Idea What are the worst units you can think of? (Rebalanced Sun MK III)

[Missingno50]

And HOW exactly would you fix them under the limitations of the Tiberian Sun engine? If you want, you can also submit some non-ares based units/buildings for RA2 when I get around to making Rebalanced Alert MK I.

This is for a mod called Rebalanced Sun MK III, and below has a list of changes I plan to make.

Spoiler

Buildings

Spoiler

Defense Structures

GDI SAM site

Spoiler

I've always found the GDI SAM to be... well lacking. Actually come to think of it, all SAM sites to be lacking in terms of TS. They're either too powerful or too weak, so I'm going to try to change that. I'll make the GDI SAM be the first to change to play out this balancing act.

Burst(Number of rapid successive warheads per shot):+1(2)
Damage(Clear what this is):+2(35)
Range(Kinda clear what this is):+5(20)
Minimum Range(Also clear. Keep in mind this makes sense for a SAM site to not really be able to directly target above itself):+1(1)
Bright:Changed to Yes

The new Projectile(labeled REVAAHeatSeeker), which was designed to replace the regular AAHeatSeeker found on both SAM sites.

VeryHigh(Changes the way the missle is seen on cruising altitudes):Changed to Yes.

There is currently no warhead to replace the SAMWH as I do believe it works for now. I may make a REVSAMWH to revise some of the stats though, but it'll most likely become REVNWH1 instead and be used in place of many different warheads.

Nod SAM site

Spoiler

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY TIMES I'VE TRIED TO REVISE THIS THING! I think I finally nailed a good one. I've replaced the missles with AA lasers to fit with the other laser weapons. This one is actually pretty easy to fix.

Burst(This may be a bit overkill...):+4(5)
Damage(In order to one up the GDI SAM):+17(50)
ROF(Rate of Fire, gotta have somewhere in between):+10(65)
Range(To fit with the GDI SAM site, the range is reduced ever so slightly for the laser feel):-2(13)
Minimum Range(To one up the GDI SAM, this one has a better chance of targeting close targets):+.25(.25)

Neither the projectile or the warhead need a change at this current moment.

 

Units

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Aircraft

GDI ORCA Fighter

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This one is LOOOOOOOOOONG overdue. Infact, as I type this, I've been making the adjustments needed.

Possible Rename:Orca Scout
Cost:-150(850)
Guard Range(The one that makes these things annoying):-5(25)
Points:+5(25)
Primary:Under review(Most likely a custom light infantry like weapon)
Secondary:Under review(Most likely a rebalanced variant of it's current weapon, the Hellfire missles)
Elite:Under review(Most likely a combination of a minigun and hellfire missles. Yep, be sure to see that in your nightmares soon. Though TBH, on paper, this thing is still a little slow and clunky, so you may have time to save yourself. Plus Nod SAMs help)
ROT(Rate of Turn):-2(3)
Reload(Not entirely sure what this does yet. Need testers.):+2(2)
Sight:+8(10)
Speed(Obvious):+15(35)
Strength(HP):+250(450)
Tech Level:5

 

 

Tell me how you think this would go and submit your own changes with them.

Keep in mind the AI in this mod will be running off of a modified set where AI CAN and WILL build walls to defend. Not exactly sure why it was even disabled in the first place. You may use partials of the completed mod in whatever you want. Hell you can modify it to just include your units, as long as you give me as much credit as possible.

Edited February 25, 2017 by Missingno50

[Isaac The Madd]

As some who has modded Tiberian Sun before do not use TibEd, just use notepad or some other text editor for editing the ini files.

https://ppmforums.com/index.php?f=30

http://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client

 

[Missingno50]

6 hours ago, Isaac The Madd said:

As some who has modded Tiberian Sun before do not use TibEd, just use notepad or some other text editor for editing the ini files.

https://ppmforums.com/index.php?f=30

http://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client

 

I'm using TibEd to give me a template to modify. I'll take this in consideration, but I do know this much:TibEd is actually pretty good despite it's issues.

(This will be my first time using anything but TibEd besides MK II which was made 4 years ago. I'm rusty)

Edited February 25, 2017 by Missingno50

[Pushwall]

Limpet Drone. Like... what's even the point? The "turn enemy vehicle into a scout for you" aspect is not that useful as you probably have decent exploration by the time you can build them, including into the enemy base, and the "slow enemy vehicle down" aspect is certainly not worth the price of this unit, unless maybe a Mammoth MK2 blunders into one? Especially since they can just repair their unit and bam, problem solved, drone is dead.

In any case it all pivots on the enemy driving onto the exact square that you want them to, which is really only feasible with Harvesters. But they return home all the time and are bound to be quickly repaired, so slowing down a Harvester for one trip is probably not going to set the enemy back by more credits than you spent to make the drone. If you want to spend valuable build time and money to create a minefield of them to deal with actual units, well, slower vehicles that you can see are still going to annihilate your base if you don't have your own to assist in defense.

Sure they're pivotal to that one campaign mission... which is heavily scripted and puts you into circumstances that would never happen in a real game.

Really its only foolproof use is something completely unrelated to its gimmick: it's Nod's only option for amphibious scouting... at least, until you get aircraft and finagle them around the edges of the shroud because that's a thing. And if they're not facing any GDI then obviously they don't need this.

I have no idea how they would be fixed within the limits of the engine though. Dropping their price to 100-200 or so seems like the lazy answer.

[moonsense715]

Limpet drone could be slightly more useful if fog of war was enabled all the time.

[Mojoman]

Limpet drones slowing down a vehicle really defeats the point. I can see 'Ooooh sneaky base exploration!' But 'Oh my vehicle is really slow, must be a limpet drone *repairs*'.

 

Meh

[Pushwall]

Even if you're not paying full attention to their speed, there's another giveaway that a unit's been limpeted: the selection box turns yellow.

I've never played TS multiplayer though (and even if I did who'd actually be using limpet drones on it?) so I don't know if that effect is actually visible to anyone other than the limpet's owner.

[delta]

18 hours ago, moonsense715 said:

Limpet drone could be slightly more useful if fog of war was enabled all the time.

I was playing some skirmish games a while ago with fog of war turned on, and I figured maybe limpet drones would be useful as invisible sentries...but their sight range isn't that great, and worse if an enemy runs over them then your scout is gone...

[moonsense715]

3 hours ago, delta said:

I was playing some skirmish games a while ago with fog of war turned on, and I figured maybe limpet drones would be useful as invisible sentries...but their sight range isn't that great, and worse if an enemy runs over them then your scout is gone...

I meant tha it's easier to just reveal the opponent's base once than trying to micromanage limpets around, but if fog of war hides your revealing then that makes Limpets better. No use in seeing what you've already discovered, unless fog of war is on.

On second thought, do Limpets allow you to reveal any stealth stuff? E.g. what if a Nod Harvester goes into a stealthed base?

[OrangeP47]

On limpets.... anyone remember this classic? Around 6:15 for the specific part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcYbfmSSVpo

 

[delta]

I still get "I couldn't save them!" ringing through my head whenever I'm a medic and a teammate is just outside my healing range and he runs off to go die 

Edited February 27, 2017 by delta

[Pushwall]

3 hours ago, delta said:

I still get "I couldn't save them!" ringing through my head whenever I'm a medic and a teammate is just outside my healing range and he runs off to go die 

Same here. A lot of people seem to severely overestimate how long the medic's arms are.

The talk of modding reminds me that I have an unfinished "chaos mode" rules.ini sitting in my TS folder, that was supposed to do a bunch of completely screwed-up stuff and not care one bit about balance, but I never got around to finishing it. I probably should do that some time. Right now here's a few of the things it does:

• adds even more spaces to the start of the Amphibious APC's name (in vanilla it just has 1 superfluous space)
• buildings produce a large wave of technicians when sold/destroyed - no light infantry
• aircraft fly just above infantry height
• the ring graphic for telling units to move somewhere is replaced by the Ion Cannon ring
• infantry disappear into puffs of smoke instead of leaving corpses. Germany approved!

[OrangeP47]

I always liked modding my own rules.ini for personal use too. Oddly the most common things I did, besides making tiberium spread like crazy to be more 'thematic', was to add in rolls similar to what APB did with infantry, ie the shotgun, officer rolls. I think I also liked to give TS Nod infantry with a laser rifle.

[Pushwall]

27 minutes ago, OrangeP47 said:

I always liked modding my own rules.ini for personal use too.

Over ten years ago I had one to mod in a third "original faction do not steal" that wasn't even related to the TS lore (though I did attempt to keep it balanced and not go godmode with it). Those are a total pain to do under the original engine and I had to backup my rules.ini for every single line change just in case some completely innocuous change to something would cause the game to become 100% guaranteed to crash either while loading or right at the start of the game.

Probably the most puzzling to me to this day was that a unit using Image=1TNK would crash the game (using a custom 1TNK voxel, not the default) but if i renamed the 1TNK.vxl to CRASH.vxl and updated the image tag in rules.ini appropriately, that stopped it from crashing. Somehow.

[OrangeP47]

2 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

Over ten years ago I had one to mod in a third "original faction do not steal" that wasn't even related to the TS lore (though I did attempt to keep it balanced and not go godmode with it). Those are a total pain to do under the original engine and I had to backup my rules.ini for every single line change just in case some completely innocuous change to something would cause the game to become 100% guaranteed to crash either while loading or right at the start of the game.

Probably the most puzzling to me to this day was that a unit using Image=1TNK would crash the game (using a custom 1TNK voxel, not the default) but if i renamed the 1TNK.vxl to CRASH.vxl and updated the image tag in rules.ini appropriately, that stopped it from crashing. Somehow.

Yeah, I learned so much about how getting any program to do what you want wasn't exactly intuitive, and probably started my cluttered, 5 backups of any game I edit (slight hyperbole) attitude. I always just copied the basic rifle infantry for new units (or a more suitable base) and never messed with the graphics or icons, so it was a rather derpy hackjob. Most of the time this resulted in having to wait for tooltips to pop up and dealing with units that go invisible when actually attacking because they didn't have the correct animation. The thing I remember that on is when I gave the rifle infantry in TS the weapon of the cyborgs to simulate an officer having an upgraded weapon. 

[Pushwall]

To bring this back on topic: How about the Cyborg Reaper, aka the Veterancy Fountain? Not a bad unit by itself, but when enemies shooting it after it's already dead get credited for even more kills - and thus more veterancy points - it can be quite the liability if your opponent happens to be using some of the few units that actually have a noteworthy elite bonus (like the Attack Cycle or Tick Tank). If what I remember about of rules mods of old is still true, then pretty much every large rules mod out there boosts units' veterancy effects to RA2-esque levels where they're actually worthwhile- if you're doing that then the Cyborg Reaper becomes even more of a liability. Easy solution here: just have it instantly die instead of going through an animation.

[Missingno50]

Okay offtopic @above

But my idea for a limpet drone buff would probably be a light machine gun, stealth even when not deployed, and when deployed has a significantly BIGGER sight range. Oh and instead of being a stealth scout when deployed, because that function is useless, and give a rocket launcher when deployed.