Yeah, that could definitely work! How would stun damage and real damage work though? I guess that if the total of stun damage+actual damage exceeds HP, the creature is stunned but alive. However, research from a live capture should reflect how hard it is to capture bugs, so that research is proportional to HP - actual damage. Meaning that if you stun the bug for its entire HP, then it's worth a million research points, and if you all but kill it, and then stun it at the end, you'll get very little research. This could definitely work, so that if you have numerical superiority you could capture a few.
Regarding how the game plays out at a higher level, here's some ideas:
- Bugs start with one hive and slowly gather food. ALL corpses provide food. Fight over the spoils! They can tunnel to anywhere, giving them fast, hidden, transportation highways. They can also
tunnel right into the Terran's base. Lots of factors affect tunnel cost, namely, how far from a hive they are, Terran ground plating, and how reinforced against nukes they are. Tunnels start out hidden, and then bugs can break them open suddenly in an ambush move. Hives are similar to tunnels but possibly generate more food, and can be used to create new troops. They also serve as outposts, since they make tunnelling cheaper!
- Terrans will essentially pick their fights, trying to get as much research as possible. They are constantly balancing the risk/reward of less effective fighting vs getting more research from the spoils. They should be creating small outposts that they can use as staging areas for further attacks. They'll be able to drop expensive beacons which search for bug activity (tunnels, hives, etc). This search takes quite a while to find anything, and beacons are vulnerable, meaning they are going to have to be defended in remote places... also, the Bugs are alerted to the beacon's probing ways, so that they KNOW where to attack.
I can't figure out Terran reinforcements. I like the idea that Terran fleets are arriving every now and then, so you have very limited access to new troops, meaning you need them to survive... but I dislike the idea that if you loose too many troops then there's little you can do, so I'm not sure.
On the technical side, I put in a couple more hours yesterday and I've gotten the basic code down for gathering research from dead bodies. I still need to test and debug it, but the infrastructure's there. I'll hopefully finish that this weekend. The system for Bug food is going to be very similar, so yay.
I think I might add Bug drones, which look a LOT like warriors but only gather corpses. They can also be used in feints, because they are so similar. This is what happened in the book, not the movies.
And again:
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Please help me flesh out the gameplay! Any new unit ideas? Resource ideas? Feature ideas? I'd love a "stance" system, but am not sure how it'd work. Or is this core enough? I'm not a particular fan of tech trees, but a decent one might be a plus?
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Please help me sprite! It takes me forever, and the graphics suck! Usually the problem is finding a programmer. Doesn't anyone want to influence the entire style of the game? There's a single sprites.png file with associated sprites.psd file. If you keep the sprites within the same sizes, you don't even need to fiddle with .xml files! Also, there are quite a few easier sprites, such as for buildings, that we can talk about and add.
- Any ideas for good sounds I can use? I can barely stand those rifles sounds, which are literally me clicking my tongue at the computer... :\