so, having watched the latest TerraTech Worlds stream [please steam to YT, Twitch is garbage]
I've had some thoughts about Gunbricks, or the ultimate expression: the Gunstair.
What is a gunbrick?
It's a problem throughout the whole life of the game:
IT's one of those large techs with just enough movement to get around or turn, and absolutely covered in guns.
and when you encounter them, they wipe you out.
Unless you ALSO have a gun brick.
Why is this a problem?
Because the only real defence against a gunbrick is a BETTER gunbrick.
sure, a small fast unit can probably zoom around behind them, but a small fast tech does not have enough firepower to do any real damage, and if you mess up once, you're gone.
To take out a gunbrick with 25 megaton cannons, you have to hit them with 25 cruise missiles, or similar.
It almost forces you to build gunbrick to survive.
It's a First Order Optimal Strategy [FOOS] meaning 'if you don't do it this way, those who do will kick your butt.'
Now clearly after the looong discussions back in the day, the devs have decided to put a stop to it.
Because it's no fun if you are scooting around in your fun an zippy tech with a machinegun on top, and you come around the corner into an invulnerable block of guns that blows you off the map in one salvo.
And it's no fun being forced to build the same and slowly trundle around in a gunbrick in order to live.
Well, here are some ideas about how to keep techs small to medium sized and fun, and stop people wanting to, or NEEDEDING to build gunbricks in order to survive.
Bases:
I've had some thoughts about Gunbricks, or the ultimate expression: the Gunstair.
What is a gunbrick?
It's a problem throughout the whole life of the game:
IT's one of those large techs with just enough movement to get around or turn, and absolutely covered in guns.
and when you encounter them, they wipe you out.
Unless you ALSO have a gun brick.
Why is this a problem?
Because the only real defence against a gunbrick is a BETTER gunbrick.
sure, a small fast unit can probably zoom around behind them, but a small fast tech does not have enough firepower to do any real damage, and if you mess up once, you're gone.
To take out a gunbrick with 25 megaton cannons, you have to hit them with 25 cruise missiles, or similar.
It almost forces you to build gunbrick to survive.
It's a First Order Optimal Strategy [FOOS] meaning 'if you don't do it this way, those who do will kick your butt.'
Now clearly after the looong discussions back in the day, the devs have decided to put a stop to it.
Because it's no fun if you are scooting around in your fun an zippy tech with a machinegun on top, and you come around the corner into an invulnerable block of guns that blows you off the map in one salvo.
And it's no fun being forced to build the same and slowly trundle around in a gunbrick in order to live.
Well, here are some ideas about how to keep techs small to medium sized and fun, and stop people wanting to, or NEEDEDING to build gunbricks in order to survive.
- Make armour really strong. Like 3 times as strong as it is now. Because RN, armour is nice, but it's not strong enough to really bother with. Because any place you can put armour, you CAN put a gun. And guns are TOUGH so they are basically armour that also shoots.
- Make guns HEAVY. So heavy that people really don't want to put more than a couple on. So that people really want to switch to a better weapon, and not simply pile on more.
- Make guns tough, so you don't need a ton of them just to stay alive.
- Do something similar With batteries. make them powerful and large and heavy, so maybe you don't want more than 1 or 2.
- Anti missile systems. Guns miss, so speed is a defence. missiles don't, and also have long range. Missiles win. So missiles need something like ammo, or much slower reload times, and a relatively easy defence. Low level defences could be a missile jammer that stops the homing at a certain range, so the tech can dodge the missile. Bigger jammer blocks the homing at a longer range. Higher tech systems are things lika AM lasers/minigun batteries.
- Ammo. Have limited ammo on techs so a load of guns is to costly to maintain. If ammo is outside the scope of the game at the moment, just treat ammo like batteries that runs on a seperate scale. instead of filling up on energy points, you fill up on ammo points. and the ammo factory is just like a solar plant/miner. When you plant it it starts manufacturing ammo. and you can fill ammo boxes like batteries, and either transfer it with tesla coils or by carrying ammo boxes to the tech. if this is too bad, have guns use energy, and the battery limits the shots/guns.
- Make cabs great again. make cabs strong and tough, but only have 1 per tech. Also give each cab something cool and unique. Radar, battery power, more speed, more wheels etc. So you have a noticable difference between a GeoCorp cabbed tech vs a Venture cabbed tech [or TTW equivalent]
- One option that would give a distinct flavour to the various caps, would be if they each have specific boosts. Like the HE cab didn't drop blocks in combat and had 10% more gun range, Venture cabs reduced the carry weight of wheels, but seriously upgraded their top speed. Geocorp cabs have more attachment points capacity and boost wheel strength and traction, but lose a load of top speed etc.
Bases:
- make the base blocks really big and tough. But also so heavy that you don't want to use them on techs.
- Keep the SCU for convenience, but limit it. only allow access to the whole block inventory within range of the SCU, and make the SCU big and heavy, so you don't want to take it with you. have a very high level portable SCU with a LOOONG wind up time, to make base moves possible without being a massive pain in the butt. So that the old base can be packed away in the range of the big SCU and the SCU too, but this can be unpacked at the new location. Yes, this does mean that if you lose the last operational SCU you will need to build/buy/find a new one to get access to the entire block catalogue. IF the SCU
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