Seige Weapons/gametype

[Okamibanshu88]

The Seige. It was bound to happen. The orokin ark would have been found sooner or later, they would raid it, destroy it, or claim it fro their own. the Orokin ark is the last remaining stronghold in the Sol system intact and untainted. Recognizing only tenno as friendly, the Orokin ark is a second, smaller, earth. Known, as the Seige.  The primary purpose of this once hidden planet, was to syphon off the radiation, heat, and light given off by the sun to power a new form of orokin technology that would have been used to fight off the infected...and worse, the true enemy of the orokin. The tenno must now retake this strong hold, and hold off the advancing armies of the grineer and corpus. Even the infected seek to infest and take the planet for their own. for the good of all the denisins of the Sol system, the Seige must not fall.

 

So basic concept is a flat out defence/survival style mission.  The planet is alive in a sence, the weapons that rivit the last great bastion of Orokin technology is a living organism. A true, PURE version of the infested that now infect teh galaxy. Repairing the stationary weapons after they are damaged, the tenno can now draw upon a limitless supply of energy to lay waste to the hordes of enemies bent on either taking the planet, or destroying it.  This would introduce some enemy vehicles, possibly ships and tanks of sorts, as well as stationary 'seige' weapons that the tenno can use to fight back the largest onslaught of enemies every fought. groups of 40 or more enemies, and thats just level one. the level would be based around the seige engines, and the tenno would have to retreat behind a barrier that engulfs the primary station, but not the weapons. Inside the station is a core, and should the enemy batter their way through the sheild, the tenno will fall back to a secondary point. Much like battlefield's rush came, every time the enemy manages to make theri way forward the tenno are pushed back until they reach the core. if this happens, the tenno must take the core, and flee. To 'win' the tenno must kill all the enemies that threaten the base, every, last, one of them. the good news is, a bottle neck makes for GREAT target practice, and theirs only one way into the core room...but also only one way out.

[Cobalt313]

This reminds me of one other guy's idea for a dungeon-esque Orokin Citadel, though yours seems more akin to Tower Defense than Dungeon Crawler.

 

I like the concept a lot, but I think the lore may require a bit of tweaking just to make it fit with known lore. For example, I think there should be some way to address the issue of what happens when players fail this mission without dooming it altogether.

 

 

How's this: when the Core is destroyed, it activates a final defense mechanism where it retreats back to the void with its shields down, killing all other lifeforms on board via pure Void exposure, but allowing it time to repair itself. Gameplay-wise, players that fail the mission not only do not get any rewards, but also are not allowed to take or join Ark Siege missions for a significant period of time.

 

This may sound like it would kill the urgency of having to protect it- after all, if the enemy can't truly destroy it, and it has such an effective way of defending itself in the end, why bother protecting it at all?

 

Two reasons. One reason would be for tactical purposes, like you mentioned. Even if the Grineer, Corpus, or Infested couldn't keep the Ark, it's still a valuable self-replenishing source of powerful Orokin technology. They don't have to keep it, they just have to loot it, and if the brief period of time between the Core being destroyed and the Ark making the punch is enough for you Tenno to be extracted to safety, it's plenty long enough for the enemy to make off with fresh new Orokin tech stolen off damaged stationary defenses. Letting the enemy have any access to this stuff is just a bad idea, so it's probably for the best that anything non-Tenno that goes into the Ark never comes back out alive.

 

The second reason would be for its potential lore implications. Think of it this way: so far all we've seen of the Orokin are their Towers, abandoned stationary structures hiding in the Void whose defense systems don't like us very much, and the Derelicts, dead vessels overrun by the Infestation when they failed to flee into the Void. Now suddenly here we have a fully-functional pristine Orokin superweapon that not only do we know diddly-squat about, but also appears to have come back from the Void of its own volition. Stranger still, the vessel's state-of-the-art Cephalon, worn out by the ravages of time and the Void, is calling out specifically to us, the Betrayers, for help, as if it doesn't know what we did to its former masters so long ago, or simply doesn't care.

 

This thing may be abandoned and weak from neglect, but it was never lost. It was hiding, waiting in the Void for a very specific purpose, and now it's returning to the Origin System to fulfill that purpose. It doesn't want to go back to hiding in the Void, it can't afford to. It's come back for a reason, and it needs our help to ensure it can stay here. Something big is coming, something this Ark was created to fight- or avert- and it absolutely must be here ready for when it arrives.

[Cobalt313]

Now that I mentioned the potential that the Ark doesn't know about the Tenno slaying the Orokin, now I'm having mental images of a mission event where the Stalker manages to turn it against us and we have to fight back through the Ark itself to find and kill the Stalker.

[Okamibanshu88]

i like both ideas lol

[Cobalt313]

Question I still have is if this works Tower Defense-style, how would placement of stationary defenses go? Would you have a series of "nodes" from which you could request the Ark to deploy a particular kind of defense mechanism, or would they all be there to begin with, just inactive, and you have a limited number of "power points" (certain number at start plus additional points gained after each wave) which you could spend to activate an inert defense or upgrade an active one? I suppose the latter would be easier on the devs for mapmaking purposes as all the defenses are already there, you just divert power to each of them to activate them or grant them additional power to make their attacks stronger. Probably wouldn't need any sort of fancy upgrade system, just maybe a simple 3-tier "level" system for each structure where they become overall better at what they do the higher level they are. Keep it simple, you know? Players wouldn't need to worry about what's the right place to put them, just need to figure out whether they need to switch on more defenses to cover a wider area or just make the ones they already have stronger.