Equalizer Self destruct could take some time and weaken parts before destroying them allowing an attacker to quickly scoop up points before they disappear.
It could also award regular kill points to whoever last-hit the ship.
Equalizer Game setting capping max number of control rooms player can bring into battle at any one time.
(Due to splitting, intentional or not, single ship can become many if control rooms are available to do it.)
This is probably a good setting to have for all multiplayer modes. Also probably a way to ban or limit any part.
IVIemories Because attacking and destroying enemy ships comes with a lot of risk and potentially no reward, players will always stay back in hopes that someone else will do the dirty work for them
I'm not convinced this'll actually happen in practice. Time spent doing nothing is time spent not earning points.
IVIemories Ships become less combat focused and more 'one-shot' focused. Sustained damage from weapons such as laser blasters and missiles will be ignored in favour of weapons that can steal kills or just destroy a ship outright without giving enemies a chance to steal the kill.
It could lead to railgun snipers, sure. I'm not convinced this'll be a huge problem though.
IVIemories without an objective for players to contest the game will always be a deathmatch and FFA deathmatches will always encourage turtling because attacking someone else weakens you whilst gaining nothing in return.
What's to be gained by turtling though? While turtling you're gaining 0 points. When attacking another ship, you at least have a chance of gaining points.
I welcome ideas for other kinds of objectives!
IVIemories Gaining points entirely on damage on the other hand might cause a issue where gameplay is basically "I can point more guns your way". If the only way to succeed is to do damage, then there is very little strategic depth to the game past "do as much damage as possible" - why even build defences at all when you can re spawn with no penalty and keep farming the enemy for points?
I think this is a argument for only earning points if you survive a fight.
IVIemories Therefore I believe the best solution (unless you are willing to implement objectives) would be to have points tied entirely to damage dealt, but also have a penalty for re spawning but far less than the amount of points gained (e.g damage is calculated at 1 point per $1 of value lost, whilst re spawning is calculated at 0.25/0.5 points per $1 of value lost). This way players will still have to be defensive about their ship design since being destroyed and mindlessly respawning will not be cost effective, but they're also encouraged to seek out fights whenever possible and not have to worry about their points being stolen.
I'll think about this. I worry that a penalty for any respawn (not just a manual respawn) will discourage players from fighting, depending on how big the penalty is. There might not be a sweet spot where the penalty is large enough to encourage defensively-balanced ships but not so big as to discourage fighting.
Mc2 This is 100% true, there should be some way that if ship is destroyed, that rest of ship will vanish too.
Yeah, probably all the debris from a player's ships should blow up when they respawn. Otherwise the game will get really cluttered over time, which will hurt gameplay and performance. (Although could be kind of cool to see.)
Dalas120 taking into account chain reactions, fire, etc.
Giving proper credit for fires is probably impossible due to the nature of how fires spread and combine, and just the performance issues if tracking the various players that started fires. Though fires probably only account for a very small percentage of the overall damage, so just ignore fire damage for scoring might not be a big deal.
Giving credit for chain reactions is I think more feasible, but there might be some edge cases that are tricky/expensive to handle, such as if multiple chain reactions combine together, does only one player get credit (less fair but easier to code) or does credit get split between them?
Dalas120 Abandoned ships do not immediately self-destruct, and can still be shot at by other players to gain points (needlessly abandoning ship will feed your opponents).
The potential issue here is that it leaves no cap on the potential amount of "stuff" floating in space, which could make things crowded and, more importantly, hurt performance.
Dalas120 Kill scoring will almost certainly lead to feelings of being cheated
This is my primary concern with kill scoring, though I'm not convinced it will be a major enough issue to outweigh the simplicity advantage of kill scoring. To a certain extent, if you don't get the final hit, that's on you, and it may be possible to develop strategies to ameliorate that, such as blocking enemy ships or using tractor beams to push them away.
Dalas120 I suspect it would cause all sorts of strange strategies and exploits
This I'm not convinced of, mainly because I can't really think of any. It's certainly possible to build railgun snipers or fast ships to swoop in at the last moment and steal a kill, but I'm not sure that's any worse than playing a sniper in an FPS game, and like snipers, it may actually be healthy for gameplay in the sense of encouraging diverse play styles and taking out opponents quickly.
Dalas120 Q5: I have two goals with "abandon ship" respawning. First, this prevents players from respawning to deny their enemies points. Second, this keeps the game action-packed by allowing players to ditch ineffective ships on demand, instead of being stuck waiting while an enemy shoots at your weaponless cruiser.
I think these are laudible goals and I really like this idea in general, I just don't think "abandon ship" is feasible without some limit on the amount of abandoned ships that can exist. Perhaps there's a timer (1 minute?), after which the abandoned ship self-destructs? And then you can't abandon again until your previously-abandoned ships are destroyed.
I also don't think "abandon ship" is necessarily incompatible with kill scoring.
Dalas120 Q6: I don't think that repairing and respawning should both be possible. Either respawning should be the only heal (encouraging fast-paced, constant fighting), or as suggested in the second concept repairs should be the only way to heal (encouraging more careful, conservative gampeplay).
Q7: I see no reason why fleets wouldn't work with this approach. If you've lost 9/10 ships, just abandon ship and start anew.
Yeah, the "abandon ship" idea neatly solves both repairing and fleets.
So yeah, I'm totally on board with abandon ship, but I'm not yet persuaded that damage points is better than kill points.
Dalas120 If a ship takes RoD damage, income from that damage is distributed among all players who damaged that ship before
You would probably want to reduce "damage share" when repairing, so that damage done at the beginning of the match counts very little by the end of the match.
Dalas120 Concept 2: more of a strategic, conservative approach, much closer to how FFA works currently but with changes to make fighting less penalizing. These ideas are more experimental and I'm less sure how exactly they would work. This could work for the new arena mode, or could be a change to existing FFA.
On the whole, I really like this idea and think it would be a clear improvement over the current LPS mode. But it'd also probably be more work than any variant of the proposed Arena mode, depending on how much control the player has over repairing.
Dalas120 Q7: Control rooms cannot be rebuilt to prevent splitter ships from being abused to produce new ships after each battle. If players could use excess credits to buy new ships, this restriction could probably be removed.
Alternatively, there could be a rule that only the "original" ship piece can be repaired. That way you can repair control rooms but still can't abuse splitters to make more ships.
nop I can only remember one case in the tourney where an FFA round went over 2 minutes without somebody engaging, and that's only because they left their opportunity on the table.
I definitely remember a tournament where this was an issue in multiple rounds.
nop Not until you implement parts for it
You do raise a good point, which is that in the future ships will likely be able to repair themselves via crew/parts/drones (or something like that), and that ideally any mode created now will still work when those repair parts are added.
nop Question #9: What happens when a player leaves the game because they're bored of being farmed for points?
Their ships remain and are still worth points. They probably still shoot back automatically, but otherwise don't have any AI attached and don't respawn.
nop This is inherently unfair to people who are unintentionally disconnected. Only the most annoying games penalize players for leaving/disconnecting (the two are the same), and only then because they are team games. I agree quitting is lame but it's a fundamental part of multiplayer games that needs to be designed for. Losing any "points" earned in the game for not sticking with it to the end is fair enough.
Why does this matter in a game with only unranked play?
nop Consider that you can't prevent anybody from self-destructing instantly because explosive blocks exist. How do you stop people from building shield-stacked cannon/rail/missile bombers, unloading their ammo, and self-destructing to deny any points?
You raise a good concern. Also, ships can self-target now as of 0.14.2. I can see two possible solutions:
- Use kill-based last-hit scoring. That way explosive charges can only ever be used to deny points if no one has ever hit you.
- The score that a ship is worth is separate (but initially equal to) its monetary value. As other players do damage, both the remaining score and the ship's value are reduced. But if a player damages themself, the remaining score is not reduced, so then if other players damage the ship, the score they receive from that damage is increased proportionally.
nop Do you mean players who leave or are disconnected can rejoin the game? That would be really cool.
There's no way to do this without pausing the game for a bit. Basically it would have to "reboot" the game instance, essentially the same thing that happens after a desync.
