Badlands II: Remade
Badlands II is disappointing. Not because the enemies are bad, nor because the map is poorly designed. It's just that Badlands II is merely Fallen 3.0, with the same tower meta and no extras. You're still playing Fallen mode, still using G. Scouts and Gladiators for early game, still getting Engis and Accels late game. It's the same as Fallen, but harder. We already have three of those.
I want to make it unique, and by that I mean as different from Fallen as D00M's Revenge is. New mechanics, new tower meta. That's what I feel the permanent gamemodes should be, making the current three huge missed opportunities. Not to say they aren't fun, but it's just the same experience as Fallen, and they're only enjoyable because Fallen is enjoyable.
In addition, Quickdraw is ass. Yeah. But I won't change its fundamentals - you will still have to beat Badlands II in under a certain amount of time. With my new mechanics, though, this should hopefully become more interesting.
Map Structure
Rather than the standard pathed map, I'm going with a D00M's Revenge style of map - enemies come in from the outside and advance towards the middle, dealing damage to base health if they reach.
The wave count will be around 20. There won't be a Wave ??? like in D00M's Revenge.
The Farm will be banned, because screw you, use the Bounty mechanic (explained below).
Modifiers
Some modifiers will stay, while some will be removed. New modifiers will be added since, well, yeah. The total rewards multiplier will still be +70%.
Staying modifiers:
- HP Locked (250 HP) (+20%)
- Badlands (will be altered to have more enemies) (+20%)
Removed modifiers:
- All Paths (doesn't work with current map design)
- Mutation (no thanks)
- Cowboy (all enemies will be original and have custom hats attached to the model, if any)
- Enemies Beta (all enemies will be original)
New modifiers:
- Farmless (self-explanatory) (+20%)
- Cashless Damage (no cash granted when dealing damage, similar to Hardcore, but also not from killing since Bounties replace that - explained later) (+10%)
Bounty Hunting
Each enemy spawned has two bounties related to it: cash and just 'points' (can't think of a better name).
Cash
Cash is the amount of cash an enemy grants upon defeat. As mentioned above, damaging enemies won't give any money. The difference between this and just the Hardcore mechanic is that weird shared cash mechanics among teammates is out the window, and granted cash no longer depends on enemy health, making it more flexible.
Points
Points are granted when killing an enemy, which adds to a counter. This counter affects wave progression, and when the counter fills up, the next wave starts regardless. Waves do not have a timer and cannot be skipped.
Cash & Points
The bounty an enemy has varies - some enemies may have a larger cash pool but less points, or vice versa, or maybe an enemy has both a lot of cash and many points. Kill too many enemies with high points and you may trigger the next wave unprepared. Killing many enemies with cash is okay, since that just means more cash for you, but when speedrunning for Quickdraw, you would want more points to progress through waves faster rather than spending a lot of time getting cash. Cash will play into the final boss fight against the Gunslinger and his Cavalries (I'll think of something). For Quickdraw, you want to find a balance between getting enough points to trigger waves faster and getting enough cash to deal with those waves.
Altering of Enemy Spawns
This is a work in progress, or rather, I haven't thought of how this would work yet. This would tie everything together and have the whole thing make sense.
I have one idea that may or may not work. Here, enemies can be flagged as 'Wanted Dead' each wave, with the number of enemies being able to be flagged increasing as waves go on. Flagging an enemy drastically increases its spawns and decreases the spawns of unflagged enemies. Here, you can optimise the enemy you're dealing with as well as the points and cash you get from them. An enemy can only be flagged a certain number (probably three) times before they can't be flagged anymore, preventing abuse of flagging weak enemies. This may be too complicated for the actual game, but hey.
Gunslinger's Fight
This one will be reliant on base health alterations. My current plan is to be able to spend money to get base health. This could make it so that, since the amount of cash normally would only be just sufficient for maximum Accel defenses, perhaps having to use cash to survive Gunslinger (and also provide extra safety in the earlier game) will devalue the expensive towers so that cost-efficient towers are the way to go (like G. Mini) for late game, rather than Accelerator and Engineer. This has flaws, of course, but if I can strike a great balance, it would finally make the Accelerator less optimal, and finally diversifying the late game, which would be fucking amazing.