Suggestion: Make traps attackable

[aReclusiveMind]

Originally Posted by RoboAV

Just let the repulsar/tractor beam effect traps. You can shoot them away.

It would be neat if the traps became active for enemies after you used a repulsar or tractor beam on them.

I like this idea. It reminds me of my Subspace days when I used to be able to lure an opponent into a corner and then either repel mines into them or them into mines. Either way was quite satisfactory.

[sbach2o]

Originally Posted by weelillad

Well at the very least, Acanth ship will change from my worse enemies to my best friends, if enemies can trigger traps.

Those traps should be special in that they only are triggered by enemies of the Acanth. Note, that those could be other monsters as well and most or all of the race ships. I always found it unjust that those race ships can move freely where I need to be on my toes. Also, imagine those traps' blast radius being larger than their trigger radius... I think this is the case. Those Acanth are putting their mines outside the trigger radius from you, but not outside the blast radius, if I am correct.

Other traps should have such a friend/foe awareness as well. They should usually be attuned to some class of monsters in the system.

The problem of the traps being cleared out for us by others could be somewhat alleviated by letting them spawn just like monsters or by having some monsters laying those traps when they have nothig better to do. A different issue would be that of fighters, ours especially. I would only be just, if they too trigger traps. So they either would need to learn to avoid them, or become something between a liability or useless.

Yet another problem I see, is that taking care of traps these ways would mean more AI code and my old computer is currently bitten hard by the existing AI code (game is actually already unplayable for me).

[silverhound]

What about introducing a mine sweeper or allowing the flak cannon to deal with mines aswell?

[LostSoul]

It would be an interesting change to the otherwise largely useless EMP weapons if they could either temporarily disable or completely remove any active missiles or mines in range. I'm leaning towards "disabling" myself. Disabled mines would be harmless till the debuff expired, while disabled Missiles would turn to purely ballistic weapons and would stop tracking their targets. Anything that got in their path would be damaged.

EMPs have a 2.25 second re-use time so it might be too effective as an anti-missile system in its current state (since it also does a smattering of damage and debuffs all ships in range as well).

[fluffybot]

Useless? You must be joking. They drastically improve combat efficiency and promote survivability in a big way. Later in the game you'll encounter high-level variations of the core concept and they can easily become a staple component of any loadout; the same holds true for EMP's. If you find them useless you're very obviously not using them right, or you've simply outleveled them.

[tomwham]

It is totally annoying watching evildoers that chase me just pushing traps out of the way. Yet when they explode on me, I'm usually totally crippled for a minute or two.

Traps must be TARGETABLE by some or all of our weapons.

[Shardz]

Originally Posted by aReclusiveMind

I like this idea. It reminds me of my Subspace days when I used to be able to lure an opponent into a corner and then either repel mines into them or them into mines. Either way was quite satisfactory.

Subspace Continuum! A big +2 for you, my friend! That jarred my memory box back to the day of my honkin' 486DX2-66 rig playing that over the Internets through my dialup BBC unix gateway. Oh, and I do remember Ritual Entertainment fondly, too. I'll keep these thoughts with me as I test .912 tonight, thanks!

And back to the topic; it would be a cool idea on some type of mines (or perhaps a Destruction type of item) to reverse the seeking behavior to follow your enemies in a radius instead of you for a brief time. Example;

Mine Targeting Polarizer
[Reverses targeting systems on mines to seek nearest enemies for a short time.]
*Duration: 15 seconds
*Cooldown: 1 minute
*+150% seeking speed rate
*+100 Radar to affected mines
*Do Cool Stuff: +3 to SomeStat for 30 seconds
*Recharge something useful: +75%


These could even be a stackable Essential Component possibly (such as the Shields & Energy buff items), but would require some spam-proofing and balancing. Just some thoughts...