Ideas for nukes
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We were chatting in slack and had some ideas on how to make nukes a more interesting feature in the game.
Basically we came up with some ideas for "fallout" to occur after a nuke goes off. Implementing any of these would provide more of a kick to nukes, but I think it would be cool to implement all of them and have the effect chosen at random.
* Spawn time increases by 3 ticks per part.
* Creep lifetime decreases by 33%.
* Creeps are unable to enter the room (spawn or entering in) without dying (or taking severe damage each tick).
* Mutations, with random body parts turning into other parts.
These effects should stack on multiple nukes.
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I do like this proposal's creativity (it will make Screeps more entertaining), but I'm afraid it will create even more disbalance between low & high GCL players.
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Depending on what particular effects are picked it may actually help balance the game out for newer players. It's easier for a player to get a nuke than it is power creeps.
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Mutations would be hilarious, but I worry that they have too much potential for someone's scripts to go wrong in a wholly non-deterministic way (e.g. a creep losing all of its MOVE components). How would this affect boosts as well?
I like the idea of adding an effect to structures that were under nukes but not destroyed - to actually give incentive to drop nukes on rooms with e.g. 100M ramparts on the spawns. For example;
- SPAWN - spawn time increases by ~2 per body part
- RAMPART - decays at 5x speed
- TERMINAL - cool-down for transactions increases by 10t
- TOWER - Add a 1tick cooldown to firing, or reduce max capacity by 50%, or minimum damage range decreases.
- EXTENSION - reduce capacity by 10.
- Empty space - Creep TTL decreases at 2/tick instead of 1/tick.
I could see this allowing smaller players (lets be honest, firing a nuke is easier than boosting and automating attack squads) to actually apply some real damage to bigger player's rooms, as well as promoting the idea that a room under attack should become more difficult to defend proportional to the number of attacking rooms (e.g. number of launched nukes).
It also adds some neat counter-play - if nukes get launched at your room, instead of building up ramparts to defend, it adds an incentive to move structures.