Thread: Booby traps

Based on talk of locking vehicles down in the "Hijacking vehicles" thread, it struck me that there would be a good work-around to simply locking them down; allow engineers (saboteurs, recon, or whatever you're calling them; pick an appropriate class) to booby trap vehicles. This would be just like a mine, which attaches to a vehicle, and detonates 2-3 seconds after someone starts to drive the thing. For gameplay purposes, you might find it prudent to limit this to only affecting enemies.

This would allow commanders to make sure their team's vehicles were protected (by assigning a squad or even just one man to booby trap his vehicles), and it would provide another useful, sneaky thing for infiltrators to get up to. What do you recon?

Personally I don't like the idea of having to check all over my vehicle before jumping in, although people could just use a AT mine so I think I'm onto a looser on this one.

Ah, didn't know whether you were doing standard AT mines.

Maybe not sabotage as in Blow up but slow down the speed or take ammunition away? So make the vehicle potential weaker? With airships you could cut the envelop and do a small bit of damage or have them loose height over time?

Cutting the envelope would require a axle grinder - they're armoured remember

Not so sure what the advantage of taking ammunition compared to blowing up is. I think it might just slow the game down.

By taking ammo you weaken the potential impact of a vehicle, although its probably not a great idea since they can just get more ammo from the base...

A few other ideas though:
1. Slit tyres to damage handling
2. Put a hole in aircraft fuel tanks, the fuel would drain quicker as it flew.

Not sure what you could do to tanks though, I forgot about the armoured envelopes but still.. maybe on a few of the recon ships.

Slitting tyres should be easily done, its already in Crysis. We just have to stop the vehicle blowing up if the tyres have been slit.

Fuel tanks should be possible in theory using a similar system.

Originally Posted by General Naga

Not so sure what the advantage of taking ammunition compared to blowing up is. I think it might just slow the game down.

I thought that if you blow it up, the vehicle'll just respawn in a couple of minutes anyway but if you sabotage it then you weaken its performance until it is destroyed. You could always make freshly spawned vehicles invincible until they're manned to force sabotage over destruction.

Sabotaging would also work if you didn't have the weapons to destroy the vehicle.

When I say blow up, I meant some sort of magnetic mine which was activated on a player entering the vehicle.

Making vehicle invincible until entered would make bombing a lot less fun and would mean we couldn't team lock vehicles - as if they were indestructible you couldn't blow them up to make way for our own team's vehicles to spawn.

You have a point about sabotage though, we could just have both. Except only engineers (for example) could booby trap vehicles everyone else would have shoot the tyres out etc..

Not sure about a magnetic mine, I wouldn't like getting into a vehicle only to have it blow up underneath me (although it would be fin to do it to others ). Thats why I thought sabotage, since you can still damage a vehicle without killing freshly spawned players.

One idea I saw in a game (Tribes: Vengeance) was making vehicles team-locked until they were entered by a member of that team.

What sort of thing do you think we could do to tanks in the way of sabotage without making them impossible to drive?

Another idea with sabotage for engineers:
Aircraft (fixed wing): Cut Cables, this would damage the planes handling by destroying the cables that keep the elevator and flaps working.