Scaling PVP respawn times

[Omnifarious]

TL;DR

In PVP scenarios, provide option to make respawn times scale with distance from your starting area on death.

What ?

There should be an option in PVP scenarios to make respawn times scale with your distance from your starting area.

I would suggest scaling on a sigmoid, with very short (1 to 5 second) respawn teams near your base, and very long (10-20 seconds) respawn times very far away.

Perhaps also, dying in someone else's starting are should be treated as being ten times farther away than you actually are.

Why ?

This makes it harder to attack the starting area, and reduces the impact of strategies like putting mines or laser turrets in the starting area of another team while not completely eliminating the usefulness of such a strategy. It also encourages people not to go in kamikaze runs as the long wait time when they're far from their own starting area will discourage this.

Scaling this on a sigmoid provides for a minimum and maximum respawn time and avoids punishing people severely for being a few steps outside their starting area when they're killed.

Also, making dying in someone else's starting are be much more expensive serves the same purpose. It allows PVP starting areas to be sort of close to each other while still allowing reasonable scaling so that stepping outside your own starting area a little doesn't immediately result in a huge penalty to respawn time.

Though, one worry again is a huge step effect when an attacker rushes for the edge of the enemy starting area when they're at low health simply to avoid the 10x penalty.

Lastly, this makes expansions significantly far from your starting area both expensive to attack and to defend.

It could be argued that simply losing all your stuff to the other team is punishment enough. But watching a recent PVP match suggests otherwise.

[bobucles]

I hope you realize the long travel time to reach the enemy base is its scaling timer. Why would you need two scaling timers?

[Omnifarious]

I hope you realize the long travel time to reach the enemy base is its scaling timer. Why would you need two scaling timers?

The biggest reason is the short time for dying inside your own base. When you come back, you have very little equipment. Once you are killed it becomes much, much harder to fend off an attacker inside your own base. To compensate for this, a short respawn timer seems appropriate. There is also dealing with the nice surprises left behind by an attacker. Most of those are one-shot kills for a newly respawned person.

[bobucles]

That still doesn't follow. A player already spawns in their base as quickly as the timer allows. An opponent must travel across the map to return on the attack. That automatically adds a length of time before they can attack again.

To reiterate:
Spawn at base: timer + 0 travel time
Enemy dies: timer + travel time

Why is a second scaling element needed?

[Omnifarious]

Why is a second scaling element needed?

Watching a recording of an actual game, it seems like there is a lack of balance: Factorio PVP Shoutcast - Production Scoring - 2018-Mar-10

It took one team about 20-30 minutes to even begin to recover from a base invasion because all of the mines kept killing them off. A shorter respawn time would significantly help with that. The laser turrets were less of a problem. If you turn off the power to your own base, you can use bullet-turrets or hand weapons to get rid of them. But they were still a major pain.

I feel the fact attackers can leave a lot of bad stuff behind in someone's base makes an attack a very beneficial for the attacker and very bad for the defender. I think the game would be more fun if attackers had encouragement to go after attempts to expand outside the starting area rather than just to trash the entire starting area in a single attack, which is generally what happened.

Some of the land-mine balancing (making them possible (but still very hard) to spot) will help a little. But I think that more is needed. Some PLD balancing in PVP might be in order too. Just reduce the damage they do to another player or another player's vehicle if it's occupied.

[bobucles]

That STILL doesn't follow. A slower respawn doesn't magically make an attack disappear. The issue with mines has nothing to do with spawn timers and everything to do with the nature of mines. Spawn camping is another potential thing but that's a combat issue in general.

spawning faster makes mine clearing faster

There are lots of ideas to address mine mechanics to make them less effective on offense. Detection is probably the most effective because it's easy to build radars on defense and hard to build them on offense. Making players spawn faster to clear mines with their face isn't fun.

I feel the fact attackers can leave a lot of bad stuff behind in someone's base makes an attack a very beneficial for the attacker and very bad for the defender.

Once again this has nothing to do with spawn timers and everything to do with other mechanics. If an opponent is already in your base, his spawn timer doesn't mean anything at all.

[Omnifarious]

I feel the fact attackers can leave a lot of bad stuff behind in someone's base makes an attack a very beneficial for the attacker and very bad for the defender.

Once again this has nothing to do with spawn timers and everything to do with other mechanics. If an opponent is already in your base, his spawn timer doesn't mean anything at all.

Perhaps you're right. It's been interesting to think about. You're certainly correct that finding the mines with your face is no fun, even if the process is significantly sped up.

Certainly, if you have an idea where they are, antielitz's method of placing down something cheap (like a belt, a waste of just three iron) to find them is a better idea than running over them.

I don't actually like the idea of making them at all visible by default. I don't like what the devs did. I think it nerfs their utility in defense significantly. Maybe requiring the use of radars to make them show up would be good, and if you have a radar, they should up a little more clearly than the current mostly hidden way.

[Chocolatetthunder]

Hey Ps7cho here and I actually vote for longer re spawn timers so you don't have to fight zerg spawns once youre in their base and you killed them all once.