Aliens who lost their base can make the game last quite long by spamming eggs

[necessarily-equal]

Generally speaking, it is possible to desperately rebuild things by putting extra drills unprotected, outside of the base and profiting from the instant surge in build points.

In the alien granger case, it allows building eggs all accross the map. You can actually play hide and seek for quite some time like this, if the map is large enough (e.g. spacetracks)

[necessarily-equal]

Proposed fix: just have the drill give its 50bp progressively: if you need to wait a bit before the build point appear, you can't spam drills.

^ An exemple build point as a function of time (time in minutes)

[Gireen]

This problem is probably mainly due to big maps with few players.
There is also nothing preventing aliens from spamming eggs across the map beforehand.
Lategame this is also not possible, or at least not for long when there is BP dept.

The proposed fix would not prevent the spam of miners only delay its effect.
On the contrary early game would be slowed down with lowered BP supply and expansion becomes harder.

A simple solution is for humans as tactic to expand across the map and seal off areas for aliens.

[necessarily-equal]

I agree that this is much more of a problem without many players; but I don't agree that spamming undefended eggs across the map is a valid tactic with this change: humans would have enough time to destroy them.

Sealing off parts of the map is something that takes a large amount of time, and doesn't work all that well.

I don't know if the slower expansion would be more of a problem in that case. I don't know if we can find a mechanism that helps forward bases but makes desperate outpost spamming harder.

[Gireen]

I don't agree that spamming undefended eggs across the map is a valid tactic with this change: humans would have enough time to destroy them.

It is with and without this change a valid tactic. Especially on big maps hidden eggs become hard to find.

[illwieckz]

One thing is that Tremulous radar was detecting stuff no one seen, while our current radar is only improving tracking of what a player in the team already seen, if I'm right.

[necessarily-equal]

It is with and without this change a valid tactic. Especially on big maps hidden eggs become hard to find.

Indeed, but that's fun enough. It's like easter, you got to find the eggs!

Having a granger desperately putting eggs in random places on all corners on the map, being helped by newly spawned hatchlings, kind turns the end of the game in a frantic hide and seek where the aliens can desesperately refuse to die for 15 minutes. And that's honestly annoying for the other team.

[illwieckz]

In tremulous it was common to sell a bsuit to buy a medium armour + radar to end such hide-and-seek game before it get annoying.

[Viech]

I agree that a build point redesign can fix this, though I know from experience that it's hard to design a system without new drawbacks one did not think of before. In any case I dig the idea of build points entering the pool gradually after building a new miner. (If this can prevent the weirdness of having negative BP but no buildables, even better.)

[slipher]

I don't really agree that egg spam is actually a problem, but it doesn't matter because I do think that building easily-destroyed miners should be nerfed a bit. Like sometimes late in the game, I keep destroying a drill and they continually rebuild it in the same spot. It's annoying that the late-game mechanics to slow down rebuilding have no effect to discourage this.

So I somewhat like the idea of delaying the entry of BP into the pool. But it adds complexity - now there are 4 statuses for a build point: available, used, queueing, or waiting after construction. For an easier-to-understand variant, how about increasing the build time of the miner? Like, a miner at the beginning takes 15 seconds to build, but after 40 minutes game time it would take, say, 90 seconds to build. This mechanism would be far more visible to players via the under-construction status.

[ghost]

One thing is that Tremulous radar was detecting stuff no one seen, while our current radar is only improving tracking of what a player in the team already seen, if I'm right.

Well, this is wrong. Radar in unvanquished is a bit slow to trigger (on purpose, it's not aliensense), but it is really the same as aliensense, with less range, from what I've both read in code and experienced in game.
If I am wrong, which is possible, then it means (human-faction) bots wearing radars are more heavily buggy than I thought in 0.52 as they litterally use aliensense for their stuff.
To be fair, Radar's gameplay effects are pretty weird and not easy to understand.

As for the issue here, I agree that miner-spam need a serious nerf, this makes lot of games much more boring than it should.

[ghost]

See #37 which might help with this issue as well.

[sweet235]

My theory is that the preference of longer or shorter games is a question of personal taste and maybe mood. So there should be a method to configure a server for longer or shorter games.

I propose an optional upper bound on how many miners a team can have at each instant, see Unvanquished/Unvanquished@master...sweet235:Unvanquished:max-miners