Endgame Possibilities

[amitp]

For those of you who didn't play Steel Chaos, here's my writeup.

[hypevosa]

I managed to find a link and play, I thought I'd recognized it a little and that this was probably the spiritual successor!

[quicklite]

Huh, never heard of Steel Chaos. I'll try it out when I get the time. And as for endgames, here's my little idea:

Once an 'end-game' is triggered (which right now is just conquering 5 sectors, but you never know), there could be a small text-based warning (ERROR;2574/ORIGIN_OVERRIDE;MAJOR_THREAT_DETECTED;ENGAGE_DEFENSIVE_PROTOCOLS), and then Origin would start to glow red. Anyone currently in Origin or anyone spawning/escape keying during this occurrence will be teleported to any random town around 100-200ish squares away from Origin. Then, Origin would explode, being replaced with a massive fortress named C.O.R.E with a unique wall layout shown in this picture below (thanks for the idea/picture, hypevosa!)

The yellow sector has harder to kill, triangle-based walls and enemies but very few walls to break through, whereas the red walls has medium-difficulty, square-based walls and enemies with a decent number of walls to break through, whereas the blue sector has loads of walls to break through, but only weak-ish circle based enemies. All three types of enemies/walls get harder to kill as you get closer to the center, and all three types of enemies defend the center. The walls have turrets/produce enemies on all their open sides.

C.O.R.E will also send weak-ish enemies in all directions to make it harder for players to reach the outer walls. All town facilities will change, losing their de-buffs but becoming laser cannons, shooting at any minion that wanders into the town, making the town an effective 'safe haven' during gameplay. Towns also get 'life pods', which will teleport you to a new grid if you don't feel like fighting this boss. The teleport function is disabled during this fight to prevent people from abusing the system by getting a stealth/tanky-based tank to the outer/inner walls and then teleporting to him. When core is defeated, he will drop a significant number of victory points as well as 1-4 'consummate prisms', which will provide 25% stat bonuses and look awesome. Having 12 consummate prisms makes your tank glow. The idea of this is that it keeps the idea of playing at your own pace (you can defeat C.O.R.E as slowly or as quickly as you please, towns are safe), there's an incentive to win/clear sectors (unique prisms, awesome boss-fight), and co-operation is key (c'mon, you think you can solo this?).
What do you guys think?

[hypevosa]

What does C.O.R.E. stand for? (Corrective Operations Restoration Engine is my suggestion, sounds decently like the retaliatory facility it seems to be)

I don't like the idea of the towns losing their debuffs, that would be especially unkind to any who recently spent any large amount of points making them. As long as enemies don't ignore the safety grid of cities, the cities themselves shouldn't need to retaliate against enemies.

This is confusing: "Anyone entering the game will be spawned here instead of The teleport function during this fight to prevent people from abusing the system by getting a stealth/tanky-based tank to the outer/inner walls and then teleporting to him." Looks like you chopped a few sentences and ideas.

I'm guessing people entering the game aren't forced onto the new grid like with oryx is what you're saying? I like that, since it means a player doesn't have to deal with barely missing endgame content or having to leave during it and not being able to return (yay for not having to hold off on the bathroom for oryx! >_>) If you're also saying to disable the teleport function, we've been over why this is a bad idea.

I don't think new prisms are needed, something I would like though is actually some kind of unique drops, maybe you get a random upgrade part to a random tank - like a mod for the hurricane that makes it shoot one bolt of lightning but that lightning chains between enemies. Maybe even parts that can slowly be cobbled together into a whole new tank that has a time limit for use before it destabilizes and you have to find the parts again. Something more interesting than prisms.

Other than that it sounds kinda cool for an end fight, though 10 to 15 walls may be a little grindy for my tastes. Maybe have the facility feature 3 different sides, a triangle based side that is only 5 walls, another side that has 10 walls of square based enemies, and another side that has 15 walls of circle based. Allow the players to try and brave the high risk triangle side, the low risk but longer time to overcome circle side, or the square side that's somewhere in between.

I like having the shape based "factions" in grid 12, it's somewhat interesting - I would like to incorporate them in the endgame content somehow since it's somewhat unique, as I think it would be a shame to ignore one of the key features of the game when designing the endgame content.

[quicklite]

I....have no idea what C.O.R.E stands for, it just sounded cool >_>

As for the debuff thing, I guess you're right. I intended on it being an extra challenge for the boss fight, and having the facilities convert into something different but still useful (more facilities=more safety in said town). But I'll change that now. No need to re-read, I'll just remove the 'lose de-buff' thing.

As for the grammatical error, the "Anyone entering the game" part should not be there (My bad >_<), and is should be 'the teleport function is disabled during this fight'. But in this case, it's only /teleport. You can still teleport to towns and use the escape key. A little bit like oryx's castle.

As for why I said prisms, it was the simplest unique thing I could think of at the time. I chose it because it makes a significant, but not massive difference (a 10% bonus on everything is awesome, but not the best thing possible), and gives the oppurtunity to show off (Looking cooler once a full set has been collected). While I really like the idea of extra upgrades or tank parts, I feel that that's a whole new system of gameplay and shouldn't really be just for the boss. If it gets introduced, then by all means have the boss drop unique ones, but the boss shouldn't drop the *only* ones. To reference realm, oryx drops exalted rings which are unique and best, but you can still get paramount rings from many other things.

Why did I include 10-15 walls? Well, you don't need to destroy the whole darn thing to beat a wall, and from my experience with train/drill combos, when a lot of people are shooting the same wall segment, it'll die pretty quickly without making the wall segments OP, which would be boring. Also, 10-15 provides a fun difficulty curve for the enemies, as that many walls allows the enemies to slowly, rather than abruptly, get tougher and tougher... I like your idea of walls, though I'm really not sure what that would look like :/. Maybe keep the walls the same number, but have the triangle side have weaker walls, and the circle side have the strongest walls, and the square side have medium strength walls? I'll have to think about that.

[hypevosa]

Here's what the fortress I had in mind looks like. BAM 2 hours in photoshop (maybe alot less if I knew all the tools better)



Yellow is triangle based wall, red is square based, blue is circle based. Triangle walls hit harder like triangle enemies, squares somewhere in the middle, and circles are weakest. Everywhere that multiple lines intersect would have a new kind of annex.

The reason the walls from the other factions reach up the side is to close off the circle side, and to prevent people from otherwise skipping half the walls they'd have to go through.

People wanting to brave triangle side will get there faster, but people attacking another side will naturally have alot easier a time.

[quicklite]

That is a seriously awesome picture! Works perfectly too. I put it in my original post, along with a detailed regurgitation of what you said. Although one problem: Technically, couldn't a cunning player use the 1-wall think barrier between the blue and the yellow to bypass half the blue walls? I fixed this by saying that the red/yellow walls separating the sectors are really strong, but that leaves the problem of the yellow and red sectors, which don't have a protective wall. Perhaps having a really strong red wall going west of point (0,2) of the square section if the square section was a grid? That would make the yellow side a pain to enter, but that might add to the challenge as well as prevent the exploit from working on the red side.

EDIT: I edited your picture in my original post to show you what I mean. It didn't turn out perfectly because of my pretty bad computer, but I think it gets the point across.

[hypevosa]

Apr 10, 2013 1:27:09 GMT -5 quicklite said:

That is a seriously awesome picture! Works perfectly too. I put it in my original post, along with a detailed regurgitation of what you said. Although one problem: Technically, couldn't a cunning player use the 1-wall think barrier between the blue and the yellow to bypass half the blue walls? I fixed this by saying that the red/yellow walls separating the sectors are really strong, but that leaves the problem of the yellow and red sectors, which don't have a protective wall. Perhaps having a really strong red wall going west of point (0,2) of the square section if the square section was a grid? That would make the yellow side a pain to enter, but that might add to the challenge as well as prevent the exploit from working on the red side.

EDIT: I edited your picture in my original post to show you what I mean. It didn't turn out perfectly because of my pretty bad computer, but I think it gets the point across.

I'm assuming all walls are producing minions and have weapons on all sides. If you look carefully you'll realize that the player that hangs out anywhere near the borders will be having a not so fun time as they will have to deal with the most difficult side still. Effectively, if a player tries to take a "shortcut" by just entering at the intersection of blue and yellow they'll be fighting both walls at once unless they end up going further INTO the blue structure, negating any distance they lost by trying to cut off the very outer walls anyways, or having it be a hybrid difficulty for the time they cut off - it may even make it more difficult and time consuming since not clearing nearby enemies makes it harder to lay back and heal.

The reason I chose my design was that, it always balances difficulty with time for the intelligent player. It assumes players will try something cunning and it smacks them in the face and wags a finger at them for doing it because it's whole purpose is to make them choose between time and difficulty.

Trust me, it doesn't need that extra red wall you put in, or thicker walls at the borders.

[quicklite]

Ah, so the yellow/red border walls are still producing minions into the ends of the red/blue sectors? That makes much more sense, I figured that it just produced minions on its sector side, and therefore could be broken through with very little repercussions. I'll remove the picture and change the text back, then.

[hypevosa]

Well minions have a bad habit of not being blocked by walls, if that gets fixed (and isn't a feature) then it's not AS effective, but I assume of all walls triangles would be the walls with weapons on both sides.

[amitp]

Mar 17, 2013 13:16:14 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

I don't think actually conquering every bit of the map would feel fun at all though, it would feel like 100% grindfest or it would feel too short if the world wasn't big enough.

Clearing regions seems to be a grindfest now

We just kill one building, then move on to the next, then the next, in a linear pattern, sweeping back and forth to kill them all.

[hypevosa]

This is grindy but it's not daunting task I never will bother with because of how stupid long it is grindy. Is that an understandable distinction to make?

[amitp]

May 19, 2013 6:18:01 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

This is grindy but it's not daunting task I never will bother with because of how stupid long it is grindy. Is that an understandable distinction to make?

It's understandable but it's not what I'm talking about. The distinction I was trying to make was that I thought it'd be more satisfying if the players had to clear 5 out of N regions (possibly N being 5 but could be more) instead of 5 out of infinity regions. It's the same amount of grinding. My complaint is about the number of regions we haven't cleared, not the regions we have.

What I find unsatisfying is that we “win” when we clearly do not control the map. If we control 5 out of 9 regions then that feels like a win to me. If we control 5 out of 1,000,000 regions then you can say that's a win but it feels like we've done nothing.

I'm being told we won but when I look at the map it looks like we didn't. That disconnect is what makes the win unsatisfying. It may be that I'm too focused on the world map, as I tend to do, and normal people don't care.

[hypevosa]

May 19, 2013 11:17:24 GMT -5 amitp said:

May 19, 2013 6:18:01 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

This is grindy but it's not daunting task I never will bother with because of how stupid long it is grindy. Is that an understandable distinction to make?

It's understandable but it's not what I'm talking about. The distinction I was trying to make was that I thought it'd be more satisfying if the players had to clear 5 out of N regions (possibly N being 5 but could be more) instead of 5 out of infinity regions. It's the same amount of grinding. My complaint is about the number of regions we haven't cleared, not the regions we have.

What I find unsatisfying is that we “win” when we clearly do not control the map. If we control 5 out of 9 regions then that feels like a win to me. If we control 5 out of 1,000,000 regions then you can say that's a win but it feels like we've done nothing.

I'm being told we won but when I look at the map it looks like we didn't. That disconnect is what makes the win unsatisfying. It may be that I'm too focused on the world map, as I tend to do, and normal people don't care.

Did you read my endgame suggestion where origin ends up using the grids we control to clear a large portion of the grid and then we're teleported to a new origin on the same map, and we repeat until we've completely cleared the grid? How would that make you feel seeing the map gradually be taken chunk by chunk?

[amitp]

May 19, 2013 16:46:42 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

Did you read my endgame suggestion where origin ends up using the grids we control to clear a large portion of the grid and then we're teleported to a new origin on the same map, and we repeat until we've completely cleared the grid? How would that make you feel seeing the map gradually be taken chunk by chunk?[/quote]

For each game to be a finite chunk as part of a larger whole would be nice :-)