[N7] server - testing unlimited balance mods

[grmg.pl]

I added another feature suggested by Lancer:

Posion contagion: A human touching a poisoned teammate will get poisoned too (with the same duration). The idea is to make camping harder for humans - they'll transfer the poison to each other when camping. Most likely this needs some testing and evaluation to see if it's not too anoying. Touching a booster poisons a human in the same way as when bitten by a poisonous alien.

F1

[Nod_Nod_Nod]

Dont use poison cotagion. It is allready implemented in TremX and its very hard to survive with it, becouse medi doesnt eradicate that poison. One human is poisoned and is on medi. Second one is clear and too on medi. He get touched and they wont heal at all.

[grmg.pl]

Dont use poison cotagion. It is allready implemented in TremX and its very hard to survive with it, becouse medi doesnt eradicate that poison. One human is poisoned and is on medi. Second one is clear and too on medi. He get touched and they wont heal at all.

Hahahaha. Total lolz

Lets test this, then decide.

[nalf]

Dont use poison cotagion. It is allready implemented in TremX and its very hard to survive with it, becouse medi doesnt eradicate that poison. One human is poisoned and is on medi. Second one is clear and too on medi. He get touched and they wont heal at all.

That's why I mentioned that it needs some testing. It's a slight advantage for aliens, but I don't think it's so disastrous for humans.

1. Humans can simply alter their behavior. When a poisoned teammate runs to a medi, just step back until he's cured. (I know, people will tell me that I'm giving players too much credit and that they will never do something like that ... ).
2. On UBP humans can build several medis so that they won't touch each other. (Also helps in the case players are homophobic.)
3. The transferred poison keeps it's timer, so even if two or more people try to heal and meanwhile infect each other, the poison will eventually wear off for all of them (unless they die, of course).
4. Another possibility would be to modify it so that a human standing at a medi cannot be infected.

[Lancer]

I love the "several medis" quite...

"Another possibility would be to modify it so that a human standing at a medi cannot be infected. "

Yes - and by the way, for a human in ATCS tunnel to base -> Touch 3 people = effect over, lose 5 hp max.

[nalf]

"Another possibility would be to modify it so that a human standing at a medi cannot be infected. "

Done.

[Forty-Two]

I made several modifications, mostly suggested by CU|ams, that are aimed to balance unlimited build point servers. I need people to play it to get some feedback, so you're all welcomed to play :-).

All games are analyzed by TremStats. Currently, I don't have a place where to publish the results, but as soon as I get some place, you'll be able to compare your skills, view games history etc. etc. (Anybody could help with a hosting? I need PHP/MySQL hosting with external access to MySQL to periodically import analyzed data.)

Features

1. Disables grangers during Sudden death (with an exception when there is no OM). (In most games I've played for aliens, at least 1 person plays a stupid battle granger and feeds the other team, no matter how many times I asked him not to and explained ...)
2. Antifeed. Edit: Credits/evos are not awarded right away, but released slowly over time. When a player dies, the credit not yet released are lost. This motivates people to stay alive, in particular, not to feed by trying to get evos/credits by desperate suicide attacks. (The plan is to take the buildings around a player into account, so that credits are released slower when camping and/or faster when in the enemy base.)
3. Defence computer limits. Only up to 2 DCs are considered when repairing a building (the number is configurable). This way, humans can no longer build a farm of DCs that repairs their base at 100HP/s or so.
4. List team' evos by issuing a new command /listteam. Useful for organizing rushes. Works great when bound to a key. Edit: Also visible in the team overview in the HUD.
5. Acid tubes are built in 10s, turrets in 15s. (The standard is the opposite.) In vanilla Tremulous, aliens have 150bps vs humans' 100bps. In UBP, aliens lose this advantage. Setting lower build time for acids and higher for turrets compensates this.
6. The Granger dance.
7. Scaring/nade.
8. Edit: Contagion. A human touching a poisoned teammate will get poisoned too (with the same duration). The idea is to make camping harder for humans - they'll transfer the poison to their camping teammates. Most likely this needs some testing and evaluation to see if it's not too anoying. Touching a booster poisons a human in the same way as when bitten by a poisonous alien. Edit: I realized that this also helps smart dretches gain evos. If a dretch poisons one human out of a large group in a tight corridor, most likely they'll get all poisoned, and the dretch will get more evos if they eventually die.

Ok, some of these are good, and some of them are crud. I've found that the game is very biased towards aliens (even with the aliens already winning many games in vanilla, this is worse).

The antifeed sucks, mainly because I'll get something powerful (like pulserifle+suit) and raid the alien base, fully expecting to die, but only after I kill some aliens, and nade some eggs. This leaves the alien team weak, and I have enough credits to rush out and do it again. However, in this case, I don't have enough evos to do that, even if I destroyed the alien base singlehandedly and destroyed every alien except for a dretch that came up behind me, 30 seconds in. I don't get all the credits due to me, even though I was definitely not suicidal.

The contagious poison is similarly annoying; as others have pointed out, this leads to mass poisoning of teammates. To add to the human dilemma, tubes now take 10 seconds less, and rets 10 seconds more!

To illustrate this disparity, let me pull from one of the games I played. The map was atcs, and I was having a hard time constructing a base due to the long ret build time, which kept getting killed, leaving my build timer running and nothing to show for it. This lead to humans camping to make up for the lack of rets. I conducted several raids down the hall, but was stopped by an alien forward base, which grew exponentially in tubes. After 5 minutes, we were dead, and the alien fore base had at least 8 tubes. This example show how it is counterproductive to have an increase in build time, because it promotes camping, and thus the loss of the game. On maps where the default human base is very cruddy (such as niveus), it also requires lots of cover, which humans have log been shown to be bad at providing.

One nice thing was the message displayed after a death, showing how many frags you had made, and how many it cost to evolve. However, this was only on Mission 1...

[nalf]

Ty for a thorough answer.

Ok, some of these are good, and some of them are crud. I've found that the game is very biased towards aliens (even with the aliens already winning many games in vanilla, this is worse).

AFAIK the game is favors aliens a bit in vanilla Trem, but on UBP it's the opposite. At least what I've seen on RCZ, humans win considerably more often then aliens.

The antifeed sucks, mainly because I'll get something powerful (like pulserifle+suit) and raid the alien base, fully expecting to die, but only after I kill some aliens, and nade some eggs. This leaves the alien team weak, and I have enough credits to rush out and do it again. However, in this case, I don't have enough evos to do that, even if I destroyed the alien base singlehandedly and destroyed every alien except for a dretch that came up behind me, 30 seconds in. I don't get all the credits due to me, even though I was definitely not suicidal.

I agree, it has such problems. I'll probably to remove it for now. Maybe a solution would be to speed up the credit reward considerably when in an enemy's base?

The contagious poison is similarly annoying; as others have pointed out, this leads to mass poisoning of teammates.

You can always shot your infested teammates to avoid massive poisoning of the team . Well, it's a test feature, if more people hate it than like it, I'll remove it.

To add to the human dilemma, tubes now take 10 seconds less, and rets 10 seconds more!

To illustrate this disparity, let me pull from one of the games I played. The map was atcs, and I was having a hard time constructing a base due to the long ret build time, which kept getting killed, leaving my build timer running and nothing to show for it. This lead to humans camping to make up for the lack of rets. I conducted several raids down the hall, but was stopped by an alien forward base, which grew exponentially in tubes. After 5 minutes, we were dead, and the alien fore base had at least 8 tubes. This example show how it is counterproductive to have an increase in build time, because it promotes camping, and thus the loss of the game. On maps where the default human base is very cruddy (such as niveus), it also requires lots of cover, which humans have log been shown to be bad at providing.

Not completely true. Acids need 15s and rets 10s in vanilla, now it's reversed. So it's 5seconds less/more. The reason for that is because on vanilla Trem, aliens have 1.5x more build points than humans have. In UBP they lose this advantage, which is why humans can build more progressively on the map. Also, on UBP with a lot of buildings, humans can destroy aliens building much faster with long-ranged weapons and nades, aliens can kill rets/teslas at much slower rate. Reversing the times is meant to reflect this. Maybe the change is too big (since I changed both, it's actually 2.25x). Perhaps giving both acids and rets 10s or both 15s would be better?

One nice thing was the message displayed after a death, showing how many frags you had made, and how many it cost to evolve. However, this was only on Mission 1...

I'm working on it, it was not finished yet and there was a bug too (a programming bug, not an alien). I'm integrating it into the other mods, so it'll be available soon.

[Yesus]

Maybe to balance UBP you should just give a relatively small amount of points in the reactor/overmind zone and increase the available points in areas powered by repeaters or eggs, lowering repeaters' cost and maybe allowing aliens to build an egg for free if it's in an uncovered zone (although this may encourage egg spamming).
This way there would be less buildings in a limited area, without limiting the number of secondary bases.

[Forty-Two]

Ty for a thorough answer.

Ok, some of these are good, and some of them are crud. I've found that the game is very biased towards aliens (even with the aliens already winning many games in vanilla, this is worse).

AFAIK the game is favors aliens a bit in vanilla Trem, but on UBP it's the opposite. At least what I've seen on RCZ, humans win considerably more often then aliens.

The antifeed sucks, mainly because I'll get something powerful (like pulserifle+suit) and raid the alien base, fully expecting to die, but only after I kill some aliens, and nade some eggs. This leaves the alien team weak, and I have enough credits to rush out and do it again. However, in this case, I don't have enough evos to do that, even if I destroyed the alien base singlehandedly and destroyed every alien except for a dretch that came up behind me, 30 seconds in. I don't get all the credits due to me, even though I was definitely not suicidal.

I agree, it has such problems. I'll probably to remove it for now. Maybe a solution would be to speed up the credit reward considerably when in an enemy's base?

How would you figure out when they're in the alien base? What if I don't raid the main alien base, but I raid the main fore base, completely demolishing it before getting killed?

The contagious poison is similarly annoying; as others have pointed out, this leads to mass poisoning of teammates.

You can always shot your infested teammates to avoid massive poisoning of the team :P. Well, it's a test feature, if more people hate it than like it, I'll remove it.

To add to the human dilemma, tubes now take 10 seconds less, and rets 10 seconds more!

To illustrate this disparity, let me pull from one of the games I played. The map was atcs, and I was having a hard time constructing a base due to the long ret build time, which kept getting killed, leaving my build timer running and nothing to show for it. This lead to humans camping to make up for the lack of rets. I conducted several raids down the hall, but was stopped by an alien forward base, which grew exponentially in tubes. After 5 minutes, we were dead, and the alien fore base had at least 8 tubes. This example show how it is counterproductive to have an increase in build time, because it promotes camping, and thus the loss of the game. On maps where the default human base is very cruddy (such as niveus), it also requires lots of cover, which humans have log been shown to be bad at providing.

Not completely true. Acids need 15s and rets 10s in vanilla, now it's reversed. So it's 5seconds less/more. The reason for that is because on vanilla Trem, aliens have 1.5x more build points than humans have. In UBP they lose this advantage, which is why humans can build more progressively on the map. Also, on UBP with a lot of buildings, humans can destroy aliens building much faster with long-ranged weapons and nades, aliens can kill rets/teslas at much slower rate. Reversing the times is meant to reflect this. Maybe the change is too big (since I changed both, it's actually 2.25x). Perhaps giving both acids and rets 10s or both 15s would be better?

Make rets and tubes both 10 seconds. In practice, it's much easier to start an alien base, because the alien repeater is also the spawn. This means that you have aliens defending the base, and there's a less need for defenses (hence the copious amounts of trappers). In human bases, they must get other humans to defend the base, meaning the first building is usually an arm, and a spawn doesn't usually show up until the second repeater, meaning that new humans may have to wait 40 seconds to defend. This puts a great emphasis on rets in defending.

In the main base as well, rets are the only defense until s3. They must be placed around the edges of the base in considerable amounts to cover all areas to create a "kill zone." The humans must create this "kill zone" early in order to defend against aliens. If they do not create one quickly enough, they will be unable to defend from rushes.

The aliens' base defenses are not dependent on tubes, in fact, the best way to stop rushes is with cades. The tubes are secondary, stuck in inconspicuous places to sap the hp of humans while aliens finish they off. Not having any tubes in an alien base does not signal the same death toll it does for humans, which is why ret build times should be less than or equal to tube build times, something that not even unltd bp can overcome.

One nice thing was the message displayed after a death, showing how many frags you had made, and how many it cost to evolve. However, this was only on Mission 1...

I'm working on it, it was not finished yet and there was a bug too (a programming bug, not an alien). I'm integrating it into the other mods, so it'll be available soon.

Try making the server 100 bp, and running it for a couple of days with #3 from the anti-feed thread. And could you pm me some of the tremstats data?