@marvintmb for a new nuke you'd need code to:

• build tunnels in time to manage to harvest Thorium (min 150k energy, depending on Thorium mineralAmount it might need build and harvest boosts)
• store Thorium somewhere (afaik you cannot build container in wall, so poor miner will have to have carry, cutting his TTL by half)
• buy Batteries/process energy in factory
• process Thorium in factory without breaking it
• store Refined Thorium somewhere without it breaking the structure

Since you cannot obtain thorium in any other way one has to code for all that. You cannot just pop a nuker, buy ghodium/minerals for it and throw into labs.

This should also prevent new-players from just spamming new nukes - and to utilize them properly would also require more advanced code than send nuke and follow-with quad, since said quad would also get the decay once entered the room.

Deposits were meant for highways only, but if that would make it less-breaking then ok.

Plus adding another mineral would break like 90% of people's base planning and mineral harvesting code that's because ppl were lazy with assuming there will be always one mineral despite find() always returning array (which was a case in Season 5). Zombies would/should hobble-around with maybe building a road into a wall, active players should be able to survive with a simple change given month-or-three notice before

for now i want to keep it as simple as possible - hence using Factory instead of introducing new structure.

I'm bit wary of the Thorium -> Energy conversion, since it's really easy to overflow it (energy) at later rcls, and adding yet-another way is imo pointless.

uses are not entirely military ones, because if someone is having too much of Refined thorium, it can be used to increase Upgrade/Harvest/Carry/Move/Build.

For Nuker - could be as addition, but that complicates logic.
You'd need either
300k energy and 5k ghodium and no Refined Thorium
or
300k energy and 5k ghodium and 5k Refined Thorium
meaning nuke with 1 Refined Thorium should not launch or would launch "normal" nuke

Thorium

Purpose of feature

Bring interesting mechanic of Season5 into mmo, while keeping balance, and adding new interesting tactics for players to utilize. It's designed to have minimal-to-none impact on existing bots. Numbers are not always backed by math, and are proposed values.

Thorium

What is it ?

A new Mineral that randomly spawns in all rooms.
Every tick its mineralAmount decays at rate Math.ceil(mineralAmount / 1000)
Possible to be lucky and have multiple Thorium nodes.

Where is it ?

Spawns inside walls at the depth 3+.
(optional - deeper in wall it is, bigger its initial mineralAmount)
Can be found via existing FIND_MINERALS constant.
Players need to build tunnels to extract it.

Potentially it can "break" bots that use .find(FIND_MINERALS)[0] - still - not permanently given Thorium mineral would decay over time.

Why like this:

requires more advanced code to obtain it, does not break existing bots, introduces new mechanics, energy sink

What is special about thorium ?

As in Season 5 :
Both creeps and decayable structures, such as roads and containers, experience accelerated aging and decay. The formula used to calculate this increased decay is Math.floor(Math.log10([total Thorium on the tile]))

Additionally, it cannot be transferred by Terminal in any form.
.send() and .createOrder() method return ERR_INVALID_ARGS if Thorium is passed as resource

What thorium is for ?

Refined in Factory to Refined Thorium

Refined Thorium

What is special about Refined Thorium ?

Additionally to aging and decay, it also causes everything on shared tile take direct damage to hits, equal to: Math.floor(Math.log10([total Refined Thorium on the tile]))

Scenario-1 : creep carries 1000 Refined Thorium on road under rampart:
- creep takes 3dmg to hits and loses additional 3TTL
- road takes 3dmg to hits and its decay timer is decreased by 3
- rampart takes 3dmg to hits and its decay timer is decreased by 3

Scenario-2 : Storage with 1000 Refined Thorium with Rampart on-top:
- storage takes 3dmg to hits
- rampart takes 3dmg to hits and its decay timer is decreased by 3

Additionally, it cannot be transferred by Terminal in any form.
.send() and .createOrder() method return ERR_INVALID_ARGS if Refined Thorium is passed as resource

How to get it ?

Factory takes 5 Batteries and 1 Thorium to output 1 Refined Thorium, at 10 cooldown.
The more Thorium in facory, the bigger the output of produce() according to
For every 5 000 Thorium in factory the output is increased by 1, with ceiling of 5.
Factory also receives direct dmg to hits equal to 5 * output

What that means:

On a tick which Factory with 25010 Thorium stored, produces Refined Thorium
- Factory produces 5 Refined Thorium out of 1 Thorium and 5 Batteries
- Factory gets 5 * 5 dmg directly to its hits as result of .produce()
- Factory gets 4 dmg due to stored Thorium

Why like this:

more advanced production chain, sink for energy, requires more code to prevent factory Meltdown

What Refined Thorium is for ?

Can be used to boost creeps with Labs

• Labs take damage to hits if they contain Refined Thorium
• All creep body is boosted by Refined Thorium
• boosting cost is equal to 3 Refined Thorium and 10 energy per bodypart
• if there is not enough Refined Thorium / Energy - creep is not boosted
• every bodypart has it's effectiveness increased by 40% (on-top of boosts, except TOUGH)
• every creep bodypart takes dmg calculated by (1 * applied_boost_name_length)
• damage is applied AFTER preheal BEFORE any other damage

example.
Creep with 10 T3 MOVE, 10 T2 HEAL, 10 T1 RANGED_ATTACK, 10 TOUGH and 10 T0 ATTACK

It takes every tick:
1 * Math.max(1, XZHO2.length) dmg to MOVE parts
(5dmg per part, 50dmg evenly across 10 parts)

1 * Math.max(1, LHO2.length) dmg to HEAL parts
(4dmg per part, 40dmg evenly across 10 parts)

1 * Math.max(1, KO.length) dmg to RA parts
(2dmg per part, 20dmg evenly across 10 parts)

1 Math.max(1, ''.length) dmg to ATTACK parts
(1dmg per part, 10dmg evenly across 10 parts)

TOUGH parts do not take any damage

Why like this:

Backwards-compatible, adds another layer to explore for players, by allowing creeps to be more performant at the cost of Refined Thorium and hits. While combat performance is boosted, attacker needs to take into account damage that every bodypart receives. Same for creeps that will try to outrepair damage. It Should help break the "Defender" advantage but more calculation would be needed. It can be also utilized for "peaceful" purposes as normal-boost alternative, for haulers/miners/etc

Can put into Nuker instead of Ghodium

Nuker:

• takes dmg to hits due to containing Refined Thorium

Nuke:

• Original nuke behavior applies, except for modification to damage and area
• Damage and area are modified to

20m in center
1m in 3x3
100k in 5x5
20k in 6x6
5k in 7x7

• Additionally : Thorium pile is left on remains of killed creeps, equal to Math.floor(creep.hitsMax/100) (50 Thorium max per creep)
• Additionally : Room receives decay status which, for 200 ticks, causes every structure/creep take dmg and decay equal to 1k Refined Thorium being in its tile (3dmg/tick). Multiple nukes stack both damage and duration

Why like this:

Backwards-compatible, makes nuke stronger for impact-center but not game-breaking, can makes breaking room easier due to damage-over-time that is applied to structures, makes rebuilding ramparts not possible during that time

You cannot, that's not how they work.

"Since you not only have to hold the room with creep alone"

i think most (if not all) of S1 and S2, top20 players can own a sector for themselves

that means that the 2-3 rooms/sector are quite untouchable by anyone else for scoring due to limited TTL of claim-body creeps. Only 'disrupting' might be possible, but still that would mean that player would probably have to sacrifice his/hers score-defence (since not owning a sector)

That alone would mean that the gap between top-players and everyone else would be huge.

With every room possible to score, there is still option for mediocre/new players to participate in some way, allows some agreements like in S1 to mitigate weak-player wipe, and there would be some more creativity with army of smaller claim creeps over big area or focusing on holding fewer more worth rooms with bigger claimers

• Emitter stations have an inherent quality. The greater the quality, the more score granted per CLAIM part
• Emitter stations are fairly uncommon, only 2-3 per sector

too easy for single player to control them with this set. I'd say every room has it, and regarding the quality:

• owned rooms have lowest multiplier (ie. x1)
• reserved rooms : x 2
• empty rooms : x5
• sk rooms : x8
• central rooms with portals x15

imo that would force some calculation about how to control area and should disallow easy snowball of top players, while still giving some competitiveness for weaker players.

i guess the main reason is that already have stuff working with squares

@tigga said in Season #2 concept:

I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.

For non-uniform world, my issue is that it leaves bigger parts of it less-usable and discourages respawning into 'worse' zones. Weaker players are not much affected by that since they don't have codebase with features that would get impacted by that. For 'medicore' players that starts to be a bigger impact.

So from good player perspective 'Center' makes sense, for weak-player there's no difference, for medicore one it's either center/close to center and then respawn into worse area after wipe, or just start in worse area and have a boring/limited play

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

Once you reach 22, the benefit of pushing anyone else out will inherently always outweigh the cost of letting them stay, if those are the only options.

GCL22 ain't gonna happen in 2 months. in current season highest GCL is 9, we might see GCL11 maybe.

@rhef said in Season #2 concept:

Snowgoose 9:50 PM

I don’t think the top players need to make any deals, if they could kill you they can just take out your towers, or just heal there way to the collector

Snowgoose 9:52 PM

Once your towers are gone they can probably keep a room down with small creeps

One can wrap decoder in ramparts or, in the end, respawn, leaving the room empty and decoder disabled

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

A good economic bot should get you in the top 100. Your combat code should determine top 10.

There's ~140 players in this season with less than 50% having scored.

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

In a large map, a top-10 player is only able to indirectly compete on the leaderboard by exerting total dominance over their holdings to maximize gains.

That's not true. in large map top10 player needs to cooperate with smaller players to get access to highRCL decoders.

In small map there is high risk of alliances, created by season1 top10-15 players, that will determine most of ranking.

Hypothetical Example

• 3 teams of 4 top15 players decide to take 6 sectors (2-3 sectors/player for optimal GCL-7/8 room setup), wipe anyone else within and 4-8 rooms around it, split code picking into assigned zones and do not fight with each-other (best in alliance wins, since breaking/fighting within alliance is too risky from ranking perspective for every member)

With big map it should reduce chance of top players clumping together. Example:

• Each of top15 players creates it's own kingdom with some smaller-player vassals as to not have to share code-picking with other top10 players