4. A third leaderboard

A third leaderboard


  • Today we have two leaderboards. One of them is energy pumped into controller, one of them is power processed. Both of these are economy based.

    I think it would be fun to have a third leaderboard which relates more to military prowess. IMO the best way to do this would be to have one of either:

    1. Number of rooms owned/reserved.
    2. Number of rooms signed.

    The former means you have to have a constant energy and CPU expendature to hold your gains, and gains would likely be a lot more stable as flipping reserved rooms takes some time. The latter is a bit vulnverable to people spamming 1 move creeps over the entire map. Signs also don't hold ground so you'd be smashed around by respawn zones from time to tmie. For that reason I prefer to have reservations as a scoring system.

    This change would incentivise combat more. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to the reader. It may make the world less newbie friendly, but I think it would also cause more wars across the shards and wars are fun!


  • Signing doesn't really correlate with military prowess though reserved/claimed rooms does. As you note, it costs you very little to sign a room so you're not putting any skin on the table, whereas reserving a room does involve an ongoing cost in claim parts.

    But if we want to measure and incentivise military prowess, why not have a more direct measure of military activity? For example, the value or number of creep parts that your creeps or towers get the killing blow on.

    BTW I have a signing leaderboard website in the works... it won't be much more effort to also add a reserved rooms leaderboard so I will probably do that.


  • @wtfrank said in A third leaderboard:

    But if we want to measure and incentivise military prowess, why not have a more direct measure of military activity? For example, the value or number of creep parts that your creeps or towers get the killing blow on.

    The trouble is that it's farmable. IMO it needs to be an objective that two people can't co-operate to exploit. I guess that's another drawback with signing: one alliance could co-operate to allow a single player sign all their rooms.


  • So would cost of creep parts destroyed be a better metric than number of creep parts destroyed? more skin in the game?

    What about mineral cost (or lab time) of boosted parts destroyed? That would exclude lower players so might not be ideal... but it would be running up into fundamental limits of what an empire can produce so might be less farmable than creep parts?


  • Yeah. That could work. In general I feel it's a lot harder to account for. Another thing to consider is that killing creeps isn't really the aim of combat: mostly it's to kill rooms. I'm not sure there's a good way to track room killing "points" in a non farmable way.

  • SUN

    I think any method that we could come up with could be farmable in some fashion. Creep parts killed, boosts wasted etc. The point is to make it not worth, or at the very lest inefficient to farm.

    Without resorting to mechanics that are not currently in the game I therefore propose something along the lines of 'RCL damage'.

    Every room taken held, and driven to RCL 0 while also having their storage, terminal and spawns destroyed counts as a number of points relative to their starting RCL. Capping the same room in a month from the same player earns fractional points. Forcing a respawn is worth a lot of (a pool of) points given to the room-takers of the respawned player.

    Finally, lower GCL players are worth dramatically less points than larger players to discourage hunting of noobs...

    Actually it'd be quite possible to give points based on relative warfare rank if you wanted to get fancy. But that would have a lot of implications in that warmongers would be inherently worth more points and peaceful turtles less.

    Lesser restrictions based on the above could be used; but make it more abusable too.

    I say this because just counting claimed/reserved rooms doesn't seem to particularly encourage a change in player behavior.

    Now for the thinking behind some of the specific rules:
    -Terminal and storage in particular allow for rapidly getting a room back to rcl 8 if filled.
    -Spawns are mostly to make it extra inconvenient to get a room back up and running.
    -Pool of points on respawn make it less enticing to gang up on a single player in an alliance setting.
    -RCL 0 is because you want to measure real, lasting damage rather than an RCL 8->7 inconvenience.
    -Less points on retaking has multiple reasons, but if you have to retake it I argue that you havn't done enough damage to your opponent the first time to earn the points the second time.


  • I think that's a fine set of rules. Personally I think they're far too complicated though. I think to have such complex rules would both require significant changes to the UI and significant backend changes. Just attributing kills to players in a fair way is complicated enough.

    There's an advantage to keeping it simple which is why I still prefer number of rooms reserved. The aim of conquest is to conquer. Maybe if the max reservation timer was upped a bit or reserve boosts introduced it would get rid of some of the annoyance of having to reserve so many rooms, but I'm not sure that's needed really.

  • SUN

    My problem is that number of reserved rooms is not direct measure of military might and does not directly encourage or measure player conflict; it is merely a measure of expansion which is already inherent to other metrics. I'm also not sure if convincing people to have larger footprints (without making use of the rooms) is such a good idea.

    Or that it's even worth the 0.2 cpu across many, many rooms for players above GCL 30 who have massive CPU constraints already. Mind I probably shouldn't speak for them. But even for me i'd much rather dump that CPU into another couple of remotes and do that much better at a more useful GCL/Power ranking.

    There are a lot of mechanics that have been proposed elsewhere that could perform the function of encouraging player conflict and many could also be used to measure a warfare rank. eg. duel claimed controllers, flags, etc..

    It's also possible to simplify the rules I proposed to 'number of rooms driven to RCL 0' ('Rooms destroyed') . Everything else is to deal with problems that for all I know might not actually be problems.

    Room kill attributation can be done via attackController() or, better yet, who did the most damage to nonrampart player structures within the room. Yes, it could be complicated if multiple players attack the same room... but is it really a war at that point? Does that even happen that often? (Most alliances will attack multiple rooms rather than all piling into the same one)

    In any case I agree attributation is quite a complicated issue.


  • The problem is that it's very hard to measure things that directly correlate to military success, and very easy to measure things that are fairly tangential to military success.

    signed rooms - easy to measure, almost entirely unrelated to military success

    reserved rooms - easy to measure, slightly related to military and economic success

    killing blow on a creep of a certain value - probably easy to measure but there could be technical difficulties or performance issues, moderately related to military and economic success (killing creeps doesn't necessarily equate to winning a war)

    room driven to RCL0 - hard to measure - fairly well related to military success, although it wouldn't credit you for starving a room or forcing a player to respawn.

  • SUN

    Room to RCL0 - Which player got the killing flow on the storage etc.? Or even the most damage to player structures? (This also means 'ownership' of a kill could change hands if a a second player worked to keep a room flattened)

    Controlling reserved rooms (without mining) isn't particularly related to economy at all unless you need to hold them militarily. But honestly holding an empty room isn't worth the effort or the CPU.

    Reservation counts also works majorly against alliances who's members tend to be shoulder-to-shoulder a lot of the time (relative to the amount a player has reach to reserve/sign) and doesn't account for war-games at all. On the other hand it also majorly works for alliances that can afford to bully and diplomance players out for the space too.

    Imagine all of YP muscling everyone off of shard1 just to reserve (but not make use of) all of that extra space. Its an awful vision, and not just because i'm on shard1.

    The nail in the coffin for the reservation idea for me is that it doesn't even measure military strength in any meaningful capacity outside of the ability to pick your targets carefully. Respawn in an area with a lot of new players and push them all out. Suddenly you're #1 on the scoreboard for the foreseeable future with little extra military investment.

    Maybe that's too extreme, maybe all players end up with the same amount of reservations per claimed room... but that makes it even worse as a counter when we have GCL & rooms claimed statistics already.


  • @pundemonium said in A third leaderboard:

    Which player got the killing flow on the storage etc.?

    easy to measure - not necessarily correlated to military conquest (someone could ninja that kill or alternatively you might force a room to be abandoned without ever breaking through the rampart over the storage.)

    Or even the most damage to player structures?

    hard to measure (over what time period do you measure the damage if a protracted siege has been taking place, plus data has been tracked on a per-room basis which may or may not have performance implications) - well correlated with military activity.

    the pattern holds!

    The nail in the coffin for the reservation idea for me is that it doesn't even measure military strength in any meaningful capacity outside of the ability to pick your targets carefully. Respawn in an area with a lot of new players and push them all out. Suddenly you're #1 on the scoreboard for the foreseeable future with little extra military investment.

    Yep, this also applies to GCL leaderboard though - select the really profitable rooms in a novice/respawn area and turf out the new players. Instant GCL mastery.