Replace TTL penalty on Inter-shard portals with portalFatigue
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Currently a creep travelling through a inter-shard portal suffers a huge ttl penalty.
- 800 ttl lost on most creeps
- 150 ttl lost on creeps that have one or more CLAIM part.
This makes directly attacking through a portal very costly because you need to send many more creeps to achieve the same result. After you add up travel time, time to rally and boost, you will need 3-5 times more creeps if the attack is viable at all!
My suggestion is to remove the penalty and replace it with a new one called portalFatigue (name subject to change). portalFatigue is simply a boolean flag on each creep that is initiated to false when the creep is created and set to true when a creep travels through a portal. If a creep tries to travel through a portal when it has portalFatigue it is instantly killed (alternatively it could just be prevented from entering the portal)
This will continue to prevent players from abusing the fact that a single room on shard1 has portals to multiple rooms on shard0 or moving minerals from shard0 -> shard2 without a base on shard1.
If you think this will improve the game then give it a thumbs up!
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I think the penalty is fine, even if that means that you need to have an outpost on a other shard to attack rooms there. There are more balancing differences between shards like tick times (=spawn times) , market availabilities and the area creeps can reach because of different portal placement.
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I think a better change would be to give each shard portals to all other shards (so you can go from shard0 to shard2).
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How about the TTL penatly is removed on claimers? It's going to be really hard to make an outpost when you're limited to a 5-7 room radius around the portal.