Make the Factions More Unique

Right now the two factions are pretty much exactly the same from an operational stand point. All the same buildings, nearly the same infantry weapons, and identical vehicle weapons. The the most unique part between the factions are the vehicles themselves, and I have no suggestions to change the chassis.

I also don't know if the factions are so similar on purpose, or just because its easiest to balance. If that is the case I will be satisfied. I am also aware that something like this has probably been posted before, but I couldn't find anything in the organize stuff thread, and I can't think of any words to search for. So hopefully I will go into enough detail to legitimize a new thread.

The "easiest" thing part of the game to make more unique would be the buildings. While physically they are quite different they are identical in operation. The Barracks and Vehicle Factories can't really have a lot changed about them, other then maybe having one factions barracks also be an armoury and then making it cost a bit more to build. I'm not convinced that is a good idea tho. Another option would be to make one of the factions repair facility also include an armoury, and possibly change the cost, up or down, or have it remain the same.

The final way I can think to make the buildings more unique, would be to split the radar for one faction, into a radar that only detects vehicles, (cheaper then current radar,) and a Tech Building that allows research. The cost of the two buildings would be equal to, or more then the cost of the single radar. This would allow one faction to get to research a little bit faster, but then not necessarily have the added benefit of widespread vehicular detection. This then also allows that faction to spread their radar coverage over the whole map for much cheaper, but at the same time, if they loose that one tech building they have to build a new one, while the other faction may have multiple instances of the current radar in different parts of the map, making the loss of one not quite as devastating. (I realize that most games having multiple radars is quite a luxury that doesn't often occur.)

That is about as far as I can take the buildings without any major work other then creating/modifying buildings. Any other ideas will need some more, (I presume,) difficult work.

If I understand the back story well enough the BE are quite reliant on their nano-tech. I think this should become a game mechanic. Split the Radar for BE into a tech building, and a Radar. This new radar will enable a "uplink" umbrella that has a limited range. Also give the command vehicle its own "uplink" umbrella. Engie radars could also have a smaller umbrella. When a player is within this umbrella, they have access to minimap updates, and perhaps other tactical information available. When outside of the umbrella they don't. This will let players know how reliant the BE is on their tech, and also help explain why the NF had such a hard time integrating into their society. If your jacked into the net, loads of information are sent to you. If your not, well your SOL.

There could also be some sort of crazy ad-hoc network where if player A is in the umbrella and player B is within X units of player A, then player B is connected. Or even crazier if player C is within X units of player B, who is within X units of player A, and player A is within the umbrella then they are all connected, but I suspect this is to complicated and unnecessary to code. Maybe it could be tied into the squads, I don't know. This crazy ad-hoc thing probably would also do away with the need to spread BE Radars all over the place.

Why don't NF need some sort of building to jack in? Well they aren't as reliant as BE on their tech. So they let each other know where things are the easy way... Radio. Stupid BE and their over complicating of things eh?

The final thing I'm going to suggest in this post is Faction specialization of the tech tree. Italicized text represents new paths on the tech tree. The first tech would relate directly to the BE uplink:
Electronics -> Improved Uplink (IU) -> Communication Satellite (ComSat)
IU would increase the umbrella on all devices by x% (x = 100?) Cost should be about 1/2 or 1/4 the cost to cover the map with the BE radar
ComSat would remove the umbrella concept and make BE operate as they do now, cost should be 1.5-2x the cost of IU
Other BE techs could relate again to their nanotech. Most I can think of would be related to infantry some of these may be better as faction specific skills, or already are skills. Increased accuracy for all, Blast Resistance (trade off blast damage for stamina?), BioTox Resistance (no, not Botox), I'm sure there are things that other people can come up with, I'm not very good with naming things.

NF is harder, as they aren't very advanced at anything, so giving them specialized research is difficult. Esp since they have been oppressed for 40 years. I was thinking along the lines of increasing the options in Biology for NF (as they seem inclined to do genetic modification.) Or simply taking Biology away from BE, give it a buff, and then leave it to NF. Since I gave BE BioTox resistance, it only makes sense for NF to have some sort of Bio Cannon/Arty to make BE want to use the stuff. If Bio is for NF only, make the Bio Warhead have a blast radius more like the nuke (infection wise, not damage wise.) And if not making Bio NF only give them cannon/arty that is similar to HE however not as damaging, but of course having the lasting effect of AIDS. Or some weird combination of the two. Bio for both, but BE gets an improved Bio Warhead with nuke like infection radius, aswell as giving them access to the bio cannon/arty.

That is all for this post

 

I think everyont thought of something like this and i would like to see factions
that are different like the ones in starcraft but i believe its a balancing / coding
animating / stuff / cookies issue that makes it impossible

 

From my understanding of the world, for the building portion of it (dividing/combining) the hardest part (other then balancing) would be the modeling. The NF repair facility could "easily" be made into the armory/Repair Facility. It already has that room on the side. Unless that already has another purpose in mind of course. The balancing issues this causes is obviously "how much does this now cost?" and the problem that BE can fit armories in a lot of places that NF can't. Quite an issue I guess.

The BE Radar/Tech Building's biggest problem is price balancing, making the tech building expensive enough that it doesn't give a major tech advantage (research 1 min in instead of 5 min in). The other problem is designing the tech building. But... yeah.

I don't think the "uplink" thing should be to big of a hurdle. Again from my understanding, the minimap is updated by regular packets sent by the server. if the packet doesn't arrive the minimap doesn't change. There is already existing code to detect if a unit is inside a given radius. Make a slight change to that so

Code:

if(unit in radius) send minimap update

Then it probaly would be good to have a HUD icon that informs the player they are linked, or not.

The final bit of research to improve the radius should be simple as well.

But this is only my understanding of the system.
Theoretically this should improve network performance. As less map updates would need to be sent ;-)

 

I don't think that major differences are needed, if you look though there are a lot of subtle differences that make the gameplay radically different for each faction.

 

I think the original idea was to make the factions as similar as possible; as this would be the easiest to balance with the multiple version iterations; then once every major feature is released (Aircraft) then the factions will be made asymetric; because feature creep would have stopped by that point and a true effort can be made on balancing the factions...

I would love bigger asymetrical factions, that is what made the gameplay in NS great; each side had a diffrent gameplay style; so if you ever got bored of one you could swich to the other, keeping you enthralled...

BE are nanotech, while NF are bioengineered... The asymetrical balance could be as easy as giving Physics to BE and Biology to NF...

 

I know what u mean with all of this its like in COH with Allies and Axis, but it could be ALOT of lines of code and alot of time spent just getting the balanceing right. it would be nice to see more variaty in the factions but at this momment in time the devs are too busy prepareing for 3.0 with aircraft and 4.0 (i think) for ships. (textureing takes a hell of long time to do something simple ive watched)

 

in 1.04 the two factions were more different than now.. It got changed because of balancing in 1.06/7, I believe...

 

In what way were they differant? :confused:

 

The balance between the two factions, BE and NF AR's were very different... but the balance was all over the wall because of diffrent situations you could end up with...

 

Especially with completely customisable vehicles.

all matchmaking goes out the window when you can get a 3phase heavy with all sorts of crap.