#4625 : [PAS] A Rude Awakening
#[PAS] A Rude Awakening [4625]
dense voidBOT
#4625 : [PAS] A Rude Awakening
dim bay
100% better than my PAS version.
Though some things were need to be mentioned:
The Corrupted Terp Seems Unreliable.
"Manual Mode" For C-Terp Doesn't seem to absolutely work.
Mesh overrides resource terrain, likely would also override breeder terrain!
Tutorial (Factory) UI goes too small when on Top-Down Mode.
Player has barely any means of going up a hill/mountain, either they wait some creep to get up to there so they can trickle-ly build a corrupted tower, or buy the shield upgrade, build, wait for it to amass creep, then move, acting like a stash.
Corrupted Towers should auto delete themselves when they are off-creep far too long so the player wouldn't be confused of why aren't they getting creep towers over time.
Over-all, 10/10 PAS CPACK 1.0 release.
||I'd miss my version of PAS CPACK though.||
Anyway have this recording of the autopilot's weapons being backed up in a corner.
GAMEPLAY SPOILER
cloud pelican
What's a reso trap?
barren drum
Put it down on redon, greenar, or bluite. Redon and greenar will be sent to the factory, bluite will be turned into creeper.
barren drum
@dim bay How did you get 5:53?
dim bay
<@452289761571373097> How did you get 5:53?
Let me get the recording
@barren drum
First rush was me withering down it's hp, enough for the second rush to actually kill the rift lab.
barren drum
Hmm. I'd like no not have to make every creeper unit only placable in creeper, but that's some hard cheese to fix otherwise.
dim bay
Wdym?
I did place them on creep.
barren drum
Like the lab, where you can't move it to a cell that doesn't have creeper on it already.
dim bay
Oh that one.
Speed runners really do play RTS games in early-rushing tactics.
Mr Hyper could only hope a Rift-Lab Player VS PAS Player.
barren drum
Eventually, I want to have networking built into PAS such that any PAS level can be played as PVP if launched in MVerse. Don't get your hopes up too much on the timeframe for that though.
barren drum
I have some ideas on how to make it work with as little networking as possible.
For balancing, I want to avoid having a single strategy that can cheese any level. The easiest way to do that would just be to make every sleeper unit, except for maybe some special ones, only movable to creeper.
dim bay
...RiftLab player gonna rush taking territory fr fr.
low flint
You could probably prevent cannon drops for quite a while just with some AC underneath the lab.
You could make the lab create a bit of AC similar to how the Sleeper lab makes Creeper; means that cannons need to drop into AC. Cannons then take increased damage and have their damage heavily mitigated.
barren drum
That's not a bad idea. If large amounts of AC are present in each level, I'd want to give cannons a toggle to target AC too.
high coral
My feedback:
I think it's really beautiful and amazing work, but also not any fun to play (for me atleast) 😦
I went in playing this naively, without trying to game the mechanics, without pausing. I did not finish it, because progression was very slow and drudgery. I felt like Sisyphus.
After having played cw4 too much, placing towers has become tedious. Placing towers without being able to drag drop them, is extra tedious. Automated tower expansion would be a great boon.
All build limit expansion being based on resources, makes it a very slow game mode. It will also require very specific map design to make it work. Fe: you can't just toss this cpack into a farsite map and except it to work properly, because build limit expansion is so contrived. So imo not all build limit expansion should be based on resources.
I think those were the main reasons as to why it wasn't fun for me. You can probably safely ignore my feedback btw, I've always been a very picky player. I don't like popular game modes like fps or vacuum either.
Less critical, more nitpicky things:
I miss double click selecting of nearby units & the info panel information of vanilla units (build status and ammo in particular). I loved that you got drag select in.
It would be a nice touch of the resource gatherer snapped onto a resource if your cursor was close "enough" to a resource without a gatherer in place.
Blue units in blue creeper is a bad color scheme. I've been meddling with classic PAC and changed the dominant color to yellow and that was a game changer for me.
barren drum
I could give units a strong yellow outline, keeps the color scheme (which I'm a fan of) and makes them easily viewable under creeper.
high coral
And outline can be turned off in the gui options, so players can chose. That would be ideal.
barren drum
I was thinking about some way to reward the player more immediately for advancing in the map. Points for "free upgrades," having resource gain increase with coverage, or giving you a direct resource boost for each destroyed player unit would be some options to reward aggressive play.
low flint
I was thinking of resource caches around the map that just give you ~100 when destroyed.
Push to get them, they give you enough resources for basic upgrades.
high coral
I would go for land mass covered by creeper and have that accumulate "creeper energy" as most basic resource. Similar to how towers work. And they you can still have pods or "alien artifacts" scattered around that give larger one-time/over-time boosts.
barren drum
I'd like to avoid adding new resource types that aren't in the base game.
high coral
I don't think you're using energy yet.
barren drum
I suppose. What would it be used for though?
high coral
unlocking mortars and cannons, cheap basic stuff. While more advanced stuff like shields would require specialty resources.
I'm basically suggesting the vanilla economy with soylent towers replaced by creeper covered land. I have little imagination 😄
After some more thinking: it actually doesn't matter what the basic resource type is, it could be bluite instead of energy. It's just that imo PAS needs a way to accumulate that basic resource from something that is not dependant on map maker choices. In the base game this is soylent towers that generate energy.
barren drum
I’ll try some prototypes of a few different systems. Resource pods, spawning resources on unit kills, energy with coverage, anything else that crosses my mind. Maybe a combination of two of these would be best.
high coral
For my PAC I made a killcounter with a harmonic series (after having seen Argonwolf talk about it).
barren drum
I personally like the idea of giving you maybe 10 Redon and 5 greenar with each unit destroyed. It gives more meaning to destroying a cannon, since you get a bonus that’s not removed once it builds another one.
Also if it’s fun I could animate little cubes flying to the factory.
high coral
Harvesting humans for power is a very creeper thing to do, so as base resource gathering method, also very fitting 🙂
You could also try to use the in game packet routing option, but with too many custom towers, just animating floating packers might even be faster.
barren drum
Packet routing is likely out of the question, as I have no idea how to make a path finding algorithm in 4rpl, or in general.
high coral
I mean the in game packet routing option of custom units.
barren drum
That would let vanilla packets be run through towers. Also, sleeper towers connections are over about double the distance, so they wouldn’t connect with that option on.
low flint
Packet routing is likely out of the question, as I have no idea how to make a pa...
It isn't that bad to make one; you basically just have each tower point to a different connected tower and very basic math to figure out which tower to point to. But definitely more work than other options.
high coral
Instead of animating, you could also change the color of the connections depending on what passes through them.
barren drum
I could theoretically make a full network out of them, but the other question is should I? A lot of players don’t like feeling like they have to make a network of towers, Kalli pointed this out earlier.
high coral
but you already had color coding for efficiency I think, so that conflicts with that.
I want a bot that places them for me 😄
barren drum
I’ve made two tower placement algorithms now, lol. I’ll pick one.
acoustic flume
The UI for the resource is microscopic. even zoomed all the way in, I couldn't read it
for the factory, rather
see?
low flint
The UI for the resource is microscopic. even zoomed all the way in, I couldn't ...
Same issue I had above, apparently that is what happens if you play in top down view.
acoustic flume
Oh, I must have scanned through too quickly, I missed it.
dim bay
My feedback:
I think it's really beautiful and amazing work, but also not any fu...
The towers seems to be the most noticeable for experienced players...
Maybe the auto-mized tower-placement in my PAS maps just focuses on making the game faster or combat-full gameplay i suppose...
acoustic flume
The towers are a bit arduous.
barren drum
I’ll probably modify autopilot’s tower algorithm a bit to work for this mode, since it’s much faster, responsive, and better optimized (for those who care, it doesn’t even use any GetUnits calls anymore)
dim bay
I’ll probably modify autopilot’s tower algorithm a bit to work for this mode, si...
Now i wanna add a custom upgrade that allows towers to be automatically built, but it would start consuming 10-25 of each resource every time it does build, has around a delay of 15-40 seconds, and it's extremely expensive.
barren drum
Locking QoL behind resources is iffy
dim bay
Placing towers is ardous enough they say though.
...oh wait.
It would mean forcing them in either side.
random oar
This map was tagged easy, but I gave up my 2nd try because I ended in a stalemate. Must be doing something wrong, but I didnt get any progression
I expected the terp to make more mesh, this was pointless
low flint
I think you should slowly win a stalemate; so long as you are getting resources you should eventually get enough power to beat the humans if they don't stop you.
barren drum
A few tips:
-cannons are great for concentrated fire or getting units inside of shields
-mortars are good at longer ranges and exploiting areas the AI isn’t properly defending
-Parking a shield on top of an M-rift essentially turns other m-rifts into strong emitters
dim bay
Crucial tip when in a stalemate:
Do NOT be afraid to mass-attack.
I.E. Grabbing around 10-15 C-Cannons then moving them behind the enemy's frontlines, it would take many missile launchers just to stop them... unless theres DEEP AC present.
cedar marsh
@dim bay thank you for mentioning the bug involving top down view with the factory!