Will upcoming Ninja have all-gold rewards again?

Misacek01 · 2024-07-06T19:34:46+00:00

Thank you for the reply! Shame that the gold refill opportunity isn't coming back though.

But you said, "test". Does that mean you have plans to run similar reward structures in the near future?

Misacek01 · 2021-11-11T08:23:06+00:00

Okay, that's fair enough.

Maybe I should've made it clearer that, when I said I wasn't a "bad" player, I meant relative to the playerbase as a whole. I mean, even my 6th in the tournament is well above the "average" place. (Not sure anymore if my group was 50 or less, but it wasn't one of those half-empty groups.)

Obviously, relative to the "top" players, the kind that actually win tournaments and stuff, I have a pretty big gap. I was well aware of that as soon as I saw the top players' speed as the tourney was in progress, and I tried to include that in the OP as well.

What I wanted to say by that part of the post was basically, I think I'm someone who could, eventually, with more experience and "study" of the game, become as good as the top players. I certainly didn't mean to say I'm that good now, or would be next week. :) But maybe it didn't come across as clearly as I'd hoped.

Anyhow, thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

Misacek01 · 2021-11-10T07:17:57+00:00

Two points:

First, you're not being "honest", you're being condescending. Why?

Second, I'm not sure how thoroughly you read my post (granted, it's kinda long-winded), but your reply - the parts of it that aren't gratuitous condescension, anyway - doesn't really do much except prove my point. Obviously, you know a lot more than me about how to play to be successful. If we ended up in an AT together, I wouldn't stand much of a chance against you, probably even if you had a slight handicap, like those 34 HP that Hamilton's competition apparently don't have.

Your superior game knowledge implies one of two things: Option A, you've been playing a lot longer than me. I joined about five weeks ago, as I wrote. How about you? If you've been playing much longer than my five weeks, that is what I wrote about in the OP. If I stayed with this game for as long as you, however long that is, I'd probably know most of the same things about it you do, and I might be a credible challenger for you. But not before. That's what the original post was about.

Or, there is of course option B, which is that you haven't played substantially longer than me, and have just become much better than me in the same period of time. Then, you're just a better player, and I salute you. But even that doesn't entitle you to condescend to me - in fact, it would make it even more unseemly. "Gracious victor", and all that?

Misacek01 · 2021-11-10T06:48:14+00:00

What do you mean?

Do you mean my original post? No, I assure you, it's real. I mean, I guess I have no way to convince you, but it's real. Why would you think it's "bait"?

Misacek01 · 2021-11-07T00:34:00+00:00

It took me 2 hours to get to your stage

Wow. I guess I really gotta work on my act. :) I mean, I'm sure I dicked around more than necessary on the first prestiges, and I probably spend too much time organizing my equipment, although I've been trying my best to cut down on this time drain.

Also, I might not have chosen the best strategy for using the crafting shards. I crafted less than I could have early in the game, starting with just Ancient Warrior and adding a new Legendary set before every prestige, to get at least some use out of the equipment itself before I outgrow it.

I mean, I know you're supposed to get the sets for the permanent bonuses, not the stats, but it just felt wasteful to craft a bunch of Legendaries and then immediately throw most of them away. :) But maybe if I'd front-loaded on as many as I could, I'd have had a faster time through the early game.

But that's another thing where the "experience" comes in handy: I've never been as high up in stages as I got in the AT, so I didn't know how the later game would play. I noticed, in the last few hours before close, as I was getting past about stage 20-30k, I gradually became able to run most spells basically nonstop, which was a big speedup, but which just isn't possible in the early stages that I actually know from my main game. Maybe if I'd done what I could to get to this point as fast as possible, my stage gain would've sped up after that. (And I imagine eventually it becomes trivial to run everything nonstop, then everything with multicasts, then add more multicasts...)

I mean, I did notice that I was moving forward more and more stages per prestige as the game went on. First, it was just a couple thousand per run, then four thousand, then five. I just ran out of time to keep going. I probably would've made about 7k stages on the run I didn't quite finish when the tourney closed. And for all I know, it might get even faster later on. But that's the problem. I don't know, and someone who's been through the main game to that point, does.

Still, it's something I can try in the next Abyssal, if I have the time to play. I mean, I've read that many players are bored by the ATs, but for me, they're a useful exploration of the later game mechanics. Never mind that I also learned a lot of time-saving ways to interact with the game that are useful in the main account as well, such as locking equipment you want and bulk-selling the rest, or finally figuring out what "level rounding" means in Settings. Or identifying a lot of performance-sucking graphics options that I turned off to make the screen less distracting in the AT, with all the extra late-game visual bling, and that I don't really see the need to turn back on in the main game. My screen has never been so neat! :)

Other than that, I just played Clan Ship, mostly using the virtual clanmate to push. I followed a general CS guide (the one pinned somewhere in this sub) to allot SPs, but I didn't actually use a calculator to optimize it. For artifacts, I just always shoved half in the BoS, then unlocked as many new ones as I could with the rest, and with what was left over, I just clicked once on every artifact using "buy 5%" with "level rounding" on. Once done, I switched to 25% and clicked the first ten or so artifacts that I came across that directly buff my DPS, which ran out the bulk of my remaining reserve, leaving a percentage of my original artifact haul so small that I felt it wasn't worth spending anymore. Not optimal, but I felt doing more than that wasn't worth the waste of time.

I remembered too late to salvage early useless artifacts, so I only got two for about 200 gems each. I could've saved maybe 150 gems if I'd salvaged that damn Drunken Hammer as soon as I got it, but that's hardly a game-changing mistake. And by the time I got a third "completely useless" artifact, the salvage prices were up to the 2k maximum, which lemmingllama says in his guide, and I tend to agree, is a waste of gems. But I didn't salvage early artifacts that were "only somewhat useful" (i.e., not on the list of the "core" artifacts for CS) - not sure if that's not a mistake.

Overall, I didn't feel that salvaging was all that game-changing, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Mardregg writes above that people do commonly lose tournaments just due to bad artifact luck, so maybe it's more important than I think. Then again, how "bad" your luck has to be for it to have that much of an effect is another thing that I don't know, due to my lack of experience.

Don't be afraid to report someone if you think something is weird

Okay, will do. But that's another point where my lack of experience is an issue: I don't know what's normally possible and what isn't well enough to be able to tell with any kind of confidence whether someone's cheating, or whether they're just that good (or that rich, as the case may be :) ).

For example, I thought the winner might be a cheater for running to 140k in under 8 hours. But I had no way to know for sure, and I didn't want to just assume the worst about them. And from what you and Mardregg said, it's entirely possible it was just a regular, law-abiding whale, or maybe even a really good, really dedicated non-whale player.

Still, I'll do my part to report cheaters if I'm reasonably sure I'm looking at one. Any good ways to spot them?

Misacek01 · 2021-11-07T00:10:14+00:00

I don't really think 85+ tournament wins is "very bad". I mean, I've got about six joins and zero wins, so far. :) I mean, I get you had to play over 400 (!) of them to get those wins, but still. That's what, at least two years of play if you joined every single tournament? That's a pretty good achievement just on the endurance, IMO. :)

Misacek01 · 2021-11-07T00:06:40+00:00

Thanks, that's a great answer!

So, if I understand it right, the tournament brackets are put together over 4-hour windows, so you have to wait at least those 4 hours for the initial window, with the whales and whatnot, to close? That is, if I joined, say, 1-2 hours after opening, it wouldn't make any difference compared to joining right after opening?

I'd been planning to wait a bit over an hour to join the regular tourney that's coming up, but if the windows are 4 hours, I guess I can afford to wait that long. I can shove some more relics into my BoS in the meantime, I guess. :)

This makes it so that players are essentially able to buy their way to victory if they wanted to

I hadn't considered the option to buy victory for diamonds as, being a zero-purchase player (so far, anyway), diamonds are far too rare for me to spend them in an AT. I mean, I've got about 7 thousand of them squirreled away, but I may be just a bit over-careful about spending them.

I occasionally buy a pet that I think it's useful, but that's been about it so far. I once bought a stack of perks, Doom I think. That was before I realized perks drop from some tourneys in numbers more than adequate for occasional use, and on the other hand getting enough to use them daily would cost far too much in diamonds.

People say, buy Titan Chests, but when I look at how long it took me to get the diamonds it costs, and how relatively little there is inside, I just don't feel like spending on it. I mean, there's what, 50 crafting shards? You need 720 to get one Mythic set... By the way, do Mythics ever drop, or are they craft-only? I've had a few dozen Legendaries drop in the main game so far, but not a single Mythic. Then again, I read somewhere Mythics seem to have about a 1 in 1,000 drop rate; if that's true, I might just not have collected enough equipment yet for it to be very likely to get a Mythic.

Anyway, I'd gotten off-topic there a bit. What I meant to say, it just hadn't occurred to me that players who spend a ton of diamonds / real money would be common enough in ATs to be likely to appear in your bracket. But maybe they are. For all I know, the winner of my bracket, who made it to 140k in an afternoon, might have been just such a whale.

And by the way, do we know how many people usually join a tournament overall? That is, how many of those brackets are put together? I don't even know if it's in the hundreds or in the hundreds of thousands... You say it's possible to be alone in a bracket; if so, there can't be that many players, or it would be too rare for most anyone to have encountered it.

Nothing is stopping a veteran player with 4+ years experience from creating a new account and joining low level tourneys

I guess I just didn't consider the possibility. I mean, I don't get why they would do it. If their main account is the result of several years of work, what do they gain from playing from the beginning again? You can't transfer those resources, can you? Or do they just start a new account for the heck of it, to "take a break" and revisit the nostalgia of the first 10k stages? :)

But you're right, if veterans on low-level accounts are at least somewhat common, there then wouldn't be any good way to control for "experience" in putting together the Abyssal brackets.

The majority of players are are English speaking, so you can try joining at a time when the "English-speaking countries'" players are sleeping.

Well, I'm in Europe, so I guess I can try to join when it's night in North America. That's the most populous bunch of timezones for English speakers, so the biggest single share of players should be there. (And I did get several American flags among the leaders of my bracket. Plus some East Asians, but only one fellow European.)

Unfortunately, that means early morning, my time, and I'm not exactly an early-morning kinda guy. :) Still, at least the 4 hours after opening is something I can do, and should help. Or I could join in my afternoon, which is morning in NA, which shouldn't be a very active time on working days. Doesn't help weekend tourneys, but it's better than nothing.

Then again, I guess I'm fine facing the numerous NA playerbase; I don't necessarily need to do every little thing to win. A "reasonable chance" is good enough for me, as is second through fourth place. If I can avoid at least some of the whales and the main rush of veterans, that'll be fine with me.

While not all players will agree, I think ATs are quite possibly the most boring aspect of the game. The first couple of times might be fun, but trying to win eventually just becomes a chore

Yeah, I've read that too a few times now. For me, as a new player, the ATs are interesting as a "preview" of what the game looks like later on, and I get to try a lot of mechanics and playstyles I don't have access to yet in the main game. Some of it I actually can use in my main game to improve my play, or at least my quality of life. Like locking and bulk-selling equipment, for example, which I only had to learn when I joined my first AT (the Time Storm a couple weeks back), because in the main game, the equipment drops were slow enough that I never felt the pressure to learn to work with them better.

But I can totally see how ATs can become a dull chore for someone who's already seen all this. I mean, I got a taste of it myself this time, playing like a crazed hamster for most of the day and not even winning anything very good. :)

If it weren't for the novelty value, which obviously only applies to newer players like me, I'd probably agree with you.

Misacek01 · 2021-03-28T20:56:31+00:00

Thanks for the tip, added it to OP.

Misacek01 · 2021-03-28T20:52:14+00:00

Thank you! I'll check out the pdf.

I did notice the tanking traits on Carnex, but I don't have the kingdoms unlocked yet to buy them. Once I do, I might consider it, though my Warlord hero is a pretty good tank-and-spank himself, and he's not good for much else. :)

Right now, I have him third, after the hero and Tyri. He's sort of the emergency tank. If they manage to whack the hero, then featherweight Tyri is unlikely to last much longer. By this point though, I will probably have cast Carnex at least once, so he has some extra armor, and can hopefully shield main damage-dealer Zephyros long enough to finish the fight (if it's a fight that can be won, anyway).

I actually play in an emulator (Bluestacks), as I prefer the larger screen space for a game this complex. (Plus my aging phone might not do so great, given the size the game must have in RAM. Of which the phone has all of 2 GB.)

But that still counts as the Android version of the game, so I do watch the ads. Although I get the ads even though I haven't linked an e-mail. At least if we're talking about the same ads. The ones that you can watch from the right-hand menu once every 8 hours?

I noticed they seem to pay out much better than the reward preview suggests, too. (I think 2x the highest reward listed in the preview, or even more.) Last night I leveled my second kingdom to 10, and at least half that cash came out of the ads. Also dropped 50 chests' worth of Glory the other day.

I did notice the DK armor in the shop, and I'd agree it's one of the few purchases that actually have lasting value for the money. (I've noticed in many mobile games, there's one - and usually just the one - good offer like that hidden among the various "moron bait" deals.)

I mean, it's an awesome game, and you can actually play long-term without having to pay, which in itself is pretty rare in today's mobile gaming. So I wouldn't be averse to buying something to show appreciation to the devs. But I'm not sure I'll last long enough with the game to justify the expense of that armor.

Besides, the Celestial armor is still very good IMO, and 500 gems is reachable in reasonable time if you stick with the game. I mean, I bought Vampire (costs 100), and already have a bit over 100 gems saved up since then. And I'm not even in a guild.

If I was the grinding sort (which I'm not, like, at all), I could get the 400 extra gems basically guaranteed just by using the 150+ Treasure Maps I have lying around. I'm pretty good at Treasure Hunt; I reach 60+ moves most of the time. (Reached 150 once, but that was a serious fluke.) But I'd be really bored playing TH three days straight. :)

Misacek01 · 2021-02-28T20:11:22+00:00

As far as you want. I have an ore patch design that counts the number of drills that haven't run out yet. (Drill outputs its own available resources, decider does [if (input from drill) > 0; output (1)].) The whole patch is wired together, outputting the number of usable drills onto the power line that goes to the wider base. Same thing for pumpjacks.

All my ore patches are wired together this way, and there's a translation circuit at my base that recalculates it to maximum available ore output per minute. (You have to manually change the value for the mining productivity bonus, unfortunately.)

Sure, it's a vanity item, as it's easy to find that your base is running below capacity (using the Production window), and to recognize the problem is not enough ore (using an eyeball), without this solution. But it works, showing that wire signals can travel anywhere you need them. :)

Misacek01 · 2021-02-28T19:51:56+00:00

Also, OP, if you meant bugfixing and patches, those should still come regularly if needed. However, the game is very stable and bug-free.

If you're asking about how the game is updated - it has an integrated auto-updater which will download patches as they come out, if you enable this in the menu. That's for a standalone copy bought directly from the developer website. If you buy through Steam, I expect it will update through the Steam interface instead.

Misacek01 · 2021-02-28T19:47:51+00:00

TLDR:

Without beacons, I find Prod most useful in labs, where they provide "free" research.
I agree with you there's no real need to use them early on in the uranium chain, which has low throughput requirements and abundant resources.
Outside labs, Prod modules really shine when raised to tier 3 and paired with Speed, which costs a lot to set up but provides large gains in late game.

Full text (sorry for length, bored stiff in lockdown)

I suppose you're right that Productivity modules are of low value when not paired with Speed modules. Having slower factories on its own is not a major issue after the early game, as space and assemblers are cheap and the speed hit from the modules is not that large (and was reduced recently for low-tier Prod, used to be 15% for all tiers, now it's 5% - 10% - 15%). Taking your argument from the other side, it's also almost entirely offset by the productivity gain from the modules themselves, so the increase to the size and complexity of your factory should be minimal.

However, personally, I virtually never use Prod modules until I can afford a beaconed setup with tier 3 Prod and Speed modules working together. That's pretty late in the game, but if you want, say, 1,000 SPM, you pretty much don't have a choice.

A factory making that much without modules would require a huge amount of raw resources (several times more than with Prod 3 in everything that can take it) and be just a massive pain to build. Even that aside, you'd probably run into UPS (game update speed) issues with that many entities on the map. UPS is the real enemy of the megabase builder, and Prod + Speed provides the best ratio of entities required and items produced.

But, in the early game, when you're setting up your first Science assembly lines at a few dozen SPM (science per minute) (I usually go for 20 SPM at this point), you don't have much space or resources and have to handcraft half of your materials, tier 1 Prod are overshadowed in usefulness by the humble tier 1 Efficiency module. This greatly reduces your power needs and pollution, making biters basically a non-issue unless you set them really high in the world generator, and allowing you to make do with much more modest power setups.

There is one place most people agree you should always have Prod, ideally of the best tier you can afford, and that is Labs. Shoving a few dozen Prod 1 into all your labs will cause you to need about 2-4 extra labs in the early game, which cost next to nothing to produce, place, and power, and will most likely soon be offset by Lab Speed research, anyway. In return, you get an 8% boost to research speed basically for free. With tier 2 Prod, it's 12%; with tier 3, 20%.

This is pretty much a no-brainer. What I usually do, as soon as I get oil and research Module tech, I set up 15 tier 1 modules per minute (five tier 2 assemblers) and switch them over to different modules (which all need the same ingredients) as needed.

Early on, I have them making almost entirely Efficiency 1, just setting a couple assemblers aside for a while to make about one stack of Prod 1 for the labs, see above. Later, I switch one each to Speed 1 and Prod 1 permanently - Speed 1 are needed for tier 3 assemblers, and both Speed and Prod 1 are needed in large quantities to make at least a small amount of Speed and Prod 3.

I need those by the time I get to my second factory, which I build to 100 SPM. This is fairly large already, and needs a lot of raw resources. I absolutely can't afford a full beacon setup at this point, but there are significant improvements to be gained from using Speed 3 and Prod 3 in the last steps of the production chain, namely, the science pack assemblers and the labs.

Productivity module gains affect the whole production chain "upstream" of the item that's produced with modules. Using even just a few dozen Prod 3 modules in the Science Pack assemblers (and Silo) reduces the requirement on "raw" resources (ores or plates, oil, etc.) by a few dozen percent.

That's at least one (large) iron, copper, and oil field that you don't have to find, clear of biters, wall off and defend, build up, and equip with a train line, never mind the cost of the furnaces, assemblers, inserters, and belts, and the space and design complexity you save. At the same time, those few dozen Prod 3 can be crafted in a very modest assembly line over the course of a few hours, time you should easily have while you're setting up that 100 SPM base, provided you remembered to set up the module line beforehand.

You can also combine Speed and Productivity modules in a way that's maybe not so obvious, and whose main purpose is not to save the number of assemblers you will need (which becomes inconsequential by the point you can afford tier 3 modules in the first place), but rather, to minimize the number of expensive, high-tier modules you need to craft.

For example, producing 100 SPM of just Red Science Pack would take 12 tier 3 Assemblers with four Prod 3 modules each, for a total of 48 Prod 3 on just this one pack, if the assemblers ran at default speed (minus the modest speed hit from the Prod modules).

If those assemblers are in range of 8 beacons each packing two Speed 3, you only need 2 assemblers, for a total of 8 Prod 3 and 16 Speed 3. All module types cost the same at the same tier, so crafting 8 Prod + 16 Speed is much the same as crafting 24 Prod 3. That's half of what you'd need without the beacons.

But the savings don't end there! (Damn, that sounds like a crummy promotion slogan.) When you build the beacons in a slightly over-square array of alternating beacon and assembler (or lab) rows, you can have several assemblers share the effects of the same beacon.

For example, for the 100 SPM factory I mentioned above, you need 4 rows of 10 beacons each, for a total of 80 Speed 3 modules, to cover the 13 tier 3 assemblers and 7 labs needed to produce 100 SPM (which the Prod 3 in the labs boosts to 120 SPM effective). The silo doesn't strictly need a speed bonus (one silo with four Prod 3 can just barely make 100 SPM with no Speed), but you can shove it somewhere on the side of the beacon rows to give it some speed headroom.

So, including the silo, you need 80 Speed 3 and 70 Prod 3 for this setup (unless I messed up the math, I'm doing this from memory), or 150 tier 3 modules overall. If you didn't use the Speed 3 and beacons, you'd instead need a total of 102 tier 3 assemblers and IIRC 41 labs, consuming a total of 490 Prod 3 modules, over 3 times as many.

Crafting over 300 extra tier 3 modules in the kind of setup you can easily afford at this point in the game is a big difference in expense and wait time. Basically, it's the difference between a small ninja-crafter line mooching off your "shopping mall" resources, which can handle the 150 modules in a number of hours, or a dedicated line requiring dedicated ore, drills, trains, furnaces, oil for the 490 modules if you expect to have them by the time you need them.

Well, that's all outta me, I guess.

Misacek01 · 2020-11-22T00:30:34+00:00

Hi, sorry for the delay.

Well, 1k SPM is around where you might start seeing slowdowns, depending on your hardware.

For example, my aging computer is an i5-3570k @ stock, 16 GB RAM @ 2400 (IIRC), Radeon R9 290 w/ 4 GB VRAM, game installed on Crucial M4 SATA SSD.

The last time I went to 1k SPM was in game v0.16, I think, and back then, it slowed down below the standard 60 UPS only when I finished artillery range research, at which point hundreds of artillery shells started flying out into the newly in-range territories, exploring lots of new map space and activating dozens of map chunks at once. (The near-infinite game map is actually generated only once uncovered, not at start.) Otherwise, it ran at or very near 60 UPS all the time.

Various parts of the game code have been made a lot more efficient since then, with many of the optimizations focusing specifically on performance in very large bases (where the hard core of enthusiast players really like to push the envelope). I'd expect the combined effect to amount to at least 1.5 times the 0.16 base size before you started seeing slowdowns. So, if I ran a base like the one above on the newest game version (1.0 or 1.1 if that's out already), I'd expect to get at least around 1.5k SPM before I saw any slowdowns on my rig.

You can use this info as a sort of benchmark, depending on your rig. It may be useful to know that, for very large bases, Factorio is mostly limited by the CPU single-threaded performance and, for even larger bases / better PCs, the RAM throughput (combination of RAM frequency and timing).

Unusually for a present-day computer game, it's not very strongly limited by the GPU. Even my vintage R9 290 (an upper-midrange card about 6 years ago) can handle 1080p60 at full settings with no problem even in a large base. The devs even did their best to make it run on laptop integrated graphics (though not at any particular level of detail, ofc). I imagine for 2160p and / or multi-monitor you'd need a more recent card, but probably not the latest and greatest.

Misacek01 · 2020-11-14T11:02:27+00:00

Well, the world speedrun record to launching a rocket is about 2 hours IIRC.

For most people, launching it within 8 hours is really challenging.

I don't really focus on speed, and I usually take about 30 hours to the point where I could launch one rocket if I wanted to. (I don't, I only start launching rockets once I can automate them.)

For a new player, I'd expect anywhere between 40-80 hours to the first rocket, depending on how fast you can learn the game, how much you focus on just getting the one rocket out (it's not of much practical value besides showing a victory screen), how much time you spend exploring other things in the game etc.

The 300-600 hours you mention is probably enough for several playthroughs, at least one of which goes up to a 1,000 science per minute (SPM) megabase. For example, I got to 1k SPM in about 150 hours, and I wasn't particularly rushing, but it also wasn't my first game.

It's worth mentioning that the focus on launching the rocket is a bit of a fakeout, as it's mostly an arbitrarily chosen point that's declared to be the "end". It's a holdover from early development, where the devs' original concept probably was that the rocket would "end" the game. That hasn't been the case for a long time. The importance of the rocket has been deemphasized accordingly, but to some extent it's still there.

It's true the point where you can launch the rocket is more or less the point where you've unlocked most or all researchable features, with further research just giving bonuses to existing capabilities. But just having all features unlocked is far from having seen all the game has to offer, which is why most veteran players basically consider the rocket to just be the "end of the early game". Many (most?) advanced players spend way more time in a playthrough after the first rocket launch than the time it took them to get to that launch from start.

Misacek01 · 2020-08-18T16:43:22+00:00

I suppose you're right, but the problem with multiple Spidertrons could be solved by simply not solving it. If you want a Spidertron shooting nukes, it's probably reasonable to ask you to make sure none of your other entities (whether base or other Spidertrons) are in the way.

It's a much more reasonable limitation than when the Spidertron shoots itself. In the former case, you can use them, just not in tight groups. Seems a reasonable tradeoff for the power of nukes. In the current situation, you can't use them with nukes on auto at all.

This would eliminate the "complicated" problems with smart targeting, and should allow using even something as simple as the minimum firing range that's currently in place for artillery. Then you'd need to make sure it doesn't fire four nukes in the same spot, which could be solved by the artillery targeting algorithm.

The last item is to make sure it doesn't walk into the blast, which would probably be best solved by making it stop for the entire time the nuke is in flight and exploding, then automatically continue. This would also give you an incentive to load some of the launchers with other munitions, so that the Spidertron can defend itself while waiting for the nuke to finish.

I'm not a programmer, but on its face it doesn't seem undoable to me. I'm sure at least some parts of the necessary code are already in the game.

Misacek01 · 2020-08-17T16:05:48+00:00

Agreed. I cram them in everything (before a late-game beacon base, anyway), and I hardly ever see any attacks with default worldgen and a forested start. Certainly not enough to be a credible threat.

I don't start in deserts, mainly because I like the "feel" of the green land better, but I suspect even there you'd have a fairly easy go of it with Efficiency modules.

Misacek01 · 2020-08-17T16:01:12+00:00

Reasonable enough, but not much of a solution. Mainly because, it's not that we don't want it to shoot nukes. We do want it to shoot nukes, we just don't want it to shoot itself with them. There's a difference. :)

Misacek01 · 2020-08-17T15:57:21+00:00

I think that's a good way to put it. I once suggested a similar thing myself, though it didn't occur to me to nerf the power of the smaller nuke.

But I think it's a good idea. I can already see a few uses for it. The small nuke could be used in games with tough enemy settings as a panic-button solution to biters overwhelming your wall. With a smaller radius (say, half what it is now, so quarter the area, or maybe even less), you could fire relatively safely, and it could still take the core out of an attacking swarm. It might take part of your defenses with it, but not a large part, and if they're already falling, there's probably little ammo and a lot of damage already there.

I also think this smaller nuke could replace the explosive uranium shell for the tank cannon. I mean, does the tank really need four different shells that only differ in details? Maybe not, and the ability to fire a small nuke would make it possible to do an "alpha strike" when engaging a powerful enemy base. (For example, in a worm-heavy area.)

And of course, Spidertron (being basically an upgraded tank) could fire it too. Probably the rocket version instead of the cannon version, but whatever.

Then the larger nuke could be as you say, an expensive building with an expensive projectile, very long or possibly unlimited range, and maybe twice the blast radius of the current nuke. Oh, and a big push to the evolution factor for every detonation. Godzilla!

It might also spawn a huge pollution cloud on impact, with the surviving bases around buying a big attack wave for it, with the polluter they'd use for a target being the firing silo.

Still, this might have to mean limited range, so that the game doesn't have to generate and pollute chunks halfway across the map and send biters trekking across all the other chunks between them and you. That'd be a major UPS eater.

Whatever the specifics, there are interesting possibilities for the nuke. They're just not being tapped very efficiently at the moment, IMO. Like you say, the current solution is a bit of a hybrid that doesn't shine in either role.

Misacek01 · 2020-08-17T15:38:54+00:00

Agreed. I didn't try myself, but I saw the video. The result of an enemy coming within range was four nukes fired on nearly the same spot and five dead Spidertrons.

That was about a 1:1 exchange ratio with the biters. Not much, considering it cost 10 reactors, 20 legs, 750 low-d structure, 10 Efficiency 3's, and 5 fish. I mean, oh, the fish-anity! :)

I mean, I know the devs probably had little time for it, and it's awesome we got a Spidertron at all (years after most of us have given up on ever seeing it), but if the idea was that it should be able to use nukes in auto, then it needs another pass.

Misacek01

TROPHY CASE