PTR Changelog 2018-02-28: lab reaction time
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@mmmd This change isn't breaking. Your old code will continue to work, so changes are not mandatory. A lot of people won't even notice this change (in fact, only a small minority of players look at PTR patches at all), and the rest can start gradually optimizing their code while keeping old code functional.
I can see why it may be inconvenient for someone since some parts of economy may become suboptimal, but it's not critical, and economy things are rarely optimal, you know
We really delayed this PTR release for too long, we can't postpone it any longer. As for splitting reaction time into another patch, small frequent releases are bad for marketing, so we'd like not to do that.
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I still believe that dismantle is already a weak option, and having it have the highest reaction time in the game certainly won't help.
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It will certainly affect me (I assemble T3 from its base minerals in one pass, except for the ones using G)
I'm not sure this will help much to stimulate fights. It mostly encourages stockpiling and increases the power of large coalitions. (a small nimble group of players will run out of boosts faster).
I would have preferred having unbalanced mineral respawn rates (perhaps by shard or general area, to encourage trading and inter-shard commerce) or have to some recipes use more then one mineral (ex: 4X + UH2O -> XUH2O), again perhaps with some random element over time to avoid the market balances out.
If it's to reduce the DB load, which I suspect, I'd prefer a change that increases both reaction time and minerals used at the same rate (ex: 10 X + 10 UH2O -> 10 XUH2O with a 50 tick cooldown)
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@vrs This change has nothing to do with stimulating fights. I've explained why this change is needed in this post above:
The main motivation behind this change is to make T1 and T2 boosts more appealing, and create some new trade-offs that make their usage reasonable. There are now diminishing returns of the time/effect ratio on each tier.
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Update:
GO (damage reduction) series reaction time set to 10/30/150 ticks.
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@artch if you want to make tier1 and tier2 boosts more reasonable to use one thing that could help would be an increase in the number of market orders a player can have. That way players would be more likely to sell boosts that aren't at tier3.
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I'd rather move the ability to boost creeps to the spawn, meaning you would directly spawn creeps with boost.
This adds a whole new level of resource management if you have to decide which extension is filled with which resource.Granted this is a breaking change but on the bright side, this would allow people to use boosts they "found" even at lower RCLs.
In this case, wtfranks percentage approach would be the better option.
@artch I know that you have wonderful spreadsheets, that's obvious to anybody who tries to develop heuristics for his code, but sometimes those are really bad for gameplay.
So don't be afraid to make "game breaking" changes. Those are sometimes necessary to evolve a game to be more fun in the long run, besides they also weed out inactive players.
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I agree with @tedivm. I'd be more willing to create orders for tier1/2 boosts if I wasn't concerned about running out of available market orders.
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The biggest problem imo, is the inconsistent REACTION_TIMES. It would be one thing to have T2 take longer than T1, T3 longer than T2, but to give different times for different reactions makes optimizing and rewriting lab logic overly complicated as some T3 boosts are just clearly not worth the time involved anymore, while others still may be.
So not I need logic that says go ahead and produce XLHO2 as normal, but not XZH2O because it's not worth the time, so stop the chain at ZH2O. Don't bother with XGH2O anymore, which was previously the #1 priority, because you can't possibly produce it fast enough to keep upgraders boosted, so better GCL strategy is now to claim, upgrade, unclaim, repeat until that gets nerfed.
Basically you can't really create lab logic that applies to all reactions equally anymore because reaction times are now unequal.
I'm not sure this makes T1/T2 more viable, since T3 is still the optimal effect per creep / tick / cpu cost which are important factors. Really it just makes some T3's unviable by creating an artificial limitation that further slows down the game and reduces the reward for time / effort invested.
Just my experience with it so far. It certainly causes a need for rethinking various strategies, and that probably appeals to the Max GCL, liable to get bored / stagnant crowd. But I'm not sure complicating lab systems while reducing the reward will inspire new players or even mid-level players much.
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