Yes, even more of them :)
Feel free to ignore them for now if you've had enough!
Here they are:
-Acid splash.
AFAIK there's no indication yet of whether the aliens of AliensRL have "acid for blood" like the aliens of the films, but let's assume for a minute that they do :) As happened to several characters in the film "Aliens", if the player kills an alien at point blank range, they may be splashed by the acid. This may result in a severe health loss over several turns, or it might damage or destroy the player's currently worn armour. Obviously this would make the game a lot more difficult, and even near-impossible on the "exit run" where aliens can pop up at point blank range, so some kind of balancing feature might be needed to allow the player to get away from faster aliens that have closed them down, without killing them - the flash grenades that I suggested in another thread would be good for this.
-Acid structural damage.
This is an even more extreme idea based on the effects of the "acid blood" as portrayed in the films. After a few turns, alien corpses would actually burn through the floor and create a pit leading to the floor beneath the current one (though not on the ground floors, obviously). If there is an item on the floor at the location of the pit, it drops through to the lower floor (where it is displaced to one side if there is an item already at the location it drops to). Perhaps lower level-aliens should not cause this structural damage effect, and additionally main corridors be immune to the effect, otherwise they might quickly become impassable due to the number of hunters that you have to kill in them. Pits are visible - if the player falls in a pit then they drop down to the lower floor, sustaining some damage (this could be quite useful on the "exit run"!). Aliens will never walk on a pit tile.
-Automatic Surgeons
These are fixed-in-place medical units found often in rooms of the medical tower and occasionally in the others. They can heal damage that medkits cannot, such as radiation damage, and the dreaded alien impregnation (see below). The surgeon can be used by activating it in the same way as a door. Following doing this, the player will be asked to confirm that they want to enter the automated surgeon unit for treatment. Using the surgeon takes a significant amount of time. The player is not allowed to use a surgeon if there are any live aliens in the room with it, or if any doors leading into the room are open.
-Facehuggers.
Currently the aliens in AliensRL don't have a "facehugger"-style stage capable of laying eggs in a host, but Kornel has hinted in another thread that "impregnated" humans might make it into the game. So presumably there is one :)
Facehuggers would be very fast, very weak enemies. Instead of attacking the player's health when they get close, facehuggers would attempt to leap onto the player's face and force their "affections" onto them ;) Their chance of doing this successfully should depend on the player's Fitness skill (the higher it is, the more chance of them failing). If they fail, they can try again in the next turn if they are still alive.
If the player does get "implanted", the facehugger dies. The player then has a few hundred turns before they "hatch". In that time, they need to find an automatic surgeon (see above) and use it, which will remove the alien embryo. If they fail to do so in time... well, we all know what happens then!
While the player is implanted, aliens will not attack unless the player attacks an alien. If they do that, then all aliens who can see the player (except facehuggers) will attack.
-Containment doors.
These are heavy doors across the central corridors that are very difficult to open once they're shut. The purpose of these is twofold: one, to break up the rather open structure of the towers, and encourage the player to sometimes leave the central corridors for reasons other than heading to or from a lift and searching for items; and two, to provide an alternative way of cutting off approaching aliens in the main corridors. Containment doors would be located near the central crossroads of the main corridors, and possibly near the connection point to neighbouring towers as well.
The containment doors would have a "panic" button located next to the wall on either side of the door, which closes the door when activated. The player can activate this switch in the same way as a regular door. Once closed, the containment door won't open again unless the player "hacks" the door control switch by activating it again (10% chance of success per level of technical skill, and the attempt takes a relatively long time to execute). The player should be prompted with something like "Attempt to bypass door controls Y/N?" if they indicate this action, to avoid accidentally trying to hack when aliens are bearing down on them, and getting shredded as a result. No aliens can open or break down containment doors, not even Elites.
Most containment doors are initially open. However, some containment doors are closed, so the player must decide whether to try and go through them or around them. Additionally, some of the closed containment doors have damaged electronics and cannot be opened at all (the player will find out that they are dealing with such a door on their first successful bypass attempt). To avoid generating non-completable maps, there must be an alternative route to go around any permanently closed containment door - that probably means doing a search of the map to check that one side of the door can be reached from the other.
Optionally a containment door could take a few turns to shut. Anything on top of the door tile when it shuts is displaced randomly to the nearest empty space on one side of it. Out of the initially open containment doors, some randomly chosen ones will malfunction when used and only close partially, meaning aliens and the player can still get "under" them (i.e. the partially closed door tile remains passable). To this end containment doors have 3 states - open, partially closed/closing/opening, and fully closed.
Author
Topic: Yet more suggestions... (Read 5174 times)