#Respawning Demolishers

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

robust adder
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How to best make demolishers actually demolish stuff and be a fun mechanic beyond just unlocking territory
I had the idea that demolishers respawn, but only around tungsten patches, so that base expansions, rails and other resources are safe.
But the player has to automate either the rebuilding of their tungsten mines, or come up automated ways to defend against them (turrets, ammo, landmines, maybe even artillery)

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The biggest question mark for me currently is when and where to spawn them, and how to set the territories.
Current idea: Spawn them in a 1-2 different lava spots around tungsten mines and create a custom territory that makes the tungsten area, lava spawn areas and the paths between them.
This way it's clear to the player where to defend and where to expect things to be demolished.

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I'd likely also override the AI so there's a clear "Attack and Retreat (if not defeated) Cycle"

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The lore would be that Demolishers actually chill hidden inside lava and come out to eat tungsten to harden their shells, though I'm unsure if I'd keep the vanilla territories at all then

tiny osprey
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Nice idea and good to see use of the new demolisher API

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Have you considered them coming in from far away? Perhaps they spawn near tungsten patches on the edge of what you’ve cleared

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Similar to vanilla enemies

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That allows you to set up defenses pointing at the tungsten areas at the boundary of your base

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The fundamentals of the demolisher mechanics are a bit in tension with this idea, because they’re intended an epic all-at-once boss fight that you choose to engage with on your terms

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the mod might be most appealing if you can think of one additional spin

robust adder
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I personally like having an excuse to automate things like ammo and turrets large volumes, and I've never even used landmines before, so that's cool.

tiny osprey
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That’s good then, if you have a sense you would enjoy they gameplay personally then that’s sufficient

robust adder
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But I'm also interested in exploring my own vulcanus science rework later, which would probably make use of demolisher drops, for now I'm just increasing the amount of tungsten dropped

robust adder
shadow zenith
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you could hard code the starting area to be always safe

robust adder
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Yeah, but for big enough bases you either want to expand past that, or run into huge problems when all your calcite in the starting area is gone

tiny osprey
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what if the way that demolishers attack is by expanding a thin sliver of territory like a spike directly into your base

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then their natural motion is that they will at some point travel along the spike, then go home if they weren’t angered along the way too much

shadow zenith
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patrol paths would be weird

robust adder
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I thought about making elevated rails indestructable and or even restricting their movement to narrow paths that you can bridge over or similar

tiny osprey
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it would hack the patrol paths system to make an attack, but it’s kinda nice that the attack is telegraphed on the map

shadow zenith
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you can set the ai state to attacking without changing the patrol path too

tiny osprey
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yeah. that’s probably best done for that idea

shadow zenith
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or tell it to investigate outside the territory to see if it could claim a chunk

robust adder
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Yeah AI can be overriden, you can do your own targeting afaik

shadow zenith
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I happen to have been messing with the demolisher/territory api recently

tiny osprey
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demolisher territory draws YOU ARE BUGS on your base

tiny osprey
shadow zenith
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pretty good, a little finicky but for normal use cases quite good

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yes that is a player driving a demolisher

robust adder
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Hey that's super cool

tiny osprey
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the proboscis like UI makes it look like more of an insect

shadow zenith
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oh yeah the debug setting lol

tiny osprey
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mod seems great

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especially if you can make a pet demolisher on nauvis and ride into the biters

robust adder
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There's already mods with demolisher egg production btw, haven't tried them yet though

shadow zenith
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the way I'd do expanding territory Is having it "investigate" a little outside an existing territory, and if it successfully does so without getting aggroed it claims those chunks

shadow zenith
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you may or may not see antielitz and nefrums race using it in the near future

robust adder
shadow zenith
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make the frequency of it scale with evolution, so it starts off really slow

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players can always dedicate and purposefully kill a demolisher if they need to

robust adder
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If elevated rails are safe, maybe this could allow us to make small defended pockets at mining outposts.
But I think since the only working solution to defeating big demolishers should be a mix of huge amounts of minefields, turrets and maybe artillery, having a telegraphed, small amount of paths where they likely travel is most fun

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I reduced their regen bug buffed resistances and hp already by the way, makes turrets which are not all extremely bunched up and a mix of defenses way more viable

regal crescent
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You'll want to add new defenses available on vulcanus, some kind of turrets that do good damage to demolishers with very big range, so that fight won't be over in 5 seconds.

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Maybe add a small tungsten ore patch to vulcanus starting zone, make demolishers spawn to attack non-starter resource patches on timer. Make rocket turret range 50 or smth to defend from demolishers, but they are locked behind gleba science.

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You'll need to solve this coding issues:

  1. how do you select targets for demolisher attack?
  2. how do you decide what type of demolisher to spawn? small/medium/big
  3. how do you decide where to spawn demolishers? This is probably easiest, you just need to make sure that demolisher target is between starting point and demolisher spawn point
echo wave
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right now it's just 'more DPS'. this would add some level of strategy

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if you can put up rows of walls that they ahve to plow through, and add a Regen-Stun of 1-2 seconds for each wall drilled through

robust adder
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What I don't like about regen is that it's not all that obvious just how much its doing
right now a medium demolisher cancels like 5 turrets or so shoots at it through regen alone, which is kinda rediciolous

echo wave
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might be worth trying to make a regen-vs-DPS 'health bar'