Endlessly roaming through the Space, an alien fleet is closing to a blue planet. Its inhabitants, blissfully unaware of the upcoming threat, are struggling with the chaos they have to face everyday. And yet, it will all soon change. The world will finally become united against a common enemy. The Earth will never be the same anymore. But what will this war bring? Do the humans stand any chance against such a foe? Will everyone willingly join to fight the alien thread? And why, do the aliens seem to look so human-like?...
Magnetic Turbines are an easily accessible source of energy for any Essence military base. Their small size means they can be burrowed underground, giving better protection from enemy fire and allowing military personnel to move over them freely. Unfortunately, they aren't as efficient as some other power generators.
If the situation requires it, Essence commanders can overload the turbines, releasing an electromagnetic pulse that disables electronic devices in vicinity. However, doing so also disables the powerplant.
Power plant meets mine meets Firestorm Defence Wall?
The placement method is similar, but you need to click near the section you want to overcharge.
I have concerns with this.
- I can't see the mine ability being used as an actual defensive measure like the example too often because it will potentially throw you into low power pretty easily. This is annoying and could hurt your macro a lot.
- Defenses in general are not explicitly useful most of the time in an RTS unless it is designed with them heavily in mind but then that leads to turtling and people tend to not like turtling.
- As just to generally protect your power plants in your base as normal, I still have concerns about it causing over-all headache-inducing problems whenever you use it to defend yourself, leaving you to just not want to use it and opt for defending your base normally.
But this is just with conventional RTS in mind.
I'd like to suggest that the deployment, instead of instantly activating, turns it into a unit that will fire an EMP Cannon-like shot at a nearby unit and then destroy itself. You still have a cost to use it and it can still be used as a defense that way, but it's nowhere near as impactful as I am imagining this will be and less annoying and potentially more usable.
It's meant mostly as a defensive measure only for something that actually gets into the base, but not their main purpose. The exception might be Vintarids, as the EMP effect is most effective against their melee units.
Being a powerplant and an "EMP mine" at the same time means they will be used simply because people won't have any other choice :P (at least until they get access to a more stable power source, which Essence might get later in tech tree).
As for the method of deployment, at the moment you need to click near a section of powerplants and those nearest will overload after a short delay (so unless i didn't understand, it sounds almost exactly like what you described, except they don't die).
The best thing would be making it fully automatic only if the player allows it (so don't need to click near every section), but right now i don't see any non-gimmicky way to achieve that.
I just don't know if I like how it seems to just shut down pretty much your entire power just by activating one for defense, I feel like nobody would use it then even in emergency because it would just be much better to still have your factories producing at 100% speed.
My suggestion is literally the TS EMP Cannon but the EMP is an auto-attack with about as much range as a usual defense (like a Prism Tower) and also doesn't shut down any other power plants so you only lose the 1 and only lose the power from 1.
It definitely won't get a ranged EMP. Essence doesn't build "Protoss Photon Cannons" and it would be out of place if they suddenly got one, even with EMP rays/projectiles.