Neon: Minor Abilities for Factories

quote: Gunships: Can fly for energy slowly.

Nah, that's jumpfac. :P

I'm unsure how this looks from a technical standpoint. IIRC facs can't receive orders themselves because these instead go to the waypoint queue for units (see how jumpfac works with jump).

Lately I was toying with the idea of morphable gunship plant that would transform into a Krow since Krow is already a strider class and it just doesn't match the metal/size class of units built outside of striderhub. The bloody thing is even bigger than the factory its build in!

morphing would preclude any nanos assisting construction wouldn't it

gajop
I think that's a valid concern. My response would be that these mechanics, while being relatively small in power level, can be skillfully exploited/played around, rewarding creativity. I'm not sure about Quant's rule, since you would be building on the factory's strength while also mitigating a weakness. Yes it would make facs technically more general, but paradoxically, this would be through further specialisation. This would not result in homogenisation of units or gameplay (except arguably in the defensive use cases), and would grow the individual identities of the factories.

My thinking is that, with many other games, I find mastery to be in expert use of the smaller elements to accrue advantages. The clearest example I can think of is Magic: the Gathering, where lands that do even a small amount more than basic are consistently in very high demand. It's very satisfying to swing the course of a game with a seemingly meaningless ability.

If such a thing were implemented, abilities that can be used defensively would need to be very carefully balanced to prevent them overshadowing statics.

Sprung
I had no idea that's how it worked. So I can Que pyros to jump up cliffs from production?

Orfelius
If there was a good transformation animation I could get behind that. Take the price down by 500 and have you sacrifice the factory? This would also prevent team krow rush strategies though, which, depending on your opinion on those, could be an upside or a downside. I personally find krow rushes unfun unless I'm the dude who ends up with a krow. It makes one team do nothing with the exception of the krow pilot, and forces the other team to deal with krow instead of playing the game they wanted. Building dedicated AA is no fun at all.

quote: So I can Que pyros to jump up cliffs from production?

Yes. But remember Moderator etc will ignore this.

quote: (free djinn) sounds disgustingly good

Throughput could be limited and worse than a real Djinn.

quote: Heavy tank: small pewpew sidearm just like their worker. It's a pain in the arse for HT to defend against factory snipes and it feels unfair when they've also got an expensive worker and not light raiders.

Nice stealth necro.
The leveler sidearm is reborn.



Also more seriously, you do realize defenders exist? They are good at defending, as the name would suggest. People are just greedy and don't build defense, but this is a problem with the player, not the game.

If you arm a factory people are going to factory plop rush (perhaps even with a teammate sharing transports). The idea is ok but I have trouble thinking of reasonable bonuses for each of the factories. Shield for shield factory makes some sense and helps things charge. Intel-abilities for cloak does not make sense because cloaking a factory is pointless. Cloaking nearby units is usually pointless.

I think it is better to stick with factories which only do one thing: be factories. We effectively have a modular factory system at the moment and this is a system which gives a lot of choice. If you want an armed factory make LLT. If you want a shield factory make a shield. Leaving these things off by default gives the player the option to not spend their resources on it.

myself i personally kinda like having the ability to make strong units like crab in a starter factory..

And yeah Aqua, just giving it the abilities of an immobile djinn would be even more broken in teams. Even on large maps: Vindicator -> com drop near opposing start position -> amph lab -> teleport in everything else the team has.