Build 39

[rob]

Hey everyone!

I was away all weekend. Anything happen while I was gone?

Seriously, thanks for finding and reporting the problems. You guys are awesome!

I've capped bonuses at 10x (or .1x for debuffs). I reset the database to the state from last Wednesday at the push. Let me know if this doesn't fix things.

Rob

[tarbomb]

Game froze on both windows at once. I could see shields/health going up and down but the view itself stayed the same. Armada bug?

[linkshot]

This makes me happy.



Atala is at Level 6 with all Level 5 facilities active. Ostenia is being built up to Level 5 Facilities.

[tarbomb]

Seems like stacked lenses can cause some visual bugs. This happened right after picking up a stacked lens. 3 empty slots, a lens, and another empty slot instead of the lens + 4 empty slots it should have been.



Also, more graphical glitches: vertical player names and tanks driving from under you (again!):





Both glitches happened at the same time - one on one window, one on the other.

Building on enemy (or is it enemy on building?):

[tarbomb]

On superloot: the caps don't seem to affect prism drops or crystal drops. This means that superboosting a region, while it won't cause the same kind of absurd gridshard region drops as before, will still buff drops past 10x by giving you a huge number of prisms which are converted to shards. Killing an entire drill-station system (the station plus the walls and the annexes) will give around ~1.5 million shards if you're lucky.

From a strategic viewpoint I don't see the problem with huge numbers, as long as leveling up/building facilities is made expensive to match. The real problem with the imbalance is that the pace of leveling changes drastically depending on the state of the region. There's no incentive to end the game and reset the shard drops back to normal (since less gridshard drops means less leveling), and as a result the preferred course of action is to dump the shards into facility sockets in order to avoid endgame. I think two things need to be done: 1) change the endgame to something like "conquer a given space" rather than the rather arbitrary "n level-ups", and 2) decouple leveling from gridshards, so that there's no personal benefit to taking advantage of uber-buffing anymore.

[rob]

Server was down for a while but is back up now.

[rob]

Feb 26, 2013 21:07:48 GMT -5 tarbomb said:

On superloot: the caps don't seem to affect prism drops or crystal drops. This means that superboosting a region, while it won't cause the same kind of absurd gridshard region drops as before, will still buff drops past 10x by giving you a huge number of prisms which are converted to shards. Killing an entire drill-station system (the station plus the walls and the annexes) will give around ~1.5 million shards if you're lucky.

Interesting; I will have to check this out.

Feb 26, 2013 21:07:48 GMT -5 tarbomb said:

I think two things need to be done: 1) change the endgame to something like "conquer a given space" rather than the rather arbitrary "n level-ups", and 2) decouple leveling from gridshards, so that there's no personal benefit to taking advantage of uber-buffing anymore.

In general, I think uber-buffing is boring, because then the game has no challenge. So it needs to be dealt with.

The endgame plan for now is to turn it into "conquer X regions" instead of "get X city levels". We'll keep track of who worked on a region (killing fortresses and building things) and issue rewards when each region is conquered. There will be a bit of a race towards the end, because if the game ends and you've put a lot of effort into a region but didn't quite conquer it, you'll get no reward. I'm not sure how this will play out but I'd like to give it a try.

We are also planning to get rid of the leveling system and have tank unlocks be more LoL-style: each week there are some free tanks, but you can pay VPs to unlock your favorites permanently.

[amitp]

Woah, 32bit overflow? Awesome find, y'all!