3. Encouraging more combat at high GCL

Encouraging more combat at high GCL


  • @hsoj said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    I know we have novice and respawn areas, but making defense harder just makes it more difficult to set up a stable, long-term colony. Personally I think this would be rough on players with less developed defense code.

    I don't think any of the ideas outlined make defense significantly harder for new players. The vast majority of new players will get rolled over by boosted squads anyway should they be attacked by an experienced player.

    EDIT: I thought I'd expand on this.

    1. Decreasing repair effectiveness would mean more energy is spent on building up ramparts. Again, it's going to slow you down a bit economically, but not really make you easier to kill unless you can perform an effective repair spam defense. If you can do an effective repair spam defense, you're no longer a new player IMO.

    2. Increasing rampart decay as proposed would only kick in at >10m ramparts, and would be a fairly insignificant cost. Sure, you'd get a little less into your controller. Really doing this means that ramparts become more of a trade-off. Build them high and be safe, or keep them low and get more free energy.

    3. You get 1 safe mode per RCL. That's plenty enough for a new player to build rooms up IMO. Most new players don't have auto-safe mode.

    4. Decreasing the effectiveness of burst damage. On the whole new players will not be able to kill T3 boosted squads attacking their rooms. If they can, they're not new players any more.

    On the whole the world is very peaceful and most new players won't get killed by established players. Fundamentally even with the best code in the world you can't really grow up as after a respawn next to an established player if they don't want you to. Bases can't really defend themselves against RCL 8 attacks until they're at least RCL 7, and you'll be dead well before that. The reason new players don't have massive problems is because established players aren't trying to kill them, not because they couldn't.

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  • @tigga What if rampart decay rates (and therefore repair rates) were based on a formula that depended on the number of hits that they've been built up to? This way we have a smooth curve where players can select their safety-to-cost ratio rather than an on/off at 10 million.

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  • @trepidimous said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    @tigga What if rampart decay rates (and therefore repair rates) were based on a formula that depended on the number of hits that they've been built up to? This way we have a smooth curve where players can select their safety-to-cost ratio rather than an on/off at 10 million.

    Math.ceil(hits / 10e6) already does this.

    You could make it smoother, the details don't really matter.


  • @o4kapuk @artch

    Can we get a developer input on this?

    Are the developers happy with the current military aspect of the higher level play?

    Do the developers agree that it is easier to defend than attack and are they happy with this?

    And what do you think about the ideas that Tigga suggested?

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  • Regarding Power, wasn't it planned to enable power globally anyway once all PCs where implemented with a short transition period?

    But I agree in general, once you're set defending is to "easy".
    I'm not against the perfect defense policy but it should take much more than it currently does.
    (Good code should matter, not a bias in game mechanics)

    Removing the ability to regenerate safe mode is a good idea, this way seven nukes "could" take care of that.
    I think this is a really reasonable investment if you really want to get rid of someone.

    As far as walls/ramparts go, maybe building/maintaining them should have some sort of diminishing return so you have to spend astronomical amounts of energy.
    This is IMO a fair trade off and would make walls more attractive due to the lack of decay.
    This would also make nukes more tactical since ramparts would have way less HP with this method.

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  • In most RTS games, static defenses have hard counters by some sort of siege unit that is useless at most other things.

    Supreme Commander FA for instance, has point defense which out ranges all other T1 units except for the mobile artillery which is the slowest, lowest hp, and its projectile takes the longest time to reach its target. It is for most purposes useless at unit on unit combat, but when destroying the T1 point defense (which is very good at killing t1 units), it out-ranges it and will kill it after a few shots. there still is a defenders advantage as these siege units are relatively expensive but defenses are there to deter and buy time, there is no perfect defense. defense revolves around having reserve units to rally to the defense, not a tower defense approach.

    that game also raises the stakes by having a concept called reclaim that allows you to recycle destroyed units/structures resources and creates a meta game of controlling past battlefields, for the reclaim.

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  • I've experienced the reclaim effect in screeps.

    I spawned into a young alliance and one of them had automated an MA swarm attack. It would have been devastating a few months earlier but I had good respawn rushing and tower energy management by that point.

    They left the attack running for a few days. By the end they'd energy drained their 3 rooms and my single room built and filled a Storage and there was still energy on the ground. I don't think they'd ever had it fail before.

    The reclaim effect becomes much less useful once a player gets even a small empire running and energy becomes essentially free.

    On the topic of encouraging combat, that led to a month of some of the most frantic/fun coding I've had with screeps, They kept me pinned in that one room for quite a while we both tried to developed effective boosting code. More than once I had to hand steer some of my boosted defenders to narrowly avoid a disaster.

    Thinking back on my experience safe mode saved everyone's hide a couple times. I chained once or twice to give me time to work out solution to their latest attack. 24 hrs was never enough. Given screepers preference for weekend play 7 day safemodes with a 1 month cooldown might be more in line with encouraging combat while giving players a chance to not get wiped at the first glitch.

    Or slightly more flexible up to 7 days safemodes with exponential cooldowns. Keep your first safemode up for 1 day and you have a cooldown of 1 day. That doesn't work so you pop another safemode for 1 day, this time the cooldown is (2x) 2 days. Next time you keep the safemode up for 7 days. When it drops you have a (4x) 1 month cooldown.

    I think that would strengthen safemode for the players who need it most while effectively removing it from empire warfare since the increasing cooldowns make safemodes a non-renewable resource.

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  • @deft-code So safe-mode would be acc bound, shard bound and realtime instead of ticks?
    Hmm that is a big departure but I like the idea, this way it becomes a way more significant decision.
    Plays different like "Awww let's use safe-mode I can regenerate it anyway"

    But I wouldn't do a exponential cool down and keep it fixed at 4x with a minimum of 24h to a max of 168h(1 Week).
    It insures that it can't be spammed or abused.

    But there is still the issue with nukes, should they end the safe-mode? Or just deal dmg regardless? <- best solution IMO

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  • I assumed the safemode would be room+account bound. I figured if I got wiped or pushed back I'd like a chance to use the protection is new rooms to build back up.

    WRT to Nukes I didn't see a need to change the clear safemode + no cooldown. Now though I see that an alliance could use friendly nukes to work around safemode cooldowns. Though given a nukes multiday lead time this probably isn't a big deal.
    As for letting nukes through a safemode, that would allow nukes to wipe out a new player. I was never hit by a nuke early on but my plan was to just pop a safemode when there was only a day left and wait it out. I hate to take that easy counter from new players.

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  • @deft-code said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    I assumed the safemode would be room+account bound. I figured if I got wiped or pushed back I'd like a chance to use the protection is new rooms to build back up.

    WRT to Nukes I didn't see a need to change the clear safemode + no cooldown. Now though I see that an alliance could use friendly nukes to work around safemode cooldowns. Though given a nukes multiday lead time this probably isn't a big deal.
    As for letting nukes through a safemode, that would allow nukes to wipe out a new player. I was never hit by a nuke early on but my plan was to just pop a safemode when there was only a day left and wait it out. I hate to take that easy counter from new players.

    Yeah given a single room that behavior was fine, but if it translates to the whole shard it becomes different story.
    And to be honest dropping nukes on "new players" is kinda a waste also you can't drop them in novice areas anyway.

    It is hard to strike a balance with those things, both safemode and nukes are powerful and should stay so.
    If you nerf it someway it should gain in another way, the goal is to make the whole fighting thing more rewarding... no I think rewarding is the wrong word...
    As it stands now it is just a big waste of resources without any result in the end in most cases.

    With such proposal it is actually possible to wipe somebody from the map if his safemode is poorly executed since it is not a matter of simply renewing it anymore.


  • @o4kapuk any thoguhts? Or are the devs fine with it as it is?

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  • agree to the increasing decay, no generateSafeMode, double hits/part. disagree reduce repair and burst damage

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  • This doesn't actually encourage more combat (provide incentives), but it does address some of the combat discrepancies.

    As an alternative solution to purely nerfing repair (since that effects a ton of other things) I'd rather see attacks on a structure give it a status effect like a power creep. Ramparts/walls attacked in the last 10 ticks have a status effect of SIEGED and get repaired at 25% repair efficiency. This addresses the in-combat repair without causing a cascade of effects due to increased overall upkeep cost.

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  • @davaned said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    As an alternative solution to purely nerfing repair (since that effects a ton of other things) I'd rather see attacks on a structure give it a status effect like a power creep. Ramparts/walls attacked in the last 10 ticks have a status effect of SIEGED and get repaired at 25% repair efficiency. This addresses the in-combat repair without causing a cascade of effects due to increased overall upkeep cost.

    Works for me.

    Though I prefer increased upkeep...

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  • what about an special body part (ex. SIEGE) that would deal significantly more damage to structures and less to creeps ? to prevent it being too op it might also reduce TTL of creep to 1k.

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  • Dev Team

    @gadjung said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    deal significantly more damage to structures and less to creeps

    Do you mean Creep.dismantle()?

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  • yes, but a ranged one that does not return energy and stronger, since dismantle goes for 50/tick and repair is 100/tick also dismantle cannot be used against creeps and this SIEGE could deal some small amount (not to outperform RANGED_ATTACK in any way) but to enable harassing creeps at longer range

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  • @o4kapuk said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    @gadjung said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    deal significantly more damage to structures and less to creeps

    Do you mean Creep.dismantle()?

    It exists at range 1, yes. Range 1 can't really be used against good rampart defenses. Taking over 5000 incoming damage before even accounting for towers and ranged creeps doesn't really work so you'll constantly be having to pull back trying to dodge the ATTACK defenders. The amount of time you actually can deal damage is so small it'd be better to be a ranged creep. With RMA it's almost better to be a ranged creep against ramparts anyway, given your objective is to do more damage than repair creeps than repair, rather than make a hole in a specific place.

    Oh, and of course if by some miracle you do manage to nestle up against the walls a repair creep can almost match your damage output.

    And you're very vulvernable to skirmishers.

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  • @randall172 said in Encouraging more combat at high GCL:

    Supreme Commander FA

    I love the idea of a "SIEGE" part that is a RANGED_ATTACK that does 10x damage to walls / ramparts / towers but nothing to units. 👍

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  • I've always thought that screeps was missing an "artillery" part that could fire from further away than the 3 tiles of RANGED_ATTACK. Maybe from anywhere in the room, and with a small blast radius for area of effect damage?

    To help balance this, I would think such a part should have some sort of cooldown where the creep can't move, or perhaps a "charging" period so you have to survive for x ticks in one spot to set up before firing.

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