A quick note; This idea is based off most of the others recently posted in this forum to do with various block combination's and blueprints. I'm merely expanding on these ideas, and in no way do I have any intention of plagiarising the ideas of others.
If you're familiar with most RTS games in which you select a builder, order it to build something and it does so accordingly, then a little scaffold graphic is shown along with some progress bar to show until the building is complete, then this will be a lot easier for you to understand.
Don't make the assumption that this idea just involves staring at a massive scaffold holding a button until a fort magically appears.
It seems that everyone wants building to be more interesting and easier (increasing the difficulty of building will only slow the pace of the game, so I'm still under the impression we want a faster game) so I thought that I could take the standard style of building in our beloved RTS games and mix it in with SourceForts.
The idea at it's most basic form is; A player selects a list of different premade scaffolds from a list (Bunker, Straight wall with ramp, whatever you can think of) with specific details about the amount of blocks required and which blocks exactly. In this sort of blueprint, players can spawn or grab blocks and 'snap' them into the correct position instantly. Once all the required blocks are snapped in accordingly, the scaffold will dissapear and the 'building' will revert to it's standard block form.
Scaffolds health could vary depending on size, but they would be significantly lower than normal blocks, making them
very vulnerable to enemy attack. If a scaffold is destroyed when half of it is built, any blocks within that block would simply unfreeze so they have to be used in consideration.
Scaffolds themselves take a good time to build, so the player would have to consider whether it's best to use a scaffold or simply build their structure by scratch.
Pros:- Quick, easy building of large structures.
- Consistency - No Human Errors involved in building.
- Keeps the game at a fast pace, with the ability to build relatively complicated forts.
Cons:- Very weak - Easily destroyed by concentrated fire.
- If destroyed half way through construction, all blocks unfreeze instantly.
Feel free to discuss, troll, Azlan.