garrotte13
commented
1 year ago After few years playing Rampant I must say, that this activity must completely replace SiegeAI in all vengeance and pollution triggered activities. Sieging settlements must take place only during SiegeAI phase, while in all other algorithm outcomes it must be replaced by Creeping or something else (remote attacks or whatever it be).
Reasons are the following:
- Vengeance must consolidate resources and do other things - see below. Not wasting them on kamikaze fruitless activities.
- Sieging as a vengeance action is often easy to interrupt early as it happens near player's attack position.
- Pollution-triggered sieging is a very annoying distractor in midgame, not dangerous, but requiring player's defocusing for a few minutes once per N minutes (depends on map difficulty). In the endgame artillery and other expensive long-range defenses neglect sieging completely. But in midgame it quickly becomes boring, very tiresome thing happening in a loop (in early game it is not boring, it's a dramatic game difficulty multiplier - some kind of disbalance for masochists and was suggested to limit at early evo in issue #140).
SiegeAI is all about chances. As I wrote in other issue Sieging fails in over 70% cases. In remaining part it sometimes causes catastrophic effects for player (in 1..2% cases) when sieging is combined with retreating (new Rampant feature) and revenge leading to a number of nests clusters suddenly appearing out of nowhere - that's really fun and hot in midgame, but too rare and it is effectively stopped in endgame. :-( Also randomizer still can't store its seed in savegame or depends on many other small not-relevant events combo, thus player can't make it happen again after gamesave reload :-( In total: SiegeAI looks like game of chances, probably nice as SiegeAI stage to make quantity sometimes turn into quality, but not as a triggered effect.
Players often build walls and defenses on some relatively close distance from biters to make a protective border. Therefore this MigrationAI submode will be some kind of SiegeAI, which keep a non-interrupted line of biters structures from center of original biters nests location to player's walls/turrets. It will be very different from SiegeAI in one aspect: SiegeAI sends settlers squad from anywhere to build nests nearby player structure without relation to existing nests/worms in range (so SiegeAI usually makes nests without other nests nearby - neighbourhood and collective protection is accidental)