Should both teams be prevented from building in water? This would fix playability issues of some maps (like pulse). Would this change negatively affect play on any others?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
If we were to go this route, perhaps also buildings making contact with the water should be destroyed. There are mods that allow buildings to be built on other buildings, and in those case it is possible to drop a building into the water by deconstruction a supporting building under the building to be dropped.
Buildings in water are generally asinine unless maps are designed for it, ie. “rush to the middle” maps.
I think this does bring up a discussion of what role water plays in Tremulous, which means different things to different map makers. To me, its a way to separate planes of walk-able play areas without having to make walls/holes so that people are encouraged to try to avoid them without it being punishing. They could be used to hide vents that lead to more interesting areas or slow down people who don’t play around them carefully. They could also just look cool when done right.
Building inside water means that enemies are attacked when they are in a state of slowdown, which I don’t think is either fun or fair. Especially aliens, who are more vulnerable when they can’t rely on their speed/abilities to escape a underwater human turret fortress of shittery.
Therefore I vote for underwater buildables to be prevented by default.
Meh. If the mapper doesn’t want people to build in water, he can just use the nobuild shader.
Should be an option that you could turn on/off on specific maps imo.
If the map is unbalanced as fuck, then simply don’t play it.
Aside from that, perhaps there could be aquatic upgrades/classes or something.
RIP “Trappers that actually drown humans”
This seems more like a legacy decision since a good chunk of the water-specific maps had (have?) huge problems whether its people building unstoppable underwater ret fortresses, people getting stuck because they bugged out into a brush floating around or aliens making kill choke points that drowns human who venture in too far deep into. There seems to be all kinds of BS associated with water brushes.
The point you made is that map builders have the power to determine where or where not to build in the water. I think we need to ask ourselves if Tremulous should allow underwater buildings. I don’t personally think so, because its clearly not designed for it.
Something like this solve alot of the problems. However with maps that lack water, this may actually hurt classes/upgrades that focus on aquatic maps. They would need to be 100% optional upgrades.
Actually with a technology tree, and an evolution tree aquatic upgrades/classes could be included. In fact, with such tress, upgrades/classes that are only useful on a fraction of maps would make more sense to develop.
We can change the design, with changes reflecting some real-world principals: Guns do not fire well in water. Electrical devices submerged in water will short circuit and die. Basi gas will release bubbles. What else?
Perhaps we need an option to completely disable building in water, so it then becomes server-controlled.
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Building waterproofing and gills should cost extra build points, and if an active human building is damaged beyond 80% health, it should start losing it and an alien building should start bleeding out instead of healing (grangers should be able to stitch their wounds so they can heal properly).
Just make aliens swim faster. This has been tried on AU in the past, and I don’t remember any complaints. Maybe humans should swim a little bit faster as well? Disabling building in water just removes options and variety, both of which should be encouraged instead.
Mappers should definitely not be prevented from allowing water building if they want it, and there are areas with shallow water where people would expect to be able to build.
For disabling building in water on maps where it remains problematic even after faster swimming, I recommend an upgrade to map layouts, so specific water areas can be blocked without blocking all of them. It should in general be possible to load and combine multiple layouts.
Afaik, slackers QVM has a command (!nobuild) that disallows building in a specific zone.
+1. let the mapper do his job
A lot of mappers have a poor understanding of game balance. Often they will design their maps based on creativity and aesthetics, ignoring the gameplay. I’m looking at you 1.2 maps.
true. let’s not play bad maps. if those maps are created by bad mapper then disable water build will make map good?
but if we really want to have those maps, isn’t it easier to fix the map itself rather than adding switches to the server to let it tune every single part of bad map? should we also fix problems with other maps? changing gravity, disallow build too high, teleporting through too long halls etc?
Some maps that might be of poor quality for some game plays can be good in other mods. For example maps which are usually a jet camper’s heaven, can become balanced an fun if introducing jet fuel, or a flying alien. It is already possible to have settings change based on the map that is loaded (such as bp and gravity). Maybe that should be put to use more, as well as implement other per map features that makes a map work better on servers with different game plays.