Draft: NPC Strongholds



  • A lot of players were discussing in slack about keeping strongholds permanently wiped in their sector - or at least as much as possible. If someone is harvesting say 5 sourcekeeper rooms in a sector, there will be invaders spawning in an sk room approximately every 500 ticks. Certainly for lower level strongholds, it seems plausible to wipe them out pretty quickly and experience few (if any) invader spawns because of them.

    If there are some strongholds that are impossible or very hard to wipe out - then that seems great. I am up for difficult (and perhaps not even possible) challenges.


  • Dev Team

    @wtfrank There definitely will be stronghold variants that are almost impossible to crack. Also, even if you're lucky and you get multiple L1 strongholds in a row in your sector, they will respawn very quickly, so the invader-free period won't last long.

    👍


  • So if the strongholds become impossible, then all sectors will end up with a level 5 stronghold that no one dares to attack.

    IMO strongholds should take full damage from a nuke strike so that there's always a way to hard counter strongholds.



  • @crusher48 I guess that's when this kicks in: "After a long time of existence at the maximum level possible a Stronghold will disappear to reborn somewhere else."



  • More randomization within strongholds sounds better to me. As does "impossible" strongholds where it's just not worth the effort of taking them out. The original design of slowly leveling strongholds seemed a bit static and "solveable" while these new ideas are much more interesting as they require robust stronghold killing code, not just code that is known to beat a certain level.

    It also means it's not just about the reward of the loot. You can keep invaders down and go after the loot. That feels much better.



  • @o4kapuk so the Core will reserve an adjacent room regardless of having an exit there?

    I am concerned about special kinds of remote mines I am using: if a room has just one exit, you can use it as a remote from the exit room and don't need to build walls between the two, because there is no way any threat could appear in the enclosed room.

    Do you intend to make such rooms unsafe? As in: can they be magically reserved?


  • Dev Team

    @nobodysnightmare Well 'yes' for now (but nothing is set in stone currently). You'll still be using such rooms as your remotes; if additional core appears there and reserve controller, it will still block spawning of npc invaders at that edge, because it will be reserved. Currently, we have no plans of changing how it works.



  • I like it. I like it a lot. Make it so.

    Besides making Invaders more dynamic, it provides a punching bag to practice siege code in a safe environment.



  • @o4kapuk How up to date is this? Any new developments?


  • Dev Team

    @davaned Going to publish to the ptr soon

    👍

  • Dev Team

    Implemented in this PTR patch.


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