Strategic Teleporters v0.1 - Preview/feedback release
Overview
The motivation for this mod came largely due to the fact that many of the games I play (usually with 2-3 others) on any maps bigger than 20K end up turning into nuke-fests and experimental stampedes. This is largely because getting a conventional army near the other person's base either takes being super sneaky (and them doing a bad job with intel) or it takes FOREVER while they slowly make their way across the map. I had often wished for a faster way to move units around when I came across Moolio's mod and realized I had the workings of an answer.
The basic idea behind this mod is to add another strategic-type weapon to SupCom which makes traditional land-based units more useful, most especially when playing on large (40+ km) maps. While ferrying works, even it is slow when trying to move units across the largest 80km maps, and it would be nice if there were a way, in exchange for significant economic assets, to move units around faster.
This mod enables the Quantum Gateway for each faction to teleport units around it to an allied gateway anywhere on the map. Since this is a strategic event, there is a relatively high cost involved as well as some risk.
Details
Teleportation takes place between two allied gateways. The initiating gateway's rally point determines which gate will act as the receiving gateway. Any and all units can be teleported. This includes experimentals such as the UEF satellite and the Czar.
Teleporting a single unit costs an amount of Energy based on its tech level. Moving Tech 1 units is cheaper than Tech 2 and so on. The current energy costs are as follows:
- Base cost for initiating a teleport = 1000 energy
- T1 = 50 energy per second per unit
- T2 = 75 energy per second per unit
- T3 = 150 energy per second per unit
- T4 = 2500 energy per second per unit
- ACU/SCU = 8000 energy per second per unit
The motivation behind these values is to try and make the costs of moving a large "army" of units approximate the cost of a nuke (the idea being that both are strategic weapons). An army of T1 is about 150 units, T2 is 100, T3 is 50, T4 is 2. Commanders cost significantly more because they already have a teleporter upgrade and this mod shouldn't allow excessively cheap commander teleportation.
Teleporting units has a "charge up" time. This value is currently 30 seconds. The charge-up time serves two purposes:
- Allow time for resources to be collected.
- Allow time for an enemy to respond to a teleportation.
The first is pretty obvious, but the second is more interesting. With such a powerful unit, I wanted to put some downsides into the equation so people have to consider the cost/benefit of using the teleporter. I thought about damaging each unit teleported by some percentage of their max health, but didn't actually implement it (I still like the idea, though). What I ended up doing is this:
If either the sending or receiving gateway is destroyed while a teleport is in progress, BOTH gateways are destroyed AND all the units in-transit are destroyed as well. This gives your enemy an additional option to dealing with people using teleporters: Instead of destroying the gateway outright, they can wait until their enemy starts using it and THEN destroy it. This has the potential to deal MUCH more damage than just losing a single building.
Finally, I added various visual effects to units being teleported, the gateway charging time, the teleport event, and the active-gateway-destroyed event.
Notes
Some important things to be aware of:
- Only units within the gateway radius when the teleport is initiated are transported.
- Units are made immobile when transport begins.
- There is no way to stop a teleport in progress (except CTRL+K'ing the gateway).
Compatibility
This mod is almost certainly incompatible with anything that modifies the Quantum Gateway unit. Other than that, I'm not sure, but if you find something, let me know!
Picture
I notice people like pictures of mods, so here's (a lame) one :)
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That's about it. I'm pretty new to the whole modding thing, so hopefully I haven't done anything too dumb, but I'd love to hear any thoughts or ideas, or about any bugs or problems anyone finds. Thanks again to Moolio for his help and allowing me to continue work on this mod.|||Development Ideas
I have a lot of ideas for what might make this mod better, but I decided to start small and work my way up after seeing what other people thought. While it's good to stay balanced and not go too overboard, the real goal is to make a fun mod that you want to use with your friends which opens additional strategy to SupCom. Here are some ideas I have:
Resource costs: OMG that's a lot of energy! :O A specific goal with this mod was to make another strategic weapon system. Much like T3 missile silos (4,500 drain), the teleporter has a large energy drain. This is somewhat on purpose, but I'd like to see what others think. Is it crazy high? Too low? It seems like a dedicated T3 power plant to teleport an experimental unit isn't too crazy... is it?
Tradeoffs: I like the idea of making the user decide if teleporting is worth some kind of risk. Right now the big risk is that any units teleported are subject to potential death if either gateway is lost during the teleport. I really like this as it adds strategy to the game, but also considered other ideas. Perhaps each unit teleported could have a percentage of it's hit points removed?
True Strategic Teleports: Another thought was to allow for teleportation to anywhere on the map, even if you have no receiving gateway and no vision in that location. This would make the teleporters function much more like nukes and truly make them strategic weapons. To offset this huge jump in power, I was thinking you might have two things:
First, the energy cost to send to an empty location would need to go up some, and the energy cost to send to a remote gateway would go down. This makes some sense (it's cheaper to send to another gateway, but less powerful since you have to send a unit there to build it, enemy can see it on radar, etc).
Second, there needs to be a defense against it. Nobody wants 5 GCs teleporting into the middle of their base. You would probably need to add an "anti-teleporter" field, probably to an existing unit such as an Omni Sensor. Perhaps you cannot teleport strategically into any enemy Omni range. Better would be that such teleport attempts are allowed, but units are lost in the process (much like a nuke vs anti-nuke).
Cancelling: While I kind of like the idea of making teleporting a non-abortable event (also much like launching a nuke), given the somewhat unpredictable energy costs and such, maybe you should be able to. The downside is that this negates the power an enemy has when you begin teleporting and he threatens to destroy your remote gateway.
Global Announcement: Once again like a nuke, I think it might be worthwhile to have an announcement to all players that a strategic teleport is taking place. This might be another benefit to teleporting only to remote gateways: When teleporting to a gateway the announcement is not made, but when performing a strategic teleport (no remote gate), then everybody knows about it. Like nukes, it would not say who is doing it or where it's going, but just that it is happening.
Confirmation: Because the resource cost is something of an unknown (unless you do math beforehand), maybe there should be a confirmation box that says something like "This teleport will take 82,000 energy per second. Continue?" Might help remove some of those "Oh shiiii---" moments :)
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Thanks again for taking a look and even more for telling me what you think!|||I would suggest changing your thread title from [FA][WIP] to [REL/WIP-FA] so that people know you have released something.
That said, I wish you the best luck in developing your mod! :)|||Mooilo|||well i downloaded this a few hours ago and tried it.
The only problem i had was that you can teleport experimentals while they are still building and the cybrans acu construction drones can also be teleported while they are building and drain of 50 energy, but it doesn't really effect play.
ill test it some more tommorrow and see if i can find any more.|||Volgun|||would it be possible to make the strategic teleport (if its added) be blocked by the anti teleport towers from the Blackops mod so you cant drop a large army on top of there commander.
maybe you can add some of your own in with there permission
o and another bug is that if an engineer is building and is teleported they are still building from the exit gate even though its half way cross the map same goes for if there building an experimental and it is teleported.
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