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« on: March 06, 2014, 09:39:53 pm »
Salutations,
First off I would like to apologize for the thread necro but I figured that it would be a good place to put my thoughts on a possible fire idea.
I propose a change where fire stacks would potentially grow over time based on the number of stacks on a component. Say that the main engine gets 2 stacks of fire, at the beginning the growth of stacks could be slow to get to 3, 4, or 5 stacks however as it does so it gets progressively faster such that by the time it reaches say 12-14 stacks it wouldn't be long before it hits 20 and the component follows shortly thereafter burning away the entire time.
This could have a few potential effects for mid battle decisions such as if the balloon catches on fire then you can either try to ignore it and gun, meanwhile the fire stacks accumulate over time dealing more damage and making it harder to remove with chem spray or try to put it out immediately saving the balloon but sacrificing firepower. It can also cause more priority on a gunner's gun as currently if it were to catch fire gunners just hit it with a pipe wrench every so often and continue firing until an engineer can go to put it out. Continuous fire growth would make a gunner's fire more of a priority as eventually without care it will reach the mythical 8th stack forcing a gunner off until extinguish or break and rebuild.
If one wanted a potential nerf to the chem spray it might also be possible to make it so that the immunity applied only works on the initial application of fire and not necessarily the growth so it can still gain stack number even with immunity applied. This could make the extinguisher a better backup method of fire extinguish as if ones immunity wore off and several stacks were applied during that time a chem spray might not be able to save it due to having to constantly fight the growth of fire necessitating either an extinguisher or a break and rebuild. This keeps the chem spray's strength of preventing fires but makes it helpless in fighting them as eventually, provided enough firepower by the enemies, once the fires start then the constant attempts at extinguishing and rebuilding will take time letting the other chemmed components wear off and set alight.
The downsides of such an idea that I can think of so far would be an extra incentive for the third engineer to be able to handle his own fires. Another thing would be whether or not this would have an actual affect on the state of fire. Given the right levels of growth I don't believe it will be overpowered but the true weakness of fire is a well chem sprayed ship which while fire growth will give fire a potential fight against chem if it starts on a sufficient level of stacks it still has to get through that layer of immunity.
I'm not sure if this would be possible as well, but if it were possible to make fire able to spread to other components on the ship once the stacks got to a certain threshold level. Starting by spreading to the hull/balloon first if those aren't on fire already then going to random components from there. This is just a possible addition to this idea, but I'm unsure of the difficulty in implementing it into the game code wise and to balance it as well and is not the main part of the suggestion above, but a possible addition to it.
Lastly, my apologies for the terrible grammar and the wall of text. English grammar isn't my best subject I'm afraid. Post your thoughts about this idea if you could and thank you for reading.
Summary,
-Improvement to fire allowing a fire to grow in stacks over time based on amount of stacks.
-Potential nerf to chem spray by allowing fire growth to ignore immunity.
-If possible to implement and balance have fire spread after reaching a number of stacks.
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