Domination Points
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@Gankdalf Nice idea.
This is why I loved playing Dawn of War 2 over other RTS'es online. You had to hold strategic points, not build the biggest base.
The issue as always is how do you stop a single high GCL player from hoarding all the Obelisks around them? Some players are spread across multiple sectors and would most likely have multiple obelisks that other players can't attack.
One solution might be to add a CPU cost to having an obelisk. Maybe a creep needs to be constantly at range 1 and running a crypto mining style system. The longer you mine the obelisk the more CPU it costs. The cost would decay over time and be stored for each player. With this, a single high GCL player would be unable to constantly maintain the advantage from all obelisks at the same time but could for a burst.
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A standing defense force has a decent cost to it. Every creep they want to keep there must be spawned, taking spawn time. Every creep they want to keep there must walk there, taking CPU. Every time someone challenges their dominion it would cost CPU for every defender creep they were defending with. These are just natural costs without any additional systems.
Beyond that I already mentioned that they would need to "reserve" the obelisks. I had seen this as working just like remote mine reserving, even using the same parts and function. This is far from free. Claim creeps are quite energy hungry to spawn, and require a constant usage to actually keep a room reserved.
Maybe it's a bit cheap for high GCL players, but it's far from free, especially if others are continually trying to take it. Even a GCL 1 player who decides he wants to try taking it will burn the resources of the high GCL player trying to guard it, since their defenders must spend CPU to move, attack, pathfind etc. It gets worse the busier the obelisks become.
Now, as nice as trying to make it "balanced" between high GCL and low GCL players sounds, it isn't exactly something I think is important in that way. If someone with very good code is able to defend every obelisk by themselves for months, that's not an issue in my book. Without a bunker and the normal defenses of a room, they have no special advantage over any other player except potentially two things: more rooms and more CPU. That's all high GCL players have that low GCL players cannot get.
With the idea simply as I stated it, it would even be possible to try taking the obelisk by skimishing the owner's creeps en-route. The owner cannot keep the obelisk without a claim creep, and they cannot make the claim creep in the obelisk rooms. As a matter of fact, if the obelisk were in crossroads rooms, the owner couldn't even build it in neighboring rooms.
These obelisks would not be intended as a simple resource that everyone is meant to enjoy, like Power. These structures would be the source of conflict. If only one obelisk existed per shard in the center of the map, it would make everyone who wanted a chance at it migrate to the center, fight over center rooms, and inevitably cause chaos.
That is the intent. It is the negative inverse of the damaging fields you see in battle royal games. Where in battle royal games, you are forced into the center by a damaging field, these would encourage players wishing for rewards to migrate to the center. Adding them all over the map would likely just cause what you were stating, where the high GCL players in each area simply kick everyone out around the obelisks. With only 1-3 though, the high GCL players have no choice but to fight each other for them.
And for reference, I am GCL 5
not exactly high GCL lol
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and the "for 1000 ticks" part was meant for the underdogs who take the obelisk from the king for a short time. The longer that duration, the more rewards someone can get by taking it for a single cycle.
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Now imagine trying to fight over an obelisk with nukes. Remember nukes destroy every creep in a room. If nukes get involved, you start dealing with multiple nukes in multiple rooms to try and counter nuke retreat code.
honestly this is more chaotic than I had originally imagined, since I had forgotten about nukes.
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And it will probably end up just like the power system...
That fits already your bill, granted power doesn't bring much of a benefit yet but we will see what the future holds.But honestly I don't see a war over those soon...
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Power creeps only increase player strength, and Power itself can be found fairly peacefully all over the map. Maybe that changes when it actually becomes useful, but either way it doesn't put player interest in the center of the map, and doesn't really encourage PVP creep combat as much as it just promotes PVE farming.
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I like this idea for multiple reasons
It can be automated
But more importantly it gives an reward for aggressive actions, in the form of GCL, so basically, should it come in place you can have more GCL by either pumping energy in your controllers (currently the only way) OR by pumping energy into attack creeps to battle over these things.
I've heard repeatedly on Slack that war/battle as it is, is just energy wasted that could have been used for GCL increase instead. It is I think what lead to the creation of the various tournaments outside the official server. This would nicely counter that.
While I agree there should be some limitation on high players, I think the regular CPU limit does that fairly well, as high GCL players have by definition more creeps / rooms to operate as well.
I think we should see this as an alternative to the 'temple rooms', a way to gain GCL / an energy dump for players with a surplus.
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Of course, war always wastes energy and resources and it would be terrible if it would be different.
However, there is clearly a lack of something to fight over.
But adding something that has that worth and doesn't screw up other mechanics or is super OP isn't an easy feat.I like the idea of the added lifetime if that is also added to the energy cost, this would effectively only free a bit of CPU since you spawn less frequently and are maybe able to use fewer creeps on long-range cargo shipping.
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@mrfaul Yes. In general I think the idea works much better as just granting GCL.
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Hm, the thing is how would you make that engaging.
Here is a little concept I thought of:
Every quadrant (2x2 Sectors aka 19x19 rooms total) has in its middle the hmm... let's call it the "Shrine of Life"
The Shrine of Life is able to accumulate "bonus TTL" if you pump energy into it.However, in order to access and use those bonus TTL, you have to claim/reserve the four altars/obelisks or whatever you want to call them in the four surrounding highway rooms.
- This makes it challenging since you have to essentially control 5 rooms at the time
- Worth attacking since you already gain at least the satisfaction of disturbing his operations if you are able to knock one room out
- Very rewarding since you have the potential to free up CPU and "capture" the bonus TTL somebody else generated
- Is probably a good resource sink since the CLAIM parts and the bonus TTL eat energy
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@mrfaul Creating so many points to capture ensures that you cannot gain any benefit by assaulting it for a short time. It is already engaging because you are creating creeps and combat code in order to gain GCL.
The only way to gain progress (GCL) in the game at the moment is to pump as much energy as possible into your controllers. Controllers are capped at RCL 8, so the meta revolves around creating and destroying (your own) rooms.
As fun as economy is, it's single player (or mostly so). To make the game PVP/Multiplayer oriented you need some reason to fight each other. Some benefit. Currently, the only benefits are:
- take a room/area for its resources
- defend a room/area for its resources
- someone is trolling and you need to defend from the troll
- or preempt any of the previous combat types by removing neighbors
- bragging rights (also called trolling)
- shard0 edge clearing because tick times
- improve your combat code in case one of the previous types comes up
What this means is that if there are enough rooms and few enough trolls, conflicts never actually happen, and because of how defensive rooms can actually be, even if you could gain a benefit from taking them, it is often not even worth it to siege.
Combat in general is basically pointless after you have settled into an area. You can't get bigger, and it's not super likely that anyone still alive wants to take your rooms, since they already are as big as they can get as well. Everyone just sits in their own realm making temples.
This idea was to add a benefit to sending creeps into a known combat zone. If you win, you gain GCL.There will always be potential benefit to this. You are no longer wasting energy that you could have spent on a temple room if you actually gain GCL through combat.
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Another modification of the idea would be that every 1000 ticks, a certain amount of GCL progress is given out split between every player who successfully reached the obelisk with a claim creep in the last 1000 ticks. This would make it beneficial for even a single successful attack against the obelisk holder, while still encouraging the defense of the obelisk to increase personal reward.
