Breakable and Repairable Terrain
Grombie
Member
Manipulable Terrain
Map Terrain at the Moment
- Stagnant and Familiar --> Feels kinda of small and also predictable.
- Few Variables. Bushes, Walls, and Height.
- Moderate Player Interaction. Wards, Vision Spells, and Spell usage without requiring vision.
Destructible Terrain
- Sections of Walls that surround Center Top and Center Bottom creeps. These walls requires a lot of firepower to punch through. Perhaps a specialized unit could be made to destroy terrain. Juggernauts/Engineers?!
- Rocks: A new passage way from Cliffs to Titan arena. A destructible rock would be placed on the ramp for players to destroy and open.
- Tiny Towers in Titan Arena that can be destroyed to prevent the enemy from setting up during Titan Battles.
- Burnable bushes to increase vision; however, these bushes are not easy to destroy, since they are imbued with Atlas' energy. Instead of one bush to destroy, there are two bushes to destroy. So if one bush is destroyed, only half the vision will be revealed.
- All tier 1 terrain should have an average survival rate of 3 seconds against a late-game army and around 7 seconds against a mid-game army and 15 seconds against an early game army. Tier will be mentioned later
Repairable Terrain(A Hotkey to Repair/Build)
- Walls that are destroy can be rebuilt. Due to the construction technology of these races, walls can be repaired faster than they can destroyed to fill gaps in key areas. Only specialized units and heroes can build/repair things.
- Blockades/Marshes/etc. Players can create small obstructions in certain places to reduce vision or decrease the size of choke points. Perfect for luring an enemy to a so-believed escape route.
- Rocks from ramps on Cliffs can be rebuilt to remove a passage.
- Tiny Towers in Titan Arena. Perfect for placing wards for vision and small spell-casters(with Vespid support).
- Grow-able Bushes. Players can infuse bushes with Atlas' energy to regrow them at a fast pace.
- All tier 1 terrain should have an average build rate of 8 seconds with a hero/specialized unit.
Terrain Tiers
All terrain starts out at tier 1, the weakest. Every time terrain is rebuilt, its health is increased by 500, resistance is increased by 25 and construction time is increased by 3 seconds up to Tier 5. This is to increase the difficulty of annihilating walls and obstacles but also time to rebuild it. So by the end of the game, a map should have many holes/many obstacles.
* Tier 1 Rocks: Build time of 10 seconds. 2000 Health. 100 magic/physical resistance.
* Tier 5 Rocks: Build time of 22 seconds. 4000 Health. 200 magic/physical resistance.
Upgrades(In Either Core or Research Tab)
- Bastion Aura for Towers and Walls where players can apply a layer of 200 magical and physical protection. Protection lasts for 20 seconds. Takes 60 seconds to recharge. - Tech 2
Bastion Aura uses the same hotkey as Repairable Terrain. Just use repair on an already standing building to activate the Bastion Aura. - Siege Weaponry. Some units get bonus damage against terrain. - Tech 3
- Vision Aura. Players can apply an aura upon destructible terrain providing a very small field of vision. Each Hero may have a maximum of two charges and it takes 60 seconds to regenerate a charge. The vision aura dissipates after 30 seconds. Enemy vision auras can be displaced using a vision aura. - Tech 3
Vision Aura uses the same key as Vision Ward(G), but has a separate icon. Simply, G has different effects when used on the ground or on a wall. - Heavy Metal-works. Decreases construction time of terrain by 6 seconds. - Tech 4.
Comments
Coming from SC2, I've got PTSD-like flashbacks just by reading the title
. I feel that interacting with players is the best form of interaction. Destructible terrain, the way you propose it (with tiers, repairing, damage modifiers, upgrades) may introduce too much complexity in the wrong place. I think that Artillery's goal is to make the genre more accessible and focus on army vs army interactions.
I used to play Starcraft Brood War and destructible objects were a nice way to open another path to an enemy base. This is also very common in SC2; however, in my suggestion players can actually plug a hole without losing resources.
Foremost, this post is about increasing player vs player interaction. By introducing new paths, it's more likely that players would find each other more unpredictably. Armies could now have more space to fight or less space to be forced to fight. In addition, player intuition and strategic thinking is emphasized. Before Titan fights, players could destroy walls and bushes to decrease sniper cover or develop tiny towers to drop wards/saplings/small spell castors(with Vespid support). This will develop the interaction between players. For instance, Vela's counter play would be to deny wall destruction in the first place. Or have Grath use his bulls to charge at the moment the wall collapses to an enemy to catch him/her off guard. Both of which are possible strategies due to this proposed mechanic.
On the contrary, games without terrain are fairly straight-forward. A team develops a strategy, then follows up with their preferred compositions respective to early, mid, and late game. Once the game begins, there is really only one main objective, which is not to destroy the enemy base but to get as much resources as possible. This setup is really simple and not much thought goes into it. Go take resources either from your side or their side and deny them through micro and resupply through macro. If we take a step back and look at the larger picture, we can see flanking and surrounds being used to eliminate enemies. Why don't we take that concept and make it broader? Destroy blockades to attack opponents from severe angles or prepare an escape route before hand, so one can farm with little risk. Therefore, adding the ability to manipulate terrain should be seen as something positive to the strategy of the game even though it can tilt the game from its proper direction, but "Hey! I don't think it will happen."
Also, I do think that the upgrade/tier system matches for its complexity. The general idea of ever increasing strength is prevalent throughout the game. Titans, units, upgrades, and heroes all follow this format except for Towers and Creeps. So why should destructible walls and especially rebuilt walls not follow this concept? Furthermore, I don't think 4 upgrades and a progressive strength system would make things too complicated. At the moment for units, we have a screen filled with upgrades so adding two out of the four upgrades wouldn't hurt, especially if it's on a different tab such as the production tab.
Besides, I said this would be an implementation of all the options, which I could see to be excessive. Perhaps what you're interested in is only destructible walls that can rebuilt, which is a huge oversimplification of my proposal. I'm not against that. After all, this is a collection of my ideas of destroy-able and rebuild-able terrain.
By all means, I'm in favor of controlling and shaping the map. I think that I would prefer doing so more organically, through units, much like you would with BW tanks. There could be units that block paths, like SC2's raven turrets, swarmhost/broodlord that spawn free units with a limited lifetime and reach, tanks that efficiently defend an area, etc. In fact, we already have some units that kind of serve that purpose, such as Seedbots or Purifiers. It just has to become worth it to split your army into smaller chunks and focus more on map control, BW style.
Yep, I have nothing against simpler forms of destructible terrain as a means of reshaping the map without losing resources.