ID4 Base
Pushing the Limits
Some of the bases I enjoyed building the most were a series of bases we created inspired by the Independence Day movie. These were a surprise to our players when they started to spot spaceship bases on the world map on the 4th of July.
Defending While Attacking
In War Commander when you attack a base all of the buildings in that base are enemy buildings. There is no concept of a friendly building. When you deploy your forces they will start destroying buildings in the base. And all of the base defending units will only attack your units (not the buildings).
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So the only way we could get an alien mothership to attack the buildings in the base was to actually make it a friendly unit on the player's side. However we didn't want the player controlling the ship, because then they could just tell the ship to leave without firing at anything. So we took away the ability to select the ship. This results in a ship which moves on its own throughout the base destroy it.
A Friendly Threat
While the mothership was on the players side, we want the alien presence to still be dangerous for the player to approach, so we had the friendly mothership spawn enemy drones which were setup so they could not target the mothership.
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These drones, acting as base defenders, would engage the player's forces.
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So just to balance things out a little, we spawned some friendly Raptor aircraft to fight with the alien drone ships (and quickly die).
Shields Up
In the Independence Day movie, the first encounter with the aliens shows direct combat to be ineffective as the alien ships have shields on them. We wanted simulated that effect using the shield effect from the Vanquisher tank unit.
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This really only made a difference at this point for the drone ships in this base because the mothership was actually allied with the player.
Gameplay
Even if the alien ships were not shielded in fact, the player would not have been able to attack the ships since they were actually units spawns on the same team as the player (just not controllable). So the gameplay we wanted to introduce was to spawn a friendly Research unit which was configured to be the only unit that could attack a downed alien ship in the base.
Evolving Defense
The Researcher unit was actually an unit we created for a previous event where players needed to protect a scientist as it escaped from a base.
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So the player's challenge was to find a way to protect the Researcher unit long enough for that unit to "hack" the ship and discover the key to penetrating the alien shields.
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Initially this was just done by sending in your own troops to provide other targets to shoot at. When we brought these bases back the following year, players had a Caretaker unit which could redirect any damage taken by the Researcher to the Caretaker. The following year players had Cerberus unit which could spawn high priority drones which drew the fire of the alien ships.
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Bringing these same bases back every year really gave players a sense of progress when they were able to come back with better tools each time.