Arena bfg isn't that great, the 9k is much owwie, the 10k is worse, then you've got dualgats and that @#$%ing shaft to worry about. For a rail-only... Well, doom's gat would work, slippy's on the downside since the shaft is his best bet then.. Machineguns, slippy's got his shotgun, doom's pistol packs a punch, earth and strogg have submachineguns. etc, it'll take some planning, but it's not THAT iffy.

Well Tek, it's good you brought that up, but I've already got a counter for it. The railgun packs a punch yes, but the railgun is slow. You can do rougly equivalent damage over time with doom's gat vs a railgun. I'm personally more a fan of hitting more often for less damage than missing and then waiting with a massive damage weapon. Mid range, a machine gun is more effective than a railgun. long range the raingun wins, however, if you miss, they can and WILL close the distance while you're still reloading.

Angst - also take into account that doom's armor is the worst of all 5 classes. A Srogg rail will always leave him reeling or kill him outright unless he's got a megahealth. In most cases, doom will get smacked around in the open by Earth/Strogg/Arena's long-range weapondry.

HOWEVER! A QUADED DOOM CHAINGUN WILL DOMINATE EVERYONE. PERIOD!        Doom needs to be a powerup whore in open maps like q3dm17. If he does come across a chaingun and his accuracy is good, he can hit people going for a rail mid-air, adding to their velocity and making them miss the landing spot.

Slippy needs to use his special physics to dodge shots and close the distance to medium range, where his rockets become the most effective. His armor is quite good, so he'll have a much easier time doing that than Doom.

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One thing about having special-weapon games that just popped into my mind: each map has an optimal weapon for each class. There are few well-rounded maps like q3dm6 that allow for multiple weapons to be effective. For example, q3dm17 is a long-range exclusive map. Eternal Arenas is a shotgun, close-range map. Dunwich is a grenade/shotgun/rocket map, with many hallways and corners connecting medium-sized rooms. Since some classes have superior weapondry than others (Q1 RL, Q2 RG, Doom SG/SSG, etc.), a gamemode that limited weapons would force unbalanced gameplay, even if other classes were given some compensation or balancing. In short, I think it's a neat idea but I don't see it working =/

One idea that may be interesting is to be able to customize what other classes pickup! For example, make every single weapon pickup a chaingun for Strogg and a gatling gun for Earth. Or, switch things up (even if they don't make sense), like when Arena drops a Railgun, it's picked up by others as a Shotgun. This idea needs to be played with a bit though o_O

Custom pickups are a nono, it'll break Gen. The weapons are hardcoded for playability reasons.

now, while the idea of turning gen:resurgence into something akin to pokemon DOES sound mildly amusing, I don't think that'll fly.

again, I'll state that it's not a very feasible idea, next topic..

ok ok ok . no cyberdemon .
can we spawn an arachnatron with a plasmagun please

Now, back to the topic:

Some feasible game modes:

Last Man Standing: Fairly self-explanatory. Basic DM rules, dead players become spectators until there is one player left "alive." Last Man Standing gets X number of frags. Possibly the only scoring possible in this mode.

Hunter/Hunted: One Hunter, everyone else is Hunted. Only the Hunter may score frags, a Hunted fragging a Hunter becomes the Hunter.

King of the Platforms: Players score by knocking their opponents into the void/etc kill brushes.

I would love to see Hunter/Hunted... though I rarely play with enough people to make that enjoyable, it is one of my more favored game modes. King of the Platforms is something I have never really considered before, the description brings back fond memories of Worms though