swarming

[TheCapedAvenger]

I dunno if this has been suggested yet, but perhaps there should be bonus for being near your teammates, so as to encourage formations. There could be an extra bonus for being near the person with the bomb to encourage guarding

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by TheCapedAvenger

I dunno if this has been suggested yet, but perhaps there should be bonus for being near your teammates, so as to encourage formations. There could be an extra bonus for being near the person with the bomb to encourage guarding

Something like 1% damage increase for every player within X amount of distance of your plane. Could be a cool stacking effect.

[lamster]

I agree -- "formation" bonuses are an interesting idea I've always wanted to experiment with. Not sure when I'll get around to testing it but I'll look back at this thread for ideas when I do.

[Ferret]

There's already a benefit to flying with your team, it's called "everything else dies." And flying near your bomb? "It hits their base." Completely unnecessary, and allows new/bad players to drag down their team even more with constant suicides and running across the map to kill turrets. It's already a penalty when someone in your team can't fly in a straight line to save their life, there's no reason to make it an even bigger negative. Also on certain maps, especially city, good players will come up from the bottom of the map and start wrecking havoc on defenders when the bomb is about to cross the middle. A bonus for staying with your team would make this less viable and essentially be a "flanking penalty," which is pretty nonsensical.

[DiogenesDog]

pretty much agree with ferret, and the disdain and elitist attitude in his post makes me want to agree even more.

[lamster]

I agree with ferret in principle -- that the 'formation bonus' should be the natural domination that organically derives from coordinated play. However, it's always seemed to me that with the realities of bullet spam in 2D, tight formations are almost always a bad thing. It's especially bad when escorting the bomb carrier: random bullets spammed "toward the bomb arrow" are almost certain to hit something. Area of effect weapons (laser, heavy cannon, rockets, etc) will always be effective at breaking apart tight formations, and rightly so, but spam makes almost everything becomes hyper-effective against tight formations. The idea would be to provide a small bonus to make tight formations -- especially on bomb runs -- situationally viable, for example to exploit a lack of AoE/concussive weaponry on the enemy side.

I agree that flanking is fun and interesting, and should not be penalized, so maybe any sort of swarm bonus would be bad. But flankers do enjoy the element of surprise (the enemy is generally focused on the bomb arrow) so a small bonus to formations doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me.

[skywalker]

Bad idea, people need to learn to contribute to the team instead of your own interests without something else in return.

Sorry for the harshness of this post.

[lamsbro]

You could encourage team work by having more abilities that benefit team members. For example shields, AoE disables, and attacks that help allies if they hit them.

[TheCapedAvenger]

I think there is effectively a disadvantage right now to being in a group. It can be confusing to keep track of exactly where you are and which way you're pointing, especially if you're looking at the target instead of your plane. And as someone said, splash damage is more effective against a group.

[TheCapedAvenger]

Let me clarify what I mean. If it's 5v5, and one team is clustered together, while the other one is not, and they all start fighting each other, the non-clustered team will win. (ensemble averaging over all skill levels, planes, powerups, etc.)

[Smushface]

Formations would make bombing too easy.

[Blank]

Originally Posted by TheCapedAvenger

Let me clarify what I mean. If it's 5v5, and one team is clustered together, while the other one is not, and they all start fighting each other, the non-clustered team will win. (ensemble averaging over all skill levels, planes, powerups, etc.)

Doesn't this make sense? Shouldn't multi-pronged attacks beat blobs? Should the opposing team really have to counter blob to beat it?

Blobbing can make sense and rapes at holding one or two passage ways. But I think if they're flanked or attacked from too many angles, it just makes sense to lose... *shrug*

[BEWBTUBE]

I like how the game is now it requires real skill to be any good at and a feature like this would be like dumbing it down a bit, i think.

[lamsbro]

I think what Capey is getting at is that the bonuses for good team coordination are fairly small. Currently a good team seems to be only slightly better than the sum of its parts, although with all the changes its not clear this is still true. I like the idea of encouraging allied cooperation a little more, but I think it should emerge as a natural consequence of the planes' perks and characteristics, not necessarily as a "swarm" bonus.

[WOLFPACK2]

Originally Posted by TheCapedAvenger

I dunno if this has been suggested yet, but perhaps there should be bonus for being near your teammates, so as to encourage formations. There could be an extra bonus for being near the person with the bomb to encourage guarding

For every teammate you're close to adds a 5% weapon armor and energy bonus (energy amount increased and charge increased)(i have not read anyone posts on here so sorry if i stole an idea