Sheep Tag Community

For sheep I was thinking they would get some abilities that cost mana and that farms would still cost gold, just to separate currencies, so you didn't have to choose between using one or the other. I suppose you could have abilities with no cost and high cooldowns, then use mana for farms, but if you're going that route, it seems weird to have mana be the currency for building farms over gold.

For shepherds, I agree that you could probably replace all passives with tech trees, but I'd be concerned about how much time people would spend just looking at their options, and how often they would have to open a menu to tech into something. I was thinking something like max level of 5, and after every level up you get to choose one of 2-4 abilities, then leave passive items in the shops to be bought with gold. I'd also say that, in general, buying items is considered a positive part of games.

I would agree that saving farms should be removed or preferably immediately removed upon finishing construction and turned into income (like st hiding/farm defense/relapse). Like you said Beer, the only way the current saving farm is useful is if you have a giant mass/no pressure, which I think is pretty much the opposite of what we want to see in games. The problem with completely removing them from the game is they are the only way sheep get better throughout the round, so we would need to add something like leveling up as the round goes on (I like the idea of this even with saving farms).

The two interval idea is basically the way it currently is except you turned the default gold interval and saving farm interval to be 6 seconds, instead of what they are now (1 and 4, maybe?). Really more of a balance issue I'd say.

I think the tokens would have a positive impact on the game, but they feel a little hacky/forced to me. Kinda hard to describe, but just getting this token every 30 farms doesn't feel like part of a real game, as much as being forced to do something. I guess it's better if you get +1 food every time you build a farm, and then can build a chicken farm or some **** for 30 food in addition to gold, but it still seems weird to have a currency that is only used for one thing. Maybe if frost farms/aura farms also had animals involved and cost food to build?

Dispersing gold on death automatically would be fine, but I don't like the idea of gold ever disappearing randomly because someone else used it or was saved... going for a hard farm/golem only to find out you don't have enough gold anymore would be pretty much the most frustrating way to die/miss a kill.

I'd suggest dispersing gold on death, then giving half the saving bonus to the saved sheep and half to the saving sheep.

You could also have separate gold pools, but make all gold generation even, so instead of giving the owner 10 gold every 4 seconds, saving farms would give all surviving sheep ~2 gold every 4 seconds and similar with killing farms/sheep for shepherds. That way everyone gets the same amount of gold, but no one can steal your share, and saving farms would even somewhat incentivize keeping other sheep alive/saving them. Would probably be a good idea to disable shepherd gold sharing with this system.

1. Should players be able to physically click build, and then farm?
2. Should button options for Attack/Move/Hold Position/Patrol be a thing?
3. Should patrol even be a thing?
4. Should shift building be allowed? Should it be instant?
5. Are we sticking to one set of build options? If so is there even a need for pressing B? Should just pressing F bring up a farm?
6. Should sheep be able to attack farms/save with a right click? Or should they require pressing A then left click. Or should they not be able to attack farms in general? Should all players farms be controlled as if it is a being shared as in they can destroy another sheeps farm by selecting it and press D.

1/5. I think it would be best to keep the build menu, unless you're removing at least a few farms, just to save hotkeys
2/3. I'd keep attack and hold position, probably drop move and patrol (or maybe make patrol only break  if a sheep comes within range, for golems).
4. Definitely keep shift for shepherds, but I was very much not a fan of instant shift build in SC2 (it made massing feel less like a game and more like a chore, not to mention faster/easier), so I'd say drop it or keep it slow.
6. Save with right click, but stick with A+left click for farms... right clicking a farm is pretty common to walk to it/change pathing and it'd be annoying to have to stop an attack, and I'd have to TK so many people if I could select their farms and destroy with D.

I agree with sticking with sheep tag 2.

I think it would be interesting to slow the game (movement speed, maybe turn rate) down a bit, maybe like 10-15%. It would hopefully be enough to reduce some luck, like jumping out of farms and just running, hoping shepherds can't click your sheep in time, and mass speed, making positioning/thinking ahead a bit more important, while still keeping the game reasonably fast paced. I'd also like to see some sort of progression, or at least increased gold options, for sheep.


Anyway, I think the real question on everyone's mind is: when is CTF coming?

Okay so we played around a bit. Found some noteworthy issues:

Wolf attack animation speed is way too slow. You can't kill a sheep that is running away from you, even if it's standing still when you start the attack.

Wolf range is way too high. You can swing on sheep well inside of their mass (not that you'll hit them ^^).

A lot of the items don't work (guessing you know this), and necklace of immunity causes wolves to miss 100% of their attacks.

A few things about mirror image: The ability animation is really slow, so using it to jump farms for a kill would be basically impossible. A couple of times the ability resulted in the shepherd/its illusion being stuck between farms. Images are kinda hard to tell apart from the real unit. Using image at the bottom of the map while facing down caused my image to go on for a really long distance before eventually (like 10 seconds) just teleporting me back to the same spot, though this may have been because i was surround by some farms at the time. The ability can also travel over hills.

Frost farm missiles can't be dodged, making it seem overpowered. I'd also like to see some sort of construction animation if possible.

Sheep speed is pretty low (360 vs I think 380 of revo), very noticeable when runtagging.

When building a farm, the sheep sometimes seems to teleport the last little bit to the farm, might just be a visual thing, but it looks choppy and sometimes the sheep still stays pretty far away. Hard farms and wide farms can be built from very far away.

008 disconnected during the start of one game and then reconnected after I spawned as wolf, but wasn't allowed to play and the round didn't end, so we had to restart the game (a -cancel or -restart within the first minute or so would be nice).

It's really hard, for me at least, to see where you can build/walk near the edge of terrain (especially since the buildings don't always turn red when they can't be built). And you can jump down/up levels of terrain really easily (not necessarily a bad thing).

Sometimes an attack command on a standstill sheep caused the wolf to run back and forth in the same area indefinitely.

I took a look at the code you're using to build, and it looks like it'd be pretty easy to fix the range issue with building from corners... you just need to check distance from any part of the farm (rectangle/square) instead of distance from the center of the farm (point).

So the code in buildinghelper.lua should be changed from:

builder.state = "moving_to_build"

local distance = (location - builder:GetAbsOrigin()):Length2D()
if distance > castRange then
    return 0.03
else
    builder:Stop()
to something like:

builder.state = "moving_to_build

local pos = builder:GetAbsOrigin() //Some sort of point object?
local x = max(location.x - castRange - pos.x, 0, pos.x - (location.x + castRange))
local y = max(location.y - castRange - pos.y, 0, pos.y - (location.y + castRange))
local distance = sqrt(x*x + y*y) //The distance from the builder to any part of the farm

if distance > [Some constant value] then
    return 0.03
else
    builder:Stop()
 
The castRange variable would need to be half the length of whatever type of farm being constructed so that the (location.x/y +- castRange) gives the min/max x/y of the farm being built. I got the distance from point to rectangle formula from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5254838/calculating-distance-between-a-point-and-a-rectangular-box-nearest-point if you're interested.

Never used this language so I don't know the syntax and all, but it should work (also possible I have no idea what I'm doing and am not even in the right section of code).

The problem is a sheep can build a farm like that without ever being vulnerable to attack. This would make it extremely difficult for a shepherd to prevent a sheep from escaping isolation.