Despawning for dead players
-
If a player loses all of their spawns, their controllers still remain active and holding their areas. Even if they have been completely wiped out, they will still hold their bases for however long it takes for a controller to downgrade. This has some merit in an alliance war where a dead player can be rebuilt by an ally, but it gives a zombie AI a suprising ability to hold territory.
Thus, after a player loses all of their spawns, a timer of 40000 ticks should start. This timer is paused if they have a spawn construction site with progress on it, and aborted if they gain a new complete spawn. When it hits 0, the player despawns, reverting all of their structures to neutral and unclaiming all of their rooms.
-
I would add that they also need to have 0 creeps before any timers like that start.
-
You can go attack their controller to speed up the downgrade.
-
@rurik Even then aren't those attacks time gated pretty harshly even though the player has no chance of coming back without outside help?
-
Yeah, only one Creep.attackController every 1000 ticks, but that's 300 * the number of CLAIM parts on the attacking creep, so you could feasibly (for ~6600 energy per creep) blow away 3000 ticks every 1000 to quadruple the decay rate with whatever creep you're sending out to Creep.reserveController on it's way to wherever it's heading, and hit multiple sites if needed with one creep feasibly.
-
Don't forget that friendlies can help resurrect a "dead" player.
They can help by rebuilding the spawn.
-
I don't like this idea in general. I'd hate for it to hit a player that's struggling to coordinate a jump start from an ally. Jump start code is not likely something you'd write a head of time, and if you did you'd rarely use it so it might grow bugs.
However, IFF the devs had a strong signal that a player is a zombie (e.g. not active in the last 30 days) they could just insta-declaim the all the controllers of a zombie after a complete wipe. If we wanted to get crazy they could do the same for any wiped room.
The key principle, is zombies are essentially environmental flavor for other players to exploit. We should only keep them around in ways that improve the gameplay of active players.
-
They already spin down CPU to 0 if you're not active for long enough, I'd be all for despawning for 'deactivated' players, that's the extent I'd be okay with personally.
-
@wolfwings Not if they are still subscribed though I think. I went a long time without logging in and my script stayed active because i had a subscription. Makes sense, you shouldn't be cut off if you're still paying. And if they are not subscribed they're at 10 cpu and likely can't hold a ton of territory anyway.
-
@rurik Correct, if they're paying subscribers they don't get de-activated, but the devs have said already they disable free users that aren't active for 30 days so I'd think enabling an instant-despawn as well for those player slots if they "go zombie" would be reasonable.
-
@dissi Yes, that's why there's a timer on the despawning so that if the player has an ally capable of rebuilding them, they can be rebuilt. Note that all that is needed to delay the timer is 1 progress on any spawn construction site for the player.
