3. Ideas for next seasons

Ideas for next seasons


  • Firstly, I'd like to say I'm a huge fan of this season so far. And the concept in general. Screeps from GCL 1 is much more fun than MMO based screeps. It's also a bit my full-on though.

    With that said maybe it'd be nice to have a break rather than back-to-back seasons. At least a two week gap between them, or maybe a month? I think you risk burn-out running them too frequently as I feel players put a bit more effort into seasonal than regular Screeps and that's hard to sustain non-stop.

    I have some feedback on the current season which I'll share and I guess might help inform the next season.

    1. Collectors and containers seem to be fairly well balanced. To compete for top spots you need multiple collectors. Collector capacity is low enough to prevent "bursting" meaning fighting for collectors is effectibe. Regen is about right for the score generated in the region. If you expanded and took land and more collectors it is easier to score high. This is how it should be.

    2. Game start wasn't handled perfectly: the rules dropped very late and so the collector:container balance was unknown to players until after they'd spawned. This meant it was impossible to make good decisions, and I think that's bad. For example: should I spawn near the centre crossroads with four collectors, or should I go for the best room I can find across the map.

    3. Some people struggled to respawn after dying - things got fairly cutthroat. One suggestion on slack was to explicitly stratify the world. Make score spawn more (and collectors regen faster) closer to the centre of the map. Maybe bias the map generator so rooms closer to the centre of the map are more likely to be two source rooms, or less likely to be swamps. This creates stratification: good players want to be closer to the middle. Weaker players can then spawn at the much safer outskirts. There's a risk:reward tradeoff: the winner won't likely be on the outskirts, but at least you can play.

    4. No market worked fine. We're not even done with the first month and there have been multiple T3 boosted fights. I think no terminals would be fun, but more game changing. Not really sure.

    5. @bodgen suggested it might be nice to be able to attack a collector. Maybe using claim parts you could attack it and gain a (very) small fraction of score placed into that collector, deducting from other players. Not a very "Screeps" thing as stuff always goes down. Does allow for more combat options around collectors.

    6. Total tick count and 100 CPU gives a fairly nice balance between sub RCL 8 play and RCL 8 CPU conrained play. I do think min(100, 20 + 10 * GCL) would work fine as well.

    👍
    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    @tigga said in Ideas for Season #2:

    With that said maybe it'd be nice to have a break rather than back-to-back seasons. At least a two week gap between them, or maybe a month?

    Yeah, for sure, I didn't say it's going to start on February 1. Just in February. A two weeks gap is something we have in mind as well.

    👌

  • super-structure / wonder

    1st player to build a ScoreWonder structure wins.

    optional: creating 1st ScoreWonder triggers timer after which game ends if ScoreWonder is still standing and undamaged any other ScoreWonder completed during this timer counts towards x place (so 2nd person to get and hold ScoreWonder undamaged get's 2nd place and so on)

    ScoreWonder requires:

    • 20-50m energy (?)
    • 1m of each resource (?)

    End game Trigger Timer:

    • 1 week ?
    • paused if ther's no 'undamaged' ScoreWonder

    Ramparts are disabled/very low limit, Walls have lower limit, terminals disabled same as in S1

    1 Reply
  • Culture

    Pyramid Challenge / King of the Hill.

    Stack a few shards on top of each other, with each higher shard having less resources and space. Each shard has prizes associated, which each higher shard having more rewards, but the rewards end up getting split amongst all players with claimed rooms on that shard.

    This can then incentivize later stage players to abandon lower shards for the higher rewards, which could help keep a balance in place (new players spawning on shard0 won't get wiped immediately as the more skilled players are already on shard 3). The shrinking shards helps incentivize battles at the higher levels, and since they're smaller they should hopefully require less resources. Top shard can be a single 10 by 10 block.

    1 Reply

  • A structure that can be built in owned room, generates score but compromises room defenses, so disabling towers, disabling walls/ramparts in some way.

    👍

  • Some Stuff I vaguely remember being talked about in Slack before.

    Battle-royal

    • Everyone starts with a creep with 1M part, have to 'pick-up' parts around the map.
    • Rooms deactivate/start to cause damage after a short time (blue-zone/storm) to force players towards center.
    • Last creep alive wins.

    Not sure that fits a seasonal thing though.

    Territory/King

    • Players are split into teams, teams have one 'king' at the 'center' of a sector. The king having a room there enables 'vassals' team-mates to spawn within the sector. *Players compete to destroy nearby king's rooms, disabling vassals/forcing respawn (if last), king who won can then take that sector as their own
    • Team with most 'territory' and/or points from having territory wins.
    • Players with 'top' code bases and/or winners of previous season could be 'kings' adjusting so that its not one very large/advanced team.

    King of the Hill

    • crossroads have 'score zones' instead of collectors.
    • A creep inside the 'score zone' increases global 'score' for the player, multiplier and/or additional points for more parts (larger creeps)
    • Score zones could change in size/shape/worth dynamically, requiring creep movement and/or different numbers of creeps allowed in the zone at different times.

    Edit: Could be 'ramparts' that are pathable, standing on them deals damage to the hits of the rampart, starts with random # of hits, as hits goes down, adds to user's global score. the 'area' tends to have different values/hits and pathing to/defending one your standing on adds variety then 'stand in the area'

    Creep harvest

    • Creeps drop a new resource on-unnatural death (players only)
    • Larger creeps -> More of the new resource.
    • New structure in a player's base processes these for score (like a powerSpawn)
    • Player with the most of this new resource processed by the end of the season wins.

    Econ-wars

    • Players compete to see who can have the most credits, normal market in-game as the MMO
    • Scoreboard is total 'credits' of players.
    • deposits spawn more frequently / different ways to get factory resources
    • Natural/unnatural waves in the NPC market to benifit players who hold back resources for higher prices vs selling bulk at lower prices.

    The great road

    • Players compete to build the longest-unbroken road, longest road at end-of-season wins.
    1 Reply

  • @donatzor Find the catan ref! 🏜


  • Ahh darnit, should have just said 'the longest road' quite right heh.


  • @bogden I love this idea, especially if the rewards scaled up with more players getting involved. I've got a couple of coworkers who are more likely to hop in if it were a 'friendly' coop where we all worked together. There could also be rate-limiting tied to account, so it really would be in the interest of the community to get more players involved in the season.

    A peace-nik hippy flowers love-in commune definitely wouldn't be appealing to everyone, so just cycling in the coop season periodically would be the way to go, then the short knives could come back out in to appease the blood lust of the top tier players.


  • I think I would buy into almost any coop, but some team-based thing could also work wonders, though that needs to be balanced to prevent noobs becoming energy farms for the big guys.

    Any other mode + limit controllers to level X (say, 3 or 4), but have a lot of CPU (or, haha, lower CPU action cost) and low GCL. With no boosts we'll now have massive zerg-like armies instead of T3 phat quad meta.


  • One more vote for CO-OP games Hunt:

    • Few special creeps wandering on the highways, who takes only fixed amount damage from each player. ( x players will need to kill them completly )
    • Leaderboard shows the damage done to them
    • Lesser creeps should help the boss ones, to make the engagement harder.
    👍

  • Generally there are quite a few interesting game modes in other games, we could even imagine a Battle Royale 10x10 shard (an obvious limit of 100 players), GCL limit 1, no corridor rooms. 100 players start, but in the end (in a voice of Christopher Lambert): there can be only one!

    This thing could keep restarting, too, people seem to think it's not repetitive, some matchmaking can be added so that you can have a chance to win and the excitement from being one of the last few is quite a thrill.


  • @gadjung Could do a wonder that's like "The tallest tower" where you pump energy into it like a controller, which builds up its hits 'infinitely', see who builds the one-tallest by end-of-time/season. May be hard to get to the wonder in-time to trash it if not enough people spawned in the area / already were cleared, but I suppose that's part of the challange.

    1 Reply

  • So first things first, i think you've done a lot things right in this season. I havent had the chance to participate, but it's been fun to watch and read along in slack. Initially i thought releasing the mod in advance would be better, but now i think it might be good this way.
    That said, i think that the rules should be released further in advance, both so people can decide whether the season is one they would like to participate in, and also to enable speculative coding and deliberations.

    I also think there should be a while between seasons. Now it's all new and shiny, so it might not matter too much, but i think further down the line even 2 weeks between seasons might be too little – maybe a month or two? For SWC/BA and other current community hosted competitions it works well because the objective is generally always the same, but with changing rulesets and mechanics i think it'd just lead to people burning out - and it's a lot of work for you devs as well, i reckon. Might work better to keep it somewhat "special" in the long run.

    One last thought is kind of a question: Will seasons stay somewhat close to vanilla Screeps in general? I.e. season mechanics wont stack up too much, straying away further and further.. The occasional really far off season might be fun, but if that were to become a standard i could see season becoming more of a top dog / elite playground. Just wanted to ask since i'm curious what your stance on that is.

    Now, for actual suggestions:

    • I also think that there should be coop modes (obviously not all the time). A few ideas:
      • For team management:
        • Have the quarter of the world you spawn in decide which team you're on. Each of the 4 teams would then work towards their goal. To make for competition within the teams as well and keep all the big guys from playing on the same team, it could be reflected in a split in the rewards: I.e. one part of the rewards for the rank your team places at and one (more interesting / better) part of the rewards for the rank within the team. Of course players could also sabotage other teams by using portals or just walking over if they're close enough to center roads, expand there, etc.
        • Smaller teams (e.g. 3-5 players). This would be more difficult to pull off, especially if it should be a fair split between more and less experienced players. It could maybe be figured out using metrics on MMO (restricted to those spawned in for X time if necessary), like power processed, GCL upgraded, creeps killed etc. Alternatively the game mode could be one with relative (in-team) performance measured instead of absolute (global) performance.
      • For goals:
        • Something like bogden's idea with the artifact could be nice, but it would need to be worked out better. Some problems i can see with it is that:
          a.) It could be cheesed with 1m creeps that get suicided once they've pulled and incurred the 5k fatigue. A possible solution could be a target lock, where it's locked to the same creep for say 100+ creeps after a pull. With a 50m creep you could then pull once every 50 ticks, with the break even point point being a 25m creep in this example. The target lock would have to be modified to reflect whatever you want to be the break even point.
          b.) It would pretty much lock out anyone who isnt on the line to the center. An easy solution for this is to have several artifacts, which would have the nice side effect of it not being a "done and over" kind of situation where a team can finish too quickly.
    • A hitman/handyman mode - the system gives each bot targets to either kill or assist:
      • In the case of an assist:
        • The target gets notified about helper(s)
        • Points get awarded for contributing to target's economy (construction sites, resources, ...) and clearing their owned and reserved rooms of hostile creeps
        • Points get awarded to both target and helper(s) for
      • In the case of a kill order:
        • Target gets notified about attacker(s)
        • Helper(s) gets notified about attacker(s)
        • Points get awarded for damaging target's economy (attacking owned/reserved controllers, destroying structures, killing creeps, ...)
      • Rate of attack and assist orders could be dependent on players' performance - higher up means more attacks and less assistance and vice versa
      • Target selection based on performance (weighted random):
        • High performance players attack high performance players
        • Low performance players attack low performance players
        • High performance players assist low performance players
        • Low performance players assist anyone

    Heh, that actually took more time than expected. Might have been thinking about the actual implementations too much already ^^'


  • The most important thing for me would be a delay before the next season, I feel it should be a month minimum, I have really enjoyed this one but I think a good break is needed to prevent burn out. Also I like the idea of a gentler/co-op based season to help engage new players that others have mentioned. Really like 'the great road' and 'king of the hill' ideas

    👍

  • @tedivm I like your idea. To add to this idea

    I think the shards could have a pyramid structure as they go up - the upper shards are smaller, where the outer hallway corners of each level line up with the center rooms of the shard below.

    Basically the center rooms can have teleporters that go UP a level, and the hallway crossroads can have teleporters that go down a level.

    You could keep score and scorecollectors as the main mechanic for scoring. Put higher score amounts in upper levels but less energy or minerals to mine as a tradeoff.

    Even if it was just 2 levels it might be fun.


  • How about a "race" variant where a tall fixed-height map keeps expanding to the east, while losing rooms along with anything in them at the western edge (e.g. by a column per day)? Minerals could be very much biased in to vertical bands, and never all available at once, so you have to carry forward a stockpile from room to room if you want boosts.


  • Age of Power

    • All users start out with some amount of GPL, and may spawn in power-creeps in any configuration desired up to the GPL Limit
    • Powerbanks spawn more frequently, or smaller in every room (to allow for more harvesting and/or power creep renewal.
    • win condition(s)/'achievements'
      • Longest living power-creep
      • Most power-creeps
      • Highest GPL level
      • Most enemy power-creeps slain
      • Furthest distance traveled from spawn

  • Invaders have a 'sickness' and when they get within 6 range of a creep the sickness can spread to that creep. Tough parts can reduce the chance of getting the 'Invader flu'. The creeps TTL will drop quicker and can spread the sickness to others. When a creep with the sickness dies you get negative points.

    Each region of the map needs to collect/deposit heal boost into a central 'lab'. After enough boost is collected the lab will create a 'cure' You then need to boost a heal creeps with the 'cure' boost. Healing creeps while boosted with the cure creeps will give you points.

    The sector with the highest points wins.

    As if we haven't had enough of this 😥

    😷

  • Paint the World

    • Each player is assigned a color value.
    • Either signing a controller or 'moving onto' a room position 'paints' that room/roomPosition the player's color
    • mapVis shows painted rooms/positions
    • Player with the most 'pixels' (roomPositions) or rooms painted wins, can score from 'most covered area'.
    • Could also 'paint' with energy and have some low eng to build walkable structure as a 'claim' on that room position as well.
    👍
    1 Reply