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Post by bobbobbob on Aug 8, 2017 11:48:13 GMT
I think you should be able to steal HF because otherwise there is no real reason to attack people. Maybe there could be a limited amount of total HF and you have to take it from people
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Drongo
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Post by Drongo on Aug 9, 2017 8:45:27 GMT
The reason to attack people is for leader boards, in all the resources listed in the Resources thread. Everyone wants to be at the top of a leader board, either as an individual or as a group/alliance. To further provide incentive I propose that the game provides rewards for leaders of the board from time to time. Randomly selected - maybe this month it's the leader of the Honour resource.... next week it's the leader of the Pheromone resource, and so on.
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murgle
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"Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime's work, but its worth the effort" -Fred Rogers
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Post by murgle on Sept 8, 2017 1:23:34 GMT
I like the idea of increasing the areas of contest, but I'm not sure dropping the antzzz HF system is the best way to do that, its way too important to the core gameplay and if we got rid of it we probably wouldn't attract the same players because the game would just be too different.
Food can still be made important while still having territory (maybe in the name of being different from antzzz thats what we should call it instead of "hunting field", just call it "territory", no one will ever know muhahaha), but with the inclusion of territory thats two areas of control right there. Food would still be used for things so it would just naturally have value, and you'd be able to steal more food per attack than HF, so you could get, say, 5 days of food in an attack, versus taking their HF and having to wait 5 days yourself to get the same amount of food but possibly getting more days if your opponent doesn't get the HF back. (So fighting over food would be a short-term gain, while fighting over territory is more of a long-term gain)
Also, players rising and dropping is important in tracking army movements, and the 50%/300% attack rule means you can only attack someone or several people so many times before they get knocked out of range and suddenly you're in a position where they can attack you but you can't attack them, which in its self is a large area of strategy and tactics available to utilize that antzzz veterans would likely miss having very much.
All that being said however we could just simply change the way harvesting works to this, so we'd still have hunts and chains and all that, but players would still have a choice of what ratio of workers/soldiers they want. For realism sake we can imagine it as hunts being your army clearing out the "big" obstacles like antlions, wasps, and bears (oh my!) and setting pheromone trails or something, and then your "harvesting team" coming in and just following those trails and either cleaning up what was missed or finding new stuff, and it magically teleporting from one player to another is actually done entirely via the power of movie editing and tricky camera angles!
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omnipotentman
Xenomorph
"Crap. I'm meant to get started on that assignment. I'll just log into Antzzz first..."
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Post by omnipotentman on Sept 15, 2017 11:02:27 GMT
You could have a 'fog of war' on the map. Then you have to send scouts out to find other nests.
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omnipotentman
Xenomorph
"Crap. I'm meant to get started on that assignment. I'll just log into Antzzz first..."
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Post by omnipotentman on Oct 7, 2017 5:26:26 GMT
I think Anthills should be less permanent. One player can control multiple Anthills — if you wanted to introduce an O+ system, you could make it easier to manage them through some sort of tool — but if they have too many anthills/population, they might risk an outbreak of some sort of disease. Players would have to make "medical centres" and lay nurse ants to limit the risk. If you wanted to make it even more complex, you could say that the more times a group of ants visit another anthill (that you own), they can cross that path faster (you would have a cap on the bonus).
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murgle
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"Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime's work, but its worth the effort" -Fred Rogers
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Post by murgle on Oct 22, 2017 23:31:42 GMT
I just had a thought, we might be able to combine systems of realistic terrain capture to the HF system by assigning a certain amount of "territory quality" to controlled tiles, and then harvesting the tiles would decrease the quality but bring food and possibly other resources if they exist, and territory quality could either increase at a fixed rate overtime (up to a maximum,) or be sped up or increased beyond normal means by other players who might specialise in, say, digging, and thus aerate the ground, or perhaps they could farm bugs to populate the tile. but in any case there would be jobs that increase resource production essentially so there's still an incentive to work together.
Harvesting these tiles would be accomplished via an attackable "supply line", which can also be used to reinforce raids elsewhere, and maybe could provide a constant trade of resources between different allied players or their anthills. players could guard these supply lines by assigning soldiers onto it, who would then evenly distribute across it (aka magically teleport to wherever there is a battle along it somehow probably) and there could also be predators that come along it too, maybe opening strategies to wanting either shorter supply lines for better protection, or longer ones to catch more bugs that go along the path. (and balancing out more or less workers vs. soldiers would have its pros and cons as suggested in the first post too, so it would tie in with that, but also not be limited to just harvesting)
and I think the idea of fog of war and less permanent anthills is a great idea too, since it wouldn't have the same restrictions as antzzz with everyone being in a fixed place on the map, it really opens the door to straight out hiding that information to begin with, smaller players who find themselves surrounded by giants might find it advisable to move locations for instance, or if they don't they might get stomped so hard they have to move anyway, or maybe they found the PERFECT spot to sit undetected but have to move a few tiles over to reach it, the possibilities are there.
opinions on all that?
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omnipotentman
Xenomorph
"Crap. I'm meant to get started on that assignment. I'll just log into Antzzz first..."
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Post by omnipotentman on Oct 23, 2017 3:50:22 GMT
I really like it. It definitely makes it more a strategy game. As long as this is all doable, programming and server wise.
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murgle
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"Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime's work, but its worth the effort" -Fred Rogers
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Post by murgle on Oct 23, 2017 22:11:39 GMT
It should be. its just numbers being thrown around so its definitely possible in code, and if the server can't handle it then we need a new server.
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omnipotentman
Xenomorph
"Crap. I'm meant to get started on that assignment. I'll just log into Antzzz first..."
Posts: 29
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Post by omnipotentman on Nov 17, 2017 10:50:23 GMT
Just got another idea. Anthills in the same region can build huge construction projects. So if the area is prone to flooding they can build a dam which protects them for a month(s) or if they're all the same alliance they can build a big wall to protect from invaders.
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Drongo
Administrator
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Post by Drongo on Nov 8, 2018 8:00:39 GMT
Below are some of the HF concepts we're looking into right now. Each player can have more than one nest, with each new nest having a higher ongoing cost, so only larger players with larger incomes can afford to have multiple nests. The higher the income of the player, the more nests they may choose to have (at a cost). Each nest may research/build higher capacity for workers and also for military. Capacity is not the same thing as population. A nest may have high capacity but have a very low population because the player for example may have chosen to send all their workers to another of their nests. Each nest's worker capacity is reflected by a larger foraging range (or "hunting field"). The larger the hunting field, the larger the number of workers that can be assigned to foraging (the player may chose anywhere from 0% to 100% of the hunting field to be populated, providing the player has that many worker ants available in the nest), then the higher the income that nest will gather from the hunting field. The resources gathered from the hunting field will also be affected by the base value of each tile's resources. So if a nest has for example a forage radius of 100m (that's 50 pixels in all directions), and has assigned 100% of this forage area with worker ants (assuming they have enough to do that) then this nest will gather the full amount of resources that are available to a nest of that size. Debuffs to the forage may potentially include (we're still investigating these): 1) Other nests foraging radius ("hunting field") overlapping the nest's own forage area. 2) Percentage of forage workers assigned to the area... which the player can alter between 0% and 100%, depending on the number of workers available to the nest. 3) Raids by other nests which target the hunting area workers (as opposed to raids that target the nest itself). 4) Random events such as weather events, fires, potentially seasonal changes, etc. 5) Maybe also a per-tile depletion mechanic, whereby an area can be over-foraged and begin to lose resources faster than it can generate them, resulting in an area eventually producing far less than it normally would. This image gives a concept of how different nests could have different foraging radius (or "hunting field"), and how they could overlap resulting in negative effects on neighbours. The above images show how a single nest can increase its forage radius through research/building the tech. The above are very tiny examples, maybe a nest in its first few days. Later on larger nests would cover hundreds and even thousands of tiles. Each tile represents a single square meter, or approximately 3' x 3', or about 10 square feet.The forage area of a neighbour might not be directly known in game, but might only be visible by seeing the circular "depleted area" which would be a visual indication of the nest's forage radius as well as how heavily it is being taxed by the nest's workers. Raids could be sent against another nest by selecting a tile to send a raiding party to, and depending on the strength of the party (and whether there's any workers actually working that tile or not) the raiding party would kill the workers and take the foraged resources from that tile. If this mechanic was part of the game, then it would probably have a radius feature so that a raiding party could be sent to an area rather than just a single tile, or raids might risk becoming extremely tedious. Ideas on how this might work are welcome! Any thoughts on this current Hunting Field model are welcome! Have your say, evolve the game into something you'd really like to play!
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imp
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Post by imp on Nov 8, 2018 16:19:25 GMT
So how does a player acquire Hunting Field? Will Hunting Field Chains still be effective? And if not, what kind of alliance economy could replace it?
I guess we can just see what strategies evolve in the Alpha
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Drongo
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Post by Drongo on Nov 9, 2018 1:48:11 GMT
Yep alpha will play a critical role in evolving the game, which isn't for a long time yet. Initial gameplay tests will be by Murgle and I, and then after that a very select group of folks, and then alpha... we'll advertise for alpha testers but not for awhile yet.
Hunting Field is obtained in much the same way as buildings are grown in antzzz at the moment... you invest resources to increase any one nest's size. The cost of it is affected by things like the size you're upgrading to, the species of ant you have chosen to be (some ants are excellent builders but not so great at being warriors, while other ants are the opposite, etc), the warmth of the area you're upgrading, your pheromone resource levels, etc.
Because of this, each nest has its own unique HF which cannot be taken by a competitor, and remains a capacity of that nest forever. (The nest can be dismantled partially and in waves in attacks by enemy, which might include the reduction of HF size... haven't firmed that one up yet. The aim is that it becomes possible to reduce and eventually evict a neighbouring nest if it becomes a problem or is otherwise an enemy. How this occurs exactly is not yet decided.)
What an enemy CAN do however is move an enemy nest into your HF radius (or many of them) where these new nests HF overlaps yours, and this debuffs both yours and theirs. So really large enemies can actively debuff your own HF forage rate (ie: income) by placing "disposable" nests in your range and populating them with workers purely to affect your own income... even though they themselves will reap very little reward from these new nests.
So in a way it's like a more realistic version of the current HF system - in that an enemy can indeed take your HF, but not completely... instead they sort of compete with you on it to the point where your HF is less effective than it otherwise would be.
You and your allies, in turn, have the option of eradicating these nests (either by raiding them regularly, by slaying their workers, or by actively destroying the nest, which are all actions you can order your own nest's ants to do, at the expense of pheromones).
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