This sounsd like a really cool idea! Looking forward to see where you take it. A few questions/thoughts:
Will you be using some form of rock-paper-scissors strategy where certain car weapons deal more or less damage to certain other car weapons?
I'm planning to have both average and specialised weapons, where specialised will do more damage but there will be a way to counter their attack, ex. if your enemy is using guided missles, having ECM car will make them fly at random making them almost useless.
How many different types of train cars are you aiming for?
The ones I already have graphics for:
Locomotive
- unarmed but packing heavy armour.
Empty car
- you get those at start, they serve no other purpose than adding HPs to your train
Machinegun
- the weakest weapon but useful against enemy saboteurs/infantry (I'm planning to implement this later)
Napalm launcher
- shoots fireballs that explode on hit
- does extra damage by setting enemy cars on fire - they slowly lose HP for a while
Missile launcher
- shoots guided missiles at long range, deadly accurate.
I'm working on a code right now so I won't be adding any more train cars in a while but I'm leaving this open for discussion if someone has ideas for more train cars you're welcome to share your thoughts
the ones I have planned:
heavy cannon - high range
- armour piercing - ignores armor boosts
- vulnerable - lowered HP
pulse blaster - fires bursts of "energy balls"
- medium range and damage
laser cannon - constant beam fire
- medium range and damage
- vulnerable - lowered HP
mortar - high damage and range
- extremely inaccurate
ECM car - makes enemy missles ineffective
extinguisher/fire engine - spreads foam (which also works as dense fog) on friendly train cars whenever they are set alight or fired upon by lasers - largely reducing laser and napalm damage
engineering car Either increases armor of the whole train reducing damage or repairs damaged train cars during fight
battery - increases strenght of energy weapons (laser, pulse)
barracks- deploy infantry/saboteurs to plant explosive charges on enemy track charges will detonate on next round causing massive damage.
- infantry is extremely vulnerable to machinegun and vulnerable to napalm and mortar if hit ocassionaly (they will be ignored as a target by everything else than machinegun)
Are you going to allow players to do anything during the 'fight' phases, or are those specifically set aside for players to observe the carnage, the opponent, and formulate new strategies for when the car pulls in again?
I was thinking about some sort of "super powers" players can use during fight but I have no idea how players should be able to obtain them.
If the set of cars you are getting each round is completely random, are you going under the assumption that players will sometimes get screwed over by the RNG?
The idea is that the best weapons will be rare so it won't be completely random. Also there will probably be a limit of the "utility" train cars (which are unarmed but will give you certain bonuses instead) so you won't be stuck without weapons and with utility cars only.
These rules will be precised during gameplay balancing.
Perhaps while the trains are fighting players can scrap cars they don't want in order to somehow affect the random ones they get when the train pulls in again? Or maybe you can try combining some of the cars you get to make new/different cars?
Combining cars is a great idea. I will think about it.
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