Fantasy walls
Here I sit on a lazy Saturday afternoon, wondering what to write about. Combat is a little fast-paced for this mood, so instead I’ll focus on walls (again). The thing is, everyone just loves writing about all of the combat units, but nobody really thinks about walls. This is a sad state of affairs. Walls are important dammit! Especially to turtling noobs. But this article isn’t about the current walls; it’s about all of the walls that could be:
Tech 2 walls
This one is a given, and will hopefully be on the way shortly. Basically, tech two walls would be stronger and taller than tech 1 walls, allowing them to survive longer and block more incoming fire. Unlike tech 1 walls, their resource cost wouldn’t be insignificant.
Tech 3 walls
This wall would be twice the size of the tech 1 walls (thus its footprint would be the same size as a power generator). It’d also be even taller, stopping nearly everything except for artillery. It would be so high that even massive units, like spiderbots and galactic colossi, could not merely walk over it. Also, the resource costs would be quite hefty, something along the lines of a few hundred mass per wall segment. This bad boy would easily survive a nuke, and the best way of getting around it would be to use engineers offensively.
Experimental mobile wall
For some reason, this just feels like a Cybran unit. Imagine a large multi-segmented mobile wall. It would slowly advance across the battlefield ahead of an invading army, deflecting shots from hitting the units behind it. Any enemy unit unfortunate enough to find itself right in front of it as it is moving would get crushed. The experimental mobile wall would even have some tech 1 point defense turret equivalents embedded into it, so it could defend itself. I know I had you are “mobile wall” though — is there anything cooler?
Hover wall
You would build hover walls around your shores out on the water to keep out nasty enemy amphibious units and ships. Only the Aeon would get the hover wall though. The other factions would get a sinking wall, which consists of nets designed to prevent submarines or other submerged units from being able to pass through.
Air wall
Basically, imagine a balloon tied to a series of hanging wires. Float them above your base, and any enemy air unit running into the dangling wires would be destroyed. At this point we are getting a bit farther away from the original concept of a “wall”, but whatever. Alternatively, just think of a really, really, really tall wall segment, over a kilometer in height. Planes would run into it and be destroyed.
Invisible wall
Take a normal wall, but cloak it. This way the enemy units won’t even know they can’t get through until they run right into it. Units running into invisible walls would take damage; really stupid units running into invisible walls repeatedly would eventually die from the trauma. Unfortunately, invisible walls would draw some energy while cloaked, but hey, that’s the trade-off you have to make. The best thing about invisible walls: robots stubbing their toes.
Okay, so some of these wall ideas are pretty far out there. That doesn’t mean you can’t go around pretending like they’re coming in the next patch, though. I want everyone to practice saying, “Hey man, did you hear about the new experimental mobile wall coming out in the May patch? It’s gonna be awesome!”
April 21st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Right! That’s it! You’ve taken this sick, sordid wall fetish too far!
No more walls for you Cyde Weys. I’m taking away all your wall privilages.
April 21st, 2007 at 3:57 pm
“Right! That’s it! You’ve taken this sick, sordid wall fetish too far!”
Fantasy Walls? More like Wall Fantasies!
April 21st, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Natural walls anyone?
Engineers being able to modify the height of the land could “build” natural walls, or ditches?
April 21st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
It would definitely be cool to build a moat around your base. The Iraqis under Saddam Hussein tried something like this to prevent tanks from entering Baghdad. Really rough and uneven terrain would prevent units from being able to cross. I just wonder if the SupCom game is capable of this. As far as I can tell, the heightmap is constant throughout the entire course of a map. All of the “craters” that seem to get added, including even nuclear craters, are nothing more than textures applied to the static ground. Change the view to a low-angle shot and you’ll see that no actual craters have been created.
It would be really nice to have deformable terrain that does significantly change throughout the course of the battle. Red Faction, an old-ish FPS, had that feature, and it was awesome.
April 21st, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I disagree with the T3 walls. The harbingers reclaim ability would come into play and leave the other SABs in the dust in this role. The aeon don’t need another advantage atm. :/
April 21st, 2007 at 5:35 pm
@moats/deformable terrain: when constructing buildings the terrain does get flattened quite a bit so I don’t think it’s impossible for the SupCom engine. And it has been brought up before by Chris Taylor that deformable terrain might be one of the new features in an expansion ( http://www.supremecommander-alliance.com/Interview-Chris-Taylor-Novembre-2006.4643.0.html ).
April 21st, 2007 at 5:46 pm
How about stackable walls? All you do is build a new t1 wall on top of your old one to make it taller… then you can do this again so it is stacked 3 high! adding a bit more health to the overall wall each time you stack it!
April 21st, 2007 at 6:05 pm
You were right… You had me at mobile wall.
April 21st, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Speaking of walls, I was just reading a post over on GPG forums about how worthless the T1 walls are at stopping fire from hitting your PDs, etc. Basically said the best bet is to use them to slow the enemy by placing several staggered rows across chokepoints to help screw up pathfinding, etc, which slows the enemy getting through.
I noted that you could simply drop a nuke to clear the pathway right quick, but other than that it seemed like a decent idea. =)
Regardless I definitely think a T2 wall similar to the better wall in TA would be helpful for doing a better job of protecting PDs. The current walls really are pretty useless when I’ve tried to use them to protect PDs like you suggested in your previous Walls post.
April 21st, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Deformable terrain sounds like a good idea but it’s awful if not implimented properly. They have it in TA: Spring and it’s very annoying. The ground at choke points gets all uneven, slowing all the units down and making them get stuck, destroying the flow of play. Artillery shelling your base would create craters outside your factories and units would get stuck on it. The opponent could tell the location of your labs because the ground had to be flattened before the building was nanolathed… lots of problems.
You could flatten the ground with a con unit but it wasn’t enough of an incentive. The brilliant thing about wreckage is people are compelled to clear it.
April 21st, 2007 at 7:00 pm
“It would definitely be cool to build a moat around your base. The Iraqis under Saddam Hussein tried something like this to prevent tanks from entering Baghdad. Really rough and uneven terrain would prevent units from being able to cross. I just wonder if the SupCom game is capable of this. As far as I can tell, the heightmap is constant throughout the entire course of a map.”
http://www.scmods.net/?q=node/11
:)
April 21st, 2007 at 7:29 pm
The mobile wall definitely sounds like a Cybran unit. The only way I can imagine it working would be like an inch worm or those snakes that move sideways. That’d fit in nicely to the bug/insect theme that Cybran units have.
April 21st, 2007 at 8:49 pm
imagine it trying to get out of the factory though… o___0
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:44 am
The mobile wall reminds me of an older RTS called Metal Fatigue, all 3 teams on that game could build mobile walls (which were the only walls), but the actual wall would only appear when the ‘towers’ aligned with each other, when this happened, a wall appeared (this wall didn’t have any hp, you had to destroy the towers to get rid of it.
I was thinking if you made mobile walls like the current walls are in Supcom, wouldn’t it be a bit confusing since all these individual segments are moving everywhere? You could just do it like Metal Fatigue did, also, the towers could have turrets on them, but that’s not necessary.
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:39 am
Throw a stealth function on that mobile wall and you’ve got a deal. How much would that rock? The enemy don’t see it until line of sight, suddenly they can’t get around it! Oh noes i’m being crushed!
I want it.
April 22nd, 2007 at 6:09 am
Also make the T3 (or even T2) with some small spaces so only T1 Bots (or tanks) can go throught it, so you have to mix with T1 ones to fully cover your base.
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:18 am
Making the mobile wall a force-field type wall (the engine already has this technical ability via shields, just make it an impassable shield) would work and make more practical sense for both building it and deploying it. Perhaps make the ‘unit’ an individual unit that acts as a ‘tower’ (as described above) that when you have two or more of them, and you select one to ‘Assist’ another one, the forcefield wall is generated between them up to a set max distance,