Natural events that hamper your strategy

I noticed that a lot of focus at the moment is on Planets getting destroyed by asteroids, and thats fine and all, also going over past tactics and strategies and unit ideas but I can see natural events that may just be just as crucial to your strategy. Probably a bit too ambitious, but a lot of emergent gameplay can be found.

Coronal Mass Ejection- Shuts down orbiting satellites for a duration, more prominant in Giant stars and less likely to happen with smaller stars.

Hurricanes, Typhoons, Cyclones- Causes high winds, blows rockets and missiles offcourse, aircraft forced down by downdraft, accuracy of ships is decreased due to violent waves in oceans.

Quakes- Occurs more prominantly on geologically active planets and moons, when it occurs, damage can be caused to structures and movement of mechs and tanks is decreased as they try to steady themselves on the moving ground.

Asteroid collision (Not player commanded) - This may be a rare case, especially in early game where enemies may become allies, to combine their resources just to redirect the spatial body from the planet.

Electromagnetic Anomaly- Missiles go haywire, aircraft guidance is thrown off, radar randomly pings 'ghosts' or does not work at all.

It's a Random Event, and thus bad for gameplay. Same type of thing came up when talking about the ideas of meteor showers and such.

Mike

Randon events is only fun when they are rare and truly randomic.
If a meteor hits your planet 1 time in 100 hours of game play, then when this occur, its gonna feel epic! If it is like in some tiberian sun maps where the thunder storms had 150% of chance to happen, then we have a problem.

I disagree. Even if some random "You lost" thing occurs only once every 100 hours it still sucks.
Thats like disconnecting. It doesnt happen often thankfully, but it still sucks.

Maybe allow for an option to turn natural disasters on/off? It would make the game more interesting, but someone could have a terrible time with luck and get wiped out early.. This is very debatable.
It might be cool to be able to construct things that use natural disasters as weapons, like earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes.. etc

It is completely different.. if you disconnect, then it over.. if a meteor have a chance to hit you, your enemy or nothing, then I'm ok with that.

A disconnect might hit me or my opponent or it might preferably just not happen.
Same with a random "your base just got owned" Asteroid.
Also why make a natural disaster like that a random occurrence?
We can throw Asteroids at each other, so why wait for mother nature to do it?

Yeah, no random **** please, unless they are low intensity and global, such as the meteor showers on some of the old TA maps.

Because a slight element of luck is okay, but a big element of misfortune (crippling early game event, or late game extinction level event on your homeworld that kills your comm even though you had the game in the bag?) is a no-go.

Just give the players a warning before the event happens. The warning could come sooner based on how destructive the event has the potential to be. A minor local event like a volcanic eruption may only give 30 seconds while something like a hurricane or meteor shower may give about five minutes. That gives plenty of time for a player to adjust their strategy and accommodate the event.

Similarly, you can make these events substantially more likely based on direct player actions. For example, having a huge battle at the base of a volcano could make it much more likely to erupt. Again, this allows players to plan their strategy and accommodate the event.

Just to reiterate, the key is that players have some ability to react to the event before it actually occurs.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of allowing players some degree of control in instigating these events. As a planet becomes more and more battered and wartorn through the course of a game, its climate becomes deteriorates and inclement weather becomes more common, extreme, and destructive.

Of course and option to disable these when creating the game may not be a bad idea.

No thanks.

You can also just so natural things like a rain storm, or snow storm that just slows your units down.

No thanks, indeed.


Imgine you are playing a very evenly matched game, perfect adrenaline rush and still plenty of time left before a winner could be declared.

Then you get a message that you have 5 minutes to evacuate your secondary base or something. And your opponent doesn't, because his Side of the world world isn't affected by the meteor. Greeeeat funnnn.....


Or imagine a game where you finally wrestled control of the skies from your opponent, and start pummeling his superior land army with gunships.

Solar Flare approaching, land your planes or lose them.... Greeeeat gameeeeplayyyyyy...


Or imagine your commander, damaged, chased and shot at by a large group of tanks. You can safely make it to your defense line, which is just a mile away. Unless suddenly a snow storm slows you down..... Greeeeat forrrrtuuuuune...

(though admittedly, weather and other global effects would be okay if they didn't affect units too much and were frequent enought to be considered a regular incident).

You are assuming that this will also occur in competitive/important matches.. you should be able to toggle this feature on or off.
It would be a neat feature to have random events when you wanna play just for fun in skirmish mode against the AI...

Weather would definitely be cool and it could influence the gameplay in a balanced way, if it would have an global impact, like snow on ice planets or rain on tropical/water planets.

You're also assuming that for some reasons these events only affect you and have no impact on your enemy. If you based your entire strategy around a single unit and that unit is particularly vulnerability to a certain disaster then, frankly, you deserve to lose.

People have this utter misconception that perfect strategy is what allows one side to win a war and that as a result war simulations should occur in an utter vacuum. Like chess or checkers. In truth, wars much more often swing on random factors that commanders didn't account for. War is much more about damage mitigation and recovery than it is about executing some perfect paper strategy. The victor is usually the side that is able to recover more effectively from some unforeseen event rather than the side with more arrows on their map.

What about player created natural disasters?


(image borrowed from SimCity Deluxe for mobile devices which we are in no way affiliated with)

So this would not be a natural disaster =)

Eh, this happened in TA? I have never seen this... Is it only on specific maps?

While this may be true, the largest problem with these kind of ideas, is that people think of a cool thing, but don't think about the gameplay implications. Getting killed by random stuff is frustrating.

I guess this proves my point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY6TrLsN6qM

If the frequency of these events is HIGH but the impact low, so that the chances are low, that one player gets more damage than the other, it MIGHT work. (player 1 lost 121 tanks due to meteors, player 2 lost 124 units for instance)

These kind of features, can also simply rule-out any E-sports that this game might bring forth.

With the option for them to be dissabled (default turned off, so more like enabled) there aren't really many arguments against them. Of course the most important one is, how much will this cost? and if they would be default off for all the above reasons is any price really worth it?

besides i'm sure mods will come out for it sooner or later as some people are quite fond of the idea.