4. NPC Strongholds

NPC Strongholds

  • Culture

    This is an excellent idea. It adds more depth to the game, and should not be hard to implement. I would also suggest that the strongholds buildings automatically disappear after a set amount of time.

    Helam
    “storage in the middle of the room that cannot be destroyed”

    I’d suggest a stronghold building. The building will have:

    • minerals
    • energy
    • power

    The building has a at least a rampart over it. You need to destroy the rampart to siphon the resources out of it. The building can also be destroyed, but this should be entirely optional.
    Once the building has been secured you should be able to safely siphon the stronghold dry.
    Don’t make us drop it on the ground and pick it up I don’t like spilling.

    Ideas for different types of strongholds:

    Tier I:
    - 1 Tower
    - No walls
    - 1 or 2 unboosted creeps defending the stronghold on ramparts
    - http://i.imgur.com/nqhjs2m.png

    Tier II:
    - 1~2 Towers
    - Walls of max 100k
    - 2~4 unboosted melee creeps defending the stronghold
    - http://i.imgur.com/D1rb4pH.png

    Tier III
    - 2~4 Towers
    - Walls of max 1 million
    - 4 unboosted melee creeps defending the stronghold
    - http://i.imgur.com/HjaKAYf.png

    Tier IV
    - 4~6 Towers
    - Walls of max 10 million
    - 4 unboosted guards on ramparts behind walls
    - 4 boosted melee creeps defending the stronghold
    - http://i.imgur.com/nZoaRLQ.png

    You get the general idea I’m going for.

  • SUN

    This seems like a natural extension to NPC invaders; The attack part of the defense encouragements.

    Should walls drop energy? Is the ability to mine for energy part of the reward?

    Other considerations are to potentially have base weighted towards the stronger side (with a rollover reset to not give well established players too much of a boon?) every time they are destroyed and to have towers only attack in a fixed range so you can at least ignore the bases if you need to.

  • Culture

    For determining base strength:

    An evolution factor per sector or room seems appropriate. If bases keep getting wiped within reasonable time they should increase the levels, if left alone the evolution factors should be lowered.

    Should walls drop energy?

    I’d say yes. Normal game rules should apply.


  • The way I think about Screeps is as a set of several general problems, each branching towards specificity and increasing in complexity as the game progresses. As a puzzle solver, the progression of each problem is incredibly rewarding, where your successes introduce you to new problems, enabled by a continually growing, improving, and never lost codebase.

    All of the problems currently posed by the game seem designed to follow this type of progression, and I think that this suggestion of NPC Strongholds fits perfectly. Given the provided design, which feels really well developed, I think it fits into what I perceive to be the general philosophy of Screeps, while introducing several nice features.  Additionally, I think several existing systems could be leveraged to make implementation fairly straightforward. 

    Great idea.


  • Awesome idea 🙂

  • SUN

    Another idea that came up is the potential for raiding parties to spawn from the strongholds. They would be on par with the current invaders in unoccupied rooms but if you where to wipe out a stronghold to get at the goods (or to just stop spawns) you would face steeper competition next time the stronghold spawned...

    Plus it would solve much of what bugs me about the current implementation of invaders.


  • Excellent idea!

     

    One thing I would definitely want if this was added is at least 2 different tower 'strategies' for NPC towers, possibly more. These could either be random depending on the base, or different at different levels, but I think it would be good to have some variety in behaviors and layout so that it is harder to develop one-siqe-fits-all strategies which predict NPC movement and are more like mining SK rooms than raiding a hideout.

  • CoPS

    This sounds cool.

    I'd prefer there to be an encouragement to do these things co-op: More player-player interaction is fun. Currently we only have "attacking each other" and "non-personal market trading" as the incentives to interact. You could achieve this by increasing the amount of loot if there are multiple players that are doing similar damage.

    I'd like to be able to walk past a stronghold without getting shot. eg. I power mining mules or claimers getting shot would be annoying.


  • Yes, and also. The strong-hold could launch an attack on those who have attacked it, thus, you might get destroyed.


  • This definitely would add another dimension to the game.  I like AMD's "counter-attack" suggestion, too.