The Energon Pub

From the wish list!

Discuss!

Absolute Zero wrote:
I'd like to see weapons start off as pretty basic, and then we can add on/change parts to the weapon. Some wouldn't really be a big deal, like putting a silencer/flash muffler on the barrel would more or less just be cosmetic, but would be cool for characters who are supposed to be sneaky assassins/infiltrators. Adjusting ammo capacity (not really a big deal in the current game) would be cool too. Changing barrel types for accuracy over damage, changing ammo type for specific damage types. There's a whole lot of stuff you could do just to the guns. Melee weapons you could do the same thing with, different blade types, different materials, different hand guards, different grips.

KoToR is a good starting example, so is Rainbow Six Vegas and Army of Two. If you add 4-5 variables, and a maybe a hundred tops to each variable, you have more possibilities then characters in the game. I'd really really like to see that.

This idea was mentioned way back in Glyphs day by ShockwaveUK, but his suggestion was that we had a single named weapon frame that could be customised to be either a gun or a sword but not both, and then could be swapped to the other at an energon/time cost, that went down well but Glyph wasnt able to implement it back then.

I do like the KOTOR-style individual upgradeable weapons though, would lead to a bigger choice.

There is another thing to think about; damage types. Glass Gass (ice), flamethrowers, electricity, corrosive, non-lethal (why?), armour piercing, high explosive, Vibrating (for swords), laser tipped (and of course lightsabers, thanks to SW:TF they're canon now) etc.

Think of the possiblities; Corrosive sniper rifles, flaming swords, high explosive toe-caps for Burn to greet the newbies with...



Im loving this idea.

make all WEAPONS equal.

moke stats/equips the variables. but don't make 1 uber equip

i really love how Adventure quest worlds does weapons. all weapons do same damage by level. a lvl 5 axe and a lvl 5 mallet do the same damage. its all about how you want the char to look. to make variety some weapons are drops or certain shops only. you can upgrade your weapon at a shop to give your weapon a level and you can upgrade it. No more weapon drops above your level. find a "template" make the thing. you could also make some weapons deal static damage with some others a little more variable (15-25 instead of 20 for example) give equip slots to those for secondary ability's like more betters damage or stun or what ever you want and you have a balanced diverse set of weapons..

I still like the idea of our characters being able to carry more than one weapon, limited by the Firepower stat of course.

If all weapons are equal, what's the point of having weapons? The point is to make weapons that are great on their own areas, but have weapons that can counter them.

I love the idea of customizable weapons. Just the ammo packs could have a wide variety (ammos like Armor Piercing, Superheated (greater damage to organic alt. modes), Ion (slows the non-organic opponents down) or explosive bullets... there are lots of possibilities)

Personally, I'd suggest having level-based weapons that you customise, so that a low-level weapon base would allow for bog-standard weapon customisation (effectively what you would start out with), and upgrades in certain stats (firepower, skill, rank even) can unlock higher level weapons, which would allow for more upgrades, the ability to add more attachments to said weapon, or increase or narrow the damage range of the weapon, for example.

Psychout wrote:There is another thing to think about; damage types. Glass Gass (ice), flamethrowers, electricity, corrosive, non-lethal (why?), armour piercing, high explosive, Vibrating (for swords), laser tipped (and of course lightsabers, thanks to SW:TF they're canon now) etc.

Think of the possiblities; Corrosive sniper rifles, flaming swords, high explosive toe-caps for Burn to greet the newbies with...

Damage types would work well in adding a level of stratagaem to the game, flame weapons could have inceased damage output, electric weapons may immobilise the enemy, armour piercing may negate enemy armour (to a point), stuff like that. If they take up slots on your weapon, the challenge would then be to utilise the best ability for that weapon.

By the way Psychout...

Psychout wrote:Vibrating (for swords)

...I know what you mean, I just can't get the thoughts out of my head now!

I know this is going to be a TL;DR post, but bear with me.

Typically, the way customizing weapons works involves finding drops. New weapon drops, and/or weapon upgrades. Combined with the Battle Map, and gathering raw materials for armor and even minicons (if we go back to that part, which was a good idea) aquiring new weapons or parts shouldn't be a major difference. And as much as people hate the arena, it could be a reward for it. I know that wont really go over well, since people hate the arena, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Now, I agree that we shouldn't have one best weapon, but we need more diversity then "all weapons for a level do the same damage." But, this should be pretty easy to offset, just by variety.

Damage doesn't need to be a constant, however, there should be a set range for most weapons. I hate to say it, but DnD is a very good example for this. Weapon damage, for starting/base weapons, they generally range from 1/4 up to 2d6 damage, with top end being I believe 2d12, before you get into special weapons. Special weapons have additional abilities. Like flameing swords.

So, how do we set up special weapons? Pretty simple. Randomized drops. Uh.. wait, can't do that can we... Adding expansion slots to weapons then. If we limit slots to five per weapon, then every two ranks of firepower can unlock a new slot. Not all expansions need to boost things, some can also have offsets. Increasing damage, but decreasing accuracy is an example.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples to pull from. Most follow the simple DnD formula. Basic weapons, as you proceed in level/gold/booty, better weapons become available. As you continue progressing, weapons kinda reach a peak where base damage is pretty consistant for that weapon/group, add on abilities increase your to hit chance and damage range, as well as critical hit threat range, or sometimes deflection/reflection/block chance.

Carrying multiple weapons is cool. Most characters characing more then one weapon are dual weilding twin weapons. Twin pistols, twin swords, twin batarangs, what have you. A majority of the characters with more then one weapon don't carry them. They're hard mounted to the body. Prowl/Blue(Silver)Streak/Smokescreen have a gun, then twin weapons mounted on their shoulder/neck. Sideswipe/Red Alert carry a gun and have a shoulder mount launcher. I would think strenght and skill would determine how many weapons a character can have mounted to hard points on their body. Simular to armor.

Speaking of armor, there's no reason a simular system couldn't be developed for armor. After all, to install armor, we're basically putting a stripped down frame into a new skin, and in some cases (mostly Primes) wear an additional suit of armor with additional hard points for weapons.

There's a lot of room for customization in HMW, because of the source material it's based off of. Even if we only limited the weapon add ons as names from weapons of the series, that's still a ton of options.

And, you could use weapon slots to give the characters abilities not covered by tactics but are from the canon, such as Skywarp's teleport or Hound's holograms.

this was actually one game that i wanted to be nothing like DnD. Don't get me wrong. name a 3'rd ed title and i got it memorized. i know first and second ed too. how about modern. but the d20 system is a far from perfect system.

but i get that its a realitively easy starting point to base things off...

Name_Violation wrote:this was actually one game that i wanted to be nothing like DnD. Don't get me wrong. name a 3'rd ed title and i got it memorized. i know first and second ed too. how about modern. but the d20 system is a far from perfect system.

but i get that its a realitively easy starting point to base things off...

Even if we don't use d20 damage ranges, we still have to have a random variable for damage, otherwise it's almost always going to come down to who gets their hit off first if damage is static, and that'll blow big time. Personally, I like d20 damage range more then d6, with it's constantly expanding d6 damage.

However, as neither a moderator or a programer, I have no real decission on what gets used, I was simply using DnD as a reference point, since it's a pretty familure system to probably a majority of the people who play either RPGs or tabletop games.

My thought process on this goes along the lines of, a weapon should have a base damage range according to type and level of (skill of) the character and then be customizable with available slots. So one way of looking at it say Prime picks up Sludge's sword. Now either he does awesome damage with it because he's a top level character, or he does crap damage because Prime doesn't know what he's doing with it. Maybe take a note from the Elder Scrolls series and make skill with a particular weapon usage based. If going that route maybe make Skill and aggregate stat that's based on your weapon skills. IMO IF we can get that hammered out then the rest of the discussion could be a lot more productive.

My other thought was reserving specific types of weapons for specific ranks or factions. Like for example, arm mounted weaponry is primarily available to the seekers, or shoulder mounted missiles are primarily the domain of the Autobot cars, or Fusion Cannons are primarily found on Decepticon leaders. Now obviously we'd need to make sure it's balanced so everyone has the same number of slots regardless of (or maybe depending on) character type and rank. And it'd be a major plus if said slots allowed only thing that made some sort of sense. Because as amusing as it might be to have groin mounted light sabers it's probably not a good thing to allow.

Another note is will the combat logs say where it's firing from? So instead of seeing Megatron hits Optimal Optimus with a Flame Thrower, maybe make it Megatron hits Optimal Optimus with a Hand mounted Flame Thrower.

As I touched on a little maybe make specific weapons mountable in specific places. Like Energon Inferno's Forearm mounted cannon, G2 Megatron's Shoulder mounter Fusion Cannon, or Shockwave's gun hand.

Apart from that those things above it seems to me that the rest is ammunition. While some weapons are seen as always shooting the same thing, Megatron's fusion cannon, a lot of the other's weapons normally had "non special" blast it could do that had no side affects. I can only thing of a couple of times when Starscream's null rays actually nullified anything for instance.

You're absolutely right, I think, Skill absolutely should control how effective you are with a weapon, whether it's broken down to a weapon group like Elder Scrolls, or all weapons, skill should play a more prominate roll.

Gotta remember to keep focased...

However, some of the weapons you've mentioned, I think should require a strength stat to weild. After all, I couldn't picture Rumble or Bumblebee being able to effectively fire Megatron's fusion cannon.

First off and slightly off topic, The Megatron's fusion cannon is probably a bad example to show strength being a requirement. Dimply because Brawn used it once and got knocked way back and he was fairly strong. (Tech spechs give him a 9 in strength. Dang that little bugger didn't look it.)

Back to the topic at hand, most of the melee type weapons were just that, melee type weapons. Why do some of these have a firepower requirement? If anything they should be the ultimate in Skill or a Skill/Strength hybrid. If weapon frames had different stat requirements or were boosted by different stats then maybe more diversification of stats would be encouraged. Presumably with the "weaker" stats getting more powerful frames/upgrades or giving better bonuses to weapons overall.

For the sake of example, maybe Autostinger's stun gun requires say 4 Firepower, but has its effectiveness boosted by his Intelligence. (Which is a rather nice 8.) So as his Intelligence gets upgraded it would stun for longer periods of time.

Maybe have it so we buy the weapon frames (IE the base weapons), but the special abilities and ammos for them need to be found after a victory. Like AZ described in his post (that I've quoted the pertinent part of)

Absolute Zero wrote:Typically, the way customizing weapons works involves finding drops. New weapon drops, and/or weapon upgrades. Combined with the Battle Map, and gathering raw materials for armor and even minicons (if we go back to that part, which was a good idea) aquiring new weapons or parts shouldn't be a major difference. And as much as people hate the arena, it could be a reward for it. I know that wont really go over well, since people hate the arena, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Absolute Zero wrote:You're absolutely right, I think, Skill absolutely should control how effective you are with a weapon, whether it's broken down to a weapon group like Elder Scrolls, or all weapons, skill should play a more prominate roll.

I've said on several occassions that skill should play into accuracy when it comes to weaponry. I remember the arguements that Tammuz and Glyph (and myself to a lesser extent) used to have about that subject (Glyph favored speed for accuracy, while Tammuz was fervently for skill).

And what if Intel (and Courage?) would give the weapon requirement, and the different stats would give how efficient you could be with a weapon?

For example, melee weapons' damage would be influenced by strength, but each weapons damage output-strengthening would be different (for example, a Energo-Cutlass would have 1 extra point of damage for every strength, but a Claw would be benefitted for 1-2 extra damage?)
Skill could give a general better accuracy for both melee and ranged weapons, while giving better damage for some weapons (sniper rifle, etc)
Speed: faster attacks, the usual

That's another thing I believed in: strength should have some effect on skill-based weaponry. I'm not sure how much courage should effect them, though, except to launch more attacks. Intelligence probably should have a minor effect on some weaponry with skill, IMHO.

Spectral Dragon wrote:First off and slightly off topic, The Megatron's fusion cannon is probably a bad example to show strength being a requirement. Dimply because Brawn used it once and got knocked way back and he was fairly strong. (Tech spechs give him a 9 in strength. Dang that little bugger didn't look it.)

Brawn's not only smaller than Megatron as well, but Brawn also wasn't designed to carry a weapon with a killer of a recoil. I gather Megatron's extra weight (no pun intended) and more balanced systems counteract the recoil of his cannon.

I thought that with more courage, more deadly or dangerous weapons could be wielded (for example, weapons with explosive warheads or Cosmic Rust/Virus-enchanced weapons)

Hmmm... on second thaught, those properties could be given to weapons by added parts (Cosmic Rust Enchanced Blades, and such...) Opinions?



EDIT: As for Brawn using Megatros gun: How about every weapon could be wielded under the requirements, but they would receive negative modifiers if you do? (just like in Fallout, if you use a str 7 weapon with 4 strength, your accuracy would be a lot worse than using the gun properly)

Were getting somewhat off-track here. Remember that the weapon mechanics will be however Moggy fits it all together and how the complete set of stats fit together - and whilst these ideas and theories are great, that part of the game is already well under constructon.

I totally agree that strength, courage and intel should play a part in what weapons can be wielded by whom - so should rank - but mechanics for a balanced game will always need to be considered, as we dont want to end up with 1 stat having too many functions like speed does currently.


What we're concentrating on here is how the games weapons should be styled, so Ill let you into a secret: Moggy does want weapon upgrades to be an eventual possibility for the game. Therefore, what we're interested in is how you would prefer the upgrades to work... do you want to start with a basic sword and add a 'flame' upgrade to the blade that does heat-related damamge in the KOTOR-stle, have a Judge Dread lawgiver-type weapon that whilst fixed to set functions can be switched between its different payloads, would you prefer a generic weapon frame that can be upgraded to anything given the time/resouces, or is there a better option we havent explored yet?

Weve had some great suggestions so far, but there is always space for more.

In my not always humble opinion.

Diablo 2 slotted weapon style would be the best. It's a mix of a generic frame work and starting with a basic weapon and adding to it.

You can go with generic sounding weapons, long sword, short sword, gladius, bastard sword, broadsword, two hand sword, hand and a half sword, katana, dai-katana, ninja-to, scimitar, rapier, honestly, I could keep going. But, for the most part, each weapon does about the same damage. The bigger ones do more, the lighter ones do less. From these 'generic' starting types, you can get x# slots as you progress in level or firepower. As you get more slots, you get to install upgrades on the weapons. Twin, flaming, burst, ice, electro, sonic, keen, crystal, damascus, serated, wave, etc.

Guns you can do the same with, though to a lesser extent since there isn't as many gun types are there are sword. Sling, crossbow, long bow, short bow, shuriken, dart, revolver, pistol, rifle, carbine, light machine gun, heavy machine gun, I'm sure there's other types. Then upgrades could be the same, as well as chromed, smoothbore, dual barreled, explosive, corrosive, long barrel, sawed off, snubnose, magnetic, blaster, ion, ect.

With multiple slots, you could ensure that no weapons on any bot should be the exact same, just because of enough options.

I was thinking more along the lines of COD4: Modern Warfare.

You can get perks that modify the base weapons (ex stopping power = more damage), you could encase a shell in plasma or something like that.

Also, you can get base weapon upgrades (ex M203 on M16 = some sort of explosive projectile on an energy weapon...etc) or a scope = greater accuracy...etc

For the swords, I like the idea of a vibro sword, or a flaming sword, what about Blazing sword (voltron ref there ).

What about different color schemes for the weapons? Albeit, I don't know how visible they will be but I would like to see color schemes, nothing better than a matching weapon for a color scheme of your character.

Just my .02