Build 53

[tim]

Hello everybody!

Welcome to build 53. Here are the changes:

* Coin Indicator no longer updates until poof hits
* Replaced buttons in various dialogues with new, shinier buttons.
* Make Convoys travel town-to-town
* Added a new Convoy: Flux Barge.
* Adjusted speeds of older convoys
* Adjusted Convoy drop tables.
* Moved Crystals to be behind Long-Term Storage when it is open.

This week we spent some time polishing up our UI tools, to clean up some of the slapped-together UI that was made last week to get buy offers out, and to prepare for new UI projects such as making and browsing Sell Offers.

Convoys now travel from town to town instead of in a straight line across the map. They still travel across the map, but they "visit" towns along the way, ostensibly to collect fuel from the sockets.

This week Rob also added a new Convoy, the Flux Barge, to test the new version of our tank creation tools. He also reduced drop rates of the normal convoys, and made this new, more difficult convoy drop at roughly the old rate. This is partly because Convoys should now be slightly easier to kill, as their town-to-town paths take them through more areas that are guaranteed to be cleared.

Thanks again so much for helping us to test the game, it's great to have active players giving us feedback. Please report bugs and other issues in this thread.

Tim

[Duco]

Aren't new builds usually released on fridays? Anyways, nice work!

[hypevosa]

We just did an antimatter convoy and neither tanker dropped any loot at all... considering even the weakest enemies in the grid always drop SOMETHING this is really not cool when you spend 20 minutes waiting for them to spawn. I would suggest just having a loot check where if there's no drop it runs the loot tables again and again until something drops - or give it a 100% drop chance of something (like pulchs at least)

[rob]

We made a fix to a database table that was causing some real bad server lag spikes. Has anyone noticed an improvement or do things seem the same?

[renenutet]

Yes, performance has improved! Rubberbanding was awful, but now it's a lot better. Thanks Rob.

[hypevosa]

indeed, alot less rubberbanding in my experience, but our maps are so huge now we still get alot of lag on zooming in and out. Perhaps we could give an enemy territory toggle somewhere so that people can flick them on and off quickly if we need to look at them, but keep them off for when we're just trying to teleport to a player or a city.

[Stabbeh]

Agree with hype on the loot thing, convoys are a team effort and deserve better loot

[delsy]

Performance significantly better. Smaller convoy drops seem justified considering how many people will be piling on them, so longas they don't drop nothing outright

[fsm]

I was experiencing a lot of lag on a windows 7 laptop today. I didnt get it on the vista desktop though.

[tarbomb]

How many towns does a convoy visit? I've seen convoys travel to one town before flying off into the wilderness.

I'm annoyed with the drop rate nerf on convoys - specifically, the fact that prisms no longer drop means that if you die, there's only one way to get your prisms back: farming fortresses. There's no way to choose to perform a higher difficulty task (convoys, possibly scouting) to rebuild; this feels needlessly grindy to me. I see three possible solutions:

1) Make prisms tradeable (optimal - not only does it mean that you can get prisms back using any method of gaming, but you can also create a "death reserve" so you can get back on your feet instantly after dying if you've saved up enough)
2) Bring back convoy prism drops
3) Eliminate death penalty for prisms, moving the main burden to volatile storage, whose items can be purchased (allowing you to turn the rare loot you get from convoys into prisms)

[gingerbear]

I am grateful for the overall performance increase the game shows.

I think the convoy loot is a bit broken, because:

- 1) It is not that easier to kill them. Specifically, they tend to move between cities that do not have cleared areas between them, so unless we get lucky, now even "perfectly clean" sectors won't be help at all since there is no guarantee that they get passed through their whole length.
- 1b) Additionally: As new cities get discovered, convoys will have more targets to choose from. Which means that now we are bound to clear to any discovered cities because convoys will likely search them out (I guess their path finding algorithm goes "start by nearest to edge of the map city", which are evidently always the fresh cities), moreover, we should also clear paths towards any probable moving direction (cities in sight towards other edges). It also means that until now we disliked notorious explorers because "oh damn, you messed up this nice path that leads through the clean region", which has now escalated to "well, f*ck you, this new city means another 3-4 unnecessary long paths to clear back and forth if we want the convoys caught".
- 2) Convoy supposed to be "endgame material", which means it should drop accordingly. I'm fine with it no longer dropping shards, but getting 0 loot is just plain "why do we even bother?". It should always drop at least 1 item, and I'd say the items level should be balanced to the difficulty: getting a lvl 7 tank unlock from a hard kill feels just as bad as not getting anything.


What I feel would be balanced for convoy drop:
- I'm fine with no grid shards.
- I'm fine with no prisms, as long as the prism drop rate and quality is increased at the towers:
Super Tanks should drop higher prisms as they are a hard kill now, Drills should drop double tops again. This would be also an incentive to actually kill stuff, not just exploring around like a mad man or gct/delta hunt, or just sit around and waiting for a convoy while others try to clean some sense into the map. If the actual usefulness of prisms is further increased (let's say by a 10%), it would also be a good motivational factor.
- Convoys should always drop at least 1 item, or 3 items maximum. I would make the drop convoy type dependent, and drop amount dependent. The harder the kill is and the less item drops, the better it will be. Difficulty now is AMT < Baryon < Flux, this could mean a plain % increase at better drops. Similarly, the amount of loot could provide an inverse proportionally bigger chance in getting higher tiers, ie. a single drop would be at least 75% a level 12+ item, while if three items drop they might as well be all level 7-10.
- If only one thing drops from convoy it should be always either a storage or an augment. If we get storage we feel more rewarded, however this would lead to serious convoy grinding in order to keep up. If we always get at least an augment, that would not make convoy hunting disproportionally "good" against other methods, yet still useful in the long terms. (There are a lot more tanks to augment with the same level than storage to unlock.)

[Duco]

You can't switch tanks from the edge of a town, even tough the color of the button says you can.

[hypevosa]

I've been able to not play grid12 alot more easily since the convoy loot was so severely nerfed