GearHead2 v0.401

[Anticheese]

I'm thinking of a few things here in no particular order.

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Difficulty levels improve or lower your score

Score is the universal rating for how well you did in a game, playing the game at 1/10 of the normal difficulty should only be worth one tenth of the experience. Likewise someone playing the game at double difficulty should get more rewards.

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Different challenges/plot arcs for different difficulty settings

You're not going to seriously consider letting people do dangerous things like infiltrating a foreign embassy when they signed a deal with god to give the guards all the brains of half a dead starfish? Add some difficulty specific missions/plot content to add a bit of flavour.

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Is it not nifty? Difficulty slider bar in colour!

Think about it, at the begining of a new game the player will choose his difficulty setting right? Lets use a scale of one to ten with five being the "normal" yardstick.

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(It looks bigger in the ASCII version)

Basically you have a coloured slider bar starting at green on the left (for cakewalk) and red on the right (for masochistic) and have a blue # act as the slider. It gives a visual representation of your difficulty and plus it looks neat.

This would also be easy to do with the SDL version.

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Difficulty settings, random events and you.

I'd like to bring to the table the idea of random events. At the moment the only random events you have are:

You find a $25,000 chunk of ore. Or bandits.
You find the martian princess.
You find a corporate truck that gives jack-all benifits.

What I'd like to see are more random events in GH2, anything from a meteor shower (think Pitch Black (the movie)) to unexpected total faliure of a non-boss enemy Mecha.

On the easiest difficulty setting events will still appear at the same rate as any other difficulty setting, on super-easy they are overall 99% positive (the one percent is: "You break a nail.") but they are also very minor.

On super-hard however, events are far more severe but carry far greater rewards.

I would *LOVE* to see this system in.

[Joseph Hewitt]

I'm looking into ways to speed up the display, such as a toggle to turn off background animations.

Any other comments about the arena mode? It's now possible to access inventory via the ArenaHQ, and as luck would have it when I started work on this I found that I had apparently already anticipated this feature, since many things were already set up to easily accomodate it. Wild.

I've added defense turrets to the base attack mission; what I really need to do is build the base using random scene content sorted by difficulcy level. The next two things to do are to redo the way monster difficulcy levels are handled and get to work on the Mecha Engineering changes.

[macksting]

Maybe some base missions should be against hardened locations without load-bearing engines to destroy them; basically, your job is to harass forward maintenance bases.
Or maybe create a mission where you're destroying ships under construction, requiring the destruction of multiple hardpoints. Or maybe just another engine.

Getting even further out there, you could put in a random event where, once you destroy the engine in the base, the game slows down briefly, half the text is scrambled, and images are pasted in sideways while all the colors change with every step.
"You broke the engine, damnit!"

[draconuszero]

Another fun mission would be to disable a mech by either destroying its legs or by forcing the pilot to eject.  That'd be a challenging mission as well since you do not want to go overkill.

[Joseph Hewitt]

For those who have tried it, how are the v0.401/2 improvements to tactics mode? Enjoyable yet?

[draconuszero]

i didn't try it, so i can't say...  i thought i did, but i only played .400 so yeah.  if possible, just delete this reply since i can't delete it myself.

[SharkD]

How do you turn Arena mode on/off?

[draconuszero]

in gh2 select the start arena campaign option instead of rpg campaign

[SharkD]

I seem to be stuck in Arena mode not being able to hire a character. The first time worked OK. There are no characters in the 'hire' menu.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Create some characters from the main menu, then hire them.

[SharkD]

Well, I've been playing around in arena mode and I find it kind of weird. It  doesn't really feel like other turn-based games. I can't really put my finger on what feels different.

A couple of minor things:

1) The remaining time indicator gets obscured by some of the other menus. Maybe move it somewhere where it's always visible.
2) Enemy turns seem to proceed super quick. Is there a way to slow these down?
3) Having a way to select movement destinations with the mouse would be nice. You could also display a trail of footprints leading from your character to the mouse pointer showing the amount of time that would be consumed by moving there. (Fallout and ToEE have this.)
4) The remaining time indicator should have ticks on it so that you can get a feel for the measurement of time.