The Survivor balancing issue

[dcode]

Hello everyone,

it turned out to be quite hard to find a working Survivor mode balancing so I want to try to describe the issues we have. Together we may be able to find a solution suitable for all players and map sizes.

About Survivor mode: Traditional TD games that are providing a Survivor-like mode are usually built on the concept of creep an round bounties. This means that a player receives credits for killing creeps and for finishing a round successfully. The amount of credits is fine tuned to the specific map and fixed waves in this cases. However, in CreepTD there is the "Income" that raises credits exponentially on the one and the different map depths on the other side. Both these features make it hard to find a send strategy that's suitable for every case.

The approaches we tried till now have been based on the AI's income and the credits the player receives. But it turned out, that all these approaches have been too easy or too hard because of the following fact: Every time the server sends creeps, its income is raised. Every time a player kills creeps, its credits and/or income are raised also. So: If the AI has more income, the player has too (when killing the creeps). So it doesn't make any sence to adjust the amount of credits or income the AI spents when the client receives this later, too. Even when aggressivly raising the Survivor's credits, the player usually will not be able to defend.

Because of this the only factors for the game's difficulty seems to be some sort of limiter for the client's credits and/or income. Maybe some kind of "tower upkeep" (e.g. 10% of its price/round) or similar. Maybe some sort of fixed income depending on the map length. Unsure.

Any ideas?

Few ideas:
1) Forget about realistic money spending for the attacker bot, just attack as it seems best.
2) Track the length how far the creeps manage to get, the faster they die, the stronger it will attack: if it sent 2 sharks and both of them died: send 4 sharks next time!
3) Send creeps that will explode when killed: explosion will destroy some of the players towers in time. This would keep the player busy building and not just doing nothing & watching how the creeps go.

3) Send creeps that will explode when killed: explosion will destroy some of the players towers in time. This would keep the player busy building and not just doing nothing & watching how the creeps go.

No!

I like that suicide Creep. What else can the creeps do in Survivor-Mode

Habe grade mal Quadcore gespielt.

Bin bis Runde 101 gekommen, 750.000.000 Credits auf der Hand. (Ich denke maximal gehn noch 2-5 Runden mehr)

Schonmal eine Verbesserung zu dem altem Survivor wo man quasi ewig weiter spielen konnte.

Heftig is nur das die KI dann quasi Swarming macht mit verschiedensten Creeps... das waren am Ende soviele das das Spiel ins stocken gekommen ist. Als ich gestorben bin hat das Spiel ca eine Minute Standbild gehabt bis dann die Game Over Meldung kam. Außerdem bin ich imemr wiede überrascht wenn plötzlch eine Computerstimme "How are you Gentlemen?" sagt... und das obwohl ich den Ton aus hab

103 auf Bromium aber dann hings auch schon extremst! bzw... es ging ne Zeitlang aber ab Level 97 sah man nur noch flackern .. Screenshot ist im Mapforum: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=368&p=3911#p3911

Find ich auch nervig, dass die Stimme trotz ausgeschaltetem Ton kommt.
Es sollte eine Limit geben, wieviel Creeps pro Sekunde geschickt werden können.

I played one survivor game now on the beta version, and we both agreed that the current way is bad: you get money from kills and only +50 income each round! that makes it impossible for someone to catch up others if he lost few lives at the beginning. It punishes too much for few misses. I liked the old system more when you got income from kills and money from kills too: if you kill them before round ends, you gain more money than other players who kills them in very late.

Its also way too hard, you get big creeps too early, i liked the old survivor mode better since it didnt suddenly send sharks, you kind of knew what is coming, and i get kinda pissed off when there is absolutely no chance for me to even kill that shark (or etc). For example the current system might work fine on QuadCore map, since only few speedtowers are required to kill a Raider, which it sends all of sudden, and if you kill it, you gain 4000 money... which is crazily unfair for those who doesnt kill them, you basically win the game if you kill that Raider... but i dont think you could even kill it on quadcore since you dont get enough money...

Not to mention that the way it works atm is very confusing if you switch to normal game mode. So there are now 3 points why the old mode was better. Please change it back, but just adjust the hardness as i suggested: somehow detect how fast the players can kill the creeps and send creeps accordingly to that. We could even make custom attack speeds for each map: quadcore would get spammed LIKE HELL, but speedvector wouldnt get spammed that much (the old version was PERFECT for that map! i really enjoyed playing it).

OK ive been playing survivor quite a while now, and i can say the new mothership functionality fucks up it totally: it spams low level creeps and it really fucks everything... all my towers will target to mercury instead of phoenix for example, and that makes me set to farthest tactic, but its already too late then... so please change the mothership to what it was before! (no spawning random creeps from it). it really spoils the whole idea of setting a strategy for the towers, especially on small maps where survival is (was) actually fun to play!

[dcode]

It's not random, it's one creep per segment (express raptor, phönix, counting down...and therefor completely deterministic) and a decent player will be able to find tactics to handle this (e.g. a tesla coil on "weakest" at the right position).

i would like to see you try - when you get money from kills... and you will miss every phoenix or raptor because of this so you wont get any money... i dont understand why are you adding these features that changes the whole gameplay... it doesnt make the game any more fun. just the opposite... do you understand that the ultimatetowers will hit the sharks before they even get killed? because their range is so long. any speedtower isnt gonna help.

only decent idea is to spam white rockets which kills even those sharks... but its not as easy as that, on short maps it really sucks ass, the mofos will keep spamming sharks and shit in the middle of the map. so i could defend against those if i filled the map with white rockets, but thats not gonna happen in any good (=short) survival map since i wouldnt have the money!

the mofo spamming low level creeps is just pain and useless, please remove it.

At least put the old survival mode option back so we can still enjoy the survival mode somehow. now its super hard and boring, it keeps spamming high level creeps and i dont have a chance to kill any of them most of the time. might be possible on quadcore though. but who plays quadcore on survival?

Edit: did someone delete few of my posts here...?

im not sure if my suggestion will solve the problems dcode stated in the first post, but:

the player should gain interest for unspent credits each round. so he gets rewarded for defending as cheap as possible, which is the essence of the multiplayer games too.

90% of the good single player TD games do have interest, and i think its the most interesting part of those games - to figure out how to defend efficiently (as cheap as possible while leaking as few as possible creeps)



generally, i think the game should usually end BEFORE the map is full of fully upgraded towers.

[dcode]

The "interest" thing you mentioned is exactly the solution we are currently working at. This is, why the semi and hard difficulties are not selectable currently

Idea is: Normal remains untouched, Semi is a combination of both and Hard is entirely interest based.

so where did my message get deleted & why? cant take critic...?

i have a suggestion: remove the new mofo ship spawning feature and enable it only for the ultra hard survival game mode?

[dcode]

I didn't delete anything. Why not just give it a try the way it is.

I've gave it a try a bunch of times... and i dont like it. are we going to fix anything or are we trying to just make things look cool?

the mofo ship would be ok if it didnt spam level1 creeps, if it spammed only few, lets say vultures (2-3), then it would be ok i think. but now it keeps spamming way too long and all my ultimas just gets busy killing those only and misses everything else basically... it works in some maps but in the good short maps it just doesnt work at all. and in those maps where it works, you cant even see the spam coming out of them because rockets kill them instantly! so either way, its totally useless.

i gave you now at least 2 ideas how to fix this... your turn...

tracker all you need to do is figure out at which spot in the map the mothership spamms creeps and build a few rocket towers near that spot, leave them to the strategy "hard" and you solved the problem !
Why do you care about it anyways, survivor is about getting killed at some point !

tracker all you need to do is figure out at which spot in the map the mothership spamms creeps and build a few rocket towers near that spot, leave them to the strategy "hard" and you solved the problem !
Why do you care about it anyways, survivor is about getting killed at some point !

why do i care? because:
1) the mofo ship spams creeps to the halfway of the map.
2) i cant afford building rockets to the halfway of the map
3) i cant even afford building more than maybe 5 ultimas if im lucky, and if very lucky i can build 50 (rarely).
4) the old survival was a lot more fun because you had a chance to kill the creeps quite consistently, currently you start suddenly getting phoenixes and have no chance to even kill them, so you get stuck with 5k money and cant build any more defense for the rest of the game... really boring. before you could keep spamming more defense and trying to squeeze every power out of your guns just to get that one creep more killed than the other players!
5) rockets doesnt solve anything in the end: ultimas reach the whole map, if they see a mercury, they shoot the hell out of it and waste their precious bullets, they will hit it faster than the rockets.

i have probably played the survival mode more than anyone here so i do know whats fun in it... it was super stupid until i found out that short maps were actually pretty fun to play on. i remember disliking the survival mode a lot before because it was so easy... but now, its actually TOO HARD, and its not fun at all... well there is some fun though, but then the fun ends a lot faster... after the sharks you are pretty much game over since you cant kill toucans or mambas etc, just not enough money to build defense even if you played it perfect... if the game plays it lucky and sends weaker creeps then you have chance, but the shittiest thing is that it now stops sending the weak creeps! so you cant get any more income when the big creeps (phoenix etc) start coming!

and also its annoying that now it sends super hard creeps all of sudden... before it sent them in logical order: weakest to hardest, now it could first send a super hard creep, then some weak creeps... then super hard again, and then some harder creeps, until it keeps sending only super hard, and no weaks at all so if you missed few creeps, you dont have money to build defense for the rest of your life!

that doesnt solve the problem that ultimates will aim on weaker creeps, since rockets need a looooong time until the projectiles impact...

i dont like a creep-spamming ship either, but i dont care so much about it...

if it changes gameplay in survivor, it does so for every player, and the game remains fair

if it changes gameplay in survivor, it does so for every player, and the game remains fair

but does it remain fun ? not with the current spam mode, it might work on some maps... (yet to be found). but mostly, i find the new survival a lot more boring... its like playing against some super elite player who knows how to kill me efficiently, not fun at all i can just watch how i die slowly.. its just no fun...