Ambrosia Software Web Board: Totally WACK ideas - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Alright, we all know that Hera is capable of just about anything. We just need some crazy ideas to start off with. Here are a couple:

Spatial construction platforms: Cargo ships drop these as their special weapon. They can construct moors, artillery drones, relay stations, power stations, or a special racially based construct (Human outpost, Obish shipyard etc). After building, they self destruct. The platforms are technically "planetoids," so they get around the "no moving builders" restriction.

Warp inverters: Eleejeetian dreadnoughts drop these special "mines." Within a certain range, about 256 pixels, they will target any warp in/out flare and detonate it for an instant kill of any ship it hits. The idea is to get ships to stay and fight or slowly limp away if they wish to retreat. A rather unorthodox use of this would be to take a cruiser into hyper outside range and fly out of hyper on top of, say, a carrier.

Specialized engineer pods: Obish and Gaitori engineer pods can be equipped, in order to make up for their lack of power, with special features: increasing the time to take over by five seconds, they can take control of enemy ships. It is still useless unless either the target ship is immobilized with maybe a moor, or unless the opponent gives you the ship to even the odds.

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Once caalaklael, now Pallas Athene
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Athena, daughter and favorite of Zeus, half sister of Ares, goddess of wisdom and war

How about a Flak Drone that only shoots engineering pods

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Dr. Tall says: Taller is Better

How about force field generators? It could be a station (or stations, whatever) that fires a continous beam that can destroy anything that runs into it. It would protect anything on the inside of the beam intill the generator was destroyed.
Also, could there be a weapon that destroys planets?

I'll disregard Dr. Tall. Nak'Goek, however, does have an idea there. A small pod could be dropped from a layer-ship, which would set itself up. I think an ideal range would be a radius of 64 pixels, so that it would be just large enough to cover a planet or bunker station.

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Once caalaklael, now Pallas Athene
---
Athena, daughter and favorite of Zeus, half sister of Ares, goddess of wisdom and war

In order for an object to build, it must have preset classes of ships to build. If you plunk down a planet and check off the 'can accept build orders' flag, it doesn't work. You have to type in ship classes in the scenario file. So you could not create planetoids with a weapon, or build new planets, and have them build anything.

It is possible, however, to reveal objects during the game. This is how the Gaitori carrier arrive in level 3 - it is a hidden object that is revealed by scripting. However, hidden objects can only be revealed in order - the hidden objects are like a stack, and you can only reveal them from the top to the bottom. This prettymuch sinks any ideas of expanding your building abilities during a game, unless you pick a different way to expand.

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Replicant
www.axis.n3.net

Na'Goek : you've burst my secret open.

In my plug, the final dramatic explosion at the end of the game will be of the Audemedon moon Remus. In that mission, yo are to escort a Salrilian Planet Crusher to, well, you know. I have the explosion animation, the sounds (from the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy), the graphics of the Planet Crusher, the pl, etc...

I hope you're happy.

-Slug

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I do not suffer from insanity
I enjoy every minute of it

-Cantharan Admiral za'Grom
After the capture of Earth

Hang on a sec, you call these WACK ideas? They seem perfectly reasonable to me.

I kinda like the idea of a forcefield-equipped vessel, so long as the force field drains energy at a nasty rate and suspends firing capability.

Another suggestion, some kind of ultra-close range beam weapon. Remember the Umgha's "Shaving Brush" from Star Control? A weapon which generates a small cone of nastiness right in front of your ship, capable of doing severe damage to vessels and destroying incoming shots.

What do you think?

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only

Sundered Angel, good idea, and they are called wack because they are ideas so strange that not many people would think of them but they are perfectly reasonable.

Replicant: Oh. I'm sure I can find a way around that. It would be possible, I suppose, to make it so that each planet has a spatial construction platform capable of building flak drones etc, and having a cargo ship "land" on it. The cargo ship would expire, and could be replaced by a "cargo ship; flak drone" and have it go to a spot, fire its special weapon, the flak drone, create a flak drone and expire, being replaced by the original "cargo ship; empty." It's confusing, but the main idea is that the ship is replaced by a ship capable of building whatever is in its name.

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Once caalaklael, now Pallas Athene
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Athena, daughter and favorite of Zeus, half sister of Ares, goddess of wisdom and war

WTF are you people talking about?

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I break things...

I am here to opress you!!!



you there! scrub those space potatoes, and NO funny stuff!

you! Where do you think youre going, walking off like that!!! shine that left shoe... and losse some weight for gods sake!



d00d! pwmp the spqr d00dz! ph34r my 31337 hax0ring skillz!



yeah, sure it makes no sense, but i just spent 5 minutes typing that...


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"These are my terms, abide by them or drink vacuum."-Tycho

We're talking about Ares MotherLove, or in Cotton Mouse's case, fantasies. Talking about Ares on an Ares board, what an idea!

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I have a plan so ingenius even an idiot could devise it. We will line all our ships up and fly straight at the enemy death cannons therefore clogging them with wreckage.

I love those ideas!! This is the sort of stuff that this board is missing. I think I have found a way of making up for Ares having three weapon slots. All one needs to do it have weapons which in turn fire other weapons. For example, say one was creating some sort of "super carrier" and wanted it to not only be equiped with a turret and c-missiles but with more then one type of fighter. The slot normaly reserved for fighters would be filled with bombers. every bomber would have a fighter it launches from one of its weapon slots upon creation. this way, everytime one launched a bomber, a fighter would go out too, and amgicaly you just used four weapons on a three weapon ship. The uses for this are almost limitless. The idea of specificaly targeted weapons has potential as well. One could make a weapon that specificaly targeted c-missiles, it could be invisible, perhaps explained as a jammer. One could design an anti-zerbilite weapon. (just for the fun of it) What about making an object that does damage on top of suns?

-Walter-


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Damage on top of suns? As good, or even better. The sun is a stellar object most likely, and if you turn on its can be engaged and hated flags, but not its can be collided, you could get some interesting things- an "exciter" weapon, which only targets suns and is a self rotating object which displays initially a sun and morphs into something else.

Another idea: In EV, primary weapons were always fired simultaneously. Therefore, you could make a group of 2-3 energy weapons and have them all be fired from primary. Then you could make it so that there was a group of secondary and a cloak too.

Actually, a more effective double weapon would create a quickly expiring shot which first launched the fighter and the bomber. This would leave an additional space for the bomber's weapons.

Next idea: lasting flamethrowers. The weapon itself is a simple flamethrower. however, in its destruction action, it is set to create another object which is a self animating sprite and does damage, taking quite a while to expire.

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"If so, then how does one count to 10 on the Mac?"
"128, 127, 126, 125..."
-Pallas Athene, Member of the Obish Consensus

Napalm doesn't need oxygen to burn, so it can burn underwater, underground, even in space.

However, I can only see EVA troopers and maybe fighters and Zerbilites taking serous damage from that because napalm just sticks and burns hot. It's designed to kill things that die from the heat. If used on a big ship, it will only turn the ship into a giant candle and heat it a little.

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Last night, I played a blank tape at full blast.
The mime next door went nuts.

Weapons which only target certain things certainly have a lot of uses... Especially if you can choose for them to target multiple things. Oh, the possibilities... **Drifts of into a happy dreamland where anything is possible and Gaitori Cruisers destroy Audemedon Carriers in playful combat.**

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only

Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

The Salrilian Planet Crusher is set to only attack planets.

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I do not suffer from insanity
I enjoy every minute of it

-Cantharan Admiral za'Grom
After the capture of Earth

Wait, are we talking Vorlon or Salrillian?
A planet crusher would NOT be a good thing- you would have to redo planets to be collided, which would prevent transports from getting in top of them.

Next idea: Energy depleters: Small self-rotating sprites which appear to be two bubbles attached and rotating around each other. When they hit an enemy ship, they creat an expanding bubble and remove about 1/20th of the amount of energy carried by a gunship (I'm not sure how much that is).

Is this possible? Internal storage bays: a large (300pxl) ship which when underneath friendly fighters will cause them to expire, and increase its special ammo count by 1. If there were some way to specifically state the types of ships carried, it would really improve the ship because then Asl/Standard transports could be brought around with hyperspace.

A question: Are EVATs hyper-accelerated?

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"If so, then how does one count to 10 on the Mac?"
"128, 127, 126, 125..."
-Pallas Athene, Member of the Obish Consensus

No. And after a short time, they expire.
It would not be possible to have a storage bay, even it would target only friendly fighters and take -1 ammo pieces. it would need 2 free weapon slots (the launching bay and the "pickup bay") also, you cannot have a weapon that when fired, creates more ammunition for a different weapon.

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I do not suffer from insanity
I enjoy every minute of it

-Cantharan Admiral za'Grom
After the capture of Earth

If Hera's out, we need more ideas

Trazer mines: mines with Trazer Beams

Slingshots: These special ships are basically a ring with little engine power but fairly good rotation. They have a special weapon which will increase the speed of a target to a very large amount, shooting the ship to a target.

Fighter Squadrons: Simply a fighter with 3x the weapons and its picture having 3x the ships.

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"If so, then how does one count to 10 on the Mac?"
"128, 127, 126, 125..."
-Pallas Athene, Member of the Obish Consensus

I have a moderately WACK (y) idea - how about the ability to ram other ships, fighter inflict nominal damage to lare ships and large ships (carriers) knock out both ships. This could be done with a weapon: very short range (2 or 3 pixels) large explosion inflicting x amount of damage (higher the bigger ship is) until a big ship has an explosion so powerful it knocks out any ship.
This probably makes no sense, but half of the fun of my ideas is trying to figure out what the hell they mean. Best of luck...

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"A person needs change. Without change something within us sleeps and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken." -Duke Leto Atreides (Dune)

You could simply add to the damage field.

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"If so, then how does one count to 10 on the Mac?"
"128, 127, 126, 125..."
-Pallas Athene, Member of the Obish Consensus

Pallas At the begining of this board you mention several ships that i have never heard of (eljeetian drednaught or something, a couple Obish ships). Have you made pics for these ships?
If so can i have them please, please, i have been working on an Obish plug since the public beta of hera and i really need some obish ships (i created a battleshp out of that liner pic from shoplifter 1 but anyone could have done that). Plus i applyed for that eljeetian position on you High Comand and if im going to get it i nee dto know as much is i can about them. So if you decide to give them to me (i will be very appreciative) please mail them to matrekie@aol.com
and if you dont ohh well ill try to make my own (they will probably suck horribly) and stop bothering you.

As for my WACK idea what about a Drone (like a flak drone) that fires tractor moors at a pretty long range to immobilize attacking ships this would enable your capture pods to work. Of couse it would have to fire pretty slowly and not have that much sheild so it wouldn't be invinsible.

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"Learn about art captian,
when you understand a
species' art you
understand that species"
Grand Admiral Thrawn
at the fist battle of his
campaig

I do plan to make all of my Obish ships public-they will be in a short while or in a month-one or the other. Eleejeetian pics are not made, but I have ALL of the Obish pics on one computer or another. None are rendered, but I'll post them on Angelfire as .s3d as I find them.

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"If so, then how does one count to 10 on the Mac?"
"128, 127, 126, 125..."
-Pallas Athene, Member of the Obish Consensus

I've been thinking of a zerbilite that could morph into something (a zerbilite queen or zerbilite warrior or something) .the zerb would have weapons which can change object type into something else and the something else could do something else (maybe morph further). I got this idea from StarCraft Zergs as they morph into things.

I've already made a zerb that can take over (capture) ships

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

I was reading through some old ideas and saw one about a napalm flamethrower. A great idea of course, but i thought it would be even better if you somehow equipped the EVAs with 'em. I imagine it would be quite damageing for a ship to fly through a cluster of EVAs and be sprayed all over with Napalm. Just a thought...