Not sure if I remeber correctly from SupCom but

Was the commander able to blow up in a gigantic explosion after his health reached 0? It's been a while since I played at the first SupCom honestly. :lol:

But anyway, might anything like that work in PA?

yes and it was confirmed in the latest update video.

as an aside i got confused when you said first sup com... i had forgotten there was a second.

Right, I was watching the video right now, great to know :lol:

The remaining question will be: will there be Mutually Assured Destruction? It was present in Total Annihilation and SupCom (at least in the early days, may be it was removed after a few patches, I don't quite remember), but was removed in FA.

for gameplay's sake it should be rather like in FA.
And another thing we need would be the "share until death" feature of Forged Alliance Forever.

I think the health of the enemy commander shouldn't be visible (except for some damage sparks etc.), and mutually assured destruction should actually not happen, because it resulted in many, MANY draws in early supcom builds. Even if the commander explosion wipes everything EXCEPT the commanders out, it's being abused by commbombing.

So, the explosion should be cool, but the actual damage radius should be sufficiently small to allow for more wiggle room.

The topic is very, very deep.

My suggestions would be:

• commanders should go thermonuclear, but there should be a big damage falloff with distance (one over distance squared sounds about right) so it doesn't punch a giant hole into whatever base it explodes in
• the explosion should not happen instantly, i.e. the death process should be drawn out over a few seconds - make the commander go limp, let two or three smaller blasts happen before the antimatter containment fails (imagine a white glow and rays of light breaking through cracks in the armor), so the other player has a chance to get away
• units should remember which side they came from ("share until death"), so if that side loses their commander, the units self-destruct

exactly

Draws can be prevented 1v1 with a change to the rules. If someone's commander explodes and causes the other commander to explode then the second commander should be the winner.

I don't see how to fix commbombing in teamgames other than reducing the power of the explosion. Delayed death and falloff are some ways to help with this.

Teams can simply have players which never build something, they only assist or build things which are fairly unimportant. A team can organise it such that commbombs are still available later in the game. I feel this is a time when awesome(big explosions) and good mechanics are at odds.

Sure this would prevent draws, but actually I like the idea that you have too survive to be declared winner. It doesnt really matter who died 1 second earlier, if both are the dead the endresult should be draw, imho.

I'd be fine with a big explosion that cause little to no damage to buildings and other commanders. Like in the latest FAF-Patch of FA.

To make draws a possibility just make the explosion smaller and weaker. Then players wouldn't be able to win comm duels to the death just by starting on slightly more health or getting the first shot off.

Small damage should be enough, the graphical effect should look really big, imho.
Commanders ought to go down with a big bang ^^

:idea: IDEA: Make the comm blast not destroy everything, but instead blow everything a good distance away?

Ah yea that is something I forgot to request from ZK. Impulse for weapons such that there are weapons to throw units around. A bit off topic but an example is the nuclear implosion bomber which draws units a bit towards the impact point using negative impulse.

Anyway some sort of impulse effect for the commander explosion would be a good way to make the explosion awesome without being too powerful.

Dyamn, I'm gonna try that Zero-K game now.

Edit: Ooooh, it's a spring game. I wondered why I hadn't realized a game with such an awesome engine existed. Still - massive kudos! This is awesome.

This is nice and cinematic, and I like it. By the time you've managed to destroy the enemy comm you should have the time to spare to watch the model do a nice, satisfying 3 second animation followed by an even more satisfying mushroom cloud.

Indeed, the suddenness of it in FA was neat, but I think it's safe to go for the cinematic route here, Commanders are that important after all.

Thygrrr, seems you pulled up the slack last night while I was out! Seeing lots of great threads! xD

Mike

Hehe, yeah, just like in the old SupCom development days .

maybe commanders should kill each other with their deaths, but give a draw timer so that if you die within 10 seconds of the oppenents its a draw. why should you win just because you're commander dies a fraction of a second late.

draws are OK in my opinion. if you manage to pull of a draw when losing it's pretty good