Clone target

[marhawkman]

This damage type is very strange. In my experiments with it I've noted two main things of note. 1: cloning your freinds gives you evil clones who then try to kill you. 2: if cloned enemies die you lose prestige points for it. This is exactly proportional to what you get for KOing them.

[wickerman]

Not being an expert on the ins and outs of the cloning swap, I would guess that the AI is setting the clones to a 'team' that is hostile to the target.  Therefore, you can clone enemies and get allies but if you clone your friends, you end up with enemies.

I imagine the reason dying 'allies' costs you prestige is because they are set to a type  of AI class that costs you prestige in the regular game (like cops or civilians).

If you want to clone your friends and not get jumped, the built in clone command (under the special powers menu) might work.

As far as the loss of prestige with the allies, I have always kind of liked it (tho it might not have been intentional).  Cloning is an UBER powerful ability in the game and I always figured it should cost you something extra to use it.

[marhawkman]

It's also UBER EXpensive! The only practical clone skill I've managed to make that has a halfway decent prestige cost had idiotic energy cost, a short range, and high accuracy. I think I might have given it a small radius too. It still cost almost as much as my "demolisher" attack. Oh yeah, I think I had to give it annoyingly high damage too. IIRC the damage is the percent chance of succes.

Demolisher was designed for causing massive damage to the city scape. True it'd kill enemies too, but it's range and unpredictable behavior made it almost untargetable. I also had to give my character immunity to Energy X attacks, the skill caused way too much damage to survive getting hit with it. Obviously not something I'd use during story mode. the prestige loss from demolishing half a city block everytime you use the attack would add up really fast. that and it would make for really expensive characters.