Unit Specialization by Experience

[Kingpin]

Units are able to specialize to work very well against a common enemy and less well against a rare enemy. For this, let me explain a bit about what I mean.

Say you have a unit that starts off initially very capable against a given range or category of enemy (infantry and tank, tank and aircraft, tank and structure, tank, strucutre, infantry and aircraft, etc., or even Harkonnen and Ordos, etc.). An Ordos Kobra comes to mind, very powerful against both infantry and vehicles, but the problem is that the enemy is throwing huge numbers of tanks at this unit and yet it still remains less than optimised for the task, slow rate of fire, slow ballistic arcs, large splash damage versus a highly concentrated impact energy. The problem is that this unit cannot cope with the danger it faces and thus will be destroyed because it did not adapt. Likewise a human wave may be able to break it in two. What you really need is a unit that can adapt well to the demands you are currently facing.

So basically we can alter, subtly, how veterancy is registered by altering the scoring of each unit. Consider this, have two systems of scoring, one for infantry, one for vehicles. Now if a unit kills a certain number of infantry, it will change its profiles to be more amenable to killing infantry in the future, i.e. larger splash damage with warhead changes. Likewise with tanks, it will change its profile to hammer tanks as it encounters them more and more often.

Within the limitations we face, we can do it like this...

Score infantry at one end of the spectrum, say from one to five points each, and score vehicles at the far end of the spectrum, say from 200 to 300 points each. This immediately means that the two scoring systems are completely independant of the other, almost.

Now the Veterancy of a dual purpose unit would look alot like this...

// LEVEL 1 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 10      // Score required

Armour = Medium

Health = 5500

CanSelfRepair = 1                              //per model tick

Score = 2

TurretAttach = ATMinotaurusBaseA

// LEVEL 2 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 20

Armour = Medium

Health = 5500

CanSelfRepair = 2                              //per model tick

Score = 2

// LEVEL 3 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 30

Armour = Heavy

Health = 6500

CanSelfRepair = 3                              //per model tick

Score = 2

TurretAttach = ATMinotaurusBaseB

Elite = TRUE

// LEVEL 4 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 400      // Score required

Armour = Heavy

Health = 9000

Score = 200

CanSelfRepair = 0                              //per model tick

TurretAttach = ATMinotaurusBaseC

Elite = FALSE

HitSlowDownAmount = 30                  // Percent (100 = complete stop)

HitSlowDownDuration = 100            // ticks

// LEVEL 5 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 1000

Armour = Heavy

Health = 9000

Score = 250

HitSlowDownAmount = 20                  // Percent (100 = complete stop)

HitSlowDownDuration = 100            // ticks

// LEVEL 6 ----------------------------------

VeterancyLevel = 2000

Armour = Massive

Health = 10000

Score = 300

TurretAttach = ATMinotaurusBaseD

HitSlowDownAmount = 10                  // Percent (100 = complete stop)

HitSlowDownDuration = 100            // ticks

Thus the unit would gain a few altered characterisitics with its rank that make it more powerful when confronted by a given threat. Of course, this also means that the whole rank of a unit could be altered by killing a single vehicle, even on accident, so any given modification to the system would have to take this into account. But it does make the possibility of having units adapt to their given circumstances based upon there own experience, instead of their hardwired characteristics.