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The one thing above all others that I hate about Tournament Mode, is that you got your pilot and bot, yeah they are now 25 in all stats, max in all upgrades and a couple of enhancements. Sure, so it just the same as every other pilot with the same bot. Great. Tournament mode upgrading went on the concept of min to max. The mode is actually not customizable at all! In-fact you have less real choices in your character setup than even 1 player! In 1 player mode you at least had to pick your pilot and thus accept some strengths and weaknesses that came with it, and pick a HAR that was fitted to that play-style. In tournament mode you get to pick a picture and a name, the rest just goes from minimum to maximum with money. Typical case of given “false choices” as we often call it in cRPG's.

The other thing was the Tournaments being a ladder, and not a Tournament. Not an Elimination or Round-Robin system. Thus making them rather predictable and generally without consequences. Little replay value etc.

Now naturally you think, this *is* that old loon raptor we're talking about, so he probably have some *grand* idea on how to completely fix this, make it better, faster, harder, stronger right?

And right you are!

Creating a character pilot will be similar, but with one addition, after Portrait and Name, you will be allocating stats, you're given 30 points and can allocate them as you wish between Power, Agility and Endurance from a scale from 1-20. This should sound familiar to most, as this is the same system used for the pilots in 1/2 player.

Reasoning ? This will be the one and only way to alter stats, meaning stats matters, if you pick Power 9, Agility 20 and Endurance 1, you're going to be stuck with that Endurance 1 for the rest of the game. You will have to pick what strengths you want, and what weaknesses that comes with it. That means you get consequences for your play-style.

Remove all current BOT upgrading, this includes Hyper Mode and all Enhancements. Each bot will be given X number of upgrade slots (6 upgrade slots looks right so far). Without any upgrades filled into the slots, the HAR will be considered a level 1 HAR of that type, say a Jaguar. There are 6 types of upgrades that can be upgraded to level 2 and then to level 3, naturally you need level 2 upgrade to be able to upgrade to level 3. The 6 types of upgrades are: Power, Agility, Endurance, Special-1, Special-2, Special-3.

The three basic stat upgrades essentially replace the old HAR upgrades Power (Arm/Leg power), Agility (Arm/Leg Speed), and Endurance (Armor/Stun Res). Let us say each level gives a +5 boost to this stat, so you could have level 3 Power for +10 to power.

The special upgrades are more interesting. Each HAR would have 3 different specials that could be upgraded, each upgrade generally make the special a bit better, just as we are familiar with the Enhancements. So a Jaguar's Concussion cannon would go from 1,2 to 3 shots depending on level 1/2/3 of the cannon. Jaguar Leap would go faster/stronger, go shadow version, and eventually at level 3 let you cancel into another attack like Jump Kick or even Overhead Throw as we can see it do with Enhancements.

The plan with this is to have level 1 be the standard familiar we know from 1 player, while level 2 generally are just more beefed up, faster and stronger bots and special in general, while the level 3 is specialization where you take on weaknesses by not upgrading certain aspects to save up for the level 3 stuff, and things like special moves start getting new options that change the way you can use them.

This way a Jaguar could use each of the 6 upgrade slots to upgrade everything to level 2, this would give him an all-rounder Jaguar with no real weaknesses. Or he could upgrade all the stat boosts to level 3, and thus get +10 to all three stats, but no better specials. Or he could upgrade all the specials to max and none of the stat boosts, thinking to win on finesse and skill with abusing all the special tricks instead. Or more likely some tweak of such, for example level 3 jaguar leap and agility, but sacrifice endurance and overhead throw specials to un-upgraded, while keeping the level 2 upgrades for power and concussion cannon.

The entire idea here is to give useful upgrades that matters, that lets you choose what you want and not, and to adapt your own play-style to the game, and never feeling stuck with a bad setup. There would naturally be some less used combinations than others, that is natural in any such game.

Just to make it clear, since some commented on the forum post about this: There is progression in this system, you will feel your character growing stronger etc, just a bit more differently, and more about adapting and customizing it to your own preferred play-style.

When you start a new character you lock your stats. Then you get a robot with no upgrades, but with 6 upgrade slots (empty naturally). As you fight you earn money, this money you can save up and buy upgrades. Example the Power upgrade will increase the power of your robot (for example a +5 to the power stat), so saving up, buying and equipping this will make your robot stronger. Next time you save up some money you might want either the Agility or the Endurance upgrades. Either one will make your robot better than it was without.

You could play through the game, and buy one of each upgrade, equip them, and then say you're “maxed out” and that would work. You would have an upgraded all-round version of the robot. And you would clearly be better than the non-upgraded robot you started with in every way. So even if you do start with all 6 equipment slots available from the start, you don't have anything to fill them with until you buy the upgrades.

This is also where the “high end” comes into play, since you can actually buy a second upgrade to each one, or a level 3 of each upgrade. Your basic robot starts with for example “power1” built in, you can then buy “power2” for the extra +5 power, and once you have bought that you can also buy the “power3” upgrade which gives annother +5 power for a total of +10. Similar with the other stats, and the same principle applies to the “special 1/2/3” upgrades as well. But to equip power2 and power3 you have to use 2 of those 6 equipment slots, thus something else can not be equipped. This is the basis for the entire system, since this lets you upgrade something at the cost of something else. You got to specialize what you want your bot to do.

With the Jaguar example again: You might want to equip:

• Power 2
• Agility 2
• Agility 3
• Jaguar Leap 2
• Jaguar Leap 3
• Cannon 2

This will give you something like +5 power, +10 agility, make you get the jaguar leap with in air activation, shadow, double leap, with cancel into either jumping kick or overhead throw (everything), double shot with concussion cannon, and no upgrades for the overhead throw. And would be pretty much how most people play their Jaguar in single player.

But you could also go completely different, and try a Jaguar with:

• Endurance 2
• Endurance 3
• Cannon 2
• Cannon 4
• Overhead 2
• Overhead 3

Which might turn out to be something entirely different and fun ?

Or my Nova would probably look something like this:

• Power 2
• Power 3
• Endurance 2
• Endurance 3
• EQS 2
• EQS 3

Since I don't care about agility, rockets or the grenades anyway as long as they are there at all.

Now for the tournaments themselves, I'd like some changes to those, nothing mayor, a simple toss up the competitor and play a Elimination system until you win or lose. This will end up letting you face different enemies every time you play, might not even meet the same “boss”. And would make that horribly long World Championship be bearably shorter to play. Nothing much else to say really.

Now let us go into the deeper game here: This system I've just been talking about have the potential to be useful even in multi-player, as long as the upgrade options gets balanced against each others etc. For as long as Tournament Mode is single-player only, we don't even need balance, just toss things out there and have fun.

First of all the multi-player could be played in 3 different modes, Level 1, 2 and 3.

• At Level 1 you essentially have what is now 1 player mode, save that you do play your own pilot with own stats, but unupgraded level 1 bots.
• At level 2 you play with bots with up to level 2 equipment, thus you have everything upgraded. (Least interesting mode really, could be skipped).
• And level 3 is full mode, where you can use any customization you want including level 3 parts. For as long as the options are balanced well enough this could actually work in multi-player. Which is hard for any system that lets you upgrade or customize your fighter.

Yup.

Options for later:

• Starting a bot with 0 upgrade slots, having to buy upgrade slots to use them. Or 1.
• Standardize the cost for upgrades over all bots
• Making price adjustments based on a Tier system. Make bots that are good in PVE a higher tier, thus more expensive etc. Would make weaker bots easier to progress with.
• Reduce number of special attack upgrades from 3 to 2. Too many special attacks have no enhancements.

Variation Stats/Training

• Max limit X (30)
• Same cost for all 3 stats, buy one and the next cost a new price no matter which one.
• Have a Forget/Sell menu to get rid of stats.

• The way the costs work, you'll almost always end up with the best option with all upgrades evenly upgraded, so your bot will always fell “sameish”.
• Same with pilot stats, always most economical to upgrade them evenly.
• That you'll end up with the same maxed out as everyone else.
• No way to really personalize the bot at all, other than playing with less than max upgrades.
• I absolutely loath how the arm/leg speed upgrades messes with the animation strings, and thus changes the actual timings of the attacks, confusing my training and habits.
• Also dislike how those same arm/leg speed eventually turns most moves so fast, that you can just spam them into themselves, making most end game tournament combos = spam. Which is boring.
• Most of tourney mode plays out as a boring slog to mash through inflated health bars, due to enemies just having twice as much upgrades as you do, due to the worth scaling.