3. Ideas for next seasons

Ideas for next seasons


  • @tigga

    (semi-edited / deleted the post I forgot to link to this one)

    Holding a controller's 'sign' adding to score over time would prob do, more you have signed, more points your accumulating and could also add multipliers for rooms that are owned/reserved. Would prompt wider sprawl though probably alot of fighting over territory for more score. Everybody could probably easily be on the board, but more advanced could mass-reserve areas to increase score at the cost of energy/spawning.

    If it was roomPosition/easy-to-build objects on each roomPosition with your assigned color could add score per-tick per each one, or every x number of pixels (positions) adds a point (like 25 = 1 point per tick). Would also be fairly easy for anyone with creeps around to score just by doing basic movement, more advanced players w/ scouting to score, or way more advanced to path though unowned pixels (positions) in patrolled rooms or finding best route to take to keep an area painted.

    Would agree that if it was total count at the end, would be a end-round blitz to paint as fast as possible.


  • Limited Amount of creeps:

    Idea:

    • every player gets limit of X creeps (lets say 50k? creeps) to use throughout season (could reset on respawn)

    • every creep that has WORK, CARRY, CLAIM, HEAL subtracts 1 from total creep count

    • limited ramparts to 10m(?) , walls to 50m(?) at rcl8 (so attacking/nuking is worthwhile)

    • creeps with only ATTACK / RANGED_ATTACK / TOUGH / MOVE parts do not count towards creep limit :

    to make combat, sieges and enemy-creep killing still viable and do not disencourage fighting since it's net-creep loss for attackers most of the time

    • why not HEAL then ?

    since repair/work creeps are limited to offset siege balance and encourage more planning on offense rather than just pop boosted quads all around

    Why it would be interesting:

    • renew() mechanic would come into focus
    • stronger need on calculating for remote mining (mining/transporting/defending)
    • stronger need on proper calculation for attacking and sieging (do i realy need to take-out this guy and use some creep quota by adding 'heal' parts ? should i have in-wait healers that are renewed ? etc)

    Rating: determined by amount of owned rooms, their level and amount of creeps left


  • Battle Royale.

    World gets smaller by random rooms, where the center point is randomly determined and you can't respawn in that shard. Have a lot of shards that each time you die you get pushed down to the next shard that has a lesser reward when you win. If your last to survive a shard then you get the prize for that shard, first shard being the biggest prize. That way over time you will start facing players equal to your score.

    Mass Invasion

    Where NPCs are in constant invasion and surviving will be tough and over time you will get overwhelmed. You get a ranking based on how you survive. Give enough space to everyone where it's not PvP focus but like a long tower defense game. Make invasions occur in rooms regardless of energy harvested forcing players to always be on there toes. Make strongholds spawn larger invasions. Just a lot of Pve invasions.

    Maybe even add some co-op where you want to work/trade with others to have boosts to stay alive longer. An idea is that everyone start out in the outer ring of a map, and invasions come from the outside non-stop. Everyone will want to move inside as the invasion get more and more intense and starts killing the outer layers until there's just a small space in the middle.

    I think making a PvE focused season would be nice - where players want to work together to stay alive or newbies aren't under pressure from bigger players to live.


  • Environmental hazard

    • Lava as a terrain type used, causes damage when on the same roomPosition as it, unless a road is used, but road takes a higher decay rate (at the benefit of no damage to the creep)
    • Center of map (or highways crossroads) is/are a volcano(s).
    • Eruptions occur every x ticks and last y ticks.
    • During an active eruption phase, lava terrain tiles generate dropped RESOURCE_LAVA in adj tiles that fills to X amount per tile, then spreads to the next tiles up to Y range if at max amount in-tile. Could generate less in highways/SKs/unclaimed rooms for less objects over all.
    • Dropped lava causes high-damage/damage to structures & creeps on the same tile (or adj tile)
    • Creeps can pick up Lava, but take damage per-tick that lava is held in their carry. (negate or slow if tough parts used?)
    • Dropped lava not next to a lava terrain type, or other dropped lava cools (or placed in a structure to cool/process?) into a diff resource, like RESOURCE_OBSIDIAN or something.
    • Could use this new resource as a 'scoring' res like score currently is, turning it in or processing it for points.
    • Could also have volcanos on eruption blast 'rocks' out into random rooms which deal damage in an area & take time to land like a nuke, but less dmg/doesn't kill all creeps in a room. Necessitating dynamic moving and/or shielding of structures.
    🆒

  • I suggest building on the current season, but with some PvE elements baked in.

    Same point system (spawning new resource with certain processing spots)

    However, add in:

    • Strongholds spawn more frequently, and start stronger but weaken over the duration.
    • Waves of boosted super invaders spawn from strongholds and assault nearby rooms periodically.
    • Strongholds contain a large portion of the point resource in addition to their rewards, which scale down the longer they have been alive
    • Portals spawn at a higher rate.

    This uses and encourages more people to code for an existing mechanic, strongholds. Players can now play around scheduled enemy attacks on their own enemies to apply pressure, and stronghold wave detection is similar to portal attack detection.

    In short, leveraging previous season's code along with encouraging useful code for existing game features so that players can build on the prior season's work while still investing in their long-term codebase in mmo.


  • Hold the Spot

    • randomly single spots or spot clusters appear
    • standing on one with your creep gives you a point per tick
    • spots decay over time

    Torch Relay

    • randomly torches appear
    • torch needs to be pulled to the center
    • torch can only be pulled for 100 ticks by a single player
    • all involved players get a point when torch is handed in

    The Great Gatherings

    • random (highway) rooms are marked as gatherings
    • every creep saying "42" gets a point multiplied by the number of different players in the room
    • gatherings can have invaders or even strongholds

    Meet and Greet

    • every creep meeting and greeting another's player creep gets a point
    • greeting means to be near another creep and to say "howdy"

    Play Capture

    • a random player is marked as "the hunter"
    • a creep of the hunter needs to get in range 10 of another players creep to capture it
    • captured creeps can not be captured again
    • after a while or when 10 creeps are captured the hunter gets a point for each captured creep

  • @bogden Great idea. This brings screeps closer to a classic MMO. It would be possible to add intermediate goals and objectives to the players that would give access to the final goal.


  • Another idea not for competition itself, but as a supporting feature:

    All bodyparts except WORK,MOVE,CARRY,CLAIM require their cost in particular mineral:

    • HEAL - Lemergium
    • ATTACK - Utrium
    • RANGED_ATTACK - Keanium
    • TOUGH - Hydroxide (so locked behind RCL5)
    • CLAIM - any single mineral (so 600 oxygen will work, but 240 oxygen and 360 Keanium won't)

    This minerals can be loaded only to extensions (spawns stays energy-only) Extractor becomes unowned structure available at no-rcl

    • can be built in unowned rooms
    • double extractor-use cooldown in unowned rooms Mineral amounts in all rooms are equal to 1/2 - 1/4 to accomodate for more opportunities to harvest them

    Why would be interesting:

    • new coding challenge
    • more impact on controlling remotes
    • harder combat (due to proper mineral load requirement)

  • Drastically increase the number of invader strongholds and make them permanent structures such that they spawn in 50-100% of claimable tiles (prolly leave sk stronghold spawning the same). On first spawn for everyone it would wipe a stronghold and let you have the room for free. But after that you would have to bring down a stronghold to be able to settle a room. Obviously at first you would be limited to taking down low t1 and t2 strongholds in scrappy fights without much in the way of boosts. It would make the game much more pve rather than pvp and i think could be a fun introduction to a lot of players who have never really messed with strongholds up to now. Ranking could potentially be related to kill shots on cores (ie if you have majority offensive power in a room when a stronghold falls, you get ranking points based on the strength of the stronghold). I could see this causing more teamwork organically (especially early on) since raw numbers help a lot in underequipped fights. Not sure it would be neccesary, but it may add some color/ depth if additionally invader spawns in owned rooms scaled with the number of directly adjacent cores (and related to their levels), basically making more of a constant flood of invaders (almost forcing settling early bases against highways to not be overrun)


  • Simple Rules, easy to implement, not too complicated. - Cause you guys are limited on coders.

    Free power - where only energy is required to get power levels. - Most power wins the season.

    No Terminal like mentioned would be interesting.

    No Labs and/or no(less) towers.

    Cheap War - HEAL/RANGE_ATTACK/ATTACK are a lot cheaper.

    Faster Building - parts take 1 tick instead of 3.

    Pure Economics - No ATTACK/HEAL/RANGED_ATTACK, faster GCL levels. Highest Controller Upgrade Score wins.

    Smaller Shards like 20 North/west/south/east and like 3 shards. Shard 0 starts with the most score generated, other shards open up as player get wiped from the previous shard. With shard2 being the last that newbies can be in to play against each other, but also has the least score generated.

    This will at least make bigger and higher level players forced against each other for space, and each shard will have players that are more equal. Look at how the map now, and imagine if the last circle was gone and only the top 10 players were in a tigher space, it would force them to play against each other.


  • Invader Apocalypse (3 flavors):

    1: king of the hill. Score pylons spawn in neutral rooms (highways and sector centers). you score points by having a creep standing on the score pylon (requires 50 ticks to activate after stepping onto). While active (including during activation) the pylon aggressively spawns invaders of increasing strength and quantity the longer the pylon is held (possibly continuous or in waves), player score is rewarded based on how long they can hold the pylon and the pylon breaks (despawns) if an invader steps onto it (which they are always trying to do).

    2: Underground tunnel invasions. Give the player some form of warning similar to a nuke icon of the room location and magnitude of the assault. When the assault happens, all structures and creeps within range 2 of the indicator are destroyed instantly and invaders are spawned into that area. This will require much more adaptive/ reactive defenses and base design/ redesign. Potentially even land full on spawning structure that keeps spawning more units until it is destroyed. The invasion goal is to touch the controller. If it does, it instantly drops the controller level by 1 and despawns all invaders. Could just do scoring based on total rcl, or could make the invaders drop a rare resource (similar to score) when killed.

    3:Invader spawners. Spawn in unowned rooms (could just be lvl 0 invader cores). Spawn invaders who bunch into randomly sized and boosted groups and then attack nearby rooms. If the spawners are not dealt with, they will build up (either through leveling up, or more spawning) and eventually overwhelm a room. Gain ranking by killing spawners or with invader loot drop as before.


  • Screeps Dune:

    harvesting sources heavily (in owned room or remote) is annoying the EnergyWorm(s) of a sector that after crossing minor threshold send their invader minions to wreck havoc. If major threshold is crossed, after some short (1-2k ticks) warning, EnergyWorm(s) show up in owned room in sector that has mined the most energy.

    Every sector can have between 1-x EnergyWorms and after killing a worm there's grace period of X ticks in sector that no EnergyWorm/invader spawns and harvesting sources does not progress spawn-a-worm counter.

    EnergyWorm could have:

    • 100-500 boosted bodyparts (so it's proper room-destroyer level and lot's of HP)
    • ~10k TTL
    • takes 10% of nuke damage (so there's no way to 'farm' them with nukes)
    • worm destroys all structures, attacks creeps, and causes attackController every 1k ticks
    • worm does not care about safe-mode

    Score for every worm killed in room You own/reserved The one to destroy most of the worms in his rooms wins

    SnakeMaze:

    Every room has maximum of 2 joined rooms thus forming a one-way-in, one-way-out tunnel-like rooms so in order to expand / reach highways / reach SK rooms going through someone else room would be mandatory (either with force or diplomacy)

    1 Reply

  • Each Sector starts with 4 players randomly placed in corner rooms. A large sector is made up of 4 sectors, 16 people.

    Can't leave your sector /or enter another( can then use highways still to get around their sector) sector until you are the only one left alive in your sector. Other players who get killed in sectors respawn with other players randomly again( new sector not opened till 16 players are in que so doesn’t give anyone advantage) with now a maybe less dangerous neighbor as all these have been vanquished.

    The 'winner' of the sector is now free to invade the other 3 sectors of the big sector, hopefully this will put similar skilled players together after a bit shuffling. This could be done by opening 3 portals in the centre room which leads to other sectors.

    4 Big sectors could be combined to then find the winner etc if there's time but not needed as overall winner could be decided by score.

    Scoring could be done by holding corner rooms of each sector, maybe having them claimed will allow a ticking score to accumulate. It would be important to then conquer the corner rooms of your sector and then the others as quickly as you could as this will increase your overall score. Corner rooms cannot be occupied, only claimed but maybe you could have some sore of booster building that you fed with a resource to increase base score.

    Also best to stay alive in your first sector as you are accumulating score, if you purposefully respawn you could be waiting in a que for a time and not scoring. Others could harass your corner rooms and kill claimer that would stop you accumulating score and would thus need guarding. I would imagine that the rooms bordering the central room with the portal(cant build in portal room) would have defensive measures built ideally to stop others portalling in and rushing to unclaim/claim your corner rooms, lots fights would happen in the centre of the sectors.


  • @gadjung said in Ideas for Season #2:

    SnakeMaze:

    Every room has maximum of 2 joined rooms thus forming a one-way-in, one-way-out tunnel-like rooms so in order to expand / reach highways / reach SK rooms going through someone else room would be mandatory (either with force or diplomacy)

    Oh, i like this. Should be really simple to do and change the general dynamic up a good bit.

    An idea that came to mind was a War for the Underworld (was it?) kinda season, where we have to dig out the rooms.
    So basically all (or most) of the plain tiles are filled with constructed walls and paths to points of interest have to be dug out by dismantling the walls there. A random number could be 10k hits on them by default and maybe more/less around certain objects (e.g. 100k at range 1 to controllers, 50k around exits etc.), possibly leaving out certain other spots - like around the sources.
    Placing one's initial spawn on constructed walls would have to be enabled and successful placement should probably remove walls on the selected tile and the 8 surrounding tiles, but other than that it should be fairly easy to implement.

    Not sure if this would be enough for a whole season by itself, but it could be a mechanic at least.