Circuit and CAI do not support terraform and both can be gamed hyper easily this way. There are plenty of replays that show people harming their own botmatch experiences by breaking the AI (eg. Walling off so units can't path to their base). Suggestion: where not a Chickens game, and where one side is entirely bots, disable terra by default. Can be re-enabled by players manually per game if desired. Outcome: default settings give players non janky/abuseable single player or coop experience.
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Removing terraform from bot games will make players unable to experience terraform, which is arguably one of ZK's killer features. A much better solution would be to teach Circuit to play with/against terraform, but that's also a larger project. A solution with the same outcome, but easier on the AI dev front could be making terraform easier to counter in general (cheaper Quake, easy-to-use anti-TF units in every factory)
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No. Make bots deal with terraform if they need to. How good is your evidence that people don't have fun making impenetrable porc castles?
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But the AI a killer feature, and terraform breaks it. Breaking the opponent is more impactful than dropping a trololo feature, it dictates the validity of the competitive experience. Not sure if Lamer still updates Circuit, so that might be a pie in the sky
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quote:
How good is your evidence that people don't have fun making impenetrable porc castles? |
I think the issue is more, how much is the vs AI experience reduced by the player's knowledge that most challenge and peril can be alleviated effortlessly by exploiting this game mechanic. Its hard to feel like you are playing for keeps when you can just quickly dig a shallow moat to break the AI's pathing.
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quote:
The Quake creates a powerful seismic shockwave |
wrong. it gives a very unseismic green blopp. quote:
Cost 400
Hit Points 1000 |
decrease cost - try 200 or even 100? do not let it be blocked by shields! then make AI use silo and randomly target map anomylies and most altered points as targets.
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quote:
decrease cost - try 200 or even 100?
do not let it be blocked by shields!
then make AI use silo and randomly target map anomylies and most altered points as targets. |
This is not much cheaper or more reliable than just having Circuit mass-produce Tremors and spiders in response to detecting large earthwork projects by the opponent team. 1200m silo +2x 200m Quake buys you one 1600m Tremor, but while Quake just tears down the wall (if you also apply the shield penetration...), Tremor will also tear down porc around that terraform, kill (and not just unburrow) buried outlaws, etc. A game-side feature that would make anti-terraform AI dev much easier would be some kind of a LuaRules-supplied map of the terraform as visible to the current (AI) player. Humans get to see the altered textures, after all. Having a map of visible/discovered terraforms would allow those Tremors to be applied, and also would make figuring out an algorithm to otherwise defeat them much easier.
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Not easily. I can imagine it working, but i can't picture an exact way in which the user would convey intent to destroy terrain to their units as opposed to intent to destroy enemies, and what should the priorities be. The ways that i can picture exactly are not anyhow easier than "select tremor, press F, click approximate location where the bad terraform touched you".
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GoogleFrog said: "How good is your evidence that people don't have fun making impenetrable porc castles?" He clearly said "by default", and "can be re-enabled by players via options". For unpenetrable porc castles, they can easily use Easy AI, that won;t push them so much. Otherwise - following you logic, I have super fun creating 1 metaloenergy cost unit that blows up all enemy units, instantly. what evidence you have on the contrary? Yet, no such "feature", shame. For the record - I am not thinking that removing terraform from bot matches (by default) is best, or only one course of action. What I am against is the rolleye-inducing logic of "what evidence you have that broken glass is broken". OP's idea may be wrong, but issue he raised is real, and needing to prove that it-exist-we-exist-and-we-are-not-camels-by-the-way is hamster-running-in-cage feeling inducing - and, on top of that, unnecessary. --- Side note - GoogleFrog, having to do "evidence" and "Design reasoning" for obvious things, like "AI gets broken by terraform, lets do something to fix it" is tiresome. I get why people like lamer decided it is not worth to spend mana on "4h 'reasoning' <-> 1h implementing" work cycle. At first, it seems nice that you try to have coherent design and insight re changing/implementing things. After 3th long "reasoning" discussion about obvious, absolutely basic common sense things, it gets super-tiresome and mana draining. Cheers, /CatLady --- 
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quote:
He clearly said "by default", and "can be re-enabled by players via options". |
The set of "new players who won't look at options" seems likely to closely coincide with "the set of people who most enjoy making impenetrable porc castles". The set of "players who want a fair match against the AI" seems likely to closely coincide with "the set of people who can look at options for themselves, or simply not abuse terraform". Remember that with terraform hard-disabled you can't even flatten ground to place buildings, if the campaign is any guide. Not sure if the AI knows how to do this for itself. As such making terraform disabled by default is likely to annoy *everybody*. quote:
Otherwise - following you logic, I have super fun creating 1 metaloenergy cost unit that blows up all enemy units, instantly. what evidence you have on the contrary? Yet, no such "feature", shame. |
It does not seem likely that many people would enjoy this "feature" for very long. quote:
Side note - GoogleFrog, having to do "evidence" and "Design reasoning" for obvious things, like "AI gets broken by terraform, lets do something to fix it" is tiresome...
At first, it seems nice that you try to have coherent design and insight re changing/implementing things. After 3th long "reasoning" discussion about obvious, absolutely basic common sense things, it gets super-tiresome and mana draining. |
Sometimes what appears to you (or to somebody else, sometimes even GoogleFrog) to be "obvious" and "common sense" can be "wrong for subtle reasons"... if not "absolutely daft". It tends towards the "absolutely daft" end of the scale when you add hidden corollaries (as you in particular appear to do often). "AI gets broken by terraform, lets do something to fix it" is a different statement to "AI gets broken by terraform, let's ban terraform". Not all cures for a problem are necessarily better than the original problem.
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Re the cures - it is exactly what I mentioned in my own post, so your lecture is unnecessary. Heck, I, even mentioned that I think OPs solution to the problem (ban terraform by default) is BAD idea IMO, which makes 3/4 of your post irrelevant and unnecessary. What I was referring too, was the - extremely tiresome - need to "prove" that the problem even exist, which is the kind of things that ARE obvious to common sense. AI.Can't.Deal.With.Terraform (as of now). We can, safely, jump to discussing solutions, rather than do philosophical debates "maybe the fact that it is broken is good for players liking that it is broken, what evidence you have against it". ---
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Nobody disagrees with the statement that "the AI can't deal with terraform". quote:
We can, safely, jump to discussing solutions |
We first have to establish how big of a problem "the AI can't deal with terraform" really is. "How good is your evidence that people don't have fun making impenetrable porc castles?" is not a question which challenges the statement "the AI can't deal with terraform". It is a question about how big of a problem it is, and also a question which challenges the proposed solution "disable terra by default". GoogleFrog WAS discussing potential solutions. He was just disagreeing that this one is a good idea. As such your entire argument is based on fallacy. [Spoiler]quote:
Re the cures - it is exactly what I mentioned in my own post, so your lecture is unnecessary. Heck, I, even mentioned that I think OPs solution to the problem (ban terraform by default) is BAD idea IMO, which makes 3/4 of your post irrelevant and unnecessary. |
You appeared to think quote:
"by default", and "can be re-enabled by players via options". |
was a relevant statement, which did make it necessary (if only to explain some things to Ivory).
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This is easy problem to fix. If you want super competitive no terraform bot matches, just turn terraform off yourself? Is it hard to turn off terraform? From my experience its super easy.
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No shit genius, it's a good thing your here or we'd have never known! Subject was a proposal re: changing a default setting to another default setting. In either state, that setting could be changed manually.
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Im willing to bet more people would want it default to have terraform than changing it for no reason. Its easy as pie to make a match however you want, what's the point of changing terraform off when its such an important part of game? Some maps its very difficult to place factories without terraform, some turrets benefit from terraform also, and honestly its just a really big part of the game. It would be crazy to have new players playing bot matches never having used terraform, then they have to figure it out playing against other players getting complained at because they don't know how to play? Its more trouble than its worth to change terraform off by default, and honestly its not what most players want. More people would have to manually change terraform on than people now that change it off by a huge margin. I see like 1/100 matches where terraform is turned off on AI battles.
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Whenever fifteen platforms comes up in the teams room, it feels like every time someone is complaining about not being able to teraform. Disabling teraform by default would have that effect for every map and every game, imo.
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the percentile of users that find this a roadblock is negligible, certainly not a big enough issue to alter default settings. It's your game under your control and the term abuse is in erect form for sure. It'd be way low on programming priorities (imho) as well for complexity, and behind quake adjustment anyways. Come in the 1v1 queue, who cares what AI does, test out the skills on me. I will burn a donut hole through your army while you dig your moat or whatever. But while we're brainstorming it's currently Encounter Terra-block > Meh Can be something like Encounter Terra-block > call transport (widgets working well now) feasibility loop > quake feasibility loop > Meh
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