3. Season 2 feedback

Season 2 feedback


  • What I think went well

    • I think the combination of claiming for decoders, energy, minerals and collection space worked well. It lead to some interesting decisions. I ended up with a bit of a shortage of X, though in return I was able to gather from a large area.
    • There was a lot more fighting between competitors for the top spots than before. It's not clear if that fighting ended up mattering. IMO it did a bit: without the fighting Genovese would have probably hit second.
    • I think the score system and score gathering worked well, again. I liked that the most collected resource was worth the least. I did some 1:1 trading with @psy372 near the end, for example, to take my most scored symbol and trade it with one of my least scored symbols. That was mutually beneficial.
    • I liked the walls. They lead to new interesting code to write to handle them, and made things quite strategic in the early/mid game. It's a bit painful that things such as findRoute don't have a clean way to hook into them as the block in the middle of a room.

    What I think did not go so well:

    • There wasn't actually that much incentive to keep newer players alive. The two I did let live near me didn't really contribute anything: if decoders were harder to come by they would have, but as it turned out, getting to 22 wasn't that hard.
    • I didn't like the boosting. At one point one competitively placed player gave all of his score to another, losing his own position for his ally. I think if we can come up with mechanics to prevent this sort of thing it'd be good. No terminals work, but the top three players all had workarounds for that with rooms places very close together and transporters moving between terminals. I quite liked the idea in the "King of the Hill" thread where score is not something that's a resource and transferrable, but something that's gained by "controlling" a room. That makes it a lot harder to boost people.
    • A little too much manual stuff. Not sure this is avoidable with the way that room combat works. Often it comes down to 2 hours and manual overrides as even the perfect automation doesn't quite work. I prefer automatic Screeps.

    I'm looking forward to season 3. Balancing time between that and arena may be tricky.


  • I guess I will write my thoughts also. I wasn't here for first season so this was my first take on seasonal, but I am not new player also, I was playing around 2018-2019 and then had a break from, game, so I jumped in with two years old code. Overall I did surprisingly better than i expected (got 16-th place).

    • Place brackets was too wide for my taste (mb cause of that was, that there wasn't too much player competing), but around beginning of second month I figured out that I have no chance to get into top 10 (at least with time I have on hand for codding), but in the same time I was pretty sure I don't drop bellow 30 place. That caused I started to lose interest in fighting for better place. I wish there was more incentivise for fight for each place.
    • Highway walls was pain for working with, but I liked it. My code for getting around them was crappy, but that was mostly because i had more pressing issues with my 2 years code that I was in need of fixing. I don't mind if for them to be in next season, and i even want them. I liked gathering score, and overall it wasn't too hard to get it started, so I think it was easy enough to start getting them for more freshly players.
    • As Tigga said, boosting was problem this season from my perspective. As player with no alliance or in game friends it was hard to compete for high places.
    • I was missing market. I know it was for better to disable it, for above reason, but maybe enable it to trade with "npc"? So you can trade resources that you have too much for more needed ones. It sure should be balanced, so there is still better to plan rooms for mining desired resources, but at least you could have something to do with all that oxygen and hydrogen. Also, you can transfer that code for persistent server. Also, factories would be more viable that way.

    Not much feedback but i want to share also: yea, Tigga was extorting me, but overall I didn't end to badly with that barging compared to players that got totally wiped out and needed to respawn. I think it was good deal for me (I didn't have chance to fight since my war code was pretty non-existent at this point of game). I even enjoyed it somewhat (Stockholm syndrome? xD) I think it can be nice addition to game, but to that happen, big players need to have harder time to control large spans of territory.