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Author Topic: Sheep Tag Rivals on Starcraft II  (Read 2420 times)

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Re: Sheep Tag Rivals on Starcraft II
« Reply #30 on: December 17, 2015, 10:00:57 am »
Maybe instead of forcing a swap, you could disable joining the sheep/wolf team if they had more than X players, so the last few people to select a team might not be able to choose sheep, or at least have some sort of cancel command for the first 10-15 seconds... spending an entire round with only one wolf is pretty miserable.
It does already do this with the caveat that the leaver occurred before the team pick started, not ideal I know but more complete solutions are messy. The nice thing about the bots is you can control them: clicking a bot gives you complete control, although them remembering your commands after you click away is something I still need to work on.

Could you elaborate? By removing the pen you've taken away a lot of fundamental strategies and goals. You've also made defending dead sheep impossible for wolves.
Yes and no, some of them have just been repurposed. Balance aside, I don't see an unmanageable problem with the design of the system but time will tell. This is a huge topic but perhaps at the crux of it wolves were disproportionately rewarded for preventing both themselves and the spirits they're guarding from playing (the fun parts of) the game.

As far as other suggestions, I have some below. Please don't take these as criticisms. They are merely suggestions. I am not trying to say that you've done a poor job. I think the work you've done is far better than what I could have accomplished. I just am providing my thoughts, and if you think any of them could help, great. If not, that's fine too.
The only reason I'd consider them criticisms is if I believe the game is in perfect balance, which it has never been. You guys found it pretty early in the balancing process (the map is only a couple months old) so things are still being felt out. Likewise please don't take my responses as ultimatums (unless I explicitly say it's not changing), I can be reasoned with and dissent is typically for fostering discussion. My co-creator and I also run things by each other so we're on the same page and the resulting discussion can also change the opinions of either of us.

Regarding your suggestions:
  • Good idea, not sure if links in that section are clickable though, I'll try it out
  • Was planning to do this when we move off the [Beta] version, no point in doing it on a temporary map
  • But they do stack :)
  • I need to think about this more
    • This sort of plays into the below unless you're talking about outside of the ability system, which is likely not to happen
    • I could see an ability that is cast on Totems that has some sort of camping behavior whether it's a minion or something else. There's another map control ability I'm going to look into first: a stationary minion until a sheep nears it and then it kamikazes towards the sheep (explodes when it comes into radius of a farm or a sheep, providing counter play). This ability worked out very well in the previous sheep tag I made.
    • Yes, but their mana cost will likely increase. Will require tuning.
    • The totems can be attacked to save sheep because we noticed a significant number of new players try to attack it to save and then typically got confused when they couldn't target it. I've toyed with the idea of adding a hit number to the totem itself (proportional to the number of spirits) and I agree that currently mass-saving is too easy. I personally don't like spirits being two-hits to save but that change is not out of the picture down the road.
    • This might work
    • This breaks (sheep) map control. It becomes more plausible if it requires sight (which buffs far sight) or if it's a one-way ticket to a totem or ally.
  • Far sight is better than you make it out to be: instant awareness anywhere on the map you choose. The area is so large that you can use it to zone out sheep trying to position themselves around the map, check the locations of saving farms for quick cutting to them, and is a catch-all for sheep that are trying to be sneaky. But yes, what levels abilities are on and their power in relation to each other is not very balanced.
  • You actually only get 1/4 of a gold for killing a tiny farm (1 gold every 4 tiny farm kills).
    The sheep kill bounty is an interesting situation: there actually was supposed to be a bounty when you kill the sheep that summed the bounties of the farms that died because you killed that sheep, there just isn't a base bounty to start with like xp has (30 + sum). I did some digging and unfortunately this sum is not being calculated and therefore each sheep kill didn't have a gold bounty ever. The idea is if you kill a sheep that doesn't own any farms of value, the bounty should be small if anything. And we want gameplay to *require* farms of value if the sheep hope to win. Basic farms should be replaced by massing upgraded farms and so on as the wolves scale in power; you have to feed the beast if you hope to have a chance.
    I'm going to fix the bug first and see where it leaves it before making any other change. The bounty based on the number of sheep surviving is interesting but would likely still make situtations where a rapid succession of kills due to an attempted save puts them too far ahead. You also can't look at gold in isolation from xp as both are resources. Wolves do have that base xp bounty from sheep kills so they're guaranteed a baseline of experience that will help them level up for more abilities, they just aren't currently getting both that *and* guaranteed gold for better items. It's also worth noting that the more spirits that are dead the higher the (gold and xp) income is for wolves.
  • I don't personally like this kind of balancing, giving arbitrary rewards for not having an ally. Other things can be done here that I'd rather explore first but I haven't had the time: funneling their income & bounties to the remaining players, better bots, better managing of bots, etc

About the shade, sure its easy to avoid if you can run infinitely in one direction, or have a large mass already, but using something like that in on an isolated sheep, or a sheep in a corner, or god forbid, using two of them at once, pretty much assures a kill.
It depends, it just forces you to skip a farm ever other placement or two. You can still mass around you just can't do it on every step or it will catch up. Two shades tend to stack up on top of each other and follow the same path, and you can also use tiny farms to reroute the shade's path.

I'm not going to get into a discussion of what removing the pen accomplished (as I don't know), but I'd like to ask how decentralizing the spirit locations fixed that issue. If the pen was an issue, is decentralizing the answer? What about not being able to save sheep at all? What if spirits could not be saved, but instead can move around and locate wolves, or generate money for allies, or slowly repair hurt farms, etc.
Regarding removing saving, I know you were just spitballing but I don't think this would be the way to go. Saving forces the sheep to interact with the wolves which provides interesting gameplay. Bulldog succeeds in this because it forces sheep to do the same thing but for a different reason.

 

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