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| Suggestions Post ideas and suggestions here. |
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#1
05-16-2008, 08:46 AM
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Things what would make game better.
1: If you are playing to win, there is currently no point in being anything but a bomber. It is tough enough to basically ignore any single enemy, get to the objective, and spam it with bombs. In order to kill it properly takes either uber skill or more than one person, in which case one player is still accounting for >1 enemy without doing anything other than flapping about like a wounded duck pressing "D". Which brings me to my next point.
2: Right now, it seems as if each plane is balanced to be roughly as deadly as any other plane in a straight up fight. This is bad, as it makes the game uninteresting from a tactical standpoint. With the exception of the bomber, you can basically pick whatever plane you want and the outcome will be similar. A better approach would be to classify planes in more of a rock/paper/sizzors fashion. This would encourage actual teamwork rather than the mob mentality that I have seen thus far. It should be fairly obvious how this would work, but heres some notes anyhow: A: Bomber, cant hit planes with anything except tail gun (bombs no longer collide with planes). Takes lots of damage, should be bigger and easier to hit. Having one over your base should be bad news. Can carry super bomb without penalty (more or less as now). B: Biplane, decent against fighter, excellent against bomber. Primary anti bomber craft. Takes medium damage. Secondary fire should be a low power bomb, which would solidify this craft as the jack of all trades for games without many people. The current machine gun is allright, but a little pointless. I would blend the current secondary with the primary weapon to get a new primary weapon. Medium range, high rate of fire, medium spread. If you manage C: Loopy, slightly weak against bomber, homing missiles make it anti-fighter. Take slightly less than medium damage. D: Miranda: God against both fighters and bombers but is more fragile. E: Explodet: Defensive ship. Would not change much about it except to make the blast radius of the primary weapon larger, and do more damage to the firing craft. Mines should also home quicker and more easily, do more damage, but be able to be shot down. (Imagine escorting a bomber in and having to shoot down a cloud of these.) Others that do not currently exist: F: Awacs: I envision this being the rough priest equivalent that buffs nearby fighters, makes homing missiles home in more, displays enemy HP, etc. G: Stealth. I like in general the idea of a fast, extremely fragile, maneuverable plane that does not display unless you are nearby, it would be good to fly around doing the equivalent of knifing people. The purpose of this plane would be to basically prevent bomber escorts from getting too far. It would also open up some new map types. 3: Right now the map has good choke points. Ideally, it would be very difficult to impossible to fit certain planes through them. (Cough, bomber). However, at the moment people seem to just open fire on nearby chokepoints without bothering to see if an enemy is there or not. Not 100% sure what to do about this, but blind firing should not be rewarded in general. See powerups below. 4: It also seems as if there is a universal damage scheme whereby some planes simply have more hitpoints. I would propose creating various armor types that would protect against certain weapons while being weak against others. This would just be good for balancing things in general. 5: Raise the ceiling on the levels, the plane physics are great but the pacing of it forces you to corkscrew around each other in circles rather than fight for altitude (COUGH, NAME OF GAME) and attack from above, which should also confer some benefit to projectiles. The general strategy should be something along the lines of escorting a bomber to high altitude, before diving in with it for a bombing run. The purpose of the dive would be to gain speed to avoid flak. 6: CLOUDS. There should definitely be clouds in some levels that you can fly inside and be obscured, (see awacs). 7: Powerups at the moment are pretty excellent. The homing missile seems to be the least useful though, I would make it either home better or do more damage. If you see one coming after you you should be thinking "oh ****", as it is I hardly notice. The portable wall things are awesome. One thing that sucks is that the powerups stay where the person died. I find myself steering myself into walls and such if I am about to die to deny use of a powerup. This is bad, the person who killed me should be rewarded. This is compounded by the fact that they fade away quite quickly. Most games of this type have the powerups bounce around a bit and tend to float away from obstacles to make them easier to pick up. I like the current energy system, but it might be a good idea to dispense clouds of ammo (thinking floating bullets/batteries etc) for primary and secondary weapons for use in a separate system. The reason is just to discourage spamming. Ammo should be easy to get, but the on board supply should be fairly tight. This should help balance things a bit less in favor of advanced players as well, as even if they are shooting everything down that moves they still have to keep an eye on their ammo supply, whereas a dead noob always gets a full load. 8: I would try to differentiate the weapons a little bit more. I already mentioned the cone fire for the biplane, but here are some other items. Missiles should be different bright colors so you know their effect and can prioritize dodging them, this can be aided by having different lengths and colors of contrail/rocket flare. Also, I'm not certain but it seems they don't have any acceleration. Having them accelerate towards a target would be both cool and awesome simultaneously. The telegraph would also allow them to be dodged easier, which would allow them to have their damage increased to put them more in line with what one would expect out of getting nailed by a missile. 9: Defensive emplacements are good, I would just add some more types. The existing ones are just kind of plinking away and I generally ignore them. I would add missile turrets that fire sporadically, and flak cannons that do a kind of area denial thing. The only ship that should be able to survive for any time in this mess would be the bomber. As an afterthought, adding a plane or weapon to the lineup that is extra strong against emplacements specifically seems like it would add some more strategic depth. 10: The greater depth described here would allow for some different game modes, like playing as biplanes and defending an awacs while getting harrassed by an enemy composed entirely of stealth fighters, capture the flag type play, etc. A lot of possibilities open up. Anyway, I can't be assed to write more right now, but that covers just about everything I have taken note of in the past couple of days. The game has come a fair way even in the two days I have been playing it, and clearly I spent a few hours today playing it so it is already very good. The biggest threat I see to the games success as it is is just having no longevity. The sort of thing I mention here I think would address this and would put it into "classic" territory IMHO.  -SL 
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#2
05-16-2008, 09:29 PM
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The bomber isn't the only useful plane to take out the base. If the base's turrets are down, the explodet and biplane can take out the base fairly easily, and they're better at fighting off any enemy planes nearby. The bomber is more powerful because it's the slowest and not at all useful in attacking planes directly in front of it.
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#4
05-17-2008, 07:09 PM
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I think that approach shows a lot of promise. A lot of plane related games just have meters like speed/turning/damage/armor and just mix and match those to get different behaviors. The addition of specials allows for a lot more potential for team mechanics and such than is provided for by merely picking a plane that matches your skill and playing style. As for the bomber, the biplane is all well and good, but the bomber I think is still better as it allows for you to fire behind you. On the current map enemies spawn above you, immediately dive to shoot at you, and then run into bombs you have dropped or get raked by the tail gun. On another note, I was trying to master the tail gun yesterday, and I repeatedly shot down loopy's and biplanes that were chasing me. The amount of bullets and damage I could throw out seemed to by considerably greater than what they were returning (or perhaps just the damage from them I could absorb). Either way it was fairly easy to shoot down planes that were trailing me and firing back before dropping my bombs. Anyone share that observation?
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#5
05-17-2008, 07:45 PM
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sounds to me like you're making the game more complicated just for the sake of making the game more complicated (and/or you just finished playing an arena game of World of Warcraft and thought "hey, if these were planes that would be AWESOME").
As far as bombers tailgun goes: You have more HP than loopy/biplane and deal (at least) on par damage-wise... so yeah, you'll win the attrition war if they're dumb enough to continue to plug away at you from that angle. The one point I'll agree on is bombers effectiveness on bases are out-of-whack. I'm personally a fan of the 'big bomb only deals damage to bases' club (of which, I think I'm the only member) which basically puts more emphasis on plane to plane combat/escorting and less on ignoring other players and spinning in circles/spamming bombs over a base. Of course, this method makes turrets even more useless than they currently are but meh.
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#7
05-18-2008, 06:00 AM
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Uhhh, yeah. No offense but a large part of the reason Altitude has had any success so far is because of its incredible simplicity. Just seems like you want to make a tactical FPS + WoW arena hybrid out of a game that is far from either of those.
Originally the game was balanced with deathmatch in mind, not as a team game. Team objectives were added as somewhat of an afterthought, but still provide an amusing change of pace. I assume, and hope, that this is what will continue to happen. I'm guessing you started playing semi-recently since most of your individual plane/powerup observations are quite a bit off, but there are a couple decent points (1 and 2A.) in there. And yes, Blank I would like to join your club and subscribe to your newsletter. Last edited by Snowsickle; 05-18-2008 at 06:23 AM.
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#8
05-18-2008, 06:01 AM
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Meh, planes should be able to hurt the base, only because it would completely suck to have a partial bomb hit leave the enemy with a pixel of health. But yea bombers make things kind of ridiculous.
As far as the original post, it sounds like you want to play a different game. I can't comment entirely on the direction or aspiration that lams and others want to take, but this is more of a side scrolling shooter than a tactical standoff of defined skills. Overall this sounds like a well crafted troll.
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#10
05-18-2008, 02:18 PM
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#11
05-18-2008, 05:29 PM
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The biggest problem imo with limiting damage to only the big bomb is that it really means you can only have a couple roles for planes. Being able to differentiate between good offensive vs defensive planes is nice. As it is, there's some issues with overlapping roles imo... in the long run, itīs going to be very difficult to make it so that all the defensive or dogfighting planes are equally viable in competitive team games. Eventually players are going to get to the point where minor balance problems get magnified and players will only pick the Miranda and never Biplane (not making any claims about balance, just giving an example of two planes that basically have the same function).
And also, thereīs just something cool about different planes being good at different stuff. =)
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#13
05-19-2008, 04:21 AM
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I'd prefer same or greater bomb strength, but less of them. What I'd prefer more is FFA, because that's what planes should be balanced to. If bombing bases is such a problem then just have bases have "anti-bomb technology" that makes bombs do less damage to them. Bomb strength balance should be based off of plane-plane interactions.
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#14
05-20-2008, 11:13 PM
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I disagree with reducing the number of bombs and increasing bomb strength on the Bomber. Two reasons...
1) This makes the bombs even less effective in dogfighting without affecting its offensive capabilities, and I think that right now the Bomber is straddling the "crappy at dogfighting but good at base killing" line pretty well right now. 2) The more important reason - dropping a ****load of bombs is just FUN. Itīs very visually appealing and enjoyable to let loose a full payload, and a lot of that would be lost if the number of bombs was reduced. 3) If the ammo powerup gets back in, this would make Bombers sick as hell. Pretty minor issue one way or the other, though. =o
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#15
05-21-2008, 01:11 AM
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i don't know if this has been said already, but I have told people, in IM conversations, that it would be awesome if there were 6 or 7 medium strength (as opposed to high strength like right now) bombs in one payload.
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#16
05-24-2008, 04:51 AM
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Linear Mode
