War of Conquest

One game balance goal is that all defense structures should be useful in some contexts, so that players have a lot of different possible tactics to experiment with and choose from. It's long been a problem that rocket launchers are just *too* useful; they do a lot of damage to anyone attacking within a certain radius, and that's always useful. Decreasing their damage and increasing their energy burn rate or cooldown time helps some, but makes them less useful overall. Likewise putting a low limit on the total number of them that can be built would limit their usefulness overall. Ideally, they should be very useful in some contexts, and not useful in others.

So here's an idea: instead of having rocket launchers activate whenever any square of their nation is attacked anywhere within their radius, they would only activate when an *empty* square of their nation (that is, one that doesn't contain a defense, wall, resource, orb) is attacked. They could still attack enemy squares that have defenses and other objects on them, but they would only trigger when an empty square is attacked. This would encourage nations to incorporate empty squares into their defenses rather than making solid grids of walls and defenses, and would limit the effectiveness of clumping many rocket launchers together (because such a clump could be defeated one-by-one without triggering any of the rocket launchers, since there's no empty squares separating them). It also kind of makes real-world sense -- armies don't fire rockets at their own installations that are being attacked.

Thoughts?

Sounds good. We should test it for a while and see how it goes. Probably needs to be tweaked again, but not sure unless we have had a chance to test it.

At one point i suggested a minimum range. For example, that they can't shoot at range one, but can at 2,3,4. This could be an alternative or something for the future if needed.

Dumb idea, defeats the sole purpose of defenses!

What's the sole purpose of defenses and why does it defeat it?

The idea is to make it so that no defense is perfect in every situation, but that different defenses can be combined in different ways to complement each other. This might not be the perfect solution for rocket launchers, but it's a way of giving them a weakness so they are not the ultimate defense to be used in every circumstance, and so that they work with arrangements of other defenses in interesting ways.

Its like reverse from Djinni portals. Djinni portals cannot attack empty squares. Rocket launcher would only attack when empty squares are attacked. I like having mechanical variety in game.

For this I recommend my billiards strategy, "hit it and see what happens?"

so.... try it. See what happens?

Absolutely not. Napoleon is just tryign to make it so he can attack orbs and not have the rls attack him.

Heres why (please dont do this)

Fire is defended by (whatever towers) aa 6x6 radius of towers. EACH of those towers will occupy a square. If those towers are rocket launchers... and you attack the rocket launcher...... the other defending rocket launchers would not attack (bullshit).

No this is a terrible idea. If you want to hear a real fix for rocket launchers... Give them ammo per hour..

So they need energy to maintain.... and Ammo to fire.... this can regulate abuse and also gove attackers a way to wear down the defnces with persistance.

Maybe something like Rl's can store say 500 ammo each that would refresh every hour. so any single rocket launcher could only fire 500 ammo per hour. then it would have to wait for the reload to happen.. becomes inert until reloaded.


Thoughts???

I dont like the ammo one at all. Gives another layer to the game that is not needed.

Lets just try the empty square only first and go from there.

loki wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:35 pm

Fire is defended by (whatever towers) aa 6x6 radius of towers. EACH of those towers will occupy a square. If those towers are rocket launchers... and you attack the rocket launcher...... the other defending rocket launchers would not attack (bullshit).

Yes, this change would mean that empty spaces would need to be incorporated into the defenses in order for RLs to be useful there, and a tight grid of defenses around say an orb would need to rely on defenses other that RLs. We'll try this and see how it works; if it doesn't, it will be easy enough to tweak or change back and try something else.

Loki,

I have no motive behind what I said. It wasn't even my idea. I was just showing support for mike to try something.

You are so pathetic.