Hi all! I just wanted to complement you on the superb job of game design and balancing you guys have done, and to chime in with my idea for a weapon/map object that I think would add something to the game: the magnet.

I encountered the magnet in one of the Worms Playstation Portable games. It is both a weapon that worms can place and a map object which randomly spawns, like barrels and mines.

In the worms game it was a small red or blue horse-shoe shaped object, with a light colored aura of expanding or contracting lines surrounding it. It had two settings, attract (blue) and repel (red).
Its effect was to either repel or attract metal objects near it. These can be moving weapons such as the bazooka and the grenade, or stationary objects such as mines. Nonmetallic objects such as the homing bee and watermelon would not be affected.

These properties allow for a variety of interesting strategic effects. The most basic is that it can be used as a defense -- a hog standing in an exposed position can deploy a repulsive magnet and be relatively protected from grenade and bazooka attacks. It can also be used offensively to draw incoming grenade or bazooka attacks to a specific place, or, if the ground is level and there are mines, to draw mines to a desirable location.

Less obviously, the magnet allows for a variety of unusual bank shots, especially if it spawns as a map object. A hog can fire a bazooka slightly off center at an attractive magnet on top of a projecting section of the map, and have the bazooka loop around the magnet and strike down at a part of the map that could not ordinarily be hit (excepting wind). Or if there are several repulsive magnets on a map between the firing hog and the target, the player could skip the bazooka round off of them and have it land near the target.

Since we want to distance ourselves from Worms, I propose a novel deployment method for the magnet: via plane drop. This would allow a large scope for creative use of the weapon, and yet not allow for omnipresent placement at any arbitrary point.

There are of course several balancing questions. Should using the magnet end a player's turn? If not, the magnet would likely become extremely popular as an aid for long distance shots, and possibly to cluster air and drill strikes onto a single target point. However, this may well be overpowered. There is also the question of how the magnet would interact with the RC Plane. And of whether the magnet should even effect air strikes and drill strikes.

Then there is the question of how much damage a magnet should be able to take before being destroyed. And whether it should have any sort of explosion when destroyed. An interesting effect could possibly be a magnetic pulse on destruction -- as the magnet is destroyed the magnetic field could momentary surge, affecting things much further away than would normally be the case, and moving barrels and mines around a sizable distance away.

What do you think?

*Edited for spelling*