Constructor Enhancement?

[TheWall]

Battlezone the way it is, more often than not, puts a premium on staying home, base sitting, and creates a very difficult imbalance to overcome as an offensive player. Primarily because of fixed Geyser locations, and both the long supply lines that it requires to maintain an effective offensive strike, and the long road home in case of an end-around attack on your main units (REC).

"WHAT IF", a Constructor was able to DRILL up to 3 Geysers!??!? WHAT IF the Constructor could BUILD (IE - modify) a Spawn Point?!?!? That would put an end to spawning players, add realistic, player independent strategies!

[bb1]

Battlezone the way it is, more often than not, puts a premium on staying home, base sitting, and creates a very difficult imbalance to overcome as an offensive player. Primarily because of fixed Geyser locations, and both the long supply lines that it requires to maintain an effective offensive strike, and the long road home in case of an end-around attack on your main units (REC).

"WHAT IF", a Constructor was able to DRILL up to 3 Geysers!??!? WHAT IF the Constructor could BUILD (IE - modify) a Spawn Point?!?!? That would put an end to spawning players, add realistic, player independent strategies!

The repurcussions of such would likely tear the fabric of space and time itself.

The people who are good already have about 6 bases on their way to attack you, so much so that it is insanity. They don't need anything

[Nielk1]

Isn't this exactly the public face of Spock's tirade against everyone else when it comes to this patch. Screwing it up royally and adding all the wrong things?

[bb1]

Isn't this exactly the public face of Spock's tirade against everyone else when it comes to this patch. Screwing it up royally and adding all the wrong things?

That's exactly the reason for my first line in my post You have wonderful things called recycler varients in bz2, but in bz1 it's WYSIWYG. It's a neat idea in certain cases, like moving a spawn point, but that kind of takes away from the "Bz feel" messing with the mechanics rather than the RTS. Plus, with this small community you can probably avoid anybody who spawn camps anyway. There's no place for that in a strat game.

Geyser drilling rig you mean? That was a fun ship to fly in that OC map! You'd deploy it and it would deploy a geyser. In general, maps are made a certain way by the map maker for an intended effect. Moon is a good description of that, with geyser sites all over and one main base one in the center.

[Avatar]

I was going to say, we did have geyser drilling Construction Rigs in BZ1 variants.  FON and I messed with all kinds of things along those lines 'back in the day'.  They totally screwed up any map, allowing you to just keep advancing on the enemy until you were on their doorstep.

The give/take of having to be both vigilant about Recycler defense AND out in the field to attack the enemy is what made the game exciting for me.  I can't tell you how many times Mower would bait me and, once I got my fleet to his base, start SP'ing my Recy to death back at MY base.  I can tell you that his Recy would be nowhere to be found in these situations.  He was a MASTER at luring my AI to their deaths and mortaring down my base in what seemed like seconds.

Old fart, I miss him.   

Anyway, as was said, there is the perfect tool to explore gameplay of this type in BZ2 Recy variants.

-Av-

[eddywright]

That's what mods are for, to try different things.  A lot of the permanent changes in BZ 1.5 started, dare I say it, in a mod.

Remember the uber mods of Tribes? I can't remember the name of it but one variant was a favorite of [TBZ] PK and it was in many ways better than the original. But it was a lot different than the original. It added sniper turrets (devastating), shields (looked too cool), platforms, portable stations, tons and tons of changes. So adding a constructor that can drill geysers would be different. If people like that flavor of BZ, they would play it. I don't think that one change wouldn't be enough to make a full mod but it could be included with BZ2 style scrap pools, different vehicles, new buildings, etc and become a full mod.

I can't understand the mentality that only the original is worth playing and anyone playing a mod is committing a sin against the BZ gods. Anyone who's played the new tanks in BZE (ie Birds of Prey) would appreciate how an old game can be new again. And anyone who's played BZC for that matter. I just hope the BZ purist spotlight doesn't get aimed at BZC when it's released...

Eddy

[bb1]

That's what mods are for, to try different things.  A lot of the permanent changes in BZ 1.5 started, dare I say it, in a mod.

Remember the uber mods of Tribes? I can't remember the name of it but one variant was a favorite of [TBZ] PK and it was in many ways better than the original. But it was a lot different than the original. It added sniper turrets (devastating), shields (looked too cool), platforms, portable stations, tons and tons of changes. So adding a constructor that can drill geysers would be different. If people like that flavor of BZ, they would play it. I don't think that one change wouldn't be enough to make a full mod but it could be included with BZ2 style scrap pools, different vehicles, new buildings, etc and become a full mod.

I can't understand the mentality that only the original is worth playing and anyone playing a mod is committing a sin against the BZ gods. Anyone who's played the new tanks in BZE (ie Birds of Prey) would appreciate how an old game can be new again. And anyone who's played BZC for that matter. I just hope the BZ purist spotlight doesn't get aimed at BZC when it's released...

Eddy

Shifter, Biohazard clan Unity (used to mod BZ too incidently- really fun mods! If you have biohazard battlezone PM me- I want to play that again), Renegades, football, annihilation, total air combat, the list goes on...

Of course, those were server-side mods and would automatically download to the player. This system was great, especially since today's games that try to do this often register in the 10s-20s of MB rather than the 1-2mb of mods of the past. I join a server to play, not to sit and wait 20mb on my slow DSL connection. Auto mod download is a very neat system, though, when not abused.

[eddywright]

I went looking for shifter and found TribesNext. Anyone try it?

I'll get it downloaded and see if we can get a game of Shifter up. Man, talk about epic battles...

Eddy

[Firestorm29]

Shifter, Biohazard clan Unity (used to mod BZ too incidently- really fun mods! If you have biohazard battlezone PM me- I want to play that again), Renegades, football, annihilation, total air combat, the list goes on...

Of course, those were server-side mods and would automatically download to the player. This system was great, especially since today's games that try to do this often register in the 10s-20s of MB rather than the 1-2mb of mods of the past. I join a server to play, not to sit and wait 20mb on my slow DSL connection. Auto mod download is a very neat system, though, when not abused.

I'm really interested in how this worked. Did that server side mod thing allow players to keep to the same rules to help stop hackers? Sounds like
a nice set-up to keep people running on the same mod without some jerk running with some tank that isn't part of the mod,

[bb1]

I'm really interested in how this worked. Did that server side mod thing allow players to keep to the same rules to help stop hackers? Sounds like
a nice set-up to keep people running on the same mod without some jerk running with some tank that isn't part of the mod,

It would download modified content of stock models and such, so you would probably have a tank with a custom weapon, or any mutation of that (like a quad chaingun with 4 chaingun models stapled together). As long as it used stock assets, it could be sent over internet.

[eddywright]

I did some searching and found TribesNext.  I downloaded the game and it worked with Win7 64-bit.  I had no clue how to play the game anymore but it seemed to be working fine.

Now to find Shifter server...

Eddy

[SkyNET]

Of course, those were server-side mods and would automatically download to the player. This system was great, especially since today's games that try to do this often register in the 10s-20s of MB rather than the 1-2mb of mods of the past.

Just TRY playing a match of Unreal Gold without downloading 50 megs of skins and crap. It's a shame, by the time i've downloaded the files, everyone's left the server.

[Red Spot]

One of the mayor cons of that system though is that you end up downloading stuff (you may not want) when you join a server. Quite often it can be a big pain to find out what exactly you will be/have downloaded.
I always liked the feature in SoF II, however if you try it nowdays you will be downloading more than actually playing a game .... 

[Blunt Force Trauma]

I can't understand the mentality that only the original is worth playing and anyone playing a mod is committing a sin against the BZ gods. Anyone who's played the new tanks in BZE (ie Birds of Prey) would appreciate how an old game can be new again. And anyone who's played BZC for that matter. I just hope the BZ purist spotlight doesn't get aimed at BZC when it's released...

Eddy

I think the 'mentality' of keeping with the 'purity' of the original BZ is an absolute ruse.

And the community is WAY too small to believe that it's all just a "purist's perspective". In other words, let's not dance around acting like we don't know why that excuse is used.

Let's see if and when 1.5 removes the game's easy exploits and the easier hacking, it gets the same treatment of being too "different" by that same VERY small group.

[SkyNET]

A lot of the time purists are just morons. "If something's broken, but the game gets tweaked to fix it, it's different so it sucks."