Reinstate newbie walls for new players


  • Dev Team

    The thing is that we cannot really mix safe mode and protection walls mechanics. It would be just too confusing for everyone, especially for new players. You spawn with walls and safe mode, but then they disappear, but you can activate safe mode again, but you cannot place walls again... It's a mess. Currently the system is not perfect, but it works better than the previous one. For new players as well, it gives them some understanding of what safe mode is and how can they make use of it at the next few controller levels (Tutorial step 5 has been updated to reflect that).


  • Culture

    For the record, pathing around newbie protected rooms was super easy to do. I just had the costmatrix return false for rooms that had newbie protection which I didn't have visibility in (so I could respawn if needed). Caching the "isRoomProtected" function results made this trivial from a performance perspective.

    I also agree that it's super easy to exploit this with 1m creeps. However, as an alternative solution you could just make it so all hostile creeps in a safe mode room only have 1hp- then a very basic attack creep would easily be able to wipe them all out.



  • Completely agree with Artem on this one.

    I have to say, for someone who argues vehemently about requiring people to try to help themselves before he offers them help Puciek, you're quick to tout the advantages of newbie walls, which as Artem has pointed out, simply prolong the inevitable for those who haven't put in the effort to do the tutorial and play around with the sim.

    Building walls isn't difficult, building a single attack creep isn't overly hard to work out from the documentation and the examples it provides. It does, however, make it a lot easier for those of us trying to path around the map without people spawning walls on us for 20k ticks.

    Safe mode also allows new players to venture outside of their room in relative safety before the 20k ticks are over if they so desire, without being an all or nothing 'drop the walls and risk death' that we had on the old system.

    Maybe a brief combat tutorial would be helpful for those starting the game and feeling under pressure from the get-go, but there is little threat to them and respawning is always a click away

    However, as an alternative solution you could just make it so all hostile creeps in a safe mode room only have 1hp-
    then a very basic attack creep would easily be able to wipe them all out.

    This would also be a neat idea. Or at least lower it down so new players can remove higher level creeps


  • Dev Team

    However, as an alternative solution you could just make it so all hostile creeps in a safe mode room only have 1hp- then a very basic attack creep would easily be able to wipe them all out.

    This seems reasonable. We just need to think out all unwanted side effects here.



  • It might be reasonable for newbies. But imagine attacking a high level room with boosted creeps... making them have 1hp means you could just as easily kill them instantly instead, because there will be no chance to heal them, and no chance for them to move to another room. Safe mode is annoying enough already, in that it can be reactivated without cooldown in novice areas, basically making rooms unattackable for multiple days straight.

    Also, if one reason for safe mode was easier pathfinding, I think it just wouldn't make sense to set all creeps to 1hp, because it would be way to risky to path through a safe mode room then. Sure, with the new system it would be high risk but possible compared to not possible at all with the old system.. but I think nobody would want to risk costly creeps being killed.


  • Culture

    This may be a bit more difficult, but making it so that the creeps die when they are stepped on by the owner of the room would also solve the problem.



  • Or walking over them without them dying, so the owner can't chase your creeps down as they walk through to a different objective 😛


  • Dev Team

    because there will be no chance to heal them

    Healing is disabled in safe mode rooms anyway.

    This may be a bit more difficult, but making it so that the creeps die when they are stepped on by the owner of the room would also solve the problem.

    There might be cases when friendly players do some friendly activity in your safe mode room, you don’t want their creeps to be immediately killed.

    Or walking over them without them dying, so the owner can’t chase your creeps down as they walk through to a different objective 😛

    That is an interesting idea actually. Hostile creeps can become visually transparent and passable. You don’t need to kill them, you can simply ignore them at all. That would solve this issue completely, although it’s a bit hard to implement.



  • +1 for the passable creeps!


  • Dev Team

    This feature has been implemented on the PTR in test mode.