Ideas about the Egg.

I had a few ideas on the Egg.

This was mentioned, but it is what your commander lands in.

1) Should it allow a player, depending on enabled or disabled pregame settings, to choose a commander's landing point into the game?

2) It is supposed to unpack into resources or a predesignated set of structures? It would be neat to see this if set to do so.

3) Would it be able to set it to allow you to move your commander again for free for a certain amount of times after landing, and/or would it be a requirement to keep the egg and protect it after landing if your commander can only move by using the egg as a mount to the unit cannon or rocket gantry?

Being able to build an egg in an orbital factory seems pretty reasonable, with or without your commander.

I have a few ideas on the Egg, but I'm still developing them and I'm not locking them down until I see waht Uber has planned.

For now a list of things the Egg must NOT do:

• Shouldn't be an additional unit that generate Power or Metal by itself,
• Shouldn't be something that is easily replaced or made redundant,
• Must not be a powerful Offensive Combat Unit.

Shouldn't be an additional unit that generate Power or Metal by itself
This one is essential in my opinion. If the Commander generates your Starting Metal and Power, then the Egg should not. If the Egg gives you your starting Energy and Metal income, the Commander should not. Let's stay away from total redundancy here, m'kay?

Shouldn't be something that is easily replaced or made redundant
If the Egg is there to perform that critical "First Landing" buffer for you to hit the ground running, and you squander it or let it get destroyed in the early game it should hurt you. The Egg in the early game should be priority #2 after your Commander. Taking it out early game should give you a tangible advantage over your enemy. The Egg's function should not be easily replaced by standard Units, nor should normal units make it redundant until the latter stages of the game.

Must not be a powerful Offensive Combat Unit.
While I agree with the Egg having perhaps some rudimentary way of defending itself I do not agree with it being a combat focused unit. In no way, shape or form should the Egg be used as a "rushing" unit.

That's what I've got so far. Nothing too restrictive, but some good ground rules.

Oh, I reckon the Egg could be construed as a rushing unit.

If you get to choose where you land, land the egg as close to the enemy as possible. All of a sudden you have a rudimentary base right near their base and you can start your rush. Not with the egg itself, but facilitated by it.

That's fine. Just NOT using the Egg to go out and kill units personally, m'kay?

First thing that comes to mind is to make the egg a storage for mass and energy.
So you start with the ACU that gives +50 energy and +2 mass, but has no storage and with the egg that has a full 2000/200 storage but not income.
Maybe add in a little defensive weapon, I also would expect it to be a static structure.

If you lose your egg early on you would lose the storage and would have to build storage buildings. If the egg equals 4 or 5 mass and energy storages it will be quite expensive to replace its storage capabilities early one.

Also about the startposition: How about both players can chose where to start WITHIN a limited area? You basically start within the orbit aboard your egg and drop down to the planet. You are only able to change the way you enter the atmosphere a bit, so your landingzone is predetermined, but the exact position is of your choice. This way the game could ensure that both players spawn in a certain distance to each other, while at the same time you can make sure that players don't end up in a bad position on a randomized map. Landing zones are marked visibly for all players, so it is easy to tell in which region your opponent spawned, but you need to scout to tell where exactly it is.
This would i.e. give choices like: "Do I want to start on a plateau, so I can focus on air?" "Do I want to start near the sea?", etc. pp

I'd like the ability to build them for the purpose of quickly building factory's during a planetary landing.

At a higher cost and overall time then via fabbers of course.


Land and in 2 mins have 5 factorys all producing units to establish a beach head, or support a ally on the surface. (Dependant on how the economy works of course)

A lot of people have suggested that the purpose of the egg is to get the game started quickly.

What if the egg was static, had a decent amount of build power, and a short build range? It could then be used to assist in building the first factory and maybe some other structures.

The egg can do any number of things to get the game started. But is this egg something unique to the start of the game, or is it something that comes standard with every rocket? That will help determine what abilities and stats the egg starts with.

Some things include:
- An arbitrary number of extra pods with some engineers, similar to Supcom 2's start.
- An arbitrary pile of wreckage, independent of metal storage.
- A unique constructor, similar to an engi tower or special factory.
- A unique resource provider, giving some amount of metal and/or energy income.
- A unique defender, like a laser tower or something similar.
- A hole in the planet's surface, acting as a free extraction point.

It honestly doesn't take much to get the game going. The Commander is already a powerful starting unit, and early game reclaim provides a surge of resources to get things started.

I would say it should replace the "standard start" things that you are basically required to do in every game, like the x pgens and y mexes that mapmakers place around starting positions in the other games. I don't know that it really needs a turret. It should probably also be able to create t1 engys (a limited number?) or something of the sort.

Personally I don't really like the idea of the egg. A lone commander start is something special imho.

I do like the idea of it deploying you anywhere you want it to as a natural entry point into the map. So hopefully there will be an option to have the egg only deliver the commander and no other units.

I too like the idea of the egg, and more recently I've been playing SupCom with the prebuilt units option turned on.

One annoying thing I think should not happen with the egg, like it does with the prebuilt units is that it always builds 1 type of factory (i.e. a land factory), as sometimes I want to play air, or sea only games, so the initial factory is just a waste, apart from building the first few engineers.

What I think would be a better, and simpler option is for the egg to:
- Be able to be dropped within a particular area of the player's choosing - this seems like a good pre-game selection to me
- Contain the Commander
- Contain some blocks of metal to reclaim
- Contain some blocks of energy to reclaim
- Contain a unit which can unpack into a factory - games like C&C (and others too im sure) have done this kind of mobile factory unit, which has a 1 time "Deploy" which turns it into a factory. Having something like this would enable a player to choose what type of factory they want to start off with, and also allow them to position it to their liking.

As making good use of reclaimable stuff surrounding the base early on, is essential to a good start, why not have nothing to reclaim in the immediate area, apart from whatever comes out of the egg?

I think the idea of the egg having storage capabilities is kind of silly, as thats one of the game features I like to play around with early on, i.e. if you aggressively expand and take mass points, you often have stages with too much mass, meaning that even your storage limit can affect the next 10-20 minutes of play, because you can save up, and then afford that expensive t2 unit, whilst building the rest of your base as normal.

I know I tend to send all but 1 of my initial 4-8 engineers (depending on map size) off building mass extractors, so once the first couple are done, but I am not yet upgraded to t2, and I dont have any engineers left in my base, i often find that I have a big surplus of mass, so building the right amount of storage with the 1 engineer left behind to build radar is game changing a few minutes later.

Mike

I got the impression that it would be be a wreck that has both energy and metal stores which can be harvested at ones leisure to prevent your economy from stalling.

Is that not rather dull?

You guys are making it more complicated than it should be.
Here's what I thought after seeing the kickstarter trailer:
"The Egg" is just a T2 air transport, capable of interplanetary and even interstellar flights, if you have a rocket big enough to launch it.
It doesn't provide you any kind of resources or abilities that are not connected to it's transport functions. And yes, you can reclaim it, if you want.
You can't choose the starting position. You can pick the commander again and transport him in a different place, but it takes time that your opponent is spending on actually building a base.
You can use it as an early scout, but it has no weapons.
You can build more if you have T2 air factory.

Is that not rather dull?

Ooh, dejavu.

The Egg should have a yolk, i.e. a limited time premium resource income that slowly diminishes (so the game play doesn't have a sudden jerk in it).

I'd recommend maybe returns spread out over ~300 seconds, starting at 100% and ending at 0% when the egg is empty.

simplistic != dull

There is no reason for this thing to be unique and have complex functions. In fact, there is only one reason for this thing to exist at all.

Sometimes if you add something interesting to something simple it also make it more interesting!

Is the "egg" not something different to that in the concept video though? i.e. the part that detaches from the big interplanetary rocket to drop the bot off on the asteroid? If it is meant to be the same thing, then surely the egg is something build-able via a factory/launchpad? My thinking is that this is something "Commander only" at the start of the game though.

The impression I got from Mavor of the egg from one of the earlier live streams, was that it was something to "take the grind out of the first 10 minutes of setting up a base". So surely it will at least come with something extra than just being a transporter? Hopefully it will not to just be a shell/transport that the commander walks out of or gets dropped by, with a pre-built mini base just appearing out of nowhere? Maybe I am remembering this wrong though...

Something which would be good is a pre-game lobby option to configure the egg contents? I've seen other RTS games (maybe even TA - my memory is foggy after all these years) which allow you to change the starting resources for all players, pre-game, so some kind of yolk, or form of starting resources might be something good?

Also, Mavor said "the egg isnt implemented yet" in the last live stream, so maybe the fact that he even brought it up means its on the cards for a live stream soon, even if its not the next, as it hardly seems like a core gameplay mechanic to demo.

Mike

Mike

teod, If you make the Egg just a transport unit then you have made it dull. I'm all for simplistic mechanics, but I do not think the Egg should be "just" another unit.

Jon has hinted at the Egg being customisable or perhaps having special unique mechanics like the Commanders. Something to take the grind out of the tired old 'Standard Template Build Order' tripe.

I agree that Simplistic != Dull.
What you propose is simplistic... it is also dull.