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Blocks should be stronger?

Got a great new idea for the game?

Should player-placed blocks be harder to destroy?

Yay!
65
75%
Nay.
22
25%
 
Total votes : 87

Blocks should be stronger?

Postby LASTofS » Thu Mar 15, 2012 4:54 pm

Blocks. Let's talk blocks.

We've been having a healthy conversation on the IRC chat and I was thinking of changing player-placed-block entities harder to destroy? Terrain map blocks could stay the same (or easier to destroy, but that's not the issue here). Monsteri brought up an interesting idea - blocks being overpowered. What's the point of building a fortress when you can have a 2x2 wall that will do the same? Building a decent-sized fort is not worth the effort when blocks are quite easy to demolish.

This is Ace of Spades. The block building feature of this game is quite important, and differentiates AoS from a game like BF3 or CoD or any other FPS shooter game! The motto of this game is "Build Your Battlefield - Engineer Your Assault" and summarizes fairly well. We have really nice voxel maps out there, with pre-built forts and buildings, but we should NOT be discouraged from fabricating defensive structures. Frankly, I hate to see a SMG gunner rushing to my base and wiping out a good 15-minute spent creation.

We have the new click-drag buliding feature. Kudos to Ben for that, because I've seen more building going on the servers right now. Maybe if blocks were stronger we could see more intricate or detailed structures. Spades could do more damage, while more gunshots are required to destroy blocks. Maybe not. Leave your comments and let's spark up something, see what you have to say.

Also, cahirs. I don't want people destroying my cahirs when I'm snipping on them.

Advantages:

- Your fort will be more impenetrable
- Encourages more building
- This will make griefers more noticeable, allotting more time to VK them. Not to mention, making their job harder.
- Tunnelers won't be affected


Disdvantages:

- Harder to destroy enemy bases? Requires a more coordinated attack
- Griefing is less fun

Here is a log of our chat. I've edited out the quit/join messages and it's concise.

--

TL;DR - Player-placed block entities should be harder to destroy, whilst terrain generated blocks stay the same (or perhaps weaker)

Suggestions? Comments? Please go on! I should not be the only one thinking this way if we are to improve the building feature of this indie game!
Last edited by LASTofS on Sat Mar 17, 2012 12:41 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby ChaosTLW » Thu Mar 15, 2012 5:23 pm

Yes,all blocks should be stronger in my opinion.It wouldnt affect tunneling unless you are making 2 blocks tall tunnels,because with alternate fire you can dig 3 blocks at once.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby LASTofS » Thu Mar 15, 2012 5:28 pm

ChaosTLW wrote:Yes,all blocks should be stronger in my opinion.It wouldnt affect tunneling unless you are making 2 blocks tall tunnels,because with alternate fire you can dig 3 blocks at once.


Ah, yes. Glad you agree!
While that is very true, I still think terrain blocks would be easier to destroy compared to man-made blocks
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Fluttershy » Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:23 pm

LASTofS wrote:Disdvantages:
- Griefing is less fun


How is this a bas thing?

But yes, despite Ben thinking its ok to up bullet/block damage because of click and drag, it isnt. While you can somewhat put a wall up quickly it still amounts to nothing when it gets torn down faster than you can put it up. On the babel servers blocks cant be damaged with guns until you get near the enemies CP, and Im noticing how forts actually lasted and were useful. Im not saying to nullify damage because thats annoying as hell, but nerfing bullet/block damage is a good idea.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby danhezee » Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:30 pm

what if block strength varied based on how many block were above it. for instance, as you dug a tunnel through a mountain, the entry point would be very easy to remove but as you near the center it would be progressively harder to remove the blocks.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Monsteri » Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:45 pm

danhezee wrote:what if block strength varied based on how many block were above it. for instance, as you dug a tunnel through a mountain, the entry point would be very easy to remove but as you near the center it would be progressively harder to remove the blocks.

Not a bad idea at first glance, but what if there was a 50-blocks tall wall with a 10 blocks tall wall next to it? Since you would barely be able to break the blocks in the 50-block tall wall, it would be just confusing why can you break the blocks so quickly in the 10 blocks tall wall. Also this wouldn't help with forts so much, since it takes a lot of effort to build really tall structures.

And digging a trench on a mountain would be really annoying then.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby LASTofS » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:07 pm

Fluttershy wrote:How is this a bas thing?

But yes, despite Ben thinking its ok to up bullet/block damage because of click and drag, it isnt. While you can somewhat put a wall up quickly it still amounts to nothing when it gets torn down faster than you can put it up. On the babel servers blocks cant be damaged with guns until you get near the enemies CP, and Im noticing how forts actually lasted and were useful. Im not saying to nullify damage because thats annoying as hell, but nerfing bullet/block damage is a good idea.


It's not... I tried to make a joke... guess I failed to. xD
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Habsburger » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:28 pm

Great idea! Fully supporting it!
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Frostified » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:31 pm

Nice idea. It'd give me a reason to stop griefing.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Triplefox » Thu Mar 15, 2012 10:25 pm

I'm interested in this idea, and I agree that speeding up the lifecycle of construction has been detrimental overall. I don't like the towers I started making in babel post 0.75 - they're all "tentpole + trusses" designs, effective but boring. None of the structures I have made lately are ones you can "live in." They're just ungraceful blobs of blocks designed to minimize griefability. It doesn't help that once again, as with the spade/pickaxe merge, most of the population is unaware of the right mouse button and is thus effectively useless at building.

We already know what happens on every pub server given enough time: it gets flattened. But the flat-map situation is not the interesting part of this game - even on pinpoint, new construction is driving most of the unique scenarios that make AoS stand out. As such we should try to have the game bias towards more construction, not less.

Strong blocks can be prototyped in a script - so we can go around Ben on this one and just try it out. I'd also want to try lowering the block cap so that the team has to invest more into new construction, but that's more of a fine-tuning issue.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby danhezee » Thu Mar 15, 2012 10:48 pm

Triplefox wrote:I'm interested in this idea, and I agree that speeding up the lifecycle of construction has been detrimental overall. I don't like the towers I started making in babel post 0.75 - they're all "tentpole + trusses" designs, effective but boring. None of the structures I have made lately are ones you can "live in." They're just ungraceful blobs of blocks designed to minimize griefability. It doesn't help that once again, as with the spade/pickaxe merge, most of the population is unaware of the right mouse button and is thus effectively useless at building.

We already know what happens on every pub server given enough time: it gets flattened. But the flat-map situation is not the interesting part of this game - even on pinpoint, new construction is driving most of the unique scenarios that make AoS stand out. As such we should try to have the game bias towards more construction, not less.

Strong blocks can be prototyped in a script - so we can go around Ben on this one and just try it out. I'd also want to try lowering the block cap so that the team has to invest more into new construction, but that's more of a fine-tuning issue.


My first thoughts of a pyspades script would be sending the remove block command twice to the server before the block can be removed. effectively double strength blocks.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Funk » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:31 pm

stronger blocks will help us go back to the old days when forts and wall where woth building.

when it is worth building things new construction happens that add to the map.
most of the time it is not worth building
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby LASTofS » Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:39 am

Triplefox wrote:I'm interested in this idea, and I agree that speeding up the lifecycle of construction has been detrimental overall. I don't like the towers I started making in babel post 0.75 - they're all "tentpole + trusses" designs, effective but boring. None of the structures I have made lately are ones you can "live in." They're just ungraceful blobs of blocks designed to minimize griefability. It doesn't help that once again, as with the spade/pickaxe merge, most of the population is unaware of the right mouse button and is thus effectively useless at building.

We already know what happens on every pub server given enough time: it gets flattened. But the flat-map situation is not the interesting part of this game - even on pinpoint, new construction is driving most of the unique scenarios that make AoS stand out. As such we should try to have the game bias towards more construction, not less.

Strong blocks can be prototyped in a script - so we can go around Ben on this one and just try it out. I'd also want to try lowering the block cap so that the team has to invest more into new construction, but that's more of a fine-tuning issue.


Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I like izzy's Pinpoint map; it encourages building. I think the block cap is fine, since not many people use all of them anyways. However, I see what you're trying to get at.

Funk wrote:stronger blocks will help us go back to the old days when forts and wall where woth building.

when it is worth building things new construction happens that add to the map.
most of the time it is not worth building


Hmmmm.. tbqh I rarely build nowadays. Except where needed, such as the Babel game mode.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby MrHaaaaaaxFF » Fri Mar 16, 2012 8:48 am

nice idea.
thinking a bit realistic, well, a few rifle shot is enough to penerate a small wall of cover, right? That doesnt makes sense.
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Re: Blocks should be stronger?

Postby Danqazmlp » Fri Mar 16, 2012 1:51 pm

I support this idea.
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