I'm going to make my own mod to experimentate with gunships, shields and what comes into my mind.
As my first beta is finnished I will invite you - and especially the devs - to see how it is played.
* I hope I can make some things smoother, easier to balance, more unique and open new strategies.
* I would like to give players more control over the unit behaviour - especially shields.
* Players should be able to decide that a sniper shots through the shield to hit a razzor, but not through the second shield to hit your other stuff etc.
* Players should be able to manually take control where the shield charge flows. but in an intuitive system,
* Gravity units should adjust their strenght to compensate (at least most of) the map gravity.
* Some AOE gravity units should even work equally on each unit - don't push light units harder than heavy ones.
* Gravity clouds could protect your base from raiders, but beware of the running energy costs and overdrive loss.
* Gravity clouds could be used to Transport a bulk of your units or let it rain raiders and puppies in front of enemy arty.
* * Surfboat successfully steals even moving units just now - the code can be used.
* A new gadget to calculate opposing forces is needed.
* Keep the current impulse implementation if possible.
* Gunships should be affected by gravity weapons - I hope to finally replace them by self-elevating land units.
* * They should fly at a higher altitude if you disable the weapons to bypass land forces (not dedicated AA).
* Air units should be a lot more fragile and fly at higher altitudes to bypass riot units and Felon/Moderator, AA a lot weaker and able to attack land forces with very low dps if they would be idle otherwise.
* * To compensate, air units should get some armor while landed (explain with closed engines, etc. but this will need modell improvements to be visible)
_______Pene Anni
First, I will give Penetrator and Anni 20 150 damage shots instead of a beam.
It will behave mostly like a beam and slash multiple glaives or fleas if it's 20 AOE is sufficient.
The main reason is it's OPness against the shield bot factory - how it works:
http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/source/detail?r=5247______Elevator
The Elevator is a modified Newton which shots missles into the sky and let them rain on enemies.
This projectiles releases anti-gravity to elevate units.
I am using AOE, but small units are affected to hard while strong units aren't.
Finally it should hit large units muliple times - like gauß, and use AOE which is released above the target.
edgeEffectiveness and damageFalloff could work - I keep experimenting.
But today a StarburstLauncher stopped firing after 100 shots without reason.
_____Shields
* I really dislike that Thugs only spend about 1/4 and slowly up to 1/3 of their shield charge to Felon.
* To balance this, I will make Felon cheaper, less powerfull alone, Thugs shield larger that it don't relay so hard on Aspis and some other changes.
* Other changes might come from my ideas here:
*
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/1578
