Follow-up on ship bays: Grapes "waves & nasty stuff"

[kasnavada]

Following a small discussion with chemical_art and input from Chris, "Grapes".

This builds on the idea of the ship bays, with 3 main differences: the grape would mature until ripe, and if destroyed before that, everything in it would be destroyed. The second difference would be the content of the grape: it could become... a wave, a golem, a dire guardian, and not reinforcements. It's meant to be offensive in nature. Third: it could spawn from other structures not meant to reinforce, like raid engines.

The point being to reinforce the tactical options in game, and give the player the choice between leaving the grapes to grow, or to take the initiative, and try to neutralize the threat before it becomes an issue. Of course, at the cost of alienating the entire planet where the grape grows  >D.

Note: this would NOT have to touch in any way the ship bay & reinforcement mechanics proposed in the design document, nor replace the wave mechanics (whether kept in game or not).


The main issue I see with it is "neutered" planets => they should not spawn there, because there would be no point.
What do you guys think ?

Original discussion:

Actually, I'd add that some "grapes" could even become the old carriers. I feel like calling those grapes for some reason. There is possibly a ton of mechanics that could be spawned from it in the future.

I can imagine it being a grape in that when it is ripe (full) it falls off the vine and into the player's lap.
So with that idea, if a player pops the grape before it is ripe then all the ships get destroyed.

I could imagine wave-like mechanics spawning like this. Or golems. Or the raid engine popping waves after waves every 4 minutes exactly with this mechanic. Which would leave the player with the choice of "do I go beat that (and the entire planet with it) before it spawns ?", or "do I let it hit fall on my defenses ?"

Not sure it belongs in the base design though.

I think that this is worth a separate topic for discussion in the ideas forum, because it's both a very good idea and a simple one.  Seems like a good one for potential inclusion to me, unless there's some major problem with it that people think up.

[chemical_art]

Beat me to the punch (or more like our punches eat each other). funny about that. Anyway I think this there are two seperate things: "Grapes" and warp mechanics. I'll address the later first (from my deleted thread):

In the lobby there was a checkbox that either caused waves to appear on in your system, or the units would warp from the nearest warp gate and then enter the standard way. I would think it would be organic for the latter option to be implemented as how Kasnava suggested.
As for addressing neutered planet, the idea is that the warp gate acts like the conduit that allows the transfer of currency, but it needs the actual bays to spend them. So if a planet was recently neutered too badly (all bays destroyed) the AI could not "spend" the currency so would fall back to another world. Bays do come back over time even if neutered so eventually the waves could summon from there. But if you smash them too hard the cycle continues.

This similar logic of "no bays = no spending of points" would also prevent too much abuse of grapes. If a grape is squashed odds are bays are getting hurt as well. If there are no bays then they are no vines for the grapes to form, so they would go into another world. So it will then be a balance of controlling the destruction.

[kasnavada]

In the lobby there was a checkbox that either caused waves to appear on in your system, or the units would warp from the nearest warp gate and then enter the standard way. I would think it would be organic for the latter option to be implemented as how Kasnavada suggested.

I like that !

However, as stated above, I don't think that what's proposed here should replace the standard system, just be a variant in some cases. So, instead of the checkbox, maybe there should be a slider with "All spawn like AI war 1 waves" (left) to all spawn like this, when applicable (right) ?

[Tridus]

This seems like a natural way for the AI to build "big" projects, so it'd be more like a slider for how many resources the AI should invest in those. That makes it like a difficulty option for the plot, where the more that gets put into it, the more grapes the AI will try and grow, and the faster they'll ripen.

[Orelius]

I like this.  The game should reward proactive action, so popping grapes before they become waves or nasty things would be a pretty cool idea.  It'd be a great way to encourage raiding, as it'd be essentially getting a discount on killing a bunch of ships.

[PokerChen]

We plugged it initially into the astrotrains proposal as destinations of trains at fabricator worlds, which may be building, say, golems. Normal waves could also conceivably use this, but I would not like a way for players to consistently prevent all types of AI aggression

[kasnavada]

I thought of something, should hacking be in the game.

Hacking a grape could have the following effects:
- delay (would delay the ripening),
- sabotage would inflict a malus of some sort to the spawned unit, and matches well what is done with the marks on the other thread)
- emp when ripening, instead creates a (large ?) emp wave which enables the player to exploit the grape,
- explode same as above, but explodes,
- parasite all ship spawned actually... fight the AI.

Another idea:
This is in addition to "grapes" keeping the ship bay format. Which means that one grape would have one ship type only. But, should it spawn a wave, it would / could need multiple grapes no ? That would mean that grapes would actually really spawn as multiple "structures" and you'd get the choice of destroying 'only' the most annoying ones, rather than all.

Example: a grape with 2 "HK grape", 4 "bomber grape", 2 "flagship grape" => the player could only destroy the HK ones.

We plugged it initially into the astrotrains proposal as destinations of trains at fabricator worlds, which may be building, say, golems. Normal waves could also conceivably use this, but I would not like a way for players to consistently prevent all types of AI aggression

Yes, I think it can be plugged into trains, but could exist independantly. That said, as stated above, I don't think either that it's a good idea to replace entirely regular waves with this. I think chemical_art had the right idea (a bit above) on this one, making it a possibility.