Unending research will have negative consequences on combat ballance
While I believe that the concept of unending research is good for resource consumption and gives the player a way to exhaust resource fields.
It will undoubtedly make the task of balancing combat for the duration of a game an impossible one.
What if instead of research just blanket upgrading every turret on the map the player researched upgradeable aspects of the turret that could be fitted to an individual turret like a module, but instead of only being able to place one module per slot these modules were stackable, with diminishing returns on each additional module.
ie
- Barrel - increases range of turret
- Feed mechanisim - increases rate of fire
- etc
Each turret would have a module slot for each module type it accepted and the slot could be stacked as high as the player liked.
This would mean that a player could create areas of denial with far fewer turrets, but at an exponentially greater cost in resources and the turrets used in "turret creep" would either be way more expensive or considerably weaker than their defensive brethren.
Brain fart or stroke of genius? - you decide
IMO this overall concept of modules would be a superior one to the endless research one, both as a resource sink and from a factory tinkerers perspective.
ie this small factory has a similar output to my previous MEGA-factory, however, it cost many times more to build.
MalcolmCooks wrote:The way to improve biters is to improve their AI, not to add more enemies.
This is generally easier said than done.
From the general idea of GIGO, you can also expect limited input, limited output.
When you look at the current situation there is really only 3 different enemy types with 4 stages of difficulty and 1 objective.
Given these limitations, you can't really expect AI to be interesting and fast at the same time.
R3vo wrote:MalcolmCooks wrote:Example - instead of following the same path each time, they will send small attacks to different areas, probing for weak spots, and when they find one send a large attack. That would definitely keep you on your toes and make you pay more attention to defense.
I disagree. Making biters search for weak spots will force players to build turret walls around their factories, basically what we have now.
I would have to agree with R3vo on this point, something like this idea would simply add complexity to the AI with no real noticeable effects.
MalcolmCooks wrote:The ability to give your turrets a target priority would also be very welcome - too often turrets let themselves be destroyed by spitters while some other biters are chewing their way through walls that will take them a few minutes to get through.
I believe that your problem here is simply a symptom of the blanket idea of just increasing HP and DPS of enemies to increase difficulty and then repeating the process for the other side.
While I really like the idea of a turret target priority, but a blanket customization approach to this would also be a bad idea, as it would effectively render spitters obsolete or require spitters to be buffed.
ie to the point where they have equal HP to their melee counterparts, which then only creates another set of balancing problems.
IMO the best way to achieve a turret target priority would be to have an interface where the player could set "this turret only targets this enemy type" or "this turret ignores this enemy type" and to have more variety in turret types, turrets that operate in different ways.
(ie open the
ideas spoiler in this
post), this way a player could customize their defenses for specific purposes and desired effects and not just be always required to build the "Great Wall of Turrets" in every game.