by The Mak » 05 Apr 2014, 15:29
What you can do is place a bunch of wreckage on top of each other and this will act as sort of the resource field in StarCraft.
Some issues I see is that if you take an engineer and select on the wreckage, it will only reclaim the top of the stack and then just sit there. You will need to issue a patrol path so that the engineer keeps reclaiming the next wreckage.
The next item for consideration is that there will be no limit on the number of engineers (other than space) that can attack the reclaim field. So your economy will be based on how many engineers you can fit into a wreckage field. You may get around that issue by stacking wreckage that has small mass values, this way the engineer will be constantly starting and stopping its reclaim beam and adding more engineers to the wreckage field might not be so beneficial.
The other thing to consider is the possible slowdown due to so many wreckage. Each of those is a 3D mesh that needs to be rendered, and the engine needs to keep track off. I think there is also a prop limit, that is, if there are so many wrecks on the field the engine will start removing the oldest ones first to maintain game performance. Whole wreckage fields might just start disappearing in the game. Perhaps you can create a script that once the wreckage is reclaimed, another will appear, similar to the map the spawns new mass spots around a constructed mass pump. You can have some fun with this as well. First only T1 wreckage is spawned for some time or preset limit, then T2, then onwards to Experimentals. After a few Experimentals the wreckage just disappears. Also wreckage life time will need to be increased or removed.
The final item I can think of is that wreckage can be destroyed. Now you can leave that in as a game element but I feel then it will be a rush to tac missiles and nukes that will just obliterate the stack units (all the wrecks in the stack will take damage due to AOE), unless you create the script I mentioned above or modify wreckage to be immune to damage. I think you can just edit a category entry for this but I am not 100% sure.
Fun game mode for sure.