Terminals and Credits seem overpowered
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@tigga This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
Nobody should be able to reach your walls as 40 T3 Attack parts combined with short range towers melt everything. The repairers out-repair ranged attack. At this point it doesn't matter what you do as the attacker so long as the repairers are reasonably well coded.
Perfect example of a powerful defensive response that triggers. What a great thing to exploit! Walk a few boosted creeps into a room, trigger their defense creeps to spawn, then have the creeps walk on to their next room and trigger the same thing. Keep walking them around and trigger defense responses. You can easily get them to waste 5x your mineral cost and trigger in a number of rooms at once.
Basically, I'm saying that a persistent attacker can always reverse engineer your code and find some loophole. Either to cause significant damage or significant waste. Given enough time an AFK player's base can always be broken.
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@davaned said in Terminals and Credits seem overpowered:
@tigga This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
Nobody should be able to reach your walls as 40 T3 Attack parts combined with short range towers melt everything. The repairers out-repair ranged attack. At this point it doesn't matter what you do as the attacker so long as the repairers are reasonably well coded.
Perfect example of a powerful defensive response that triggers. What a great thing to exploit! Walk a few boosted creeps into a room, trigger their defense creeps to spawn, then have the creeps walk on to their next room and trigger the same thing. Keep walking them around and trigger defense responses. You can easily get them to waste 5x your mineral cost and trigger in a number of rooms at once.
Basically, I'm saying that a persistent attacker can always reverse engineer your code and find some loophole. Either to cause significant damage or significant waste. Given enough time an AFK player's base can always be broken.
Recycle. Boost only when the room is contested. Your attack is going to cost more than the defense in all but spawn time.
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@Tigga Great, now you pop in and out periodically locking up spawning for expansions with the defense creeps. Oh you don't recycle? Then you walk in, spawn defense creeps, then come back when they only have 300 TTL left and trigger their boosting. The chain can go on. You can keep thinking up something, but the point that I'm stating is that no matter what code you right, if you aren't active it can be reverse engineered and exploited somehow.
The point you're missing is that defense is inherently reactive. You have to think up everything someone might use and come up with some basic defense for everything. But on offense you can be creative and iterate. And the more protections against edge cases you add, the more sacrifices on pure defense you make and more chances that something goes wrong.
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I diasgree. Firstly, defenders can iterate. Secondly, resources aren't really an issue for many players on the MMO server. Sure, maybe you could find a way to make me spend more than you, but really, it doesn't matter much unless you're going to maintain that for a few years.
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My argument has never been that things are stacked in favor of offense. Everything is tuned to give defense an advantage, from towers to ramparts to even just TTL. My point is that no passive defense is unbeatable. If you code something and then stay AFK, you can get taken out.
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@davaned if it takes longer than my personal lifetime to break your defenses, then your defense is unbreakable.
That being said, even if you are able to force someone into spending 10x what you did on the attack, you still have to exceed the income of their entire empire to even make their numbers start going down.
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Yeah, which is why terminals are the main problem in sieges imo. Hence why I stated that we needed a power that would block terminals (and was grateful we got one). Its not that hard to do effective attrition strategies vs a room, but the issue remains that resource teleportation makes it an all or nothing. To destroy a room you must destroy the empire.
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The problem with the anti-terminal power is that it only works against players who are willing to accept the risk. If a player has a ton of credits stored up and doesn't care about the economic bonuses of a power creep, they can just not enable powers and there is nothing an attacker can do to deal with it.
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It's definitely not a perfect solution. And really, I think the best option is to just do a few rooms with power creeps and super amp their production so that you are generating tons of energy and minerals, rather than split it up.
The truth of the matter is that warfare in this game isn't that well done. It's got some interesting strategies you can employ, but there is nothing to gain from combat and the shear difficulty of cracking proper rooms means that stagnation is embedded in gameplay. It's more of an economic and management grind game with the option of combat. If you choose to partake its really only for the challenge, not because it gains you anything.
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As someone who have one of the best defense systems, I'd like to add my two cents. There are indeed many of clever thoughts I see here, but still there is something to be said.
It's theoretically possible to have a perfect defense, but, in practice, it's extremely hard to write. First of all, you need time for coding, and, more importantly, you need test cases for your code. On other words, you need someone to attack your rooms. The stronger the attack is, the better defense you can create. I was lucky enough to be attacked by one of the most capable raiders (of course, in times of that battle I didn't see it this way, but now I do), but this is rare. And without a good attack on you, there are too many things you need to consider, too many things could go wrong... and you have no motivation to do it.
Terminals? Go ahead and overflow them all with some cheap mineral, it's extremely unlikely that anyone has a code to detect this kind of attack and create market orders to free his terminals. Be creative! As said before, an attacker have the advantage of being proactive, he is able to find a breach or uncovered case. Like, throw a nuke into a wall. Boosted repairers spawned? Ok, throw a nuke into labs block (not many people cover them with ramparts everywhere). Rampart construction sites didn't appear? Congrats, you just found a breach.
The game mechanics are deep. It's always possible to find a way to fool any defense, and the only way to have a perfect defense is to experience all kinds of attacks ever possible (and if a defender survived them all... he probably deserve to sleep well). The only perfect defense is a defense that being upgraded.
