@tigga said in Season #2 concept:

I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.

For non-uniform world, my issue is that it leaves bigger parts of it less-usable and discourages respawning into 'worse' zones. Weaker players are not much affected by that since they don't have codebase with features that would get impacted by that. For 'medicore' players that starts to be a bigger impact.

So from good player perspective 'Center' makes sense, for weak-player there's no difference, for medicore one it's either center/close to center and then respawn into worse area after wipe, or just start in worse area and have a boring/limited play

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

Once you reach 22, the benefit of pushing anyone else out will inherently always outweigh the cost of letting them stay, if those are the only options.

GCL22 ain't gonna happen in 2 months. in current season highest GCL is 9, we might see GCL11 maybe.

@rhef said in Season #2 concept:

Snowgoose 9:50 PM

I don’t think the top players need to make any deals, if they could kill you they can just take out your towers, or just heal there way to the collector

Snowgoose 9:52 PM

Once your towers are gone they can probably keep a room down with small creeps

One can wrap decoder in ramparts or, in the end, respawn, leaving the room empty and decoder disabled

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

A good economic bot should get you in the top 100. Your combat code should determine top 10.

There's ~140 players in this season with less than 50% having scored.

@cribbit said in Season #2 concept:

In a large map, a top-10 player is only able to indirectly compete on the leaderboard by exerting total dominance over their holdings to maximize gains.

That's not true. in large map top10 player needs to cooperate with smaller players to get access to highRCL decoders.

In small map there is high risk of alliances, created by season1 top10-15 players, that will determine most of ranking.

Hypothetical Example

• 3 teams of 4 top15 players decide to take 6 sectors (2-3 sectors/player for optimal GCL-7/8 room setup), wipe anyone else within and 4-8 rooms around it, split code picking into assigned zones and do not fight with each-other (best in alliance wins, since breaking/fighting within alliance is too risky from ranking perspective for every member)

With big map it should reduce chance of top players clumping together. Example:

• Each of top15 players creates it's own kingdom with some smaller-player vassals as to not have to share code-picking with other top10 players

@artch said in Season #2 concept:

@qzarstb You can only use decoders in owned rooms. Wiping the sector does not benefit you directly, since you can decode as many symbols as your GCL is.

So if i decoded TAW,SIN,RES,PE and have GCL4 i cannot decode AYIN in someone elses owned room ?

@qzarstb said in Season #2 concept:

I would really urge to implement a mechanic which was proposed multiple times in the feedback topic to cluster the top 10 ambitious players together in the map center. If you would just include that controllers in the sectors near the map center give you 10x the score, the sector sector at range 10-20 rooms 3x score and rooms further away 1x score I think you would perfectly solve this issue.

With this approach (top player cluster and distance-graded decoders) there's no point in entering since top10 can easily dominate all 8 sectors closest to center (while still wiping anything outside of it) and i'm really not sure if combat there would be 'worth their time'. It would end up more as a CK3 diplomacy and intrigue at top of a ranking instead.

I'd say that the map should be made BIG on purpouse, so in order to win, ppl would need to clump together

@artch said in Season #2 concept:

By the way, if you only cooperate with 1 or 2 players, you will not be able to score all resources.

Almost yes if all of them are at GCL7 (for 3 players cooperation)

2 another questions @artch :

• how the rewards ladder will look like
• do decoders have capacity/cooldown

what's behaviour when Rampart is placed ontop of decoder ?

Screeps Dune:

harvesting sources heavily (in owned room or remote) is annoying the EnergyWorm(s) of a sector that after crossing minor threshold send their invader minions to wreck havoc. If major threshold is crossed, after some short (1-2k ticks) warning, EnergyWorm(s) show up in owned room in sector that has mined the most energy.

Every sector can have between 1-x EnergyWorms and after killing a worm there's grace period of X ticks in sector that no EnergyWorm/invader spawns and harvesting sources does not progress spawn-a-worm counter.

EnergyWorm could have:

• 100-500 boosted bodyparts (so it's proper room-destroyer level and lot's of HP)
• ~10k TTL
• takes 10% of nuke damage (so there's no way to 'farm' them with nukes)
• worm destroys all structures, attacks creeps, and causes attackController every 1k ticks
• worm does not care about safe-mode

Score for every worm killed in room You own/reserved The one to destroy most of the worms in his rooms wins

SnakeMaze:

Every room has maximum of 2 joined rooms thus forming a one-way-in, one-way-out tunnel-like rooms so in order to expand / reach highways / reach SK rooms going through someone else room would be mandatory (either with force or diplomacy)

might it be connected to this issue ?

https://screeps.com/forum/topic/3120/can-t-recreate-power-creeps-examples-in-mmo-through-gui

Another idea not for competition itself, but as a supporting feature:

All bodyparts except WORK,MOVE,CARRY,CLAIM require their cost in particular mineral:

• HEAL - Lemergium
• ATTACK - Utrium
• RANGED_ATTACK - Keanium
• TOUGH - Hydroxide (so locked behind RCL5)
• CLAIM - any single mineral (so 600 oxygen will work, but 240 oxygen and 360 Keanium won't)

This minerals can be loaded only to extensions (spawns stays energy-only) Extractor becomes unowned structure available at no-rcl

• can be built in unowned rooms
• double extractor-use cooldown in unowned rooms Mineral amounts in all rooms are equal to 1/2 - 1/4 to accomodate for more opportunities to harvest them

Why would be interesting:

• new coding challenge
• more impact on controlling remotes
• harder combat (due to proper mineral load requirement)

Limited Amount of creeps:

Idea:

• every player gets limit of X creeps (lets say 50k? creeps) to use throughout season (could reset on respawn)

• every creep that has WORK, CARRY, CLAIM, HEAL subtracts 1 from total creep count

• limited ramparts to 10m(?) , walls to 50m(?) at rcl8 (so attacking/nuking is worthwhile)

• creeps with only ATTACK / RANGED_ATTACK / TOUGH / MOVE parts do not count towards creep limit :

to make combat, sieges and enemy-creep killing still viable and do not disencourage fighting since it's net-creep loss for attackers most of the time

• why not HEAL then ?

since repair/work creeps are limited to offset siege balance and encourage more planning on offense rather than just pop boosted quads all around

Why it would be interesting:

• renew() mechanic would come into focus
• stronger need on calculating for remote mining (mining/transporting/defending)
• stronger need on proper calculation for attacking and sieging (do i realy need to take-out this guy and use some creep quota by adding 'heal' parts ? should i have in-wait healers that are renewed ? etc)

Rating: determined by amount of owned rooms, their level and amount of creeps left