We could have ckits that shoot short-lived jump pads, anti/gravity spheres (which would have less attraction power on bigger aliens), even EMP-ish stuff that temporary shutdowns alien defenses but would be a slow projectile and can be stopped by an alien’s body (lolbalance), etc.
An easy way for aliens to tell what upgrade a ckit has would be changing its colour from blue to green, purple, red, etc. Also it should give an extra evo on death, obviously.
They would have a limit of how much they can shoot at a time, and a cooldown.
The upgrades themselves wouldn’t be OP as you would still have to carry someone in your team that has almost no way of defending themselves or killing shit. That’d be a fun way of using physics, and provide some diversity in gameplay.
Same goes for grangers I guess.
You would have to buy the upgrades at a defcomp/booster respectively.
Also I think it is better if we keep anything like that out of the vanilla gameplay.
Also, we should add a painting option to blasters in case everyone is camping in scrims so they can paint shlongs on the walls while waiting for timelimit.
I think without an alien counterpart to check this weapon/support tool it’d be extremely overpowered depending on the the strength of the anti-gravitational sphere and the radius of the EMP.
The EMP will effectively knock out/severely hinder a number of alien buildings if aimed and thrown well.
You can expect a squad of four or five helmeted humans at your base all escorting the bombardier. The supportkit will then release his EMP and/or anti-gravitational device and it is then open season on the alien’s headquarters.
The only idea I can come up with to counter a supportkit is as you mentioned a specialized granger. Said granger will have 125 hp and move slightly slower than a +granger but with double the regen rate. The granger will have barbs that when thrown will deal 25 damage with a direct hit and no slow down effect or if thrown into a group of humans will deal a small amount of splash damage and slightly slow down the mob.
This granger can be the core of a defensive alien setup. With a competent dragoon escort the granger can unload his bombs and hide behind the goon while regenerating health and ammunition.
Countering the counter
To counter the grangers, humans can have another supportkit option, that is the support medic. The support medic would build medistations slightly faster than a +ckit. They can only build one medistation at a time and said medistation will have less health than a normal medistation but require no repeater. With alt-fire (right-click) the support medic kit can aim at a slowed human and bring him back to normal speed for as long as the crosshair is on the patient.
The EMP would be moving slowly (slower than lcannon projectiles) and have a rather restricted range, obviously for bases like window room on niveus it would be extremely strong if used properly (which is a good thing, force people to be more creative than just spam all your BP in tubes over the door until you run out), but not so much in regular bases like ATCS where you don’t pack defenses up. If it does move slowly, perhaps aliens could destroy/change its direction by shooting barbs/granger spit at it, or just stand in front of it. Now an interesting thing would be that, since the projectile wouldn’t directly damage structures and have a cooldown, it should be allowed to bounce off walls once or twice.
Temporary heal bubble (hi Z) which will also force humans into packing in it, which is where granger aoe would come in to play. I am not fond of building medipads faster and without power. I don’t like the idea of healing kits in general anyway, changes the human gameplay way too much in my opinion. (4 lasguns sitting by a healing kit which builds a repeater, lelelel)
Also, alternatively to what you said, the granger could turn into a “queen” gramgler that can spawn smaller AI-guided aliens, or cover the ground in organic matter (…no second thoughts) that would damage humans slightly, or reduce their armour whilst giving a slight movement speed boost to other aliens. That could also be applied to the creep, or the granger spit’s splat effect. (Which would be another effective way of getting humans out of their healing zone.)
I also like to think of the battlegranger as an alien with more hps, claw power, and better spit just like KoR’s bgranger, but it would also be able to build traps such as ones that could release basi gas, pull a human to the ceiling, idfk there are plenty of things you can do with traps. Or, it could build weak structures that provide boosts to the team, similar to the booster’s aoe regeneration. It wouldn’t require creep to be built, and obviously there should be a range restriction between 2 of them. One of them could be increasing speed and damage taken, another could increase damage but lower speed, etc etc etc etc.
Sounds like a good idea in general, i dont know if a agree on the specifics however.
EMP/anti grav and etc seem a bit far fetched if you ask me.
But being able to use the ckit other than to wait after building is a definitive must, the time when you wait for it to cool off is a total waste.
A good idea might be fake structures or small walls like nets that can hold of aliens and more such sort, but do not increase the cooldown and cost very few bp.
Oftopic: i used to play a game where you could repair structures with like a pda, it was awful it was so overpowered that if enough people did it even a huge tank assault could be countered, those were the days.