Dear Community,
I’d like to brainstorm gamemodes that would be easy to implement given the game’s current state and don’t rely on any stretch-goal or additional assets. Basically, what constraints could make fun now.
Here’s one I thought of today: Hauler
Team A - Must Visit Nodes 1,…,N in sequence to win a round. The Nodes can be anywhere in the solar system.
Team B - Must try to stop them through ambush or pursuit.
There is a time limit X for visiting all nodes, if time exceeds X or team A is destroyed, team B wins the round
The best out of three rounds wins.
The main way to make this fun/even I think would be to balance the variable accordingly: team B significantly larger than team A. Have nodes N proportional to total players, and time proportional to N.
Anyway, no way to know until we can try implementing it so I’d like to hear all your wonderful ideas!
If the devs make the modding goal however (either during Kickstarter or later as a patch) it would be a nice idea to have some simple mods included as demonstrations and tutorials to people about what the engine can do. And yours could be one of them.
something easy to implement would be “find the ball” which is a ball droped on a random location in a planet, then you have to pick the ball and transport it to your base, if someone hits you, you drop the ball and someone else can take it, well just a silly idea
Maybe not such a bad idea if it can be integrated into the Battlescape gameplay effectively. Retrieving data or scan information for your team could legitimately be a goal, and of course it would benefit the other team if they stop you getting it (or get some of their own first). This could contribute to team points or whatever and lend a purpose to scanning/recon.
Instead of a ball, perhaps a crashed cargo ship? And the teams have to escort a salvage ship that collects a portion of the “valuable” cargo that is returned for credits for the team. Could be fun for quick and small matches!
That’s actually a really solid idea. I like it a lot!
I like it best in the simple concept version since you can permute it in other ways. Instead of capture the flag, you could have a mode where the ball is initially hidden and you could add things like “hints” for each planet visited to give a direction towards the right place. Alternatively, you could have “hot-warm” based on radius to the ball.
There’s a lot of room for making it fun, and I think starting from the basic concept is the best way to do it.
As I understand it, there is already some kind of portals laid out one after another in the canyon that one can race through. That got me thinking about the Stargate SG1 episode Space race, and that it would be cool to recreate something similar in Battlescape.
Imagen a race track similar to the one already in one of the canyons, but stretching over a much longer and more diverse terrain. For example starting in the canyons, then a path of portals to orbit where they are laid out around a fleet of NPC capital ships doing their best to get you with their anti-spacefighter guns. Continue onwards to portals on asteroids inside the ring, than inside the 30 kilometre station and so on.
Everyone start in the same location at the same time, and the first one to finish wins. Ramming, guns or anything else allowed to get you to finish before everyone else.
we could also have a football-like mode with 2 giant rings on a planet, where you score using a heavy ball
also a satellite hunting mode would be nice, where you can either destroy a satellite or capture it, capturing a satellite will grant a bonus (bigger detection range, jamming enemy’s instruments, deactivating enemy’s shields), the team with more satellites in orbit when time runs out, wins.
Btw, satellites have to be installed, they are dropped on a planet surfaces in random locations, you have to pick them (capture them), go into orbit, gain momentum, then drop them in orbit, some ships can repair satellites but they have low attack power.
Sleigh-ride: Instead of protecting the hauler, all team members are tethered to the hauler in a chain (like reindeer) and have to cooperatively pull it from station to station while fending off would-be attackers
That’s a pretty good idea. Balancing for high cooperation would probably be the toughest. Still, the premise is humorous and interesting. Lots of possible additions. I’ll think about it!
In response to @FBS, I suggest a rocket-league style mode, but with each end of the asteroids field as the goal perhaps. It could be a cool basis.
Another variant of this would be to simply remove the requirement for nodes to be visited in sequence. That adds a factor of route planning and intelligence gathering as Team A try to identify which nodes are least defended.
Once all the team has passed through a particular node it could award credits to that team so that they can respawn in more powerful ships.
Yeah, but having the possibility for them to be visited out of order makes it harder for the defenders to anticipate where they’ll go next and harder for the attackers to organize.
It might be better to allow them to take different branches but still have limited branches. Or to have the requirement of not just passing through a node but staying there for some time so that the other team has a chance to respond. Something like “capturing” the node by staying close to it for some time.
Or it could be something like the Assault game mode in Unreal Tournament. One team defends and may use some tools or complete some objectives to make defending easier, one team attacks and the attacking team has to complete a set of objectives in a certain order to progress and win.
I can imagine that any team is going to split into two groups - offense and support. The support guys will spend all their time going around to build up what the team needs in order to advance to superior gear and services while the offense guys will go out and try to ruin the other team’s attempts.
That means that each team pursues objectives in whatever order they care to, that the opposing team will be coming in at all times to ruin those plans, and that the two offensive groups will either be attacking the support groups or each other. The teams will have to decide how much emphasis they want to apply to each.
So instead of having a set of facilities that both teams want and converge on, spread out both teams so that they are constantly running around the system, trying to deal with the problems of building up their own stuff and taking down the enemy’s stuff.
And never ever make a goal an all-or-nothing accomplishment. Give small benefits for partial work. That allows teams to decide whether they want to push a control point to maximum benefit, dump ever more resources into it, defend it more intensely, etc.
