[Idea] New game mode: Flying islands/airships

[Darloth]

Every player starts with a flying island kept in the air by several large jet turbines placed near the edge.

The islands can be landed using some form of interface (possibly the hardest part of the mod - the separate islands can be done as surfaces now!) and plants itself firmly onto the ground, with ramps deploying from certain locations on the edge. These ramps are the only way on or off the islands for ground based entities, the rest of the edge counts as impassable.

There are no resources in the sky, and those jet turbines are already slowly but surely eating through your supply of jet fuel (derived from oil products, of course).

However, as soon as you land, the biter evolution starts going up, fast, and biters start swarming your location. (Can be simulated by making the cooling jet turbines emit a huge amount of pollution on the ground, possibly increasing with time).

Every landing is a race to secure enough useful resources, push out a temporary beachhead, and then when you're about to be overwhelmed, finish loading everything into your storage bunkers and take off! Let's hope you made enough jet fuel. In an emergency, you can launch a single turbine if you don't have fuel for the others, only pulling up the nearest bit of your island to take with you, and hoping you can quickly scavenge enough on your next landing to rebuild.

Once in the air, you can make your island bigger (or smaller?) repair anything that got damaged, build up a surplus of military tech ready to go as soon as you hit the dirt next time, and pick your next location. More radars would give you a better idea of whether each sector is rich or poor in certain resources.

Each sector would be generated anew, and for general balance reasons, you would be forbidden from returning to old sectors until the biters have calmed down. If/when you do return, most of the structures you left on the ground are ruined or with almost no HP, and you won't land in exactly the same place twice.

Whenever you travel to land in a new sector, it costs jet fuel proportionate to distance, but the biter evolution is also decreased to represent this new area not being so riled up.


Ideally, there'd be an end goal somewhere on the overmap that you're meant to head for, but I don't know how plausible the overmap even is at the moment.


I think everything in this idea is doable, though some of it may require some serious lua wizardry and some janky GUIs at the moment, and it would take a few new graphics to look good as well. However, I think it's a nice new game mode, and would I feel be especially fun in co-op multiplayer. Some sort of tweaks to the biters may be required to make sure they always spawn enough to actually ensure the player DOES need to take off again, possibly in the form of a biter artillery unit which would preferentially bombard gigantic clusters of turrets with AoE munitions from afar.

[jorgenRe]

That sounds like a cool mod that also should be possible. The only thing would be the difficulty to make it all look 3d and good when landed :/

[UberWaffe]

A possible alternative that would fit in with the upcoming orbital space platform would be the use of a Space elevator.

That way one could un-anchor the elevator and move the orbital platform into a new position, and re-anchor again.
The concept would be exactly the same as you suggest (fuel could still be needed for moving the platform, and building materials needed for anchoring the elevator).
Most of your processing could still be on the space platform, with minerals mainly gathered and shipped to the base of the elevator (which then transports it to the space platform).

It would also avoid the problem of trying to make a gigantic platform 'sit' well on the landscape.
The elevator anchor footprint could still be large, but the actual size of the space platform is independent from it. You could make the platform event start off small and you expand it by building onto it.

[jorgenRe]

A possible alternative that would fit in with the upcoming orbital space platform would be the use of a Space elevator.

That way one could un-anchor the elevator and move the orbital platform into a new position, and re-anchor again.
The concept would be exactly the same as you suggest (fuel could still be needed for moving the platform, and building materials needed for anchoring the elevator).
Most of your processing could still be on the space platform, with minerals mainly gathered and shipped to the base of the elevator (which then transports it to the space platform).

It would also avoid the problem of trying to make a gigantic platform 'sit' well on the landscape.
The elevator anchor footprint could still be large, but the actual size of the space platform is independent from it. You could make the platform event start off small and you expand it by building onto it.

the only problem may be how good the space elevator will be looking since remember it's 2D