No friendly fire in Eternal Crusade, period. Even should there be, why half arse it. Either give full Friendly Fire or don't.
That'd defeat the purpose FF in melee is a problem though, that's true - mount&blade shows that quite well, fighting in any kind of formation is absolutely impossible since you'd kill more of your allies than enemies so - full friendly fire on ranged attacks, but in melee, if you make an attack that'd hit your ally, you're staggered for a moment to simulate a guy stopping his swing at the last moment
I like the staggered idea. I could live with no friendly fire if heavy weapons caused a serious knockdown and tossed friendly assaulters around and prevented them from maneuvering through their own friendly fire.
FF is already planned. Source: http://www.eternalcrusade.com/faq "Is there friendly fire?" "Yes. [...]" Regarding this "improved" FF option, it would actually combine the worst parts of both having FF and not having it. Firstly, you could take damage from your own forces. And secondly, the knowledge that one's actions literally cannot (directly) result in a comrade dying would greatly increase the spamming of AoE effects and wild volley fire. Half arsing indeed. This "improvement" seems to be a solution in search of a problem. We either want FF or we don't. I think we should want it, for the same reasons as Rasczak put forth in his insightful explanations.
Excuse me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this suggestion just let trolls still be trolls? Allowing Full FF: troll shoots allied troops in back as they run to the frontline. Allowing partial FF: Troll shoots allied troops in back as they run to the frontline, allied troops get killed by enemy soldiers due to their weakened state.
Wouldn't an immunity to ff past 20% encourage friendlies to throw grenades at the feet of mele fighters ? I think as far as guns go some resistance to damage could work. Such that if it's a mistake the player can stop shooting and if it isn't the penalty for killing a friendly should be more severe. But with explosives there should be 100% ff else grenade spam would be encouraged. Honestly as far as friendly fire goes the scariest thing for me is a tank running me over like in planetside 2. It happens so fast and so easily that if you wanted to grief you would be like this: View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T85vsCS-b0g Hopefully there would be a way around it with some pushback and less damage than instant kill and a mechanism for the driver to ask others to move out of the way. (this may or may not have been brought up before)
1. Doesn't happen, it's extremely rare and a good punishment system weeds this out. 2. It's more open to abuse with partial FF and is actually worse than full FF because it neither deters people from AoE Spamming into close range combat and it still provides disruption.
