Random Idea #61: Overly Complicated Racing · 2:39am Jun 10th, 2018
It has been said that StarCraft BroodWar is, on top of needing to xalance strategy, difficult with its frankly clunky controls. There's so many things you have to do, and quickly, that one can only really focus on a limited scope.
Examples include having an overwhelming army instead of small groups of precision strikes (macro vs micro), spellcasters being hard to cast wide arcs, limited control group sizes, finicky AI movements, and more.
In a fit of boredom, I wondered if the concept of "too many controls, can only focus on a few" can be applied to racing. Some of the ideas I came up with are below:
1) Turbo with bad cooling, so can only be used briefly.
1a) there are cooling systems, but activating them cause drag or drop in power.
2) CVT with preprogrammed shift points. How many can you handle? (6 for simplicity, or 20 to get really close to the optimum state? Or just one big lever that you slide?)
2a) Alternatively, stick and clutch
3) Manually operated rear wing
4) Manually altered brake balance in all directions. Brake left wheels to turn harder, but too much and you spin out.
I'm personally not that into racing games...
But Mechwarrior 4 had an interesting twist on its system for heat management. A tank of coolant you could douse your mech in whenever needed, but that tank only holds so much, and if you overuse it, you could end up overheating with nothing to do but sit there and kiss your ass goodbye when your mech emergency shutdown from excessive heat in the middle of battle.
I could easily see a system like that work in a racer. Sure, you can boost as much as you want... but unless you pace yourself and your coolant levels, your engine's going to melt half-way through the race.
Might be hell to make the computer actually grasp such a system, though. And racing against idiots that melt themselves, or cheating pricks the laws of physics don't apply to for that matter, will get dull really, really fast.
4880099
No i mean, uh, IRL Racing. Back to the days where the car was a bit of a clunky piece of shit but it was all you got, augmented by a bunch of powerful tools that you don't have enough hands for.