DFD-R2: 1032 vs. 1115, 758 vs. 1158

[Renegade]

DFD: Daily Feature Deathmatch

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The Cruel Fight For Implementation

This is a Daily Feature Deathmatch post. If you are unfamiliar with the background of this event, please read the announcement, the adjustment and the schedule.

Fight 1

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[0001032] AllowedToStartInMultiplayer.Count= flag vs. [0001115] Allow parasite compatibility with mutation logic

Fight 2

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[0000758] Optional Iron Curtain / Forcefield immunity limits vs. [0001158] having two spawns in the same unit

After the fight is over, two of these issues will be suspended, while the other two move on to the next round.
Remember that the coders will not take part in the discussion, so make your arguments complete, concise and convincing - when it's over, it's over.

Part of that is clearly marking what outcome you support for which issue.
There should be no ambiguity in the issue you're talking about, and it should be clear what outcome you support. Feel free to put your stance in bold, and use simple terminology like "kill #69" or "I want #42 to survive".
This use of simple terminology should be part of a larger argumentation - if this is all your post consists of, it will be ignored. We are interested in argumentations and details to consider, not votes.

A decision will be made either way, a lack of discussion will not cause all issues to live.

Be friendly, be civil, be logical.
You are allowed to try to deconstruct the arguments of those arguing against your candidate, but remember that they don't make the call - there is really no point in getting personal.

The discussion should be contained in this thread, argumentations elsewhere will be ignored, but you are allowed to transfer and adapt points made elsewhere in the past.

We want a good, clean fight.
Let's get it on!

These fights are largely automatically generated - if an issue turns out to be unfit for combat, it will be disqualified and the opponent will go into the queue.

[MRMIdAS]

[0001115] Chestbursters win this issue for me, could be good for a mutation style upgrade system.

[0000758] I support this, but not in the way it is described in the issue, EFFECTIVENESS= on the super/weapon could call a warhead, and parse it's verses/versus based on how effective it is, so an iron curtain doing 50% to Heavy, would give a curtain effect for half as long.

[RandomNutjob]

I back 1032 and 758

[¥R M0dd€r]

Fight1:

Support [0001115], new type of weapon is always nice.

Fight2:

Support [0001158], with right imagination, some really cool stuff could be done

[reaperrr]

Fight 1:
Support #1032
Kill #1115
I may be in a minority here, but I find more control over the number of start units of a certain type more useful than some extension to the parasite logic. The random nature of start units selection is rather annoying at times.

Fight 2:
Support #758
Kill #1158
Partial Immunity sounds interesting, this is like temporarily increased armor hardness.
The two spawns thing, well it would allow for something like a missile cruiser that also has an onboard copter, but i don't see myself using this.

[Beowulf]

Kill #1032. Really don't care as much for it. A lot of people turn the unit counts to 0 or 1 anyway so all you get is an MCV. Not quite as usable for most people. Support #1115 on the sole fact I tried to emulate it and failed. It's also a really nice weapon logic.

Second fight. Sheesh. Can you have crappier issues? Screw those. Kill both. >_>

[Nighthawk]

For fight one:
Hmm, the first issue may not be that well liked by everyone else, from what I can see, but I actually think it's not bad, it gives modders that little bit more control over what is essentially a random choice by the game.

As for the second issue, I'm somewhat undecided on it. No-one actually said explicitly in the bugtracker comments whether this was achievable or not using Ares' new mutations logic, only that it wasn't possible using InfDeath=9. That said, if it isn't, it's a good bugfix.

However, given that I don't quite know what's going on with the parasite issue, I'm going to say support #1032, kill #1115.


For fight two:
Hmm, I think I can understand the idea the first issue is getting at. However, I don't quite like the suggested implementation. Surely those properties would be much better if they could be defined on individual TechnoTypes rather than globally on a different SuperWeaponType? If they could be unit/building-definable, that could add a whole new layer of strategy to the game. For example, an ImmuneToChronoshifting tag that could stop players from teleporting certain units (for whatever reason), or an ImmuneToForceShield tag that could nullify the effect of the Force Shield on certain structures. I think the Iron Curtain one could be worked around using new ArmorTypes for weapons that have the curtain effect applied to them, but for the super weapon itself, something like an ImmuneToCurtain tag on TechnoTypes would work well. As for the Psychic Dominator, well, that's controlled by the ImmuneToPsionics tag anyway.

As for the second issue, I like what it's getting at, but I don't see that much use for it. You could have some kind of super naval unit that launches planes and fires missiles... or some kind of super tank that launches drones and fires missiles... or some kind of other unit that launches different types of planes. That's kind of all it does.

Personally, I prefer the other issue (or at least my suggested implementation of it ), as it lets people shake up the gameplay a bit more, as opposed to launching two types of planes from an aircraft carrier. Thus, my stance is support #758, kill #1158.

[~Guest~]

Not bothered about [0001032] to be honest. [0001115] is definantly my choice.

[WoRmINaToR]

@Nighthawk: It is by no means a random choice. Number of units to spawn at start is directly controlled by the differences in costs of all of the units involved in the selection. It's not a perfect solution, but if you are getting more units of a kind at start than you'd like, you probably need to increase the cost for balance reasons anyways.

And not to mention 1115 could yield some really badass ravaging aliens that rip humans to shreds and then spawn little underlings from their mutated flesh.

for fight 2 I have to support 758, the reasoning behind it is that not all mods are going to keep the Iron Curtain an Iron Curtain, per se. They (and I, as well) will likely say that it is something else that, story-line-wise, works differently, but has a similar but limited effect to the Iron Curtain. It would also be great for modders who simply want these limitations of the base IC and FS, for whatever personal reasons they provide.

1158 is a clusterfuck waiting to happen, and would get very confusing operating 2 very different spawning controllers on a single unit. That is, having the V3 launcher that rebuilds but never reloads, and then the hornet launcher that services and replaces aircraft on the same spawn manager/same unit would be very confusing to the game.

[Renegade]

Administrative Notice:

Since there have been no additional posts in the past two days, we'll assume this fight is over; we will proceed to judgement.

[Renegade]

Fight 1

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For this fight, I am pretty much following worm's argumentation.
People are complaining about the randomness of the selection, but as far as I'm concerned, that's how it's supposed to be - the starting units are supposed to be emergency defense and scouts, not a predefined tactical strike team.

As voiced in the comments on issue #1115, I'm not entirely sure that team coded their unit properly in the first place, but as Nighthawk said, if InfDeath=9 is indeed broken in that situation, we should probably fix it anyway.

Kill: #1032
Support: #1115

Fight 2

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I hate requests defeating the purpose of the system they're modifying.
I really hate requests for stupid-ass hacks trying to get weird features so they can emulate what they want, instead of just fucking requesting what they want.

#758 in its entirety would be vastly better done through some kind of "modify attributes" super weapon.
Want temporary EMP immunity? Modify attribute ImmuneToEMP.
Want temporary mind control immunity? Modify attribute ImmuneToPsionics.
Want temporary damage reduction? Modify attribute Armor and set the armor up properly.

Making an invulnerability super weapon suddenly not provide invulnerability anymore defeats the purpose of the system, and an actual "modify attributes" SW, should we ever implement one, would be vastly more versatile anyway.
Especially considering that you just fucking know once this Iron Curtain castration would be implemented, we'd be bombarded with "Can you also add..." requests for every other weapon and warhead effect ever, constantly to be updated with any new weapon/warhead effect Ares adds.

While worm is right that #1158 could potentially be complicated, I don't share the assessment that it is "a clusterfuck waiting to happen", and I think it would be interesting for the ability to have two different types of ammo for different targets alone - e.g. having a shrapnel V3 against infantry targets, and a bunker buster V3 against buildings.
Sure, this request would probably, to be fully utilizable, require custom missile types and NoSpawnAlt reworks, but we can at least take a look at it and see what we can do.

It's vastly better than gutting Iron Curtains to do something they're not supposed to do in any case.

Kill: #758
Support: #1158

[AlexB]

Fight 1

I'm going for the Parasite Mutation here. You named a few reasons to fix that so I'll spend some time to explain why the AllowedToStartInMultiplayer thing is not a good proposal.

There is no control over which units get picked when the game still tries to respect the start unit count in the multiplayer dialog. Should infantry always come first and then the tanks? Some infantry weigths more than tanks, thus it should come later in that queue.

Only checking that flag when the game randomly selected a unit and counting what's already present would not help to balance, either. Some would get a unit, other players may not.

A better way would be to define the starting units per [Country] like Paradrops.Types and ParaDrops.Num and from that list placing units until N start units are selected. That would be deterministic and thus remove the randomness altogether. But this has other issues like two GIs being stronger than two Conscripts. But with a little more thinking this might be overcome.

Fight 2
Changing the way the Iron Curtain works is easy. But to partially reduce damage, large parts of the game would have to be rewritten. The game won't consider IC'd units attackable. Some other major logics do this, too. Mind Control, Chronosphere, Temporal weapons, ordinary weapon damage and lots more, for example. This would turn the game inside out.

There is no problem extending a SW to not affect units or not. The problem is, as Renegade already pointed out, the game makes the assumption IC'd things are indestructible and changing that would take the Iron Curtain out of the Iron Curtain.

Spawn logic.

[Renegade]

Result:

As above.