Modified Payload/CP

[Stormcaller3801]

Here's an idea for people who know whether or not these things are possible, and perhaps have an interest in making them real:

We have a payload, which is a bomb. Not surprising there. This bomb has a victory condition- get it to the final point in order to win. Again, not terribly unusual.

What changes, however, is the fact that nobody's actually pushing the bomb. Instead, the bomb moves forward at a constant rate of travel. Or maybe it speeds up sometimes, such as going downhill. It's not terribly important on that part.

The attacking team's goal is fairly straightforward: there's a series of doors they need to get open. Each one is connected to a point they need to capture. So long as the door's open before the bomb gets there, it's all good.

If the door's closed? Bomb blows up, and the attacking team loses.

Now, depending on whether or not the defending team can recapture the points, there's two further ideas regarding this whole thing.

The first is just to leave everything as it is, and have your standard five points or whatever, with the final gate just in front of the end of the payload run. Meaning once the final point's captured by the attacking team, they have to defend it tooth and nail, because if the defenders get it back, it's done. If there's some means to tie the opening or closing of the door to the percentage captured, that would make for a very nice visual.

The second is if the defenders cannot recapture points. In this setup, the final capture door can be offset a ways from the last point. Why? Because here, we set up the cart so that as soon as the final point is capped and the door's open, the cart's speed goes through the roof and it flies headlong down the track until it hits the end and explodes.

I think that'd make a great visual, myself. It'd probably work out best with a custom cart involving a missile. Maybe one of those flatbed railcars with an ICBM on it. Now there's a payload for you. Grab the final point, the rocket ignites, and it's all over but the rain of debris.

I've no idea if you could set this up with triggers on the doors, and modifying the cart speed, and so on. But I imagine it would be an interesting variant. You'd likely have to be careful to make sure the attacking team has enough time to cap each point without making it too long. Might also want to trigger doors to when the cart passes through each door, so that the attackers can't get too far ahead. Maybe set it up akin to 5 point cp- You can't go after point C until the cart's passed through A. You can't go after D until the cart's passed through B. And so on.

Actually that might cause issues just because you'd kill forward momentum if the attackers were really steamrollering things.

In any case, I leave it to more capable hands than mine.

 

[Bockagon]

This would certainly be possible but we'd have to think of a better way to implement it. All the payload does in that situation is give attackers and defenders a visual representation of how much time is left. The gameplay at it's core would still be the same as any standard 5 CP map (with the possible exception of red not being able to re-capture points).

The whole idea of having a payload cart in the game is to give attackers and defenders a roaming objective that travels through the map gradually rather than a static one that changes location in an instant. With the modified system you eliminate the concept of the roaming objective and make players focus on the static objective of capturing CP's.

One thing we could try is to make a stage with only 1 or 2 CP's and still have players push the cart. I made a test map where the cart was pushed up to a switch in the tracks and you had to capture the "codes" in an intelligence briefcase to be able to change the switch to the proper direction. The same principal would apply here. Blu pushes the cart up to a blockage in the tracks (a door, a switch, a bridge, anything) and they have to cap the point to eliminate the blockage. The roaming objective is still there but with some extra variety added on.

One thing you could also try would be to have the blu team go and cap intel and bring it back to the cart, with every briefcase making it go slightly faster. This gives the blu team a roaming objective and simplifies defense for the red team by allowing them to only defend one spot. To accomplish this though you would have to figure out a way to work around the game automatically awarding victory to the first team to cap 3 intel briefcases.