Battlesuit exoskeleton. (dumb idea that maybe isn't)

[KVZ]

Hm Battlesuit. Cool idea. I like it. Also I like idea of armored cars from this topic...

[Piscator]

I'm neither interested in discussing your childhood nor am I interested in exchanging personal remarks, via PM or otherwise. I'm just trying to tell you that "I don't like it" is a valid opinion, especially if followed by "I agree with XY's arguments" and it doesn't excatly help your cause if you start undermining their credibility by calling them people who "panic and get their panties in a knot thinking about all the things that could now happen to their established towns and power-structures, if some evildoing empire or group got a hold of some battlesuits and went on a rampage" in response.

Having said that, I think the major flaw of the idea is that it doesn't address the core of the problem. The combat system is borked. What we need now is a fundamental redesign, not a high-tech gadget to patch it over. All we would achieve is making combat less straightforward, very likely introducing new loopholes to make combat even less credible. As Doug pointed out for example, all a town need to do to defeat a power armoured agressor would be to use the usual guerilla tactics of stepping out of a building, attacking and stepping in again. Together with the inability of leaving the suit without help, it would make this gadget likely be utterly useless. While the positive effects of a battlesuit are uncertain, the effects it would have on the general feel of the game, and the technological credibility of the game world in particular, are. As pointed out, battle armor would appear as much out of place as a fusion reactor would and that alone is reason enough not to implement it, at least not in this form and not unless there are some major technological developments.

[Cogliostro]

No, vague personal dislike is admissible only as vague personal dislike - not an argument. When someone asserts that they agree with what "people" said, we don't know what they mean, what people, what was said, and has it been said at all or not? You see the problem.

Did you re-read the updated original post? It's all been addressed there already, for example:

- Battlesuit warriors are invincible for people who don't have one of their own. The usual guerilla tactics you mention (hit and run using buildings) would be of no use, the suits would take control of the outside of a location, and if they have buddies, they can take control of the inside as well with some cooperation. You're missing out on an amazing new range of strategic options by thinking of the advantages/disadvantages incorrectly.

- Technological credibility isn't at all an issue. If you do not like the fact that it's a robot, and has circuitboards, fine! We already discussed, it can just as well be called "heavy plate armor", without offending the pedantic sensibilities of technology level purists.

The rest of what you brought up boils down to "I say the benefits are uncertain". Well, I say they are certain and quite interesting. Let's be real, we have been stuck with a crappy combat system for half a decade (in the process nerfing it a little more every year), and now that there are some ideas about how the stalemates this created could be broken and it could be infused with a new life without major changes to underlying code, you balk at that, saying "the underlying problem isn't addressed"?

Sure, it isn't. We don't have either the balls or the programming team to address that, and by the looks of it, never will. Since you're no stranger to Cantr's resource problems, I want you to just consider for a second what a HUGE resource sink these battlesuits can be. They also make battles depend more on the preparedness and economic power of the people involved, without at the same time making it like you're completely invincible and are now a one-man juggernaut roaming the land (needing help to get out). I know it wasn't in the original idea so I can't claim credit there, but isn't that whole possibility of throwing off the combat stalemate that has now emerged from discussion just beautiful?

[Cogliostro]

I'm very interested in hypothetical scenarios and loopholes that everyone can see arising, or positive play scenarios for that matter too.

[Cogliostro]

One scenario I've been thinking about is what happens if some powergamer gets himself a battlesuit and a ship (or ground vehicle). They would then be able to travel around solo, wreaking havoc in all the locations that haven't got their own battlesuit warriors guarding them. This is surely a lot of fun for the perp, but might get to be very annoying for the people living in the affected towns.

The ability to do it stems from how if you're in your vehicle, you retain mobility and can leave anytime even without un-deploying your suit. That's not the intended behaviour, so the way I see it, there needs to be a rule in the code that if there's a deployed battlesuit character on board, the whole vehicle cannot move again until they undeploy (or exit).

Basically the intended effect is that battlesuits give you all these amazing combat benefits, but cause immobility and the danger of being left behind Tin-man style. With such rules in place, even if you somehow acquired the expensive suit, you still can't just zip around harassing towns all by yourself.

[Piscator]

If a battlesuit could only be countered by another battlesuit, people without battlesuit would be unable to do anything against the agressor except hide and wait who starves first. This sounds not exactly desirable either. On the other hand, if people choose to play along, a battlesuit would become a must-have item, pretty much like a crowbar. Must-haves are counterproductive in a game whose basic design idea focusses on freedom of RP. Cantr is no game about villages training and supporting a champion, nor should it be.

Also, if you decide to call your battle suit heavy plate armor, the concept would indeed become more plausible technology wise, but the inability to enter a building would become less so. Although cumbersome, plate armor is not that bulky that it would keep you from walking through a door.

And yes, I repeat that the underlying problem is not addressed (or at least only insufficiently), which is the general awkwardness of the typical fighting strategies and the lack of roleplay it encourages. Your solution might solve this for people wearing battlesuits, but it changes absolutely nothing for those who don't have access to one. Instead of creating an item that allows you to fight in the way it should be, forcing the whole game world to revolve around these items, we should try to find a way that allows anybody to enjoy a satisfying combat experience.

edit: I though people in a battle suit wouldn't be able to enter a vehicle at all. It's just another type of room after all.

[Cogliostro]

Making the whole game revolve around it, just like crowbars - that is a very valid point. You mean that it'll almost be time to add taglines like "Cantr - we have battlesuits". I'll think about this more, but my first reaction is that we do have the crowbars, which are not even that expensive. So why not this? An advanced, powerful item, for people to pine after and desire. The build requirements for it could be bumped up another notch, if we think it's going to get easy prevalence. I'm thinking of it as of an extremely luxurious, atomic grade defensive weapon. It's personal armor, but gameplay-wise it resembles and behaves like an actual oldfashioned tank. I think that's an interesting, unique midde-way combination (between knightly armour and armoured vehicle) for the Cantr world.

In the scenario where attackers (including battlesuit warriors) descend on a town that has none of their own and can't call for help from elsewhere in time, the defenders get no chance to resist by force, they have lost the arms race in this case, and must either surrender or hide in their buildings as long as they can. Of course that won't help them very much, and unless they somehow manage to capture or take out the tank's agile buddies out of the picture, the attackers win.

It would go like this:

- battlesuit warrior(s) enter the location from their vehicle and attack, begin lockbreaking
- since our defenders don't have suits, they hide inside, hopefully within "deep" buildings.
- eventually the invincible and undraggable battlesuit warriors break the first lock, and call for the buddies to help them undeploy.
- (vulnerabilty time) There might be a tense interlude of 2-3 Cantr hours while the agile buddies are standing in the middle of the location helping their tanks undeploy.
- The tanks undeploy, move into the building where defenders hide. They in the first room, and start deploying again (2-3 hours) so that they can break the next lock with impunity. While this goes on, they're vulnerable again to defenders hitting and dragging them.

Given these eventualities, it's possible that many attackers will forego trying to "fish out" the defenders from their deep hiding place. Instead maybe they will try to break into some of the houses and local vehicles to profit, and then leave if that was their mission, or continue to blockade the town until defenders surrender to their demands.

[Piscator]

We do have crowbars, but this is another point that will have to be fixed eventually. Locks are among the most powerful weapons right now and having only one countermeasure makes the game very inflexible. Luckily crowbars are cheap enough so that quite a lot of people have one. Even if you are locked up without a chance to escape (which frankly sucks) there's at least a vague chance that someone will rescue you. If an item of similar importance were only available to the 50 richest men in Cantr, 99% of players were absolutely helpless.

Cantr is supposed to be about freedom of choice and that's why you should be able to do a thing in more than one way. Forcing people to wear combat suits is equally harmful as forcing people to hide in locked rooms and/or drag enemies inside.

By the way, if we had a way to stop people from the usual hit and hide tactics, conventional armored vehicles could more or less fulfill the same role as BA (which would just expand existing technologies; imagine refitting a van with armor plates). But, as I said, before we can start expanding the combat system in this way, we need a sound foundation. The idea about clashes has much more potential for improving the game than this one has.

[Cogliostro]

Yeah, true. The idea about clashes, and the idea about market stall vehicles. Look where that's all at.

I ought to be getting pretty depressed about this Cantr theme, except that everyone has made almost unbelievable progress since I started with my rants years ago. Why, I remember how in the beginning, there would be a choir of voices going "Cantr combat, we like it just how it is, don't you touch it". And look at what we have now: everyone recognizes the goofiness of the combat system, and there finally begins to arise a consensus amongst staff that a stalemate balance makes a game, well, stale - and not "RP friendly".

I'm only concerned that it always takes so long. I don't have another three years, do you?

[Piscator]

I probably do, but we might not have to. ProgD is active like rarely before.

That you seem to get more approval for your combat ideas is probably due to the fact that your combat ideas have developed into a less radical direction lately. Killing healthy chars with one blow will still provoke a (IMO justified) storm of protest. Ideas about auto-retaliation have been around since at least 2004 and I guess there has always been a fairly large player base which would welcome such a feature. With a sufficiently reliable system to avoid accidental retaliations, I think there might be a real chance of it being implemented

[Cogliostro]

Those familiar with the Fallout series of computer games will remember a faction called the Enclave. They were the only faction in that game to have powered battle armour that made them "invincible". On the surface the current idea about elite, superexpensive battlesuits seems similar to that (ultimate power for the 50 most wealthy players in the game), but it's really different if you analyse the specifics- our Cantrian battlesuits are not the absolute be-all-end-all power available to the individual, but rather a nifty strategic option that we make available to *groups*.

The battlesuit allows some members of the group (if the group can afford it) to become these invincible tanks for the duration of battle. So it's quite dissimilar compared to crowbars or other options currently available to solo individuals. We have seen how without suit-less buddies, being a battlesuit warrior is pretty much suicide.

On the other hand, being a suit-less crowd of people versus battlesuits is also suicide. You already see where I'm going with that, the exact restrictions that we identified so far allow to emulate the reality of combined arms warfare in the real world, all in a cute uniquely Cantrian way. An implementation like that would be lots of fun, brighten up the landscape for the ambitious warriors, and it also goes hand in hand with whatever other combat tweaks (Clash etc.) that may be added later, because after all we're calc'ing all the combat using the same set of rules, only in two "tiers" now- tanks fight tanks using the combat system, people fight people using the same combat system, and the two tiers pretty much can't fight each other. The tanks can't catch agile people who will hide in buildings, and the people can't damage the invincible tank. When we figure out a way to implement a better combat system than we have now, even then the tanks would continue to be a fun and useful piece of the puzzle to have around.

(PS: To clarify Piscator's question, as a deployed battlesuit warrior you can't go into a vehicle. But you could go in without your suit on, start travelling somewhere, and then deploy while travelling - so you can arrive at the destination "guns blazing". Upon your arrival, the check in the code for travel with suits onboard will stop you from being able to drive the vehicle anywhere else until you undeploy. That's what I was referring to.)

[SekoETC]

I've been intentionally ignoring this topic because it seems ridiculous. Cantr is not a battle game and there must be some other way to prevent hit and run combat. Also something like an exoskeleton sounds like it's straight out of science fiction while I prefer to imagine Cantr technology as something other than modern, even though there are cars and such. Implementing some sort of high tech battle armor is like starting to climb up a tree starting from the top. You're supposed to start from the bottom. Starting from the bottom in Cantr would be to assign defensive values to clothing, then allow making leather armor and such, giving them weight and increasing encumbrance rates based on how much they limit movement, which could lead to a delay for actions that normally happen instantly. In this point people start whining about how Cantr is a slow-paced game where seconds shouldn't matter, well, they already do matter. Currently all movement inside locations is solely defined by how fast someone's clicking finger and Internet connection is. Even a few seconds increase would give online people more time to hit or organize dragging.

[KVZ]

Agree. So, can we accept it and mark it "awaiting for technical progress" like helicopters? I hope to see those suits at least in far future of Cantr

[EchoMan]

Me too, can't wait for "first contact" RP's when we invent warp drives, and I know a character or two I'd like to slap with a medium sized intergalactic starcruiser.

[Miri]

And at least one of mine wouldn't mind getting a Death Star and blowing it all up properly. I don't think I'll be putting it in the suggestions anytime soon, though

Agree. So, can we accept it and mark it "awaiting for technical progress" like helicopters? I hope to see those suits at least in far future of Cantr

+1 to this.
Nice suggestion, but DEFINITELY not for now.