Hey guys!
I was thinking about my old "Superweapon" game mode that I suggested a while back and I was wondering how they could make giant spaceships fit into the Starhawk's premise. I was watching the E3 trailer and I realized: Starhawk already has giant spaceships! They're the ones our drop pods and buildings come out of! Why don't we give them a bigger role in the gameplay!
(If your in a hurry, feel free to Kudo this now, as this could get long 
)
So here is the basis of my idea:
The maps themselves would stay the same, but there would be a large machine (either where the giant rift extractor goes or where the flag goes). High above the battlefield, outside of the atmosphere and about 3-4 times higher than the current ceiling (assuming this is possible), there would be two large spaceships, one for each team, that are docked to these base stations by means of one of those giant pipes like in the "Scourge" level of the campaign. These ships are where B&B structures would drop down from, and this is where respawning players would awaken from sleep chambers, arm up, and either launch to the surface in a drop pod or get a hawk from one of the several build-in launch pads. These ships would have a forcefield that friendlies could pass through or shoot through, but would prevent enemies from doing the same, rendering the ships themselves invulnerable.
Now heres the fun part. These sheilds are tied to two bars at the top of the screen, one for each ship. If these bars are ever less than 1/4 full, then that ship's sheilds go down and the enemy will be able to board the ship with their hawks, infiltrate it with their infantry, and destroy its powercore, winning the match!
These all-important bars are maintained and filled by controling territory on the ground below. This could be done in various ways, but I will talk about that later to keep this streamlined.
Additionally, each of these ships could have a gigantic, base-leveled super-laser mounted on their front (a reminant from my "Superweapon" thread ) that could only be fired once the ship's energy bar had reached full capacity. I will talk about this in more depth below.
So that's pretty much my idea in a nutshell. What do you guys think? Do you have any suggestions? If you'd like to see this ingame, please help this thread garner LBI's attention by giving bumps and kudos 
Below is various other details for those who are interested, but aren't vital to the core idea (I will probably add to these over time).
How the ship's "Super-laser" works:
This would be like a mix between a hawk's torpedo, the binoculars in Warhawk, and the Deathstar's laser. You could aim it anywhere on the map from within the ship, and a large laser-pointer-of-DOOM would indicate where it was aiming. If fired at the map, the weapon would launch a giant rift-energy blast that would completely annihilate all valid targets (based on friendly-fire settings) within a huge radius about the size of the crater on the "Basin" map. If it was fired at the enemy ship, the blast would knock out its sheilds for about 10-60 seconds (LBI's call), regardless of its energy bar, giving your team a small timewindow where you could attempt to destroy the enemy's powercore and win the game. After the weapon fires, the ship's energy bar would drop down to 3/4ths full.
How the territory dominance could work:
This could work in various ways, such as a king-of-the-hill type concept with one rift extractor (or anything else you guy can think of 
) and the core ship-to-ship combat idea would still work. However, I'm picturing something inspired by pimentel2's "mining mode" suggestion, and it could work something like this:
Each team would have a permanent spawning area around the docking stations, about 1/3 the normal spawning area (or about the size of a level 2 extractor in "Zones"). The rest of the map would be divided into 6-30 separate fragments (much like the territories on the board game "Risk"). Each of these fragments would have a medium-size Rift extractor at their center (about 2-3 times the size of an outpost), and these would be turned over to one team or another similar to the way the flags worked in Warhawk. While one team is in possession of one of these extractors, their team can respawn and gain rift within that territory, again much like Zones.
These extractors are tied to the ship's energy bar. The ship is constantly consuming energy from the reserve to maintain its sheilds, and these extractors replenish that energy. You would have to possess about 25% of the extractors on the map just to maintain your energy reserve. The more your team has above 25%, the faster your bar fills up. Having less than 25%, causes your bar to slowly deplete, its speed depending on how many rift extractors you have left.
It would be interesting to see what sort of gameplay this would create. I imagine that it would be like a more aggressive form of "Zones", with battle lines constantly being drawn and redrawn, as both teams would be stretched fairly thin.
What do you guys think of this method?
duffer1998 wrote:im 99.9% sure he meant THE BIG ONE
Yes, I meant THE BIG ONE
Also, what do you guys think of the rest of the idea? I personally like the idea of an end-game where one team is flying up to space and swarming the enemy ship in their hawks once the sheilds are down, while the other team must rely on their own hawks and infantry to keep them out.
Do you guys have anything to add to this?
Added this to the bottom:
How the territory dominance could work:
This could work in various ways, such as a king-of-the-hill type concept with one rift extractor (or anything else you guy can think of ) and the core ship-to-ship combat idea would still work. However, I'm picturing something inspired by a "mining mode" suggestion I heard of, and it could work something like this:
Each team would have a permanent spawning area around the docking stations, about 1/3 the normal spawning area (or about the size of a level 2 extractor in "Zones"). The rest of the map would be divided into 6-30 separate fragments (much like the territories on the board game "Risk"). Each of these fragments would have a medium-size Rift extractor at their center (about 2-3 times the size of an outpost), and these would be turned over to one team or another similar to the way the flags worked in Warhawk. While one team is in possession of one of these extractors, their team can respawn and gain rift within that territory, again much like Zones.
These extractors are tied to the ship's energy bar. The ship is constantly consuming energy from the reserve to maintain its sheilds, and these extractors replenish that energy. You would have to possess about 25% of the extractors on the map just to maintain your energy reserve. The more your team has above 25%, the faster your bar fills up. Having less than 25%, causes your bar to slowly deplete, its speed depending on how many rift extractors you have left.
It would be interesting to see what sort of gameplay this would create. I imagine that it would be like a more aggressive form of "Zones", with battle lines constantly being drawn and redrawn, as both teams would be stretched fairly thin.
What do you guys think of this method?
