A "Low Health Threshold". How units respond near-death.

I havent been on the forums in a while, not sure if this suggested yet.

I been playing some Skyrim, mainly working lately tho, so dont get wrong idea...

Point is, in Skyrim, when an enemy is at the hairline of health left from dying, they take a knee and are immobilized. Could this concept work on this game?

Could different units and structures in game have an effect when at really low health?

Could units on low health take less small arms damage but be unable to move? Or be unable to move or attack but start struggling frantically to regen health faster to keep over the border of dying? Could different units do different things?

I think it should be a battle getting a unit/structure to the threshhold of breaking, and then another mini-battle to finish it off or capture it (good solution to make capturing more functionable).

In this way, it makes sense that units could in-game, as they take damage and become closer to death, to start reacting to the damage they are taking.

At half health, the damage-soaking-big-units can slow down even more. As they take more damage, they can suddenly go to their knees and use both hands to fire frantically. As they reach bottom of their health, they can go down on all knees and hands unable to move or shoot so they can be captured, but will regenerate health very quickly for an escape if somehow given that long to do so.

At a third health left, the speedier units could be able to move faster. The medium sized strike units could even be able to have a single long dash escape move, followed by serverely reduced mobility (to reward staying within territory).

Units can even automatically take the disabled that are left at the end of a fight if they have the units to capture enemies ready as part of the attacking army. Yet, a casually micromanaging player that happens to be overlooking a large fight can even individually try to capture a few units mid-fight, although it would be a struggle to do so when enemies are still present to fight off scavenging capture units.

I would say unnecessary complexion In the game.

That sort of thing is cool and adds flavour when you're dealing with a small amount of units but on a large-scale game like this it'd be a nightmare.

Having a bunch of units straggling, or even worse slowing down the healthy ones to stay in formation, unless you handpick them out of you group-selects?
No thank you.

I agree. Suppose some sort of artillery struck a huge portion of a formation of tanks. The struck section could have their health reduced and suddenly not able to keep up with the rest of your units. In addition it seems counter intuitive. Moar damage = faster units? I would think that it would work in reverse, metal chunks getting stuck in the treads and joints of units slowing them down.

I also foresee lots of micro. Moving in your units to deal tons of damage, and when they get partially spanked, move them back for regen and forward again. I don't like that idea.

If there are experimentals, this could be a cool aesthetic feature, but even then it would cause more pain that any gain.

And all this speak on "capturing" makes me think of chess.

EDIT: See FA's Black Ops mod Basilisk. Closest thing to fighting while going down.

Now that would be cool, imagine blowing the legs off a Monkey Lord! :lol:

I would vote no. It feels weird if machines would react like they are hurt (Sound or visual).


However, losing parts (like a kill bot losing one of its arms) could be cool.

But on the other hand it would look realy weird if it was a 100% change to lose one arm if damaged to a certain point and the competitive player base would have a fit if we made it a random event (not 100%).

It could possible be a included feature if they disabled it for ranked/ladder matches (and had a tick box for non random to disable and enable it).

While me myself love random elements and chaos in game i do understand those that do not.


I wouldent like if units slowed down when damaged. While it makes sense, it tends to mess up my game if units dosent move as planned. (One gun less on a couple of units is no biggie, but one slower moving unit can mess up my whole formation).

This kind of system would work great! A Commander that reaches a low enough health threshold might suffer a core containment breach and explode.

Or a giant unit that suffers too much damage suffers a core containment breach and explodes.

Or a normal sized unit that was hit too hard suffers a core containment breach and explodes.

Or an aircraft that gets shot suffers an engine failure, crashing into the ground, causing a core containment breach and exploding.

We shall call this threshold ZERO HP.

You had me worried for a second there! ;p

Mike

LOL, me too.

It's funny because a lot of the discussions on here about these kinds of features mirror discussions I've had over the years while making these games. I think we have other kinds of mechanisms (wreckage for example) that add interesting gameplay without muddying the experience. The idea that units degrade in performance when damaged sounds good on paper but.... well you know.

on that note something odd in supreme commander FA i noticed is units DO NOT explode at 0 HP they explode at < 0 HP.... I personally think 0 = dead not < 0

I like this idea but I think it fits more in small scale games.
In large scale games I think it tends to just cause noise rather than giving depth.
It would be cool to see a limping robot and otherwise crippled units in the carnage of the battle but it would probably just grow unmanageable really soon.
On superunits it could be cool as you don't get this 1 HP difference between a fully functional experimental and a dead experimental. It could also give room to some pretty cool death animations where the unit slowly gets torn to shreds.
Imagine a Czar losing propulsion as it takes damage and getting stranded until it is destroyed or repaired. Given enough damage in an instant and it comes crashing down while sustained fire forces it to land.
And sinking battleships...
Gonna make a thread about it.

Commanders explode at zero HP. Loyalists, too.

I think in FA units don't have health they have Armor so the next shot after 0 armor = system failure.

This reminds me of a pretty weird episode i had in FA a long time ago. A friend recorded it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3G2V41s7Dk

My engineer escapes with 0 hp...then it returns for some micro harrasment, where we end up reclaiming each others engineer two extremely unlikely episodes one after the other.

I say everything should just explode and deal aoe damage when they die.

It would be nice if there were any damage-over-time effects, a unit with low health would have a Kamikaze threshold, you know, you lose control, it runs into enemies and explodes there...

It sounds like a cool idea but, like lots of people said, it seems like it would be better for a smaller scale game. I would like to see my more damaged units cycle to the back as healthy units move to the front, reducing casualties.

I liked the TA explanation for unit explosions.

HEAVY armour is an ultra dense shielding made of artificially condensed metal and an energy field is required to maintain that density. it is tremendously strong, but if you break the armour it just explodes.

Wut?

I would say each unit has an onboard microreactor. Some (big) units require too much power and thus feed off the global economy in order to get enough power (IE, artillery).

This is why, no matter how many small units you have, they never impact the economy: they have an onboard reactor.

The commander just has a really, really exotic reactor that produces mass as a byproduct and causes it to violently detonate.

In Total Annihlation, every unit used microfusion reactors and had armor that suffered Critical Existence Failure. It was really cool, though you won't find that lore in any of the newer instruction manuals.

In TA the Commander had an antimatter reactor, and stored energy on superconducting rings. It was a ticking time bomb.