Just tried an alternative approach to balancing the "base vs base" nebula scenarios:
1) Took out all ongoing bonuses from destroyed small bases (for both ally and enemy)
2) As suggested earlier (iirc) in this thread, caused the death of a small base to provide an immediate boost to the same-side large base's production.
The idea being that the anti-snowballing isn't a straight-up rubberbanding anymore but just a burst of opposition that, if overcome, leaves the aggressor in a clearly superior position. But not an invincible position, most likely.
The result was a bit of a ping pong back and forth between the EEr and SF in the scenario I tested. I led the EEr to an early small base kill but my champ died during the second SF reprisal-for-dead base and I didn't try to jump back in. Basically the battle kept swinging back and forth until the SF won with just its damaged large base and about 10 Intimidators left (which then proceeded to wipe my HW since it just had a space dock on loop build and my champ).
That was just with having the small base death give 20,000 points to the corresponding large base. That basically lets the large base buy 5 whole "large base spawns" all at once. It felt more or less right (at least I think y'all will enjoy it more than the current form of rubberbanding) but I'm wondering:
- Should the amount given go up for later bases killed on the same side? So the first miner base dying should give 20k, the second miner base dying should give the miner large base 25k, etc. Instead of just 20k for each.
-- For that matter, should the amount given go down?
- In the bigger-scale scenarios later on, should each small base give more than 20k?