Basically, remove marauder’s electricity attack. Instead, let’s justify the marauder’s name by giving it the ability to loot fallen humans and human bases to make it a true marauder, not a fake marauder it is today. Marauders should be able to loot human structures that are about to explode and fallen humans by pressing the R key.
Looting humans should give the marauder permanent power-ups.
Grenade: kamikaze tertiary attack (same as the current basi bomb but kills you).
Chaingun, rifle, mass driver, lasgun: Limited but faster version of New EDGE Hummel’s spikes.
Flamer: slow, limited-range inert projectile that can be triggered by pressing the right mouse button again. Its damage increases exponentially with distance traveled (up to eg. 1000 damage), but if it reaches its end-of-life, it explodes harmlessly. Should have a very low splash radius.
Lucifer Cannon: homing barbs with excellent maneuverability, but you have track the human with your cursor with your right mouse button held down for a several seconds to fire one.
Jet Pack: air dash by pressing spacebar in the air.
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Looting structures should not give it any power-ups. Instead, it should give it the ability to bestow a power-up upon a single granger.
Machinegun Turret: allows the granger to build a single barb tube. It should have more health then a normal acid tube and shoot a constant stream of acid barbs that makes short work of battlesuits but will damage friendly structures if badly placed.
Tesla: the next 2 barricades the granger builds will have a weak, infinite-range zap attack that hits any human that damages it in proportion to the damage dealt.
Medistation: allows the granger to build a single cocoon, which should heal aliens faster than a booster.
Defense Computer: the next 5 structures the granger builds can survive without an egg and function without an overmind.
let’s justify the tyrant’s name by giving it the ability control alien intra-politics. there should be at most 1 tyrant. other aliens should be divided in 2 groups:
the loyals, who follow the tyrant, and help smite all opposition, and
the rebels, who try to topple the tyrant.
WRONG. gamelogic actions shall be initiated by gamelogic (virtual) keys/commands.
You’re too much into overly-literal programmer-think. Of course the controls shouldn’t be hard-coded. If you used more JavaScript, as prescribed for us all and less Haskell, you’d easily see that by R key I meant the reload key, by right mouse button I meant secondary attack, etc.
When making ideas, its best to take into account how simple it can be made to actually work in-game. Your ideas are really cool, but they would also take a really long time to implement correctly. Think simple. Why take away the marauder’s lightning attack when it can be re-used to redefine it’s role in the game?
Let the Marauder keep it’s damage lightning ALT attack, but with some passive benefits based on your ideas:
Looting humans
Make it so that whenever a marauder shoots lightning at a human wielding an energy weapon, they lose an amount of ammo which instead restores HP to the marauder. This is useless early, but lategame it becomes useful against pulserifles and luci-spammers.
Looting structures
You have something going with this concept, since the humans do have some pretty nifty structures lying around. What if Marauders could use lightning to “hack” into any structure and take control of it for duration? Basically it anytime lightning hits a structure for 5 seconds straight, it becomes “rooted”. We’re focusing on simple so just make the structure just has some funky shader applied so people know its been “taken”.
Of course, this needs to be balanced. Rooted structures should be atleast 1/2 as fast or effective as normal ones and rooted structures can easily be taken back with enough ckit repair shots. Rooted medipads heals aliens and rooted armouries act as boosters. Every other structure is simply “disabled” until either destroyed or healed with ckit.
Basically they would act as ADV Dragoons without having to hit S2/S3. They work better early against RomDOS’ portable structures then scale off late-game since the marauder needs to sit there shooting lightning into the structure for about 5 seconds instead of simply using ADV Goon barbs to shut it down.