't really explain myself with words, so I made a quick little Flash (really modified an old 'test') This is what I mean. You place the 'green dots' next to the building, at ground level and get the angle between them. Link -> http://img239.imageshack.us/my.php?image=landangleir0.swf Obviously the final cost, equation n such would have to be modified and tweaked, I'm just showing an example. EDIT TWO: Bah I fail at this D: I misunderstood 'kinda' what you guys were talking about.. I though it was about ground angle <_<
you shouldn't choose your base location because of some weird artificial game added modifier. you should be able to look at a location and say "that's got good cover, that area is vulnerable, that area is not very visible" instead of "that area has a +5 bonus yay!" the only time this would be remotely valid is for slowing down building on something very obviously hard to build on, like sand possibly, but i don't see how that would make the game a lot more fun. or my other favorite idea: slow down building past the map edge. so outside the map edge, you can walk and you can build but it gets harder and harder to build and drive and walk out there. for those nitpicky freaks: no, the map would be extended and then this added to all the extra region created so you wouldn't actually be building "out of the map edge"
@Private Sandbag First: Why do you call this "artificial"? Can you build buildings equally well on every terrain in reality? Second: Building speed would't be the most important factor and you'd still be able to place buildings where ever you want. But this would add much more possibilities for mappers. As an example, they could make important locations on the map harder to take because it takes longer to setup barracks and turrets there. This would even increase the number of possible tactics because you would have to decide if it's better to setup a base just beside the resources/important location, which could take longer but would be more useful, or a bit away where the base would be built faster and you could attack this location with full power earlier. At the moment it's of only "who is there first". With this feature, you could be at a specific location first, but loose it, because the enemy was able to build a base around there faster. Or maybe they were faster, but still not able to take the location back, because your defense was already there, at the optimal location. I'm sure this would add many new possible situations and increase the number of valid/good tactics. Third: The developers would still have to decide how much the build-time can be increased. This decision is very important for how it would be in game.
it is artificial. firstly you can't compare anything in this game to reality, building in this game is absolutely nothing like building in real life. for a start, no matter what build speed, the entire building appears the minute it's dropped. so for some reason two buildings that are both fully placed when you start take different amounts of time to build? reality has no relevance. it is very artifical because it totally randomly decides how good a position is because of some arbitrary value given to it by the mapper. if building a barracks by a refinary makes tactical sense to place one there like that should be rewarded. just giving a bonus to people who learn the maps is utter rubbish. if you sit on a hill and fire at a guy on the ground, you don't expect to be told "actually you were sitting in a -2 area so you died"
Oh, reality has no relevance, just because you can't make everyting like reality? This thought looks quite strange to me. This feature must be used well by the mapper. If it's difficult to build on a specific terrain this must have a reason. (Terain is hilly, it's full of rocks, quicksand or whatever). It will allways be possible to make shitty maps... it doesn't matter if there's one more thing a mapper can do wrong in my opinion. Good mappers won't do it wrong! Or if this is too important, then just let it depend on how hilly the terrain is. This could not be used wrong by the mapper.
It just seems to add more complexity then need to the game. How would you tell one area from another? What happens when you build half in one area and half in another? It would benefit more experince comm since they would know where all the good area is already. I can just imagine some of the mic spam that would happen if this was in. "why the heck did you place this here!$@! you should have place it 5 feet that way to make building faster.!" and of course "WTH why you place that there for, we needed it over here noob comm.. "
players should be able to decide what is tactically good by looking at the situation and making a decision based on what the situation is thinking "what if we punished good tactics... then people would need new tactics! the tactics are endless!" is just bad. then you have the elitism that it gives a massive boost to people that learn the map. that really isn't good. intelligence and a quick finger should decide who wins a battle, not who's spent more time playing. you have the extra work of updating EVERY map so far with this. only adding this to some maps would be inconsistant.
