It's getting hot in here

So what's Tuxford been working on lately? Well I've moved my desk and now enjoy the company of the good people in game cell programming department. The reason for this is simply that I'm doing a bit of programming. What I've primarily been tinkering around is heat.

Those of you that have the latest issue of EON have read a bit about the feature but in short it's the ability to squeeze that little bit extra out of your modules by overloading them. This comes at the risk of potential damage to your modules. The programming has started and is progressing rather nicely.

Another project I have in the works is a bit harder to name, it doesn't have a swanky name like "Heat". In the pasat, I've blogged about making combat itself more tactical, most often mentioning breaking up the blob.

There are really two kinds of blobs, or maybe just two incarnations of the same blob. The first is the blob that shows up on the map. You've all seen it happen, one sides has twenty ships, so you bring 30 ships. The other side then waits for more people and all of the sudden he has 50. In the end, if you want to accomplish something you need 200 people. To break up the escalation, we need a reason to use a smaller fleet. A small fleet needs to be able to make difference and we need more intermediate goals. However, this is not the blob I'm talking about but rest assured other people are working on it.

The best name for the other kind of blog I've heard is the power ball. It's centered around placing ships in a tight formation, thus becoming the equivalent of a single ship with massive damage and plenty of range. As a result, players can pretty much lock and kill anything instantly.

Don't get me wrong, I like a clean and decisive victory as much as the next man but I'd like to be able to utter "oh $*@#" before I'm obliterated. :)

There are a lot of ways in which we can discourage people to blob together in those power balls, area of effect weaponry being the most obvious. We already have a few weapons of this sort, such as smartbombs, ECM bursts, and warp disruption probes. These should discourage people from blobbing together as they would maximize the effectiveness of the attacker using an AoE weapon.

A hint of the type of AOE weapons we've been working on? Think bombs and bursts! You can probably imagine what they do, if not they go boom. More tactical bombs are also scheduled. Remote ECM bursts work pretty much like our current ECM burst except you can target it on someone and it can break lock of ships surrounding that target.

That's what I've been working on. Does that mean all the other stuff I'd said I'd do is cancelled? Nope, there are other people working for CCP that can do that stuff. Even if it hasn't been done and I haven't been working on it doesn't mean it won't get done. I might do it later.

Best regards,
Tuxford