Hey all, NS is working again and with that here is another idea.

Purpose: To allow the player more choices.

The idea is simple, allow the player to tweak the stats of the life form he wishes to evolve to. Each life form has three stats for this purpose: Vitality (Health), Power (Damage) and Mobility (Speed). By selecting one of these three (or none at all) via pop-up menu after evolving you can decrease the other two stats to have a single more powerful one. This can allow a player to customize his alien to do a specific task or change nothing at all by using default stats. Here is the example (NOTE THIS, this is just a example) of how it would work.

Only Lerks, Fades and Onos can specialize.
The cost of Specialization is 3 Resources

Specializations

Vitality = +25% Max Health, -10% Max damage, -15% Max Movement Speed
Power = -15% Max Health, +20% Max damage, -5% Max Movement Speed
Mobility = -10% Max Health, -10% Max damage, +20% Max Movement Speed

Fun Note: You will get 0 not only from adding up each Specialization, you also get 0 from adding up the Max Health of Vitality,Power and Mobility. Same thing for Damage and Speed.

Comments?

Edit: Fixed some numbers.

It’s a really cool idea but why not make it free as at the moment you have one thing boosted and two things deboosted

vote yes

I was thinking, should damage and speed be worth more then health in terms value to value?

For example:

1% Damage = 1.5% Health
1% Movement = 1.25% Health
1% Movement = 0.75% Damage?

If so then Vitality would look something like this:

Vitality = +25% Max Health, -10% Max damage, -15% Max Movement Speed
TO
Vitality = +33.75% Max Health, -10% Max damage, -15% Max Movement Speed

Aren't these the purposes of upgrades?

All these stats are vital to survive. If a player chooses to specilize (which is a neat idea I think) he should not be penalized if he is still going to equal 0 in the end (in this case 5 res and time).

Speed is good but hit points keep you alive and damage kills people from hurting you.

Power is good but hit points keep you alive and speed allows you to be hit less, and get places faster.

Endurance keeps you alive longer but makes you a walking meatshield that's not very strong.

After typing those out it seems like speed and power would be used most often and endurance the least.

I think he's tlaking about adding this in addition to your normal nine upgrades.

Maybe this upgrade chain could be affected by chambers somehow? I see a loose corelation between endurance (DC), Speed (MC), and Power (SC, because of focus).

Way, way, way too hard to balance IMHO. This would be a sickening amount of work for a relatively small benefit.

i kinda like it.

would it be like a perma upgrade, or if you die, you re-get it?


and. another problem, is that if you do stuff like this, for some people it could reduce the need for chambers. why have 3dcs when you have 10% more health? why have MCs if you have 25% more speed?

also, would it affect base stats, or buffed by chamber stats?

and, you could already see what these would always go for, the onos get power, cause they are already slow, and have a ton of HP, and Mobility for fade and lerk.

i dunno.

not bad, but a little on the... maybe a bit much side...

Would the Vitality and Power specialization slow down Blink?

Part of 'knowing' the game is knowing how many bullets it takes to kill something, this takes that and completely obliterates it.

I don't even want to think how hard this would be to balance..

Just to counter Zunni's post for the sake of it, many of the units in modern RTS games have a damage "range" instead of a hard number, putting a little bit of uncertainty in the exact # of shots needed to kill something.

That said, I'm against this idea because I'm in the "isn't this what upgrades are for?" camp of people. I agree choices can be a very good thing, and (if you'll excuse me for once again promoting my own idea) I've already posted a suggestion or few regarding the alien tech tree and "specializing" for offense. I just don't think this vitality/power/mobility choice system is *quite* the way to go about doing it.

A simpler version, but still holds the same idea. Easier to balance too.

Alien Specialization 1.1

Only skulks cannot specialize.
The cost of Specialization is free but requires being near a hive!

Specializations

Siege= +25 % damage to buildings (all attacks), -25% damage to marines (all attacks), +10% more max health.
Assault= -50 % damage to buildings (all attacks), +25% damage to marines (melee only), -15% less max health.
Normal = Default Stats

Comments?