I had an idea that most will probably not like because it contributes to the "keep the commander alive as long as possible" thing. So back to the point...what if you could build databases that "stored data" but it's main purpose is a last line of defense in the commander dying. your commander's health would go to 1%, but would always stay alive as long as the database was online. Here's an example.. enemy team closes in on the rest of your forces, and murders all except your commander, which stays at 1% health. turns out, your team sent an engineer to a nearby asteroid and setup a database there. so now, the enemy team needs to find this database and destroy it. they can do this by producing the highest ranking satellite available. they then detect it, destroy it, and finish off your army. I really think it would add an edge to your gameplay, like just when you thought you've won, you have to build a rocket and start a mini-war on the moon or something. it may be too much and take up too much time, but I though it was a neat idea. post your thoughts below.
if the Commander becomes incapacitated at 1% health, what would stop the enemy from camping your immobile body until they got the tech they required? if the Commander is simply invincible until the DB is destroyed, what is stopping someone from dropping their Commander in the middle of an enemy base as soon as it became appropriate to do so?
to answer your questions, this is where strategic base locations comes in. when you com has 1 health and you have a stable moon base, you can rocket him over. same idea goes for the second thing. if you control one side of the moon and enemy controls the other, which has the DB on it, you could invade that part while the attack is taking place and surprise the enemy.
What's to stop people from just building one of these databases and then just demolishing entire planets with an invincible commander? This idea gets rid of the point of having commanders be the king piece.
I understand where you guys are coming from and I get what your saying. and the answer Is satellites. I now realize it can be heavily overpowered, so lets say the weakest satellite can detect it. now, lets say the enemy just finished building their DB. you just so happen to have one long range missile ready. your crappy satellite detects something on a neighboring moon, and identifies it as a DB. so, in order to prevent the enemy of reaping the benefits of the DB, you send your missile to it and destroy it. these structures will also have below-average health and take long as hell to build. so it balances out.
What's to stop me from demolishing your entire base with my invincible commander before you do that? No matter how "balanced" it may be, having an invincible commander with an uber-gun walking around is a bad idea.
I get what you're trying to do, but at the same time it can be accomplished in an easier way. Why send an engineer to the remote moon to build a database, when you could just send your actual commander there instead, saving him? Creating that last stand at the moon by "legit" means. The problem with the database idea is that it could create massive annoyances where a last remaining player has 8 engineers spread out across 8 moons/asteroids, just spam queue building databases when his main base is getting attacked. Sure you might find 5 of them, and you might send some troops to cancel the construction of a few, but he'd just queue up more and more. In a sense, it would enable a "bad" player to survive despite not being "worthy" of surviving, if you know what i mean. I think a better thing, or rather what i'd do personally, is to simply play on the game mode where you must destroy the commander AND any engineers/factories to win the game. Woila. The same scenarios you desire will occur, but with different names. Remote moon Databases -> Remote moon outposts (legit, actually planned, defended or not) Last-stand at a remote moon after the enemy thought he would win by owning your commander. Except instead he'd really destroy your commander, but still would need to find your outposts and engineers. Keep in mind that commanders won't be upgradeable like in Supcom, so it might not be "that bad" if you lose it, especially not after a tough battle and if you've got secret bases all around you could stage counter attacks from. In closing, my point is, pure vanilla gameplay can let all these things happen without risking exploit / annoyances with players hiding 1 structure in a crater somewhere that enables his commander to be a 1% invulnerability machine. I mean sure it could be explained away by calling the databases "sub-space shield generators" or something, giving the commander an invulnerability shield across any distance. But again, one must ask, why is this tech then only used to make the commander invincible? Why not a tank, battleship or buzzaw? It kinda punches a bit of a hole in the plausibility of the tools of war in the universe.
thank you for that baleur. that probably is the best way of doing it. I suppose it would just be pretty unnecessary.
