PvP Game discussion



  • My statement was as follows: 

    Clearing/destroying a room is doable, but takes effort. Taking over a single room is impossible. 

    Since the defender only has to drop 1 energy into the controller in those 7 days, he only needs to send a large army capable of destroying your creeps which are keeping the room empty. Doing that once, waiting for those 1000 ticks to run out (which is in the lifetime of that army!) and then dropping 1 energy in the controller to reset the timer to about 7 days. Eventually the attacker will run out of resources (certainly if he's the underdog) so he'll have to stop attacking.

     

    So, the only real way to take over a room is to destroy the player completely, which is very hard to do. Even more so if they are in an alliance. I too "lost" rooms, but in fact, I didn't lose any. I still have those rooms, they just don't have anything build in them. I can just keep dropping a little energy in them to prevent them from downgrading. Then I can just rebuild a terminal en start sending creeps to build the defences in the room and everything else. 

    This is what happend with one of the rooms I destroyed from steeler. I did send a few guards in that room, but he could just send stronger ones. We didn't send a claimcreep to block the controller, since its pointless. If the defender enters the room with a large force, you have 1000 ticks to spawn a counter, walk there, destroy the enemy creeps en start attacking the controller again. It is not sustainable to keep a large enough force in the room to block a player from retaking it. 


    The proposed solution of a domination means that both attacking and defending gets more gameplay than just throwing resources at each other. Lets say the threshold is 10000 or even 100000, it still takes a long time for a player to lose a room, but the defender doesn't immediately get 150000 ticks of additional time to reclaim it. The defender also has to act in order to not lose the room and not wait till there is only a few 1000 ticks remaining before sending an army and dropping 1 energy into the controller to gain another week.



  • @Sanados: Thanks for your input. A nuke does cancel the safemode but because of the ticksToLand period this doesn't really effect this mechanic, unless you can throw nukes preventively every 1k ticks (which even bonzai/dissi won't be able to do).


  • Culture

    I have faced this as well. It's either a complete wipe of a player, or nothing at all.

     

    In total, you have to defend for 400,5K ticks for a single creep to successfully "claim" a room from someone else. This extreme long duration, which is counter-able by a single creep, seems to be the main issue. The amount of resources an attacker has to spend to maintain control is disproportionate to the amount a defender has to spent:

    • Defender: 1 creep in 400K creeps with 1 WORK and 1 energy
    • Attacker: multiple creeps defending said controller from any creep reaching it

     

    A quick short-term "fix" is preventing upgrading while an enemy non-npc creep is inside the room, but I think taking over rooms as a whole has to be reconsidered. I do not have any idea's yet on how to tackle the issue. When I get one I'll drop it here.


  • Dev Team

    If the root controller proposal takes place, then we can probably consider removing this RCL progress saving mechanic, it won't be needed anymore, controller downgrading will be permanent and non-undoable. Does it solve the issue for you?


  • Dev Team

    Attacker: multiple creeps defending said controller from any creep reaching it

    Not quite true. You need only one creep to attackController once per 1000 ticks, and only if it’s killed, then you need to spawn a military squad.



  • "Not quite true. You need only one creep to attackController once per 1000 ticks, and only if it’s killed, then you need to spawn a military squad."


    You then have 1000 ticks to spawn creeps, move there, kill the enemy and use the attackController again. While the defender has 150000 ticks to deposit a single energy. And when the defender gets there with just 100 ticks remaining and succeeds in pushing 1 energy back in the controller, he just gained 149900 ticks.
    There just isn't enough time to defend against a player retaking a room from that alone, excluding that when it downgrades it retains 90% of the progress so even if the attacker can get it down a level, the defender only has to spend 10% to upgrade it back from lvl 7 to lvl 8.

    If my creep that attacks the controller dies, and the other player had send 8 boosted creeps to defend the room to retake it, then I have no chance of stopping him from resetting the progress on the controller in time. I can kill those creeps eventually, but I have to start over from scratch and block it for 7 days again. And if he fails he can probably try again tomorrow, since he has 7 days to do so. 



  • While I agree with your general theme that combat favors the defender a little too much, you and your team ignored some pretty important mechanics that would have made a big difference. First of all, the attackController mechanic which you mentioned, several of your rooms were in close range to steelers and you could have used this to destroy his safe mode charges.

    Also, you can nuke to end a safe mode. After you do this, there is a 200 tick period in which the defender cannot safe mode again. You might get a demonstration of how one might use these mechanics together to their benefit. Planning for the strong likelihood of using safe mode would have meant building up some nukes and using them strategically.

    My biggest complaint about safe mode is that it doesn't seem to fit well with any of the other game mechanics. It is just a deus ex machina that doesn't really add to the enjoyment of the game. It also doesn't fulfill its original purpose, which was to stop a player from getting steamrolled a short time period due to defense bugs. If the attacking player has the resources and the code to support it, they can completely negate any benefit from safe mode. 



  • @Artem:

    I like the root controller proposal but I think those are separate issues. Resetting the downgrade timer is just too easy right now and that is only partially fixed by removing the RCL saving, although it would already be a step in the good direction.

    "You need only one creep to attackController once per 1000 ticks, and only if it’s killed, then you need to spawn a military squad." 

    That's completely true, however the the "defending" party just has to make sure that your new creep doesn't reach the controller within 1k ticks. This is insanely imbalanced as you will probably understand yourself as well.



  • If we can't get rid of safe modes (which I think would be the simpler and better solution), maybe something like your idea would be a nice thing to offset it. Completely wiping a player with decent code and the ability to maintain it during the attack is near impossible, partly due to the long downgrade timers and partly due to safe modes. Perhaps this is the balance that the devs are hoping to achieve. People who are looking for a PvP experience in which you can completely decapitate another strong opponent are probably going to be less satisfied with screeps.


  • Culture

    @bonzaiferroni

     - Also, you can nuke to end a safe mode

    A nuke, when launched, takes 50K ticks to land, a safemode lasts for 20k ticks. It's not a viable counter for safemodes. You only get 200 ticks to "attack" the controller, this is way too short.

     


  • Dev Team

    This is insanely imbalanced as you will probably understand yourself as well.

    It’s not “imbalanced”, it’s balanced in defenders favor. Taking over rooms is not supposed to be easy at all. It has a huge grief potential which can scare away some players who are not able to monitor their Screeps every day.



  • I actually really like both of Qzar suggestion of how this issue can be resolved, but strongly disagree with his thesis that a defender is at a good position no matter if online or offline - you attack a room when you see how it can be taken down - ranged units, mass units, consecutive attacks and such so in a case of a well-prepared attack a defender has no chance no matter if he only needs to boost ATTACK or not.

    In the case of our war i was away for about 3 days with very limited net access - so the result - a well structured attack based on the weaknesses of my defence lead to a loss of many rooms without the option of me countering it, still - a week later i don't have time to do so.

    Due to the fact that everything in this game is done at a really, really slow pace and you need to automate everything so it plays by itself there is rarely the case where u have prepared code for all possible scenarios or the time do it in a couple of days when being attacked and have to defend the rest of your rooms - my experience there shows that each next attack on you exploits something you failed to oversee, which is totally normal and the best way to find it and patch it

    The proposed ideas are good, but not enough in favor of both parties, so i would suggest something in addition:
    - if we're going with the domination counter - trigger an automatic safe mode for the duration of that domination to the nearest room of the defender so he can actually engage in that domination fight


  • Culture

    > players who are not able to monitor their Screeps every day

    But this is not the problem, the problem is more the ease they get for "resetting" the timer. I'm fine with defending a room from being taken over for 14 days. I'm not OK with 13 days of invested time being reset in 1 tick.


  • Dev Team

    People who are looking for a PvP experience in which you can completely decapitate another strong opponent are probably going to be less satisfied with screeps.

    Yes, Screeps is not intended to be a truly PvP-based game. It is the Arena feature that we have in mind when we think about all the PvP fun in the first place.


  • Dev Team

    But this is not the problem, the problem is more the ease they get for “resetting” the timer. I’m fine with defending a room from being taken over for 14 days. I’m not OK with 13 days of invested time being reset in 1 tick.

    This can be solved by removing downgrade progress savings, right?



  • @dissi

    A nuke, when launched, takes 50K ticks to land, a safemode lasts for 20k ticks. It's not a viable counter for safemodes. You only get 200 ticks to "attack" the controller, this is way too short.

    I was under the impression that the cancellation happens upon launch instead of upon landing, is it the other way around?


  • Culture

    @artem, yes but only partially.

    Problem is that you still got about ~6 days of downgrading to do on a RCL 8 room.

    Obviously that can be done quicker with CLAIM creeps, but due to their expensive nature you can only create 1 for 500 ticks at a cost of 10500 energy (15 CLAIM 15 MOVE). Attacking a controller is currently a bit too expensive.

    I think that another part should be able to block controller upgrading ( WORK ) and should cost energy. if you can "build up" blocked time like reserving a controller while it costs energy you have an extra "cheaper" way of blocking the resetting of the downgrade timer more efficiently.

    Personally I think there should be a clear difference between blocking upgrades and downgrading controllers.



  • @dissi

    But this is not the problem, the problem is more the ease they get for "resetting" the timer. I'm fine with defending a room from being taken over for 14 days. I'm not OK with 13 days of invested time being reset in 1 tick.

    I strongly agree with this, it took a lot of effort to make that progress on the downgrade, doesn't seem fair to be able to wipe it out so easily.

     


  • Dev Team

    Problem is that you still got about ~6 days of downgrading to do on a RCL 8 room.

    Why is this a problem? A lot of Screeps players only check their colonies once a week. Such a player may have spent many days to upgrade this room to RCL 8, why do you want him to lose it in a single moment?



  • @Steeler, You have pretty easily rebuild those rooms you lost, even though you where offline during the attack. That's the main point, there is no real way to take over a room without completely wiping a player. We failed to get all your rooms, since we ran out of boosts. Everything we did to clear those rooms is pointless, since you can easily retake them, but getting them down to 0 is pretty much impossible. Yeah we could have used claim parts to attack the controller, yeah we could have used nukes, but that is pointless for taking over a room. You can still send attack creeps to that room, defend against mine while building a terminal and building towers with it to get a quick defence going in that room. Plus you only have to do that for 1000 ticks and the attackers would have to do pretty much the same, but without a terminal, without towers and for 150000 ticks for just a single level.
    The main reason for that statement was that even if you weren't online for a long time, as long as we don't get every single room you can easily prevent losing any room. Or, in other words, its not possible to take a single room from a player if he doesn't want to lose it, without wiping said player.

     

    @artem, its insanely balanced to the defenders favor, causing it to be unbalanced. I get the idea that the only goal this game has is reaching the number one spot in the ranking. There is currently no point to attack a single room of another player, unless you're prepared and capable of wiping said player. Even if you manage to completely wipe a room and destroy all of the other players structures, it doesn't downgrade to lvl 7 for a week. (well, ok, less if you use attackcontroller creeps). If the defender has a single hour, he can reclaim it easily, causing possibly 7 days of progress to be instantly removed. I don't mind it taking 2 weeks or so for the "domination" to unclaim/transfer ownership of the room, as long as that progress isn't instantly stopped. If I want to prevent myself losing a room thats been wiped I can just send a massive army to keep the room clear for just 1000 ticks. There is no way the attacker can spawn enough creeps in time to defend against that, thus the attacker will lose all progress he made on downgrading the controller within a single creep's lifetime.

     

    Again, we don't mind it takes a long time to get a room. Rooms shouldn't be easy to lose, even if you're on a holiday or something. What we do mind is the enormous amount of energy and boosts you need to commit to get a room down to 0, while the defender can undo all of that within a single creep's lifetime. Taking over a single room from a player is impossible, you have to wipe the entire player to get it, since he can then no longer rebuild that room (or he respawns, unclaiming said room instantly). The attacker has a constant and pretty big drain in his energy to block a room, whilst the defender only has small short burst of energy needed to keep the room. No way the attacker can prevent a room for resetting if you send 8 fully boosted creeps. The attacker probably can't even spawn a counter fast enough in those 1000 ticks, let alone spawn, move, attack and reblock the controller.

    The changes propose on this thread sound pretty good. Building up a "block" counter like a reserver would give the attacker time to attack the room again, before the defender can reset the entire progress. Downgrade is good for inactive players, not for attacking. With the blocking you both have to work to either reclaim the room or get it down.