Holograms need to be tweaked

from Offworld Forums

Let me start by saying I love the concept of holograms. They're decent in FFA because you can't always keep track of everyone else. In quickmatch, however, the hologram is nearly useless.

Let's review the process of what you're doing when you build your first offworld at HQ level 5.  Most of the time it's built into one of your resource or building triangles so you can hide it well. We'll use a steel triangle next to your base as an example. So first you'd buy a hologram and put it on a steel mill. That first move sometimes gives your intentions away because a lot of the time it will hologram it as a special building. Then suddenly you delete that "special building" right after it appears because you're using that tile to build an offworld. Then it takes a long time to construct that offworld so your tile appears blank for an extended period of time unutilized (which is another giveaway as wasting precious tiles isn't normally done). If your opponent is watching your HQ that whole time they would see a sudden hacker array show up (with no construction build time/transition time), get deleted, the tile goes dormant for a long time, and then something else appears. Hmm....i wonder what that is? =)



Solution:

Make it so that if you build an offworld market on top of a hologrammed tile you would build it on top of the existing building. So say instead of deleting a steel mill and then building an offworld market you can click the offworld building and essentially build "on top" of the steel mill. Once you start that process you would lose any steel adjacency but the adjacency would still appear to your opponents the entire time so it looks perfectly normal.

 

 

I haven't really checked but I would imagine right now if someone holograms a tile in a steel triangle and then builds an offworld an opponent would be able to tell it's an offworld or hologrammed special tile just by hovering over the production of the three steel mills to see if it's the correct adjacency bonuses (correct me if I'm wrong). Is that right? If so that should be changed.


While we're on the topic of holograms I mentioned this awhile ago but bears repeating. Hologramming a tile as something better than it really is serves no point in my opinion. You're trying to conceal the building not get it attacked and point it out. In my opinion hologrammed tiles should never show up as special buildings at all especially if there's anything remotely close that resembles a "normal" building.

Thoughts? Comments?

 

4,643 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

What should a hologrammed tile look like then? A hologram appears as a special building mostly when it's standing on it's own or next to a mine/pump/quarry if there is no resource underneath the hologram. I don't think it's really so much of a problem of a hologram but rather of the decision to hologram a lone tile (which imo will stand out obviously enough even if it's concealed as a panel or w/e).

Otherwise I mostly agree with your post, I only fear that if you remove the buildtime it might just make holograms overpowered. Sure it will fix them somewhat for 1v1 but in FFA it will become absolutely impossible to track a hologram down. I'm not sure about the adjacency bonuses but if it's possible to find a hologram through that it might just work.

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

When I buy holograms during the stage of the game where my victory isn't secured (and thus I'm properly motivated to optimally use my black market) I wait until I switch to scrap out buildings and then when all the old are scrapped I add the hologram, then the offworld and finally the other structures. The empty left over tile stands out a lot less in that situation. I would personally like if a hologrammed tile would not at all factor the underlying building into projection (except to exclude the building type which it is covering) and also that it goes through its own building construction animation when it switches its projection, complete with a holographic buildings flying in from the HQ.

Because yes as you say, a decent player can spot a hologram a mile away if he is paying attention.

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Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

Holograms are super easy to spot in 1v1. There's almost no point in using them unless you're playing against somebody who doesn't know how they work. In FFA they are decent, but again, once people recognize how powerful they are, they immediately lose their power. Having animation same as the building they use as disguise might help somewhat. And invisible status needs to go, except for when there's indeed nothing on that tile nor on tiles next to it. Bottom line, and I think we all can agree on that, hologrammed tile's behavior should be consistent with the building it's disguised as.

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

Yes InSyncOTC, that is exactly how I should have phrased it. There should be no difference between holograms and the real thing.

Reply #5 from Offworld Forums Top

btw, if you have a hologrammed Offworld in a steel triangle, the other players will see a +75% production bonus, not the actual 50% bonus, so we are trying to hide that.

Reply #6 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting Soren_Johnson, reply 5

btw, if you have a hologrammed Offworld in a steel triangle, the other players will see a +75% production bonus, not the actual 50% bonus, so we are trying to hide that.
End of Soren_Johnson's quote

Good to know. Thanks for the clarification!

 

Quoting Cubit32, reply 2

 ...and also that it goes through its own building construction animation when it switches its projection, complete with a holographic buildings flying in from the HQ.

End of Cubit32's quote


I think this is a great idea and would help out if you make it look like its own building construction complete with the same construction time as the adjacent building. The challenge is that it will only take 10 seconds to construct a steel mill vs 60 seconds to construct an offworld so they would need to engineer a solution around that.  

 

There's still another scenario that I don't know how to correct though. Here's an example from Cubit's last quickmatch with gameslayer:

 

The chem lab with the goon squad is the focus here. Definitely a hologram. How would you know that? Easy!

 

Here's a shot of the next second where the chems are being cycled to something else. Notice that a magical patent lab appears in its place (which means it's not even a patent lab because a chem lab just existed in that space and there was no construction delay). The next move is to build dry ice condensers.

 

Dry ice condensers building. still a "patent lab" in our goon squadded tile.



aaaaaand finally it changes into a dry ice condenser with no construction delay after the adjacent one is finished.



Again it's really easy to keep track of 1 HQ in FFA or quickmatch so the hologram as it stands is pretty much a useless BM item. Unfortunately I haven't thought of a good solution yet but wanted to throw it out to see if people had some ideas to fix a scenario like this.

Reply #7 from Offworld Forums Top

Yeah, senseless switching from one thing to another is silly. But perhaps we're a bit too ambitious here. I can imagine how not trivial programming-wise the implementation of all the features we want could be.