shield: it will have the same effect as walls, (hold back creeps but it will not destroy them. but not as long maybe 5-7 sec if at 100% energy)
it will have a range there is a little smaller or the same as the blaster.
when the creeper reach the shield, it stop, and begin to drain energy from the shield, but it don't hold back spores
if the cheaper touching the shield whit 0% energy it will be destroyed instant.
the creeper will drain the shield but will it be able to be resupplied? so that a shield that's only say less than half surrounded by creeper can hold it back indefinately given a surplus of energy and can it be moved like other turrets?
yes if it has a good energy flow to the shield it will be able to hold indefinitely, like if you base is surrounded with blasters or molters but it will not need as much energy. of course the more creeps there is the faster the shield will fail, and i don't think it shut be moveable be course it will make it to powerful.
I like a shield Idea :)
i think its ok if its moveable otherwise it'll be a bit of a waste to build it then you have to abandon it
I think it would be great (!) to have something like this.
I think of blasters as the ultimate moving (movable) shields.
If you had a choice when you placed it to either have an area effect (like with turrets) or a point to point effect (like with relays) then you could choose to block off a canyon or protect an object.
I considered a shield, or a force based unit during dev. Basically, it just pushes the creeper it doesn't destroy it. It basically acts like a mobile 'wall' projector, except it takes energy to maintain the mobile wall. I never implemented the unit, though, for time reasons and balance concerns. It certainly sounds like fun, but it would take a little bit of work to implement and to balance.
One model for the shield unit is that it projects a circular wall around itself. Another model is that is projects a line (vertical or horizontal), but you have to decide which way it faces. In both cases the 'wall' that is projected is thin, weak, and takes damage very easily.... it is just constantly being repaired by the unit projecting it (and that unit requests energy for every wall segment). Note that the shield wouldn't look like a wall it would just be modeled in the game in a similar way.
One legit concern is why you would ever build one (this relates to the balancing issue)? After all it doesn't do anything but delay the creeper's advance. A blaster might have the same effect as holding back the creeper while also destroying it in the process. If shields are too cheap, then everybody will build them and surround emitters with them early in the game. It may also make it too easy to create artificial lakes that can be mortar'd or drone bombed.
Anyway, if I get a chance it may be something I'll actually experiment with rather than just hypothesize about.
shields could be used in maps like loki where you have overwhelming amounts of creeper, a wall can aid your weapons in destroying the creeper while you build out collectors, granted its limits are many but if its balanced carefully enough i'm sure we can find uses for it
QuoteOne legit concern is why you would ever build one
well i don't use storage unit, i just built a lot of reactors :)
and i was hoping it will be a round shield.
Perhaps if instead of working like a wall it worked like an intermittent barrier?
So if you built a shield generator you would have to wait for it to charge up, then when it is finished charging it would project a barrier for 10-15 or that would stop, slow, or limit the creepers movement. Then the barrier would go away while it recharged.
Interesting idea....
Another idea (thinking along the lines of simplifying the concept as much as possible) is just a unit that is essentially a movable 'wall'. This unit doesn't blow up when touched, but it does stop creeper from flowing through it. It takes damage, but if connected to the graph it will request packets to repair itself. The unit might be a 2x2 square and you could fly them and move them around as you wanted to make a little castle for yourself. The repair cost would be 'not cheap'. The damage would also be proportional to the depth of the creeper touching it. So if you are holding back a 4 level high wall of Creeper you better hope you have storage on hand to keep the levy repaired.
I could see doing a unit like this since it would fit in with the game mechanic and interface pretty well.
When I read "shield" my mind went to energy shields rather than tower shields.
That is, a building that protects other buildings in range, giving them a blue bar of extra health that would be replenished with energy requested from Odin City.
Though, now that I think of it, that may be harder to implement.
actually you could just have a wall builder, it fills up on packets and once its full it sends out a little probe to build a bit of wall where to specify
Quote from: Aurzel on December 28, 2009, 09:02:33 PM
actually you could just have a wall builder, it fills up on packets and once its full it sends out a little probe to build a bit of wall where to specify
Almost like drones, but there would have to be some kind of limit, because otherwise it would be too easy
it will take time, it might need 30 energy packs for one wall, that is 30 sec per wall.
and when i play a map i use to build a lot of drones and then it gets easy to
exactly, it takes a while and besides the creeper can still erode the wall like normal so its not like you can create a creeper funnel of death or something
How about a shield generater that creates a circle around itself large enough to encompass 2-3 structures and be immovable.
The shield would require 10 energy packets to build and 50 more to charge and activate the shield.
When creeper hits this shield, it will be damaged equivalent to 0.1 energy per wall segment per level of creeper attacking it.
As for repairing the shield, it can request energy at the same rate as wepons, and therefore the shield can only hold back thinner layers of creeper without being destroyed.
Perhaps a similar option to weapons could be added to disarm the shield to be activated when in trouble.
This would make shields usefull for controlled areas where weapons don't have enoughpower to hold back creeper. I don't believe, used this way, they'd be powerful enought to really unbalance the game, just give players another option for controlling creep flow.
as far as memory serves, that was one of the original ideas in either this thread or the other shields thread
No.
_k
who you saying no to me or driven?
Driven.
_k
I'd prefer something like the drone that builds the type of walls we all know and love already.
I think if you could use it more as a redirect i.e. choose to points and it forms a shield wall maybe 5 pixels long that the creeper would have to flow around
Something like this -
(creeper moved here)
^ )
^ )
)-----##
) ##
)
thats a bad diagram XD
but i get what you mean, but then its like the terraforming isnt it?
No to shields, the fact that the health they have is enough, you should have to protect your buildings.
_k
I have an idea for shields. how about weapons have shield that are recharged by shield packets and when the shield runs down it gos to strcture. and say a collector or reactor can have a shield by diveting part of the energy to the shields. and storage relays and speed get shield packets.
going off wat the last guy said, how about each building can get a shield, but only once u build a unit that unlocks this, u get to choose which buildings get a shield, (shield on/off switch), and for each shield building u make u can have up to 5 or 10 other buildings with shields. the shield activating buildings cant have shields, and if a shield building is destroyed then the last 10 buildings to get shields would lose their shields. If not all possible shields r activated, say u have 3 shield buildings 10 shields each, and u have only 20 set to "on", then if a shield building is destroyed ud just lose the ability to turn "on" those 10 extra shields.
By the way, when a buildings shield is set to "on" odin city would send shield packets to that building, each packet would power a shield enough to keep it going against a 1 by 1, .1 deep creeper unit for 60 seconds, though every extra creeper would shorten that time like this:
60s divided by the amount of creeper pushing against it, so the more creeper pushing against a building's shield, the shorter amount of time a single shield packet will sustain the shield
Any buildings' shield would surround the square that the building is on and the 8 squares around it, this said, u could, in effect, create a wall of shields if u built the buildings close enough together, though ud need a lot of energy to keep them all going.
Odin City, weapons, and the shield buildings themselves would not be able to be shielded
if you make the shields on buildings invulnerable and not be able to make shield generators you could make some interesting puzzle and/or defense maps. one idea would be to have an emitter on the city and you have to defend all (four or five) shield generators to keep the shield on or you lose.
how about that if a shields health runs out and no packets are there to restore it it is like a spore exploding there?
I'm not sure u understood what I wrote but ill repeat it simply, u build one "shield" building that would act the same a storage/speed/reactor in relation to connections, it should cost 50 units to build, (same as a drone), and make it possible to activate the shields on 4 other buildings, the "shield" buildings would not have a shield at all, and neither would Odin City, (though it does have its health bar).
Recap:
It would cost 50 units
It would allow the activation of shields on 4 other buildings
Its connections would be the same as any blaster/motor/SAM
They don't have shields themselves, neither does Odin City
Only buildings within a certain range of a "Shield" building could have their shield activated
The range of this kind of "Shield" building would be the same as a SAM
It can move but when it does any buildings whose shields are unlocked by it would be shut off immediately
@djcian
The ability to lock a unit's movement would be nice on not only Odin City, (which we already have), but also on any weapon that has it, or on these shields if Virgil were to program them to work as I have described, (that is if he makes them at all).
Its an okay idea i guess althoe I donot like the moveing idea also i dont get it how you well you well get the shild in a direction unless you puts up 3 in a row and the middle one becomes strait.
the shield would not project between buildings, it would only project from each building that has theirs turned "on"
the creeper would not be albe to pass through the shield though it would not be destroyed by the shields either, and as long as the building that the shield is projected from is supplied with shield packets, the shield wont be destroyed either
So you could just set up a Shild building at the end of a side and the either one and you could do a shield there stupid idea
no no no, u build a shield building, then u can activate teh shield of any building within the "shield building's" area of affect, weapons, other shield buildings, and odin city would not have a shield at all, weapons already have health and so does odin city, a shield building would also be destroyed as soon as creeper touches it, (just like storage/speed/reactor/drone), without any other kind of occurance
so it adds a health bar to collectors and stuff?
in a way yes. ud see a glow of hopefuly a creator chossen colour when the shield is activated. a health bar would appear just outside the shield, that is for JUST the shield.
I dont like it sorry builder but what about the other things thay should have a shield bar insted of a shield unit and if you just keep on building shield units your blastes would be almost imortal.
shield units would be expensive, or did u overlook this fact, and to continue to support the shield(s) of any building whose shield is on and in direct contact with the creeper would be extremely draining of energy if not nigh impossible to sustain once the creeper being held back by a shield reaches higher and higher. also remember the equation i came up with to detremine how long the shield will last when in contact with creeper:
one shield packet, once at its location, would keep a shield going for 60 second against a .1 depth, 1 by 1 square piece of creeper, to get how long a shield would last against more than that u simply divide 60 seconds by the amount of creeper pushing against the shield
considering the shield can be pushed up against on 12 edges, (where 2 squares touch), the amount of creeper pushing up against the shield could get rather high rather quickly, meaing very expensive,
Like ive said over and over, these types of shields would be very useful since they simply hold back the creeper, but would be very drainging and require either a vast reserve of energy, or a high energy collection rate
i like the principle of your idea builder, essentially if you had the energy to keep it going, you could build a row of buildings and stick a shield generator or 2 behind them and thus have a buffer against the creeper to keep the turrets behind it firing safely if you're dealing with unpredictable waves of creeper or if the creeper's about to overflow or break free from an enclosing that you cant get a weapon in range of, though your idea for the draining is a little off, maybe something like this: 10/(s*(d)) where s is the number of squares touching the shield and d is the combined depth of the squares touching e.g. 2 squares of 0.1 and 0.2 depth would mean 10/2*0.3 = aprox 17 therefore one shield packet would keep the shield up for about 17 seconds assuming the creeper doesnt change, which it will, though maybe the numerator should be a bit higher to give the shield slightly more life against big waves of creeper.
Hmmmmmmmm, funny thing is, all this talk of wat it should will have been for nothing unless virgil actually makes the darn things, but anyway back to subject.
At first i figured 1 generator means u could activate up to 10 shields, but then i relized that people would activate that many thinking that they would be cheap and then their strategy would probably colapse, so i went with just 4 per building built, and then i thought, to be aboe to activate a shield on a building anywhere on the map would mean u could hide them in the back where theyed probably never get destroyed, so i figured that giving them a range would make placemnt of them more realistic. Alowing them to move is a trade-off since they r so expesive, but then they also cant activate shields while in the air.
On to wat u mentioned, mabye the timing should be set to 1 packet can hold back 1. depth of creeper for 60 seconds, the equation for how long a shield will last might look like this if Virgil were to make one as defined by my description:
60sec/(total depth of all creeper touching the shields/total number of edges at which the creeper touches the shields)
Though there would be some extra part of the equation that would deal with the timing as more packets arrive , but im not sure how that would look.
If the creeper were to exceed the maximum amount that the shield could hold back, then the shield would drain instanly, and any shield packets en route to the building where this happened would disappear, the shield would not reactive until the creeper near it was thinned back below the shield's limit. But if this were to happen, the building that was protected by the shield would most likely have been destroyed after the shield turned off, so it wouldn't really matter.
This would be to keep a person from using the shields from being able to hold back the creeper indefinitly.
Shields are indeed very interesting....
They are something I'd like to feature in the expansion. There are different models for shields that have been discussed here, and perhaps some other ideas as well. The cornerstones of whatever I add will be centered on modest flexibility without lots of micromanagement. The shields operation also needs to be obvious.
For instance, the idea of a shield structure that enables the shield ability on nearby structures. This is an interesting idea, and kudos for thinking of it. I'd not thought about enabling an intrinsic shield ability in established structures in this way. That said, there are a couple of issues with it. First, when a player selects a structure he either can, or can not turn on the shield. This capability depends on the proximity to a shield enabling structure. So right off the bat, there is a problem with consistency on a structures control interface. A new player will wonder why the "shield" button is disabled. So you might imagine that a tooltip or some other text might tell them why. This helps, and makes it 'workable' but not optimal. If you add the complexity that only 4 total structures can have their shields enabled per shield enabling structure that is also nearby, you have what I call a hidden, restrictive rule. Hidden, restrictive rules are things that constrain functionality or capabilities based on a rule that isn't intuitive or obvious.
Now I don't say any this because I don't like this specific idea, or the shield idea in general. Hidden, restrictive rules can often be solved... I say all of this just to let you know that for every good general idea, there are 100 little potential gremlins that have to be carefully considered. Shields could be a killer idea... in that they could really enhance the game, or destroy it if not done properly.
:) like i've said before on many different ideas, it all comes down to, will Virgil actually put this into the game, otherwise it just becomes an entertaing disscusion of ifs and such. But since u, Virgil, have said that u hope to add one in the future, im pretty much satisfied.
Though i will add my thoughts on how to fix some of the problems u've mentioned. First, would it be possible to make the option to turn on/off a structure's shield only appear once one of my ideal SBs is built or moved within range. Second, could the fact that the SB has a limit to the amount of shields it can unlock be shown in its description, and also if one is built, make it so the number of unlocked shields in use be shown as a red number, and the number of unlocked shields not in use be shown as a green number.
SB=shield building
For those other 98 little gremlins that would need to be looked at i know that one of them would be the strength of the shield, Ie how long it lasts per packet/amount of creeper against the shield, or somethin like that.
Oh and Virgil, remember, if u ever have a problem with something in the game, try explaining the problem on the forums, one of ur loyal fans might figure out the answer, if not they might come up with something that will help u relize the answer.
CREEPER WORLD RULES!!!
another idea...
You place the shield, in its area of effect it lets no creeper enter, it holds 20 ammo, and the amount subtracted from its ammo every second is the number of creeper it has built up on its perimeter
counting the amount of creeper on the perimeter may be a challenge (i could help with the algorithm)
shield would have little health or small ammo storage to prevent cheep tactics
Shield could act to the creeper as "infinity height terrain" to the creeper (this could also be useful for having 2 creepers that collide, as a multilayer setting for later on)
as for the previous shieald idea
The shield could act like a generator, it will produce enough shield for n buildings every second, and for simplicity, i suggest this effect as global (could be done in a similar way to how a user picking up building tech unlocks a building)
oden city could provide the shield generator with ammo, it would hold this, or send it out to any buildings that have shield on (as shield packets, maby a nice light blue). if there are more buildings with shield toggles, it would disperse the energy evenly (like how oden city disperses build packets evenly even when it is overloaded with building buildings
nice comment and idea corgano, the thing is though, if it were universal, then ud only need one, so it would kinda be like thor, not to mention the creeper would not be able to destroy the thing alowing u to utilize the shields, the shield building, (SB). But ur way of doing it would also work, though then ur shield would cover more ground making it eaiser to position
wow this has a lot of comments :) ;) :D ;D
Quote from: TheBuilder on January 29, 2010, 12:38:27 AM
nice comment and idea corgano, the thing is though, if it were universal, then ud only need one, so it would kinda be like thor, not to mention the creeper would not be able to destroy the thing alowing u to utilize the shields, the shield building, (SB). But ur way of doing it would also work, though then ur shield would cover more ground making it eaiser to position
but it can only send so many packets at once, and only so fast, and I like his idea
My idea of a "sheild" would be to have a, basicly a repairable wall. It would form a Half dome as in like this ( over X area, any creeper touching it causes the usual damage to the shields which would have 2x the hp of a blaster but would be repairable by *shield packets* each packet restors 1hp, and lets say the shield has *20* each additional square of shield the creeper is touching would increse the drain of hp.
Summing it all up now
Shield Cost 75
Shield health = 2 20
Radius coverage in a Half Circle
1 packet of shield = 1 hp of shield
Basicly you can also choose how much the shield covers, so you can deploy one shield to cover a small gap, and consintrate all the power into the gap, or use one shield to cover a huge *thor sized* half circle but, it would have the same health and die quickly if a lot creeper pushes on it.
I think we should leave things like cost and health to Virgil as he did a wonderful job in balancing the game up to now. These are not the kind of things that you make up in a split second, just because a certain number looks nice. You have to look at the effects of the shield on all structures and kind of calculate it's pay-back time.
one more thing...
Maybe a sheild could be like a drone sort of thing.
it could drop those cheap green walls into the greeper to stop it temporarly.
Or you could have it drop crazoniom walls,but there would be less of them and they would cost more
*looks at topic*
*reads whole topic*
*decides topic is not quite dead yet*
Area of effect shields: good. I think that's been discussed to death.
Building shields: probably not so much
New idea: Shields that go from one building to another. Like, you place a shield building, then you place another shield building, then you build that and power a shield between them with ammo packets. It would drain energy when touched by creeper, and would be used like the rest of the shields. And block creeper, of course. Although less of a 'shield' as most people think of it and more of a laser wall, it's similar enough to go here, if you ask me.
Thoughts?
already been disscused to death too, =P. loz
Didn't seem like it.
this is like that floodgate idea