Expansion and building is punished with negative BP

[Gireen]

Currently the best strategy is to build as few buildings as possible and no outposts. If you expand and build outposts with miners, the construction points used turn into massive debt when the buildings are destroyed. A team is then no longer able to build something and starts spamming miners to reduce the debt.

Disclaimer

All problems issues are treated as opinions until agree upon

[Viech]

I'm not happy with negative buildpoints as a concept. I would say I stopped experimenting at a suboptimal point. On the other hand it is very easy to build a system where mindless spamming of stuff is not punished at all. We had a system earlier where one could mine a lot of BP like this and not lose them when the drills or leeches get destroyed. A better system needs to find a middle ground.

[ghost]

I suppose the traditional RTS way would work: you mine and store the mining's content in structures, mining structures have a small storage pool and there are dedicated storage structures. If a storing structure is destroyed, resource is either redistributed automatically for free and surplus lost, or the content is just lost, depends on the games.

[SeanScherer]

I just played my first game (vs bots, so take this with a grain of salt - oh, and Tremulous background :P ).

I was playing builder a bit, and experimenting with expanding with drills - and of course ended up with the problem that I couldn't even rebuild the Armory when it was destroyed (or - had to rebuild a bunch of drills first, which led to further problems down the road of course :P ). At least it seemed rather unituitive to me (but then of course, like I said, I'm coming from Trem).

[ghost]

you're welcome, this is a good enough place to talk about that kind of problems

[SeanScherer]

Hi, thanks :). I just read up that destroyed buildings don't insta-give back their build points (as it was in Tremulous). I guess together with the drill-mechanics (I'm afraid I still don't fully understand), this got me confused :P.

(oh, and I didn't see this was an older issue - I can open new if prefered!).

[ghost]

I'd rather keep the number of issues followable. Better to talk, than to ignore old stuff. To me, you did the right thing.

[ghost]

If you expand and build outposts with miners, the construction points used turn into massive debt when the buildings are destroyed.

There is another side on this issue which has not been talked about here:

When you build a forward base, it's very fragile, especially for aliens. The most usual results is, it gets destroyed, giving enemy team momentum while your own team loose momentum. This 2nd aspect of the punishment is even harder for a team than the BP debt, which can be worked around.

[DolceTriade]

We want to encourage building fwds, but also reward killing structures. I think it could be interesting to give momentum based on how quickly a group of buildings gets destroyed. I think that is quite suitable for the concept of "momentum", where the team killing lots of structures should gain momentum and be rewarded for it.

[ghost]

This would imply that destroying a structure or killing someone gives a momentum bonus that quickly fades, if you destroy something after that. This is not the current mechanism at all. What I am referring to is a current problem in the current player base. When a team have a newcomer, the newcomer do overbuild, and do feed enemy's momentum a lot, while wasting his team's BPs a lot. Those 2 consequences are really punishing hard.

[ghost]

2 players said it would be good to have rewards to kill buildings, in credits, none against.

[DolceTriade]

Killing structures giving credits still punishes forwards right?

[ghost]

Yes, but I could not remember where this idea (reward killing buildings) was submitted, so to avoid this info to be lost, I may have hastily put it here (before forgetting). The more I think about it, the more I think momentum should only be about killing players, though. For structures, small credit earning to encourage attacking and the BP loss feels enough to me.

[DolceTriade]

I vehemently disagree. Credits for killing structures means that people will be more reluctant to build forwards because that means the enemy can get evos/credits from killing them.

Your core premise for the problem is absolutely correct: we punish building forwards. Building forwards is a high risk/high reward venture between giving the enemy team more momentum, getting your own BP queued, etc. We need a different system.

The idea behind momentum is simple (albeit opaque): reward players (and the team) for doing things that help the team. This includes but is not limited to:

• Building
• Killing enemies
• Killing enemy structures

And if you stop performing these activities, then you will be consequently punished (by losing momentum).

Ultimately, we need gameplay tests to verify our hypotheses, so we'll need a) someone to code up a test (should be trivial for this) b) coordinate a dev game (we should bring this back anyways).

What do you say? Let's just put this to the test. If you want, I can help code it to prototype it.

[ghost]

I vehemently disagree

No problem. I was basically reporting things players said (on 5 players, 2 answered), even if I asked about 2 things:

1. rewarding destruction of buildings, as it was said more than once, maybe only on IRC, that aliens lack an incentive to attack bunkers
2. rewards for partial damages (I think this idea came from @Gireen ) but had no answer for this one.

My point was more to collect opinions than to express my own here.

b) coordinate a dev game (we should bring this back anyways).

This one seems hard :/

What do you say? Let's just put this to the test. If you want, I can help code it to prototype it.

This would be very helpful to do experiments on that topic, planned for 0.54 or after, so that we have time to properly test and talk about them, with players participating, ideally.

Note that I agree with what you said, that it would reward too much enemy team.

[ghost]

Oh, while I am at it. Doing a different post on purpose, to keep things readable.

I was thinking few days ago: when you build, your team instantly loose the build's BP, and if building is destroyed at, said, 10% of the process, you still loose 100% of the BP. It would be a pretty obvious way to reduce the punishment to have 90% of the cost back (in that example). This could apply to momentum earning/loss or whatever other rewards we decide to pack in there.

[Gireen]

@bmorel please stay on topic. you can create separate issues for other problems/ideas or also experiences.

This issue is about the negative BP. Not reward for kills, momentum or BP lost trough destruction of partly constructed buildings.

[ghost]

I disagree that BP is the only punition.