4. AttackController too easy to recover from

AttackController too easy to recover from


  • Screeps feels tuned so that someone who is engaged with the game on a daily basis is favored in most conflicts.

    For example, the difference of attacking someone who is AFK for a coupel days vs someone who is active is a huge change. This is just another extension of that, where if they come back they can recover quickly from losses, but if they ignore it they can lose everything.

    I'm with @artch on this, I think its a (mostly) healthy way to keep people who care about the game significantly engaged. It might be tuned a little too strongly, but when you remember it took someone probably a month to build up that room to level 8, losing half of that while afk is a downer.


  • I'm fine that regaining assets shouldn't be hard, so long as you can actually project power into the room for a reasonable amount of time.

    Today, if you time it correctly, you can get from RCL 1 to RCL 7 with 6 ticks at the controller. For an RCL 8 base the defender loses maybe 15% of the energy into the controller. Ticking down an RCL 8 to RCL 1 takes significantly longer than 6 ticks.

    The main issue therefore is that on upgrade you can instantly upgrade to the next level, and then the next. And on downgrade there is no cooldown for upgrading.

    To me this makes the current system no better than the old. You need to seige a room for tens of thousands of ticks to remove it, you need to regain power in a room for 6 ticks to undo that seiging.

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    @tigga said in AttackController too easy to recover from:

    For an RCL 8 base the defender loses maybe 15% of the energy into the controller. Ticking down an RCL 8 to RCL 1 takes significantly longer than 6 ticks.

    Consider this: 15% of an RCL8 controller equals to 1.6M energy, or 160K ticks per source harvesting. This is the time which the owner has lost even if he managed to recover.

    you need to regain power in a room for 6 ticks to undo that seiging

    Not exactly true. The defender needs to fight back and regain control over the controller for 1000 ticks in order to execute those 6 ticks. The 1000 ticks is the crux, not the 6 ticks. And the attacker is supposed to guard the attacked controller while he's downgrading it. If your tactic is sending an one-time raiding party and then just simply sending a lone claimer every 1000 ticks, you're not supposed to success.


  • @artch they only have to fight for 1000 ticks if they don't know how to count. They only need to have control when the 1000 ticks end, not for 1000 ticks. This is a fairly huge distinction. While the attacker needs to hold the controller for thousands of sequential ticks, the defender must only reach the controller at one specific time and they regain almost everything they lost.

    It would be great if the attacker could continue using .attackController() while the controller is upgrade blocked, not to downgrade it faster, but to keep the upgrade block at 1,000 ticks. This would mean that a well timed burst attack squad will not simply mow down the attacker for 6 ticks to regain control of the room.

    Also... assuming a 2 source room with a measly 2 remotes, 1.6M energy is less than 50-60k ticks. There is also the Market though, and last I checked, energy doesn't exactly have the highest price tag.

    I like how I cannot just lose my assets over night, that's cool, but at the same time, why am I allowed to continue trolling this considerably stronger player by preventing room downgrade for over 500k ticks, when I haven't been able to keep the room for more than a few ticks in a row?

    I'm not protecting my assets at that point, no, it's called trolling at that point.


  • The defender needs to fight back and regain control over the controller for 1000 ticks in order to execute those 6 ticks

    To rescue the room you need an overpowering force over the course of 30-80 ticks (too short for a dynamic reaction force) every 50,000->100,000 ticks. Time it to arrive when the blocked timer is running out (can't be renewed until it does), especially if that co-incides with shortly after controller downgrades, and there's not much I can do against that. The only solution is to have a force myself that can overpower any possible incoming force for every single one of those 1000 tick intervals over the course of 50,000->100,000 ticks. I need to win every time, and because it's 1000 tick intervals (and that's less than CREEP_LIFE_TIME) it's pretty much full time. The blocked upgrade does very little to actually help.

    IMO you should have to actually properly regain control of the room over a sustained period of much greater than 100 ticks to be able to recover it from RCL 1 to RCL 7. That's simply not the case today. Above you say they need to control the room for 1000 ticks. If that was actually true, I'd have less problems with the current design, but it's just not true. Maybe it's the intention, but it's not how things pan out!


  • I still feell that if you downgrade the controller, the enemy shouldn't be able to recover anything and should have to upgrade that controller back up from scratch.

    1 Reply

  • @crusher48 If that were true it might actually be too easy to take a room given the current system, but that is how I thought it worked when I first read .attackController().

    👍

  • I mean the hard part of taking a room is actually beating the defenses. Remember, this game is biased in the favor of defenders to the point where a perfect defense would be impossible to defeat.


  • @artch I think the best way might be an inbetween for attackController. Make there be an attackController that downgrades, and a blockController that prevents upgrading/safemode.

    Cd limitation is on attackController, but blockController can have the equivalent to a reservation timer that the enemy can increment up by committing resources. This will give attackers a longer window if they commit, but still allow defenders who hold the room to defend themselves.

    blockController: Adds 2 ticks of blocked controller per 5 claim parts, up to 2000 ticks. No cd on it.

    attackController: current behavior with the 1000 tick cd, except it only adds 200 ticks of blocking.

    👍

  • Crazy idea:

    Make a shard where it is easier to attack than defend and let people who want a more dynamic game spawn there. Could be fun.

    2 Replies

  • @shedletsky said in AttackController too easy to recover from:

    Crazy idea:

    Make a shard where it is easier to attack than defend and let people who want a more dynamic game spawn there. Could be fun.

    Seasonal shard would prevent people being able to turtle to unkillable levels... but that idea was shot down as being too good and requiring it's own game and another payment 😑

    😑

  • @shedletsky I don't think it was ever desired for it to be easier to attack than to defend. To make that happen you would basically have to delete towers and ramparts from the game, which doesn't sound fun.

    This idea wasn't to make attacking easier than defending. It was to make attacking a controller a reasonable possibility.

    Not to mention that 95% of the time, there isn't even a benefit to attacking another player. You pretty much will always lose more than you gain from attacking a neutral entity (even if you kill them).


  • @artch Wanted to make sure you didn't miss the message above, since you said you wanted player emoji support to validate ideas. I think this separation of concerns is a good start to making downgrade based attacks more doable.

    @davaned said in AttackController too easy to recover from:

    @artch I think the best way might be an inbetween for attackController. Make there be an attackController that downgrades, and a blockController that prevents upgrading/safemode.

    Cd limitation is on attackController, but blockController can have the equivalent to a reservation timer that the enemy can increment up by committing resources. This will give attackers a longer window if they commit, but still allow defenders who hold the room to defend themselves.

    blockController: Adds 2 ticks of blocked controller per 5 claim parts, up to 2000 ticks. No cd on it.

    attackController: current behavior with the 1000 tick cd, except it only adds 200 ticks of blocking.


  • Bumping this guy because it's still an issue. If you want it to be possible to take a room without taking down an entire player this needs revisiting. Burst counter attacks at the right time make fully downgrading a controller a multi million tick operation with 1000x+ resources required on the part of the attacker.

  • Dev Team

    Ok, let's get back to this.

    While I agree that a fast and easy recovery still an issue, it's not that easy to come up with a final solution which doesn't affect regular upgrading, makes a minimal impact on 'regular' room recovery. The main issue as I see it is that an attacker must maintain control over the room for tens of thousands of ticks in a row while defender can perform well-timed strike and almost immediately (10+1*levels) have RCL7 back. In order to solve this, we need to somehow expand a window for an attacker to react.

    I think that @Tigga's suggestion is the closest to the solution, with some additional balancing work, of course.

    First, let's calculate these 'tens of thousands'. Assuming an attacker use 19C19M controller attackers which always arrive about time, it's 6700 ticks of downgrade per 1000 ticks. Full (RCL8 → RCL0) 'natural' downgrade takes 405000 ticks (~2 weeks) so it's around 60 of 19C19M creeps in ~60000 ticks (~2 days). Let's keep these numbers in mind because we want to keep it.

    Second, let's define a reasonable attacker's reaction window. We assume that attacked room is 600 or fewer tiles away of an attacker's room (obviously), means the window should be like 600 ticks for travel and 150 ticks for spawning (I deliberately don't count boosting time because I think that a capable raider must have a very efficient boosting system; if not, he could simply attack someone living closer to him; I also don't count “oh wait, my spawners will be busy for the next 100 ticks spawning haulers” because we have .cancel() for cases like this).

    Third, let's take a look at the primary flow we shouldn't hurt: it's a novice player who has his room bugged out; said novice player should have exactly same time to wake up and fix the bug as before. Currently, he has (assuming 3s tick) about 16 hours to fix a bug in his RCL1 room or ~20 hours to recover RCL2 room.

    Let's assume that losing and gaining a level leaves half of the downgrade timer instead of full. Upgrading to RCL8 is not an issue because it requires over 1M of energy so let's take a look at lower levels. Given the current CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE_RESTORE is 100 ticks, recovering from RCL6 to RCL7 would take 300 ticks taking at least 300 energy (500 ticks and 500 energy from RCL5 to RCL7 and so on). In order to turn these 300 ticks to 750 ticks, we could either nerf CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE_RESTORE (40 seems to be the right value) or increase CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE values, or both.

    Option 1

    Together with making the timer half-filled, doubling CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE values would make full 'natural' downgrade 555000 ticks, which is 37% longer than now, or require over 80000 ticks of downgrading with a single 19C attacker. We will have 600 ticks of reaction window for RCL6→RCL7 case (still not 750 but close enough) or 1000+ ticks for lower levels (more than enough).

    Option 2

    Together with making the timer half-filled, we nerf CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE_RESTORE to 40 which makes 750 ticks for RCL6→RCL7 but also reduce full 'natural' degrade to 277500 ticks (~1.37 weeks) and (much more importantly) reduce downgrading time for RCL2 rooms from 25000 ticks to 15000 ticks (12,5 hours, sounds like definitely not enough). Plus, it's a little more than 40k ticks of downgrading with a single 19C attacker, sounds too brutal.

    Option 3

    Together with making the timer half-filled, revisit CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE making it like {1: 20000, 2: 10000, 3: 20000, 4: 40000, 5: 80000, 6: 120000, 7: 150000, 8: 200000} leaving all other constants as they are. This is my favorite because it has minimal impact on 'natural' decay and recovery (420000 ticks of self-decay – very close!) and novice recovery (still 20000 ticks for RCL1 room, also 20000 ticks for RCL2 room), and it naturally gives the required 750 ticks in RCL6→RCL7 case, more for deeper degradation up to maximum of 2100 ticks (RCL1→RCL7). It will be a bit harder to knock down RCL8 to RCL7, but, considering it's the only downgrade you can't recover from easy, it makes sense.

    I suggest voting below or leaving your comments/suggestions/corrections below in the thread. Please choose wisely because we really want to have this sorted out once and for all.

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  • I like option 3. It appears to fix the issue without changing anything else significantly.


  • Maybe I'm missing something, but if the room is 600 steps away, and the attacker immediately spawns a 50 part responder, that means that the attacker would get there just as the RCL 6 room got back to RCL 7. So shouldn't we be targeting a bigger number e.g. 600 * 2 + 150 = 1350 ticks?

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    @wtfrank Given the response is enough, it should be able to kill the upgrader. 1350 ticks sound too brutal I think, no?


  • @wtfrank that is the absolute worst case. In the majority of cases the room will either be closer than 600 ticks or the controller will downgrade a bit before the attack to recontrol it comes.

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  • Overlords

    Option 3 looks good.