a class specific skill for the scout that would improve sabotaging -50% faster -buildings emit less smoke (but darker purple) -vfs and raxs take damage when a vehicle is built or someone spawns -radars slow down research and take damage every time new research is initiated or research finishes
This will totally unbalance the game and sabotaging is good as it is now. -50% faster it's already very fast, much faster than any other method of hurting the first part of the building. -buildings emit less smoke (but darker purple) This will just confuse players. Do we need 4 colours of smoke? (currently we have brown, black, purple) -vfs and raxs take damage when a vehicle is built or someone spawns This is SO unbalancing. north rushes on mvalley will never be the same and we won't like the change. radars slow down research and take damage every time new research is initiated or research finishes That suggestion was already mentioned in organize stuff. The bottom line was: even a small slowdown would unbalance the game. So... no.
I don't think this would really work. As others have noted... * Sabotage is already so fast that a speed increase is mostly symbolic; it isn't going to make a difference. I don't think it would impact the balance, no, but what's the point? On its own it's never going to be worth a skill, and... * Letting spies damage the building below 50% (even indirectly) is a big no-no. They're already the best at taking out the first 50%, at disabling some kinds of buildings (e.g. turrets) quickly, and have many other abilities. They don't need the power to do any more damage, or to destroy buildings on their own (even slowly). And if the building can't be destroyed or only takes a hair of damage... what's the point? Still not worth a skill. * I actually support a (very) small research penalty for sabotaging the radar, just because I think that such an important building should have to be defended, even against spies. But I don't think it should be a big thing, mostly symbolic... not enough to be imbalancing. And whether or not that's worth a skill, I think it's very bad to make it require a skill; that's too confusing to everyone else (is research slowed down, or isn't it?) * Finally, the smoke, and all the optional 'additional' sabotage effects that only happen if you have the skill strike me as too 'fiddly'. They just seem like a bad idea... sabotage should have one set of effects so everyone knows what's going on when a building starts smoking, they shouldn't have to squint at it and guess from the color of the smoke.
This effect is so slow that it doesn't have any gameplay impact (except perhaps on turrets, which are practically dead when sabotaged anyway and aren't covered by these suggestions.) It isn't that I think that very slow, slight damaging would be a problem, it's that the kind of slow, slight damage that is balanced for the scout is not going to be worth spending a skill on. Not really. You can crawl along the side of a building as you sabotage it, and you'll have finished long before you can get near anyplace else. If there are no enemies nearby, you have as long as you want; if there are enemies nearby, they're just going to repair the building soon anyway. And if you try to do this during an attack by the rest of your team, when you get down to it... you're sabotaging, not ripping things to pieces with explosives. A scout should take some time, you shouldn't be able to run through with people shooting at you sabotaging the entire base just by tapping it with your pinky. Taking down a base quickly is an engineer's job. I'm not sure you understand how sabotage is intended to be used... you're supposed to sneak in just ahead of an attack to sabotage things so your team can quickly take them out, or to sabotage things that nobody is using or paying any attention to. Adding the (very slight) additional sabotage effects you've suggested wouldn't help with this... if you're stupid enough to sneak into a base the enemy is currently using and start sabotaging while your team isn't actively attacking, the enemy is just going to kill you and fix the base right up. People who try to infiltrate enemy bases at the wrong times (when it doesn't do any good) suck, and this would just encourage them... While I don't think they'd be unbalancing, specifically, they strike me as small and fiddly, unintuitive things that would just confuse people and add another unnecessary layer of complication to sabotaging without adding any real depth or functionality to the game. Has it occured to you that maybe the problems are with your suggestions and not with us?
The parts I liked were: Maybe not rax's, but i'd defo like to see that on VF's, so all those fools dont go around ignoring the vf's health and spawning crappy dead tanks. On rax's it'd stop sabouteurs getting an incredible influx of enemy infantry around them, just after they've started their attack run...it could work. I'm not sure whether or not it takes extra time already, but damage can't hurt really. Maybe this should be expanded to give even more buildings damage with use while saboutaged - armoury loses health after every 5 uses of ammo crates (or 1 health crate), repair pad loses health after an amount of repairing/reconfiguring. Possibly even have a 2nd type of saboutage for turrets, where they would still work, but quickly be destroyed through use - ML's would probably take 1/4 damage each shot, MG's probably 1/4 per 10 rounds.
Avair, you usually come up with good suggestions. this ain't one of them. Why does sabotage need to be pimped? all that it will encorage is more people to go around on their own, randomly sabotaging the enemy stuff, without actually being useful to the team. sabotage currently CAN be used like that, but it's not the whole point of it. it doesn't actively encorage people to behave like that, as this skill would. what's worse is that this skill seems to be aimed FAR more at rambo scouts that, while serve a big purpose in some situations, in normal games amazingly powerful, it encorages people to go around on their own. why do I say this? because this skill seems all about encoraging the long time lasting effects of the sabotage. buildings take more health damage as more people spawn throughout the game. radars take damage. That means that it has absolutely NO USE to a scout actually working with a team, sabotaging a building so that his team can kill it quicker, because there wouldn't be any spawns/ research. the whole things sounds like you want to buff and encorage players to wander around the enemy base, sabotaging things, instead of helping the team.
Sandbag is right, as usually... This suggestion, if implemented, would lower the average level of teamplay. This also has a motive of super-weapon that would allow scout to kill buildings almost like Tanya in "C&C: Red alert". Currently, sabotaging can be a problem. I've seen this situation a few times already: NF scout hides in BE VF. Its easy to get Yourself compleatly invisible and keep sabotaging the VF when BE repairs it. It is very hard to find and kill such an invisible scout. The best method is to go scout, take enchanced senses as Your skill, buy a HE tank and shoot at the VF untill You kill the scout. I've seen commanders build a second VF because of that ("he can't cover both of them!"). Now You also want VF to take damage when spawning vehicles. Really bad idea. Creative, but bad.
