Making the game a bit more tactical...

Hi:

I read somewhere else a post on how to make the game more challenging, and after a few posts and a Margarita, I came up with the concept of making it actually more fun as opposed to tedius.

I will shamefully admit, I got the idea from a promo video to the Mechwarrior game, where I saw a Warhammer Mech (Yes, I play mechwarrior too), dodging attacks from an Atlas by stepping out into the street and then quickly ducking behind a building. The video is very cool, incidentally.

And I wondered, would it not be nice, if we could dodge attacks by using cover? As it is, the code is set to check line of sight before you activate a power, and then when the power goes off, you get hit by the mob despite of range and line of sight. The only exception to this process are snipe attacks, in which the check for line of sight is done after power activation.

I would suggest to change all combat powers to be "wired" as snipe attacks are. This way we can use terrain tactics, and play a bit more intelligently and be rewarded for being tactically sound.

That is if a mob spot you and shoots you, but you are using Super Speed and he briefly saw you as you ran past his corridor, you no longer are forced to endure and see the remote guided, patriot missile quality vomit turning around corridors and eventually catching up with you and you getting barfed on; because the check to see if he is in range and line of sight would have been done after his power activation time.

Hugs

Stomy

If you have any otehr ideas on how to make the game mechanically more fun and interactive with terrain or what not, post it here! maybe be i17 we get something cool to make our playtime even more fun.

I really like the idea. The only thing that the devs would have to overcome is the idea that suppression would have to be removed for this work. It would not be very fun trying to take cover when you can't move fast enough to do so.

And, unfortunetely, the devs seem to want to keep us in the middle of a fight as opposed to playing tactically.

I don't think this is a terribly good idea.

As it is the game can be trivially easy if you're aware of your team's strengths and weaknesses. And you can already use cover to avoid -additional- incoming attacks, if not dodge the ones coming at you.

One of my favorite things to do in City is lay traps. Whether it's trip-mines and caltrops with a time bomb in the middle or a tar patch, or the Earth Controller's plethora of Ground Target AoEs. I love dropping the powers and grabbing some cover, forcing enemies that are aggroed on me to run up to gain line of sight. They hit the patch and voila! Either they're blown up and slowed, debuffed and slowed, or debuffed, slowed, -and- held!

Part of why I love my new Dark Defender so very much. Drop Darkest Night on a Lieutenant, then pull back around a corner to drop the tar patch. Wait'll the enemies get -near- the corner (in the middle of the tar patch) and then give the signal for the whole team to tear them apart. Meanwhile AVs can't even land a hit!

But putting the "Dodge" mechanic into the game would delay the damage function on ranged attacks until the animation loanded a hit. Think of Psi Blast's slow-moving volleys. How many players would die waiting for that thing to land, for one. And if the AI was reprogrammed to take advantage of it (I.E Duck for Cover) fights would be more realistic, but less -fun-!

Seriously! Think of a giant 8-man spawn of Council Soldiers. Lean, mean, and many. Now, before you can land a fireball, the group scatters to avoid the AoE. Single target gameplay becomes king of pretty much everything, and a perfectly valid and fun way to play (AoE based characters) are slighted for it.

And it would only further add to PvP imbalance. Think of the handful of ranged attacks a tanker or scrapper gets. Short-ranged (comparatively) and slow-moving projectiles. Blasters would become even more horrendously broken...

So yeah. While I understand the idea, in effect it's not a good thing.

-Rachel-

You make some good points Rachel. The game was designed around fighting huge spawns of enemies, not one or two at a time, even in large groups of players, to where tactics such as this would not play out well. I didn't consider the slow attacks like psi blast, and yeah, that would suck. Who is going to stand there and wait for it to hit them? haha.

Sometimes I make sense even when I don't think I'll be able to.... O.O

Seriously. I was half-awake when I wrote that.

-Rachel-

Which half?

See my Guides and Tutorials

Left...?

-Rachel-

From what I've gathered one of the main reasons for determining hit at the beginning of the attack rather than the end is because that way it can be done 100% on the server. That removes the possibility (to a much greater degree) of client-side code-hacks getting a much better chance of hitting. If you reverse the sequence then it's much easier for hackers to change things in their favor. That's also why there are certain other features, such as movement, which have a "server is always right" ruleset. It makes it much harder for hacks to give people an advantage.

Robin

Quote:

Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha ...I have the patience of a coffee-fueled flea...

Dynamic fight systems are very exciting, but they have their own rulesets and requirements. For one thing, projectile speed is VITAL, as is attack animation time. Only some of our attack animations are even taken into consideration, and that's done strictly on the DPS side of things. Attack travel speed isn't taken into account for absolutely anything at all.

Look at your average FPS game and you'll spot what's good and what isn't very quickly. Even in third person shooters, attacks fire INSTANTLY and attacks that travel fast (or even instantly) are much more effective than attacks that move slowly. Even something as simple as a very fast but still not instant attack will require you to lead a moving target. Trust me, I've tried. It's not easy. Slow-moving attacks, though, like your typical Quake rockets, are hell to hit someone with at anything but very close range, and even that's down to splash damage more so than actual direct projectile impact.

Which brings us to the other problem - here in City of Heroes, we have EXTREMELY slow-firing attacks, very few of which have any meaningful area of effect. Our attacks are constrained by animation time and recharge time, and even at the best of times, no-one can manage more than an attack every second or two. I had a list of UT2004 weapon fire rates a few years ago, but off memory, the Link Gun did something like 10-20 shots per second, and it was STILL really hard to aim, despite its projectiles being rather very fast and very powerful.

There's a reason automatic weapons have been favoured, historically. It's simply easier to hit moving targets with a machinegun than it is with a rifle, especially when you have to fire it on the assault (hence, the term assault rifle). In City of Heroes, we are all essentially armed with catapults, trying to hit fast-moving targets. We ain't gonna.

And how do you even target in a game that has dynamic combat like this? You can't really rely on current-game targeting, because the game would just hurl your fireball at where the enemy is when you throw it, meaning you can never hit a moving enemy. You can have the computer try and calculate a leading path, but with the speed with which enemies can change direction, this is largely meaningless anyway. So you're left with a cross-hair style targeting system where you put your attacks where you point. Even if this wasn't nigh-on impossible thanks to the balance of the game, currently, you're still going to alienate a LOT of player who came to City of Heroes because it was NOT a twitch-based game. Trust me, there are a lot of them. There are plenty people who have trouble walking through a door or jumping over a gap. How many would want to use dynamic targeting?

And then there's server ping. For a game with dynamic combat to work at least reasonably well, you need ping of no more than about 50-100 ms. As of the typing of this message, my average ping in City of Heroes is 250-300 ms, and that's on an East Coast server. On West Coast servers during prime time, I can get anything from 350 all the way up to 500 ms sustained ping. That's half a second between me pressing a button and something happening on the screen. This is not conducive to dynamic gaming.

It's a neat idea, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's something that can work in an MMO environment until speed and quality of connection are vastly improved, and even then, I'm not sure it's something everyone will even want, or be able to handle.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sam makes a lot of good points here.

I'm not against the idea, but I am forced to agree with him that it isn't really feasible or practical for the combat system we currently have.

If they had coded dynamic, tactically based combat into the game from the start it might have worked.

The catch to that is: If they HAD done that, would the game have been as successful as it is? A LOT of players like this game precisely because they don't need split second reflexes.

How long do you figure a 48 year old mother of 3 with carpal tunnel will continue to play if suddenly her reaction time and reflexes determined whether her character lived or died?

It would be great for your average 19-25 year old gamer, but what about the older crowd who didn't grow up playing twitch games that trained their reflexes to react in such situations?

[ QUOTE ]
Sam makes a lot of good points here.

I'm not against the idea, but I am forced to agree with him that it isn't really feasible or practical for the combat system we currently have.

If they had coded dynamic, tactically based combat into the game from the start it might have worked.

The catch to that is: If they HAD done that, would the game have been as successful as it is? A LOT of players like this game precisely because they don't need split second reflexes.

How long do you figure a 48 year old mother of 3 with carpal tunnel will continue to play if suddenly her reaction time and reflexes determined whether her character lived or died?

It would be great for your average 19-25 year old gamer, but what about the older crowd who didn't grow up playing twitch games that trained their reflexes to react in such situations?

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey, I grew up with twitch games and I'm no good at them.

Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, I barely get by. Team Fortress 2? I prefer the Medic; he doesn't require much twitching, just hosing my team down with my HP gun and hiding behind the Heavy. Couldn't do Counter Strike to save my soul.

The points that are being brought up against it actually make no such case.

The OP suggests that line of sight be calculated at the end of animation rather than the beginning, not some sort of FPS system where you have to lead targets.

Unlike what he said, this would not stop "homing blasts," but it would make them less common.