Tiberium idea

[peterthepigeon]

Since Tiberian Sun arrived on the scene there have been at least 2 varieties of tiberium.  What if we had a rainbow of tiberium?  Afterall, this appears to be the intent Westwood was working with.  All the way from say microwave tiberium to x-ray?  For example microwave tiberium would be nearly colorless and nearly worthless, and practically harmless, but spread like wildfire.  On the flipside as you approach X-Ray tiberum, the growth rate slows down, but it becomes more and more explosive and far more valuable.  The soil leached bare, the plants dead from radiation or mutated.  Any unprotected infantry traversing through the higher grades would be more likely to mutate into visceroids or die from the radiation.  X-Ray tiberium would be practically instantly lethal to any infantry even chemical warriors and damage lighter vehicles like humvees and such.

 

An economic metric could be each "wavelength" increase nets a somewhat exponential growth in value, depending on the leached minerals.  We still keep the bailcount to 28, or perhaps harvesting higher grades of tiberium is so risky, that they reduce the remaining bailcount to ensure safe transport, whereas we can harvest a whole field of lower quality tiberium safely.  With respect to the growth and spread of the tiberium as it grows it leaches "minerals" from the soil, meaning that as the game progresses, the value of the tiberium regrowth progressively decreases asymptotically to 0, or for simple terms, instead of that green field you were harvesting, it regrows as yellow tiberium, then orange and so on.  I would hope we can modify the engine to gradually replace the green grass with dead desert soil representing the depletion of the land.  ( smudge? )

Another portion relating to the growth is that in mineral rich cells, the longer the tiberium remains unharvested, the more it leaches out and the value increases, so a green field would evolve into a blue field of tiberium with enough time, and if enough time passes it could grow into highly valuable x-ray tiberium.

 

Mineral content in the soil can be replenished by destroying units/structures.

 

value =  tiberium_type * ( 3 ^ leached_scalar );

 

where the leached_scalar is in direct proportion to the mineral content of the cell.

 

Thoughts?

 

[Jacko]

That's a very strange concept, but I get the feeling it would just aid turtling.

Still the potential for nyan Tiberium is a cool one

[peterthepigeon]

That's a very strange concept, but I get the feeling it would just aid turtling.

Still the potential for nyan Tiberium is a cool one

 

Instead of a visceroid, nyan cat pops out leveling everything in his wake and leaving a trail of nyan tiberium!

 

In all seriousness, the repleshiment of the mineral content would always be less than the total sum.  I'm not entirely sure it would aid turtling, since you trade a risk that you wait for the field to mature, assuming there is sufficient mineral content to carry it to higher forms of tiberum whilst trying not to harvest too much.

 

If of course the enemy sucks your fields dry and there is no mineral content left, no more tiberium can spawn unless otherwise noted.

[AchromicWhite]

It's a neat concept, but not sure it's in any way currently possible to put into TD... would take some serious hacking work.

  -Liam

[peterthepigeon]

It's a neat concept, but not sure it's in any way currently possible to put into TD... would take some serious hacking work.

  -Liam

 

Not in the current iteration no.  As far as hacking work, not even that much, I've already located the tiberium growth function, know how to modify the bailcounts and value of harvested tiberium.  Adding mineral content means a byte variable or something to each cell, which either there may be an unused var to align to memory to it means allocating whole new array of cells size 0x22.  Locating all references is easy as I have written a tool to do exactly that.  Representing the depletion of the land is either changing tiles or adding smudges a bit more work than everything else so far, but doable.  The coloration idea is also simple to do as well.

[AchromicWhite]

Nice.

What about explosive, etc? That was the big one, well, so I thought.

  -Liam

[peterthepigeon]

Nice.

What about explosive, etc? That was the big one, well, so I thought.

  -Liam

 

I haven't given too much thought to explosives.  I want bigger bangs the more potent the tiberium is naturally.  I almost wonder if making harvesters explosive if they're carrying enough tiberium of a certain purity would be fun.  For instance you harvest some of that super precious x-ray tiberium and drive it straight into an enemy base.  They blow up the harvester causing it to detonate like it's a nuke.  Which leads to more ideas.

[Nyerguds]

You know, neither microwave nor  X-Ray are light spectra... both are in the electromagnetic spectrum. It's kind of a completely different thing

 

Overall, this seems like something that could be in Tiberian Sun (in fact, internally, it HAS more types of tiberium, including a red type), but for TD? Nah. It's just way too early in the terraforming process.

 

Oh, and people already sometimes use harvesters full of blue tiberium as demo trucks in TS: Firestorm, so, even more explosive types? Might have unintended superweapon effects  :laugh:

[peterthepigeon]

You know, neither microwave nor  X-Ray are light spectra... both are in the electromagnetic spectrum. It's kind of a completely different thing

 

Overall, this seems like something that could be in Tiberian Sun (in fact, internally, it HAS more types of tiberium, including a red type), but for TD? Nah. It's just way too early in the terraforming process.

 

Oh, and people already sometimes use harvesters full of blue tiberium as demo trucks in TS: Firestorm, so, even more explosive types? Might have unintended superweapon effects  :laugh:

 

I know they're not that's why I said wavelength in the first post the usage of the word rainbow was just to paint a picture in the mind.  Unintended superweapon effects?  Nope, fully intended.  An impromptu harvest of that precious x-ray tiberium creates a demo truck except it's singleplayer strength nuke.

 

For the record visceroid should be modded to nyan cat, and spawn a whole rainbow of tiberium in his wake while destroying everything.

[AchromicWhite]

Single player Nuke... that's like 25 square instant kill effect. Heck, I don't even like engis, lol

  -Liam

[Jacko]

oh man.

I'm aware they are from different games but could you imagine a harv full of the super-explosive stuff chronoshifted into someones base O_o

The nyan cat idea is a strange one but if it is textured to be nyan cat then it must make the sounds