Odd Idea of the Day: Leadership Combos
I want to do something about Leadership in GH2. Unlike GH1, lancemates in GH2 are more or less mandatory. This means that a character who chooses to not take Leadership is severely penalized. This is a Bad Thing. What does it have to do with the Black Tri-Stars? Read on, I will explain…
Just to refresh your memory, the Leadership skill determines both the number of lancemates you can have at one time and also the experience award penalty you recieve for having them in your party. If you don’t have the skill, a single lancemate will cut all script-based experience awards in half. The net effect of the Leadership skill is that it allows you to build huge lances.
There are several problems with this. First, as mentioned above it makes the Leadership skill mandatory. Second, at higher levels it makes the Leadership skill extremely powerful. In GH1 all lancemates started at a low level and had to be trained, while in GH2 it’s possible to find lancemates who start at Elite or Ace level. This brings up another point that I want to correct- it’s better to abandon your lancemates when new ones come along rather than train and protect the ones you have now.
What to do about all this? Well, today I got a weird idea while playing. I was fighting three Secutors in an arena match, and they kept charging past me in single file. Cool, I thought, it’s the jet stream attack! This got me to thinking- what if you could, actually, perform combo moves with the help of your lancemates? If kicking an alligator so hard that it catches on fire was one of the high points of GH1 then surely there could be some good ideas here.
The point of Leadership should be that it allows a player to depend more on their followers than their own combat skills. Most characters should not need it, even though all characters should be able to take a lance. Here are my proposed changes to the Leadership system; let me know what you think.
- You can have one freely-chosen human lancemate, plus the story-linked partner and maybe the love interest. A Leadership talent may be added to allow a second free lancemate.
- Pets and robots will be delinked entirely from Leadership. I don’t know how the maximum number you can have will be calculated yet.
- Script XP awards will not be affected by the size of your lance.
- Lancemates will be subject to rapid leveling. Based on the PC’s renown, each time you get a script XP award this will be applied directly to all of a lancemate’s skills until they are at a level appropriate to the PC’s renown.
- In combat, Leadership will allow the use of combo moves whereby several allies act in unison. These combos can happen for both the PC and NPCs, and generally require the allies to be within 5 tiles of each other. To activate a combo a Leadership roll will be made (defaulting to Cha-2) and depending on how high the roll is, a certain effect will take place. At least one of the allies must be a major character (PC or NPC with CID) for a combo effect to take place.
- In an atttack combo, one or more of the allies will get a free attack against the target. There may be special attacks like those used in Funky Martial Arts as well.
- In a defense combo, one of the allies may perform a shield block, missile intercept, or ECM jam against an atttack targeting someone else.
- Lancemates (and NPCs in general) need to be a bit less suicidal. I find that they’re usually OK in mecha combat, but die quickly in personal combat. A lancemate who is severley injured, poisoned, or burning should be able to leave the area and go out of action until the PC returns to a safe area.
So, what do you think?
January 14th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Pet and robot capacity could be determined by the skills to tame/create them. After all, a skilled animal tamer can have a lot of pets, and a master of robotics would be able to maintain and command more robots.
Other than that one comment, I find everything too wonderful to talk about.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
I’m with Erathoniel on pets and robots.
Combos sound good but rely heavily on AI cooperation, which is hit or miss in the best of games so…
Personal combat would be a little more survivable if enemies didn’t spawn in your lap and friendlies didn’t nuke each other and light scenery on fire with blast weapons.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I was gonna say what Erathoniel said, so I agree.
One problem with the current system is that you sometimes can’t refuse lancemates. After all, sometimes it’s best [i]not[/i] to take your best friend the clumbsy oaf with you.
I know the current system of determining maximum lancemates is based on charisma along with leadership, so perhaps the skill exp could also be based on that, so your first lancemate probably won’t penalize you even without Leadership, but the second will. Everyone needs a friend.
You might want to seperate romantic interests from the leadership equation all together, as the relationship is significantly different.
Perhaps the leadership skill should influence how much exp your lancemates get, with 3 leadership meaning full, no skill (aka -2 leadership) meaning half, and 8 meaning double.
Everything else rocks. My robotic overlord character would change significantly if leading them wasn’t based on Leadership and Charisma. That’s important, as I can see robotics being significantly less powerful in GH2 than it was in GH1, where robots seemed to always have the better stats, and lancemates were relatively scarce. Allowing more robots would even the odds.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:27 am
Since so many attacks in Gearhead are very inaccurate unless it’s a complete mismatch, maybe multiple attacks on a single target could get accuracy boosts. Adding attack power wouldn’t make any sense currently, because already I feel that most guns do too much damage (if they connect). For a damage increasing combo to actually mean something, the default damage of just about every weapon should be much lower.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:48 am
YOU CAN KICK AN ALLIGATOR HARD ENOUGH TO SET IT ON FIRE!?!!
Erathoniels robot idea has my vote
and just spitballing a combo move idea. how about one where you can throw your smaller than you ally at your opponent!
oh one more idea. put a skill cap on non sentient robots and split them in to 2 groups dumbot and autonomous. the dumbots can’t pilot mechas and don’t have enough processing power to adapt to software upgrades. autonomous bots can pilot some small mecha types(with penalty) but are incapable of clever stuff like combos they can also adapt to software upgrades which are needed to learn new skills (for example: if the bot has no small arms skill and if you put a gun in its hands, no matter how many rats it kills it will never get any better at shooting with out the initial software upgrade)
January 15th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
I agree with Clasic_Traveller_Diehard on the robots, and would suggest it get expanded to Animals.
So, essentially Animals would be divided between instinctual and semi-intelligent. So, instinctual creatures couldn’t learn anything new, but semi-intelligent ones could be trained to kinda pilot small meks.
I was even thinking it would be cool if the autonomous robots and semi-intelligent creatures didn’t pilot meks like normal lancemates, but rather did so more at random. Essentially, if they had gimped AI, that would add more randomness to their actions.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
“YOU CAN KICK AN ALLIGATOR HARD ENOUGH TO SET IT ON FIRE!?!!”
Yeah, its called Martial Arts.
And it can be done through one of its special attacks.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
While I like the idea of Dominate Animal determining your pet limit, I think that Robotics should at most affect the number of non-sentient robots you can lead. Sentient robots should be handled by Charm and Leadership like normal lancemates (since, being sentient, they pretty much are normal lancemates, only metal).
January 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I had an idea about the leadership equation. Here’s my proposed equation:
(Leadership + [b]Highest Leadership Skill among Lancemates[/b] + Charm + (Renown/10))/8 + [b]1[/b]
Changes should be bolded. My reasoning is that you should be able to get one lancemate for free, to represent everyone having a friend. Also, the “Highest Leadership among Lancemates” represents one of the Lancemates acting as your Leutenant, assisting with group dynamics. In some cases, your character is basically a figurehead, with the Leutenant really calling the shots (your leadership is much lower than the Leutenant’s). If you combine this with being able to give new skills to lancemates, and allowing the Leadership skill of lancemates to assist with the skill check to determine squad cohesion (the check to determine if everyone gets the proper amount of experience), it should go a long way towards freeing the main character from taking Leadership, if they chose so.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Er, by lance actions do you mean assembling into a giant tiger?
January 30th, 2009 at 12:04 am
Or you could have something like where the “energy” of the lance is combined to produce one single super attack.