[Richard Talks:] Excavation (2.0)

[Yzjdriel]

Hello.  This will probably be the longest one I've done so far.

Let's get started!

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts on this!

I will not be talking about nerfs, powercreep, meta, or anything else that invariably ends up being a hot-button issue anywhere in this thread.  I would ask you all to do the same when responding.

Now then.

EXCAVATION MISSIONS

You love the change of pace (and place), you hate them with a fiery (or icy, if you're a Frost) passion, whatever you think (or don't) about them, Excavation missions are a thing that exist.  And just like everything else in this game, they have their own place, and their own issues.

Let's talk about those issues, shall we?

As always, I will begin by breaking things down.

Simply Put:  In an excavation mission, you run, defend a machine, rage at the bad drops, and repeat this process ad libertas until you need to leave to either prevent a mission fail due to running out of revives or reset the enemy levels to continue the grind.

Pros:  The open-area(-ish) maps pretty much let you go where you want, when you want to.

Cons:  Excavators don't scale like they should, and the enemies somehow have the exact kind of power core we need to make them run...

How to fix it:  In order to fix Excavation missions, we first need to take a look at what's actually wrong with them.  In keeping with tradition, I will not be placing spoilers anywhere in this OP.  Prepare for a list of lists.

So here's what currently happens:

• The Lotus says "An Artifact has been located.  Proceed to the dig site." and a marker appears on our map.
• Someone steps into the 20m circle around where the Excavator will spawn.
• The Excavator falls out of the sky with 100s of time, 20s of power, and a health/shield bar.
• We have to keep it alive.
• We have to kill Power Carrier enemies and bring the cells to the Excavator to keep it running or to restore its shields.
• We have to successfully defend at least one Excavator for 100s to activate extraction, as well as receive any rewards that are worth a darn.

Here's what's wrong with that:

• It can get a little annoying after a while.
• This happens by accident a little too often, and it can sometimes be triggered by flying through the area above the circle.
• The Excavator's health does not scale with enemy level, like MD terminals, Defense objectives, etc.
• This is difficult when the Excavator's health does not scale with enemy level.
• This is rather monotonous, and the enemies are literally bringing us exactly what we need to have in order to keep doing the thing they're trying to stop us from doing.
• *shrugs*  I got nothing.

Here's how to fix all that:

• Mute Lotus
• Stop pubbing
• Fix the scaling
• Fix the scaling
• See below
• *drinks soda*  What?  I said I got nothing.

So really this boils down to two issues.

1.  The Excavators don't scale.
2.  We're the only ones excavating and the enemies are bringing us exactly what we need in order to complete the job they're trying to stop us from doing.

To me, that second one is the most troubling, but that's because fixing the first one literally involves writing an IF() statement based on the starting level (or Tier, even) of the mission.

So how do we fix the second one?

Well, that's actually a bit more complicated than it sounds, because that second issue is really more than one issue.  But by now you're getting tired of all these lists, so let's just ramble for a bit and then explain my rambling.

First of all, why do all three factions carry the exact same kind of power cell?  "Re-using the same model is easier", I remind myself.  Except that's dodging the real question - how does that fit into lore?  Let's ignore that for a minute, though, because there's an even bigger issue with lore - and it's really more common sense than lore anyway.  Why are the enemies carrying the power cells in the first place?

Let's pretend you're a Grineer.  Or maybe a Corpus, since they're generally more intelligent.  The Tenno are trying to dig something out of the ground, and you are trying to make them NOT dig that something out of the ground.  You can either send people to kill them that are carrying the exact thing the Tenno need to keep on digging, or you can send people to kill them who are NOT carrying the exact thing the Tenno need to keep on digging.  Which are you going to choose?  That's right, the option where you DON'T give the Tenno exactly what they need to keep on digging after they've killed all the people you've sent to kill them.

"But wait!" you say.  "If the enemies don't bring us the power cells we won't have any!"  Not to fear, my friends, I've thought of that, too.  So let's just throw out my entire plan for Excavation 2.0 without going through this chore of "what bad how fix".

Grineer/Corpus:  We spawn into the mission to find that the enemies are already digging for stuff.  They have several (2-4, preferably a random number in that range) Excavators already running in random states of completion at random distances from spawn - sometimes a nearly-finished one will be close enough to stop, sometimes it won't.  That's fine.  That's how it would go in real life anyway.  Our job is twofold: stop the enemies from digging up the artifacts, and dig up the artifacts.  We can do this by either seizing their Excavators and taking the loot ourselves or blowing theirs up and deploying our own.  So let's go over how I think that would work.

To stop the enemies from getting the artifacts, we need to either blow up their Excavators, which is exactly as straightforward as it sounds (Grineer Excavators would be armored, and Corpus Excavators would be shielded), or reprogram their Excavators (done via a hack - Ciphers active where Ciphers would normally be active) to send the stuff they've dug up to us instead of the enemies.  If we blow up their Excavators, we need to place our own.  We'll also be placing our own as we move throughout the map.  Once those drop down, they'll behave the same way they always have - though their health will be scaled to enemy level as the first thing will have been fixed as well.  Now we need to power the Excavators we have.

If we hacked an Excavator (it will change in appearance slightly or have a different map marker) - we now need to power it by killing power carrier enemies (see?  I fixed that issue without removing them!  No need to change spawn tables!) and taking their batteries to power their Excavators.  If we placed our own Excavator, we'll still need to power it as normal.  We can use the enemy's power cells to power our Excavators as normal, but sometimes Battery Carriers don't spawn (especially if the enemy has no active Excavators)...

The enemies have a source of batteries, but what about us?  Well, the Lotus will periodically drop a tower with a few (2-3) batteries in it that we can use to power our own Excavators.  Given how much the Tenno steal from the other factions, I think it's safe to assume that the batteries are all cross-compatible, even if they might look a little different (which they should, even if it's something as simple as re-coloring the texture of the Grineer cells to be matte black with a red glow - a la Kuva colors).

Infested:  We spawn into the mission to find that the Infested are running around doing whatever it is the Infested do.  Our job is to locate and dig up artifacts.  We do this the same way we would do it in Excavation 1.0, except the Infested aren't carrying power cells because they aren't digging anything up.  As above, the Lotus will periodically drop towers from the sky with multiple power cells inside - probably with enough to completely power one Excavator, since the Infested won't be carrying any batteries.  The Infested will continue to swarm us like they always do, and things will pretty much be the same, except we won't have a source of batteries other than the Lotus.  This might force the pace to slow a bit, so I would look into the spawn rate of both Excavators and battery towers and adjust one or both as needed. 

This would allow for something really cool to happen - Excavations could be valid missions for Invasions now.  That would work like this:

Grineer/Corpus v Infested:  We spawn into the mission to find that the faction that hired us is digging for stuff the same way we would be on a Dark Sector Excavation under Excavation 2.0.  We do the same thing we'd do on the Dark Sectors, except the extractors are either Corpus or Tenno (depending on who spawned them) and we're working together to beat back the Infested long enough to grab the loot and keep moving.  At the end of the mission (needs 500 Cryotic to extract, like all other Alerts), we get to keep all the stuff that came out of our own Extractors, in addition to a normal Invasion reward (whatever it happens to be).

Grineer v Corpus:  We spawn into the mission to find that both factions have Excavators running.  They're also shooting each other, because that's what they do.  We'd do the same thing we'd do on normal Excavation 2.0s, except we've got one faction helping us this time, so we could hack/destroy the enemy Excavators and defend the friendly ones, all without needing to drop any in.  Optionally, we could bring along our own.

This brings me to what will probably be the most controversial thing I'll say in this thread.  Where do our Excavators come from?  Because right now the Lotus just seems to have an infinite supply of them.  Where are they coming from?  Let's make that something we actually need to know - for example, they could be drops from other missions - you do a Sabotage and open a cache?  You get a blueprint to build one - and we'll make them dirt cheap, too, so the only 'grind' with them is actually finding the bps.  You could also get pre-built ones as drops from other missions, too - like Survival or Corpus Hijack.  That could replace the '10 credit caches per mission' or 'Reach drops from Pluto' issues, too, so that's another improvement.

Bottom Line:  Give the excavators more health and shields, and either make them powered from our shields and/or energy pool or have the Lotus drop the power cells akin to Survival capsules.  No more of this nonsense where no matter the enemy faction, they somehow have the exact kind of power cores that we need, and don't use them for literally anything else.  Also, consider reworking the mission type entirely, making it more immersive and allowing it to be used in Invasions.

 

I would appreciate your constructive criticism on this topic.

Have fun and be safe, Tenno.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Yzjdriel
bullet lists were broken (again)

[skinotik]

My beef with excavation is that whatever you play well or not, the pacing is the same.  I would like something more interactive that reward performance a little bit.

Exempe : a simple fix that could help Excavation 1.0 and give some kind of control of the pacing would be a way to Overcharge Excavator.  Like if you put more power in them they ran faster (x1.5 or x2 for the duration of the extra power).

Also +1 to excavator scaling.  

Another neat thing they could maybe do would be to make excavator behave as if they have the quick thinking mod.  When they are power on, a shield protect them and when the shield take damage, the excavator lose power.  If the excavator doesn't have any power left then it take damage to health.  It would reward player performance, the better you protect it, the faster it goes.

[Yzjdriel]

55 minutes ago, skinotik said:

My beef with excavation is that whatever you play well or not, the pacing is the same.  I would like something more interactive that reward performance a little bit.

Exempe : a simple fix that could help Excavation 1.0 and give some kind of control of the pacing would be a way to Overcharge Excavator.  Like if you put more power in them they ran faster (x1.5 or x2 for the duration of the extra power).

Also +1 to excavator scaling.  

Another neat thing they could maybe do would be to make excavator behave as if they have the quick thinking mod.  When they are power on, a shield protect them and when the shield take damage, the excavator lose power.  If the excavator doesn't have any power left then it take damage to health.  It would reward player performance, the better you protect it, the faster it goes.

That part actually makes sense to me, though, since in-universe it's not going to dig any faster just because nothing is shooting at it.

I'm not sure if I like the idea of QT for an Excavator, mostly because the further into the mission you, the less often Power Carriers seem to spawn.

[skinotik]

15 minutes ago, Yzjdriel said:

I'm not sure if I like the idea of QT for an Excavator, mostly because the further into the mission you, the less often Power Carriers seem to spawn.

I agree that if you run solo, carrier spawn rate can be a bit slow.  But, when you are in a group, often you get to a point where there is over 10 cell on the ground unused around an excavator that is at full power (happen to me a lot on Hieracon in a group of 4, especially when you get above 800 cryotic where spawn rate explode).  

Futhermore, if you implement the QT idea, you would have to boost a bit the spawn rate to compensate.  Im not saying that's the solution but I would like more interaction between player and excavator.

On a side note,  I would like survival to have something special too to reward overflow of life support.  Maybe a meter that fill with overflow and spawn a special mob to get extra loot (aka maybe G3, Zanuka, Juggernaut with modified table).  But that's for another debate ...

Edited April 18, 2017 by skinotik
typo