Have a more traditional RTS resource gathering and spending system

[ghost]

Currently, miners proving an instant boost of up to 50 BPs (depending on proximity with other miners) to their team, and their removal also gives an immediate loss.

My proposal is about having miners give a per-tick amount of BP, slowing down as game grows old.
Those BPs would be spent in 2 ways:

• by building new things
• by maintaining existing buildings (they would require a number of BPs per tick, which would be constant)

All buildings except Reactor or Overmind would require BPs to be built, including Leech and Drill, and both Reactor and Overmind would act like "big miners".

When the amount of BPs fall to 0 because the consumption of BPs is too high for the number of miners, buildings would start to decay.

Disclaimer

Ideas without a related problem issue and lacking explanation or depth are closed after a certain time.

[ghost]

Related and reported issue is only #28 AFAIK, but there are other issues that players complain in game:

• end games are too much about miner hunting
• negative BPs are annoying as hell
• buildings are disabled seemingly randomly

I may be missing other complaints here.

Note: I think this idea needs refinements, but overall I think it would improve the situation a lot. One variant would be to have the number of BPs a building cost increase depending on the number of the same buildings, which would allow to have, for example, 1 spawn, 1 armory, 1 medistation, 1 booster, 1 miner free of upkeeps.

[ghost]

Btw, here is a RTS game implementing such a decay system when you do not have the money for all buildings upkeep. It even is more punishing than that because your soldiers start to be angry at you if they are not paid , to the point that they can betray you.
Obviously, this is a pure RTS game, so the system needs adaptations on unvanquished, but I think it would be an interesting direction to dig.

[Gireen]

@bmorel pleas try and create separate issues for problems to have at least a minimum of order in this tracker.

I don't think upkeep is necessary a traditional RTS element but we don't try to mimic any particular strategy game so this could be an interesting option.

• Expansion and building is punished with negative BP #28
  i think this at least solves the negative BPs but im not sure if expansion also will be hindered by this. Thats something that probably needs some testing
• Aliens who lost their base can make the game last quite long by spamming eggs #23
  This problem is probably related. At least one mentioned solution is quiet similar to the current idea.

[ghost]

Problem is, it seems simple mining system has already been tried in unvanquished, but had problems leading to current BP system.
The upkeep idea is the reason why I think this idea could work.

I'm not trying to mimic any specific RTS game here, I'm talking about using some mechanisms they use as inspiration. I may have lost focus while trying to add details and information, though. If so, then my apologies.

[Gireen]

Maybe i wasn't clear enough but i mean the same as you. 😄
The focus is to have RTS elements inspired by other games but with less complexity to better coexist with the FPS setting.

I think just the main idea in the issue looks good on paper but has to be tried out to see if there are any unwanted side effects.
Additional number crunching behind the scene with different upkeep depending on same building count would make it as confusing as the current system.

Which brings me to two questions.
How are the buildings to decay picked or does it affect all just a little?

How will be miner spam at game start be prevented?
Since it seems to be best option to get as much BP as possible.

[DolceTriade]

So, in the past have experimented with this type of mechanic. In fact, that's what the origin of leech and drill are. To give some background, in Tremulous, late game was determined by "sudden death", ie, you can no longer build structures after a certain time. This felt too inorganic, so we tried to do something like "mining" where the amount of BP mined over time became zero the time it takes to regain queued BP increases as the game goes on. This is similar to sudden death, but less inorganic.

We tested the following mechanic:

• Teams start with a small seed pool of BP to build their initial base
• Teams must build drills/leeches across the map to mine more BP over time
• Any BP that is lost is lost forever and never regained
• BP mined by structures is reduced over time.
  In our testing with this mechanic lead to a huge problem: a team that starts out ahead will basically be guaranteed to win, albeit very slowly. They will have a huge pool of BP to draw from and never have to deal with a shortage of BP and the losing team will lose very slowly and its just not fun for that team.

We wanted to prioritize games where both teams had a back and forth type of gameplay where even if one team is a ahead, they can still lose with a strong push and a comeback from the losing team.

While I think the current resource system can still be improved, I'd like to evolve it in a way consistent with the current path of queued BP and BP pools provided by drills leeches.

If the issue is for forward bases are punished, I think we should de-value killing forwards vs killing main base structures.

[ghost]

Was there any experiment with mining + giving buildings an upkeep? Because this is the key idea here. The consequences of a shortage of BPs for the upkeep are yet to be talked about, they're imo almost an implementation detail. The key idea is really about the mining, plus the cost of buildings being multiple: initial + upkeep.

The current BP system with free miners is very bad. People simply only build one strong base, and when start loosing, they start spamming miners everywhere because they're gratis to rebuild the same or a bit different "strong base", and this leads to very boring games.
This is what I've seen across the 2 later years, with newcomers systematically not understanding how things work. I'd say even game devs would have hard times understanding in-game why a building is disabled with current system.
I myself understood the mechanics because I studied code, and even consider the current behavior is a huge bug, which makes things less punishing than intended.
AFAIK, no person currently playing the game on a regular basis like the BP system.

[ghost]

How are the buildings to decay picked or does it affect all just a little?

This is the hard question, tbh. It depends on the variant to be adopted. Basically, I suppose the ideal situation would be same as current for disabling, that is: buildings further from a miner or Main would received decay first.

How will be miner spam at game start be prevented?

Miners would cost BPs. So, yes, fast expand could be a valid strategy, but keep in mind the momentum: loosing structures makes your team loosing momentum, and makes enemy team earning momentum.
This means enemies will unlock stronger weapons to destroy all the toys you'll be able to be build.
RTS don't have a defined way to win, there are different strategies, depending on people.
This would imo enforce this.

I guess we could also use the "BP capacity" I mentioned in another post, that is, to have all buildings able to store amounts of BPs. When one is destroyed, we could have a percentage of BPs lost, but the rest transfered. Or lost, if other capacities are full.
Those are details to talk about, when such a resource system wuold be accepted.

The idea of storing resources and having a cap would make miner spam at game start inefficient, if the enemy team chooses a rushing strategy, for example.