Upgrading weapons

[bb1]

That playground was the most boring excuse for anything that game has to offer. AI should send sporatic flankers at least, especially to the guntowers. I wanted to watch them rip something to death fast.

Good ol' bz1. Wish I saved my box, but in my excitement of its arrival I tore the thing to shreds. That's a whole other story in itself. What fascinated me was the i76building class... AKA useless box class. Cafeteria, launch pad, shieldtower (although applause are due to dx for getting that working, even though pre placement on a map is the only viable option and I have no clue if the AI path around them... not to mention no graphic for the shield, but why would a magnetic field have a graphic anyway?) Oh well. I can't even believe I remember that classlabel, even though it was used so often there is no way I could forget.

Now I'm all worked up. Making things turret class buildings could make cafeteria and command tower useful at least.

[Rocket]

i believe the playground mission had to be earned up, by finishing all of the NSDF missions 

so you couldn't play with all their ships before the NSDF ever got the technology to invent them.

[Nielk1]

i believe the playground mission had to be earned up, by finishing all of the NSDF missions 

so you couldn't play with all their ships before the NSDF ever got the technology to invent them.

No, you just had to do all the training missions.

[TheJamsh]

you can use shieldtowers for a variety of things other than massive great ordnance deflectors. Im talking from BZ2's perspective here but shieldtower hasnt changed much since then.

i76building class is great! 'uselessbox' would have been a better classlabel name though.

[ssuser]

The Playground mission will not show up even if you play thru all the training missions, IIRC, at least not in 1.4, but all the training missions will always show up in the mission archives, unlike in the SP list, which only shows missions you have gotten thru so far.

ShieldTower class seems not to be very useful in bz1, even tho Dx has got it working. A more useful shield would be "active" to the AI, so it would attack a shield like it was a Gun Tower or tank. Then you could use it to block deliberate attacks on your recycler, that is if the AI was smart enough to do that in the first place.  As far as some of the "i76Building" stuff goes, some of those buildings were planned as useful things but never developed - the cafeteria was supposed to enable Heavy APC-Heavy Infantry in the MUF, for example.

[General BlackDragon]

playground's always shown up for me

And its fun, atleast, I found it fun, playing around, building a massive base, destroying it while playing with different weapons. When i was like 12-14 i'd even explore the rest of the map, hide vehicles in the tops of mountians, and pretend things.

[bb1]

Those WERE the good times. After playing the demo missions 200 times each and  learning on go-through #134 that no matter how many turrets you place in your base on mission 2 and how badly you are annihilating the enemy as they attack your base, you STILL lose. I've figured ways to deploy the APCs countless times while also attacking the czars myself. They wouldn't have stood a chance in non-linear gameplay D-':

I wanted more... so much more. The day my BZ box came in I shredded it to bits and found the CD inside. I had to play through mission one and two again...but then it loaded 3- the Mars mission. Well, let's just say I wish I could play BZ for the first time again. Sniff.

As said, those buildings could be made useful. Give them turret class with the hardpoint on the inside as the turret spinning part, load the cafeteria with a dispensor and have it drop heavy infantry- a new base defense. Switch the command tower to gun tower and give it no spin, but a massive radar line. It still won't paint targets...but still... Plus it has inherent issues with wobbliness, unless that has been fixed even further.

[Avatar]

It's true, the INF files give you a glimpse at what they intended for the game to become.  I used to blame Activision, but now I just figure that if the game had been a commercial success we'd have had patches that enabled it all.  That means it's the public that is clueless, Activision is just greedy... 

Still, what a shame it wasn't worked on until everything hinted at worked...   

Now, don't you think some of the INF files were put in as jokes?  For instance, the Cafe:

CAFETERIA:
The cafeteria will help to
feed your troops better.
Upgrades all light infantry
to heavy infantry.

COST: 6
HULL: 2000

C'mon, "Feed your troops better, upgrading them to "HEAVY" infantry!".  Get it?  They'll be too fat to fit into their spacesuits!  Lol...  APC's dragging butt out onto the field...  and after all that heavy eating we now know why the Soldiers say "Ah, Fresh Air!"...   

Still, what they didn't do then we can do now.  If you want to take the INF files literally the BZ2 DLL capabilities means it can all work.  Every last INF file can be made to work exactly as they state...   For the Cafe I've played around a bit and enabling things like 'heavy' infantry means swapping out your Recy for one that produces a Factory that produces an APC that produces Heavy Soldiers, and the Factory if it already exists, and any APC's that already exist, and any Infantry that already exist.  The DLL can do this easily.

If you don't want to resort to DLL work the requirements can do something similar, you just let the Factory make two APC's, a "Light" and a "Heavy", and make the Cafe a requirement for making the Heavy.  Simple... if not exactly what the INF files says.

Shields always fascinated me, even though they were inactive, so I used one as a 'Recycler tether' (aka docking clamp) in ThoIWalk.  I have them working beautifully in BZC but not exactly as stated (yet).  They make a 'sonic fence' between the two poles that deflects missiles and ships but not energy weapons.
(can't tick off the Golems, no, no, never upset the Golems...  )



They don't have to go between the Solars, just have to have one nearby.  The little blue balls slide along the blue lines from one pole to the other and are actually sonic shells, deflecting enemy ships and ordnance.  Flash or Blast go right through them but everything else is deflected. 

I always thought it'd be cool if the BZ1 launch pad actually brought in troops, especially if it could drop you some reinforcements when things got tight.  There'd have to be some major advantage to having something that large sitting around...

You got me going now, didn't you???

-Av-

[Dx]

How do you have solar power at night?

[General BlackDragon]

lol

batteries

[ssuser]

Why, Av has backup batteries under the S-Powers, of course. You don't think all that power they collect when not in use is wasted, do you? Plus, there are are probably backup cables leading to the shields from the portable nuclear reactor in the command tower...  

Those are some cool shields. I made something similar for bz1, copying off of Floating Point's shields in Absolute Zero. If you make sbshield a vehicle and add 2 cannon HP to the frame, you can make an indestructable gun tower type unit and have the team 2 unit attack the team 0 unit, making an impassable beam barrier - at least until you destroy the power supply for it.

BTW, if you want something to attack you in the Playground, just leave an empty tank by the neutral barracks and wait for a pilot to get into it - it'll come right for you when you go back over.

[Dx]

lol

batteries

LOL NO WAY!

NASA don't pack lead into the rockets.

[Avatar]

How do you have solar power at night?

You only use them on planets with very long days, or that always face the sun...  

I see why they were used in the game but seriously, if biometal can do a Flash Cannon or Daywrecker type reaction we'd have actually used 'biometal reactors', like 'naquada reactors' were in Stargate.  (for that matter you can probably substitute 'biometal' any time you hear 'naquada' in Stargate without too much trouble...  very similar science in many ways)

-Av-

[bb1]

What energy are those things diverting away from firing my blast cannons?

Toast that solar power in 2 seconds and the shield tower is useless. Heh. So are all those gun towers. I guess it is another one of those "seemed like a good idea until the devs' crack wore off"



Or pepperoni pizza in Tony's case.

[Dx]

Well the power should be protected inside the shields.