Mirrors

I had an interesting thought last night.  A craft-able item that could be placed is a mirror that allows shots fired by the placing faction to be reflected, yet opposing faction's shots would be absorbed as damage which when it becomes to much will break the mirror.  These mirrors could be hacked just as any other structure.  There would be both ceiling/floor types and wall types, which could be represented as two different recipes.  This will have to wait of course, but will make a nice addition after the basics of the game have been completely developed.

Request system

Ok so I was on a date with my wife tonight and she was being very patient with me once again as I brought up this game idea.  And something that came out of that brainstorming session was the idea of a request system.  Basically inside of a company sized element people can post a desired recipe and what materials are needed for it.  Then as players come back to the base they can choose which projects they want to support by donating materials to them.  Company commanders and officers will be able to prioritize these projects so players will know which ones need to be filled first.  Of course players aren't obligated to donate if they don't want to, but the faster things like bases and vehicles get built the better chances of the faction winning.  It also gives guidance to the player who is confused as to what to do next.  Once all of the necessary materials have been gathered the requesting player will be able to craft the item in question.  I would like to have some sort of notification go to the players, with something like text across the screen or a flashing icon in a corner of the screen.  Players will only be able to request for one recipe at a time so there isn't a situation where a players has spammed tons of their own projects that they want to get materials for.

Walls

I had a thought that so far I have planned on almost everything being crafted from refined metal and energy crystals.  And so in my insomnia state in which I tend to think of these things I thought what value will the other collectible items in game have.  I think I have discovered the answer in the way that crafted items of anything but metal and energy crystals will interact with shots that have been fired.  If one were to build a wall of say, dirt, for example then that dirt could only be destroyed by enemy melee attacks.  This would mean that walls put up would provide good cover for players and structures, both of which can be damaged by both melee and distance attacks.  This then brings up the idea of stone.  I want stone to be one of those things that only builders can break and/or harvest, meaning that stone walls are impervious to everything except builder melee attacks.  So a base that has been surrounded by a nice stone wall will be protected from long distance attacks so long that the enemy is not able to get line of sight on anything inside.  Since ramps will be pretty easy to put in it would be a very simple thing to set up a base that one can move out from.  I hope this will provide incentive to collect and process other materials.

On another note before I had said that recipes would be forgotten when winning conditions have been met.  I think I'm going to change it so that there will be a timer for certain recipes so that they won't come into play for a given time period after winning conditions.  I think I will rank the recipes and make it so higher ranked recipes take longer to unlock.  So for example if someone has learned a rank 4 recipe then they will not be able to craft it for 4 days after winning conditions have been met.  That way everyone gets to keep their recipes, but the winning faction won't start out with a huge lead as far as knowledge goes.

How many materials?

Something I've been struggling with is the whole concept of material collection and how to make it at least a little more challenging.  Some thoughts I have had include have a set amount each block can produce until the area is reset.  Another is having a set amount that it can produce in a given time period, like 50 in one day.  Or I can just make it so that a player will be able to harvest an unlimited amount from any node, but the amount they can carry is limited to say stacks of 9 per inventory slot.  I'm sure that this is something that will get sorted out as I start to make the game, just something I need to think through now.

Related to this is the amount of materials needed to make things.  I am probably going to go through crafting recipes one item at a time in posts so I will have it to refer back to.  This will mean a lot of posts about very specific details, which I would like to have in place for everything before I start the programming.