Misc thoughts
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:21 pm
Just a bunch of thoughts I've jotted down over the time. I'm in no way a pro and I mostly play RA team matches, but these should be pretty generic:
- Spy power down ability. In large maps with many opponents especially it is rather easy for a player to sneak a spy into an undefended PP and it's comparatively hard for the opponent to counter that. The reward is fairly large compared to the effort, given that 30 seconds (was it 30?) gives ample time to snipe the opponent's nuke/IC/chrono/whatever or otherwise lay waste to an incapacitated opponent. I believe the issue is two-fold:
- It is relatively hard to defend against this approach. But fair enough, one should deserve that in 1v1's.
- There is nothing that can be done to prevent/mitigate the effect before of after a spy has infiltrated a PP. In other terms, the aggressor has the advantage of initiative (which is fine and should be rewarded for that) AND the safety in knowing there is no way the opponent can counter that. Addressing this point might mitigate the unfairness (if any) of the former point.
- Keep the black out as is, but regain power at a certain rate per second. This would allow excess power to be a factor as it means any investment in excess power would give a return in terms of shorter blackout time;
- Disable all power plants in a radius of the affected one. Maybe not as intuitive and doesn't make sense when there is no concept of power transmission (a PP provides energy to everything regardless of where it's placed);
- Allow engineers to infiltrate PPs to restore functionality. A $500 investment which could pay huge dividends when needed.
- The power down slowdown factor seems to be a constant. I recall that in original RA and C&C it was proportional to your power down delta. I might be wrong, but in either case it would be reasonable that a 10% power deficit shouldn't cripple production as much as a 100% one (indirectly making spies a little more powerful).
- An auto-repair option. Most often than not (say 9 times out of 10?) you'll want to repair damaged structures. For the one you don't want repaired you can always cancel it (1 click) instead of ordering repairs for the other ones (9 clicks).
- Build-on-top-of-queue hotkey. Another QoL suggestion. Right now you have to cancel an entire queue of things in case you desperately need something built or re-built. Placing a build order on top of the queue with something as simple as alt + click shouldn't be an issue unless I'm missing something very obvious here.
- You can see enemy powered-down structures. Is this WAD? I don't think you should be able to know that (just as it was in the originals).
- You cannot see enemy repair icons. This is the opposite of the previous one. You can see the health of a structure at any given time, so its repair status represents publicly known information: the repair icon should be also displayed for consistency.
- Tooltips for GPS icons. Maybe it's just me, but in 2v2v2 and the like I always struggle to know which is which, and I'm not even colour-blind. Just a tooltip showing the owner (and maybe the team, even) of that structure/vehicle/whatever would suffice.
- Tooltips for superpowers. Same as before: it would be nice to check whose player/team a certain nuke refers to.
- Can't chrono deployed MAD tanks. I guess it's because they become structures. Would've been cool, sending a bunch of MAD tanks back to an opponent's base.