Grid Sage Forums

Non-Interactive Machines (NIMs) are mostly for color and ambience. However, they could be made slightly more interesting using existing game mechanisms (i.e. easy task!). Here's a few notes i jotted down. Feel free to use or ignore.

Area-of-Effect Effects:
Machines can have some effect in their own immediate vicinity, either while active or when destroyed. This might influence routing and pathing decisions of the player and other bots too. Machines might be color coded to indicate to player danger or opportunity. Effects might include:

• Increases corruption %
• Causes corruption effects
• Corrupts parts on ground
• Evaporate matter - matter generated in the area disappears.
• Heat spike
• Heat reduction (cryo chamber)
• Reduced accuracy (per weapon type?)
• Engine blowout
• Disable equipped processors
• Self destruct parts on the ground (fry - like in caves)
• Disable / jam / break weapons equipped.
• Reduce weapon range.
• Reduce optical visibility (smoke?)
• Scramble sensors.
• Slow travel speed
• Amplify EM damage
• Reduce weapon damage (like stasis traps)

Servers / Wire Closets
High value machines with special support roles. Usually guarded, shelled, or barriered. Big alert spike when destroyed. Generally best if avoided. High risk when using EX and penetrating weapons nearby. Not all types of servers are available on all floors.

• Data Servers <per type> - Serve data to Terminals, Fabricators, Recyclers, Scanalyzers, and Repair Stations. Destroying data servers takes the corresponding network offline (e.g. Destroying a Scanalyzer Server takes all Scanalyzers offline).
• Security Server - Takes random machines offline or reduced functionality. Increases your odds of getting hacking on the current floor. Kind of like a mini-Hub.
• Mapping Server - Provides support data for bots tracking you. Knocking one out reduces enemy tracking ability but increases patrols.
• Greenbot Coordination Server <per greenbot type> - Provides central oversight for greenbot classes. Disabling a greenbot server disables, inhibits, or reduces corresponding greenbot activity (e.g. disabling the Engineering server hampers Engineering ability. Ditto for transport, recycling, cleaning, etc.)
• Non-Interactive Machine Server - Turns other NIMs on/off.

Utilities

• Energy - controls doors, powers other machines.
• HVAC - Controls ambient temperature (we already have this).
• Lighting - controls optical visibility.
• Garbage - Already have this too.
• Plumbing / Pumps - ?? Pump matter into a big pile?
• Electrical - Provides local energy taps. Battery room?

Yeah there are a lot of fun ideas and possibilities for expansion, but it's been very intentional from the beginning that machines are divided into the existing three categories and limited to approximately the range of what they can do now, so I don't see a massive expansion happening... ever :P

You have the types of interactives (which already use the color-coding), blue non-interactives (which cause special effects on destruction/disabling, probably the closest current type of thing to what you're describing), and pure non-interactives which at most will either explode (explosive types, EX/EM/TH) or drop matter (for the matter-related ones).

The reason for not going further with non-interactive machines are many, including most importantly a desire to have the tactical focus be on robots, and avoiding complicating environments too much (a direction which in turn ends up complicating the UI and info the player has access to). The UI issue especially comes into play with AOE effects--remember we just have a regular terminal grid to work with that's based on three values per cell, simply glyph and foreground/background color, so it's very easy for overlap to start making it hard to understand what's going on (and currently we're still even missing AOE visualizations for some of the RIF effects, still to be added). Yeah there are a variety of solutions here, but they have their drawbacks...

Blue machines on the other hand tend to have a wider strategic impact, rather than local effects of the types described with respect to AOE. The latter are also very very hard to balance in a way compatible with Cogmind's design (they would either be too insignificant or a a source of endless cheese--even the few that we had developed in alpha have been since outright removed, or were never even released to players in the first place :P).

But anyway that's mostly referring to AOE. Additional blue non-interactives can and will likely be added at some point where applicable, but the local environments in Cogmind are meant to be mostly focused on dynamic elements (robots) rather than stationary objects, so it's hard to say how much more of this there would be. The current ones are all much more impactful and related to unique systems and locations, rather than being the kind of thing you might find frequently or on a wide variety of floors.

One reason for still avoiding the latter has to do with the balance of a game's design, where if you add one or two such features, players start to expect more of them ("why don't we also have it here, or there..." etc etc) and it becomes a problem unless it's expanded even further, and starts to take over the content, or at least affect everything in a pretty significant manner. Some underdeveloped features have been removed from Cogmind for this reason before, or in most cases are actually just left out in the first place if it doesn't look like they can or would be be expanded in a balanced manner.

In short, I prefer using robots for local effects, and one of the main arguments for using machines in some cases would be to allow access via hacking (or if its a desirable or otherwise compelling effect but in terms of theme not suitable for robots), but again I don't really see this happening. Future plans are mostly still centered around robot-based systems.