After looking Gears of War’s horde mode, Call of Duty’s special ops and Tonnes of other defence based games, I came up with some ideas for halo 4’s firefight.
As we all know, when you kill enemies in firefight, you gain score. In halo 4, there should gain money as the same rate as score. Score a constantly accumulating number while money/credits can be spent on upgrades to advance your defence against the covenant/flood/forerunners. The over powering upgrades will be priced up and only usable for either once in a round, set or wave.
Types of upgrades will be seen in seporate boxes around the map much like cod’s spec ops:
Armoury - Buy anything that is classed as a holdable weapon made buy your races (humans).
Re-enforcements coms radio - You can call in a pelican that drops troops or vehicles. Or you can send an ODST drop squad, Spartan deployment (characters may be based on nobal team) or a carpet bombing run! However most of these can be pricey and sometimes take a whole round to recharge before sending them again.
Engineering bench - use your money of buying physical things like barricades and covers. Or set up a machine gun turret or and auto turret. The auto turret can be upgraded either for sniping, antitank or just mowing down close rage enemies.
Spartan Upgrader - Spend money on how your Spartan performs in the battle field. Adding strength, speed, jump, armour or switching abilities (if they come back). Adding more lives will be expensive too and also needs to recharge over 3 waves.
Level increaser - Is your fight getting boring? send the next reinforcements immediately or add some more skulls to the mix for bonus score!
Resource cache - Highly expensive piece of equipment that generates money over time.
Support bench - Buy what’s above and put it in your own location. Or purchase an ammo dispenser that you can upgrade to give ammo for more weapons or generate them at a faster rate.
The attacking team (or elite side) have their own money system as well. They start off with a small amount and can gain it by doing damage to the enemy team. Extra points will be awarded for kills and assisted kills and will be multiplied if they are a Spartan. The attacking team will have the same things as the defenders but with a few extras and limitations. This is the main extra:
Ally Empowerment - You can add skulls to your troops to overpower the humans for a single wave, add more lives or send the next reinforcements immediately.
This will benefit for long games to become exciting and have generator defence inside human building to have a sense of objective.
I was also thinking of:
Reverse firefight where the elites have to defend from humans attacking them.
A flood side (green team) and forerunner side (orange/yellow team)
8 player games - 4 players max in each team if you enable just humans and covenant. You have a limit of 2 players if all the teams are enables. If you only allow the Human team, you can have up to 8 players fighting the covenant.
Locked/official gametypes give to full local credits/experience. The overpowered gametypes would be disabled if they become a boosting strategy.
Forgable firefight maps - you wouldn’t get full experience from them much like the custom gametypes. You have to set a lot of gametype labels to make it work though. To overcome AI issues, they could add “NPC Nodes” that give the AI points to go to if they want to get to you. They could be placed up stairs, in special doorways and man-cannons.
Customisable amounts of money to start off with. maybe an official gametype where you start with tonnes of money but never gain any throughout the game.
An option to drop or keep the amount of money you have when you die.
Please tell me what you think of these suggestions! 