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Author Topic: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?  (Read 5383 times)
Yetiers
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #15 on: January 28, 2009, 05:05:00 pm »

(I hope you don't mind if I interject here)

With Death's variant, if the risk of teleporting into a major body is too high, teleportation becomes weaker as a way of avoiding enemy fire (especially long-ranged enemy fire) while severely weakening chain teleportation, and if the risk is too low, it doesn't solve the problem with chain teleportation.
With Shiver's variant, chain teleportation is completely removed from the game without weakening teleportation as a way of avoiding enemy fire. Plus Death's variant is weird.

By the way, why can't Shiver just implement a second teleport function (activated by, say, holding down Down for two seconds) that always gets you near the enemy, while keeping the normal teleport function as it is? Since chain teleportation comes with a risk, you could hard-code a higher probability of getting into a major body when using the second teleport function.

It's late and I'm tired. There's probably something I'm missing, but I'm posting this anyway.

EDIT: It seems that fossil and Valaggar Redux approximated the probability of a "telefrag" in this topic. By the way, how did Valaggar manage to post as a guest, I thought guest posting is disabled here?
« Last Edit: January 28, 2009, 05:35:37 pm by Yetiers » Logged
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #16 on: January 28, 2009, 09:12:43 pm »

By the way, how did Valaggar manage to post as a guest, I thought guest posting is disabled here?

That's because Valaggar's account was deleted.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #17 on: January 28, 2009, 10:45:39 pm »

By the way, why can't Shiver just implement a second teleport function (activated by, say, holding down Down for two seconds) that always gets you near the enemy, while keeping the normal teleport function as it is? Since chain teleportation comes with a risk, you could hard-code a higher probability of getting into a major body when using the second teleport function.

 Grin Funny you should mention that. I'm trying out different offensive teleportation schemes at this moment.


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EDIT: It seems that fossil and Valaggar Redux approximated the probability of a "telefrag" in this topic. By the way, how did Valaggar manage to post as a guest, I thought guest posting is disabled here?

Valaggar probably scuttled his account. Or Meep-Eep banned him without saying anything to anyone else, which isn't entirely beneath him. To be quite honest, I figured you were Valaggar's next account.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #18 on: January 29, 2009, 06:14:30 am »

To be quite honest, I figured you were Valaggar's next account.

He certainly sounds a lot like Valaggar.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #19 on: January 29, 2009, 04:34:49 pm »

Plus Death's variant is weird.

Yes, and that's the only reason I don't like it. The reasoning on it was that it would give both players some control over how effective it was; and also, it came with handy narrative justification!

If you're facing the Arilou and you don't want them teleporting, head to the nearest strong gravity well and orbit it. That'll mess them up. They'll have to come at you honestly, and won't be able to skip away safely much of the time. On the other hand, Arilou fight well near gravity wells. It could lead to more interesting battles.



As for how frequent - do recall that even a botched teleport will kill ONE crew. If you set the peak rate around 8%, you won't be able to spam teleporting, but it's still highly worth it to dodge.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #20 on: January 31, 2009, 09:13:09 pm »

Here's my second incarnation of the Arilou Skiff:

* Point value remains at 16 for now, though this may fluctuate.

* Teleport delay has been increased from 2 frames to 5 frames. This has no effect on game balance, but it does make Arilou teleport spam somewhat less seizure-inducing.

* The Skiff has been given two different teleportation functions. The offensive teleport is triggered by pressing "Up + Special", while the defensive teleport will kick in when the Special key is pressed in absence of the Up key.

* Offensive teleportation will move the Skiff a fixed distance forward in whatever direction the Skiff happens to be facing.

* Defensive teleportation will move the Skiff to a random location that is always a long distance away from the Skiff's opponent. Remember to take your finger off the accelerator if you want to escape.

* A safety measure has been added to Arilou's teleportation function which moves it to another random location whenever it appears within solid matter. Chain teleportation has been nullified, so the threat of teleportation-related death is no longer necessary for game balance.



I seek three things:

1) Outside input on the mod. Anyone can help me here. Even faulty input helps me look at things from every possible angle.

2) Volunteers to play the mod. If you can get into #uqm-arena, you'll do. EP and Gekko are my preferred opponents, but they are not around nearly enough. Ideally someone beneath my skill level would play against another volunteer rather than myself.

3) Someone who can compile UQM for Mac, or teach me how to do it despite not being on one myself.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2009, 10:33:45 pm by Shiver » Logged
SweetSassyMolassy
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #21 on: January 31, 2009, 09:35:54 pm »

Heh, I hope I'm not one of the "faulty" ones, but I think you might be making this more complicated than it needs to be.  I really like the idea of going a fixed distance ahead in the direction the Skiff is facing. In my opinion, this should be the only form of the special attack. The defensive special move isn't really necessary since the Skiff can use the offensive manuver as a defensive tactic. 

The "moving forward" idea is great. Since it's tough even for the pilot to tell which direction the Arilou is facing at a single moment due to the tracking laser, the Arilou would often warp to a random location near the ship it's attacking.  This gets rid of the planet problem, or rather, makes the problem at the pilot's own risk.  At the same time it gets rid of the annoying player warping problem, since the Skiff must always be somewhere close to where it used to be. Also, the possiblilty of "jumping through" an opponent becomes another offensive tactic that actually makes the arilou way more powerful, especially if it's battling a slow-turner like a Broodhome.

If you really want to mix it up, have the Arilou always warp the same distance, but in random directions.

All-in-all, this could drastically change the way Arilou is played, probably for the better.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #22 on: February 01, 2009, 02:58:01 pm »

Shiver's version 2 allows offensive use, which is good. I just hope people don't get so good with it that they'll be able to make perfect attack runs all the time. It would be trivial to make a mod which shows the exact position the Arilou would come out, which would help that happen.

Assuming that doesn't happen, I like it.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #23 on: February 02, 2009, 03:00:42 am »

I think you should make it Down + special for offensive instead because I usually continually accelerate. It would be annoying to have to release Up to teleport away to safety.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #24 on: February 02, 2009, 06:12:23 pm »

I don't think down is even a valid input key for purposes of melee. Remember how Supox's back-up combination is up+special?
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #25 on: February 02, 2009, 06:23:39 pm »

Read Shiver's balance mod page on the Ultronomicon. The down key has been unlocked in the mod.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #26 on: February 02, 2009, 09:01:59 pm »

Since Down is a key used in menus, I don't see why it would be impossible to use it in melee. The original UQM just doesn't utilize the Down key.
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #27 on: February 02, 2009, 10:33:53 pm »

it depends it can be a pain when fighting an Arilou skiff when the player just teleports but the Arilou ship is designed for hit and run attacks it has 6 crew that's about its main function, teleport in lezerebeam pew pew teleport away
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Re: Arilou Chain Teleportation - good or bad?
« Reply #28 on: February 03, 2009, 01:27:09 am »

Quote from: jaychant
I think you should make it Down + special for offensive instead because I usually continually accelerate. It would be annoying to have to release Up to teleport away to safety.

That would be unintuitive. The forward teleport is a decent escape mechanism most of the time, so it isn't usually a big deal for a player to slip up and use the forward teleport when they want the escape teleport.


Quote from: SweetSassyMolassy
[...]I think you might be making this more complicated than it needs to be.  I really like the idea of going a fixed distance ahead in the direction the Skiff is facing. In my opinion, this should be the only form of the special attack. The defensive special move isn't really necessary since the Skiff can use the offensive manuver as a defensive tactic.

It's true that the forward teleport is good enough to escape most adversaries. The escape teleport is still necessary. Fast ships like Pkunk, Slylandro and the Androsynth comet can actually run down an Arilou that tries to leapfrog with its forward teleport to get away, especially if that Arilou has spent most of its battery attacking just prior to that.


Quote from: Death999
Shiver's version 2 allows offensive use, which is good. I just hope people don't get so good with it that they'll be able to make perfect attack runs all the time. It would be trivial to make a mod which shows the exact position the Arilou would come out, which would help that happen.

Assuming that doesn't happen, I like it.

It turned out during play-testing that the Experimental Skiff II was quite overpowered even without a visible indicator of where the ship will spawn next. It's not hard to get a feel for the distance, and as Gekko can attest it's simply too easy to leapfrog towards the opponent, backstab them with the beam weapon and then use a defensive teleport to get clear. Recently I applied a few minor penalties to the ship. Among these, the forward teleporter was set to travel between 200-240 max zoom pixels forward rather than the 220 I had it at before.


Quote from: alen456645
it depends it can be a pain when fighting an Arilou skiff when the player just teleports but the Arilou ship is designed for hit and run attacks it has 6 crew that's about its main function, teleport in lezerebeam pew pew teleport away

How did a YouTube comment find its way into my thread? You must be lost.
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