[781][Gen] What do you think would be the best way to stop stalemates happening?

I've noticed that as people get better at KAB, stalemates are becoming increasingly common, as people know how to attack and defend against thing in much more efficient ways. How would you stop these huge stalemates form happening? It could be anything; removing auto balance, changing win conditions, or simply just nerfing a class or item.

 

I've been jostling with an idea for a while... It may not kill stalemates, but it will at least a benefit to whichever team has a varied attack or a stong, successful defense. It might be a bit overcomplicated, but it could be adjusted as needed. The idea is this:

• The general idea is to make respawn times for various items variable, within a range from slightly faster than the current times to possibly even 4 times as long.
• The game tracks 3 variables per factory item:
  • Idle time: time spent between the item being dropped from the factory, and when it's first interacted with (picked up, usually), for the current item's life
  • Active time: time between deployment of the item (uncrating for items in crates, just being picked up for uncrated items) and the destruction/capture of the item. If an item is picked up and dropped or stored, the Active time counter pauses and the Idle time resumes.
  • Average of the active time over all previous deployments.
• Upon an item's destruction, the game calculates its respawn time. If its previous idle time was extremely low (<30 seconds, all times changable by server options), it takes longer to respawn. If its previous idle time was quite long, it respawns a little faster. If the previous life's active time was really low, it might take up to 2x as long to respawn. If the items average lifetime is low, it can take an additional penalty to respawn time.
• This serves to lengthen the respawn time of drills, kegs, and pyrotech for unsuccessful rushers, while keeping constant or shortening the time for long-lived ballista defenses, well-defended mounted bows, and teams with multiple factories of similar items.
• When a strong defensive team stops having to focus on eliminating suicide bombers every 20 seconds, they can actually progress in developing an attack force capable of overwhelming a constantly mobile team of rushers.
• Some items (military supplies, additional ballista bolts and boulders) would be excluded from this process, due to the expected need to refill ammo.

So, yeah. I don't know if it would actually encourage stalemate-breaking attacks or if it'd just needlessly punish rushers and reward turtles, but that's my idea.

 

stop making/hosting shitty ocean maps

 

How bout water drying up.

 

see my post above, design maps better to begin with

you dont need mechanics like drought fucking over maps designed around water

 

When warboats have respawns hopefully this will help.

 

Theres only a few things to avoid when making oceanmaps.
1. Making the cliffs too big.
That will allow the defending team to just sit there, and have one builder drop some blocks or shoot some bolts, and everyone else can prepare for their attack, which will get the same treatment on the other side of the ocean.
2. Floating islands.
They're too easy to defend. Not only is it hard to be taken, the only way that is both fast and efficient to get up, is ladders. After a two minute attack, it takes only two seconds to get rid of their way in.
3. Making two oceans.
One ocean is fine, five is fine, but two is certainly not.
One ocean is fine, because it's simple. just defend, not too many stalemates here.
Three oceans is fine too: There will be two mainlands, and two islands.
Both teams capture one island, then battle in the middle.
Two oceans, however, means that one team has two-thirds of the map, and the other only has it's mainland.
That gives the islandteam too much of an advantage.
Four seas or more is no problem. The advantage of an extra island is small, so even if a team has one more, it will not make a difference.

 

I imagine a cool map design (that might not work) would be to have the vertical space of the map doubled. Then you could make an underground ocean and above that a large land mass. This isn't really relevant to the OP but that is just an idea I had.

In terms of stalemates, I agree with what Gofio said about the cliffs on oceans. Not only is it hard to attacks these, it often makes the ocean to land transition very messy and chaotic. This leads to an awkward battlefield in which either team does not advance.

 

Give bombs, minikegs, and kegs a higher explosion radius and damage. This would make it easier to take out towers next to the ocean. Allowing the team to attack. Some might not agree, but it would speed up the game.

 

Said map exists. I played on it not sure which server though.

 

How did the match go?

 

Quite well actually but I only played it once and it really needed a few more go's to develop proper strategies.
Some people kinda ignored the water section and got owned by the bison but there was still a fight down there.
Eventually one of our boats got through and we pummelled their base from the inside. Bison were used like sharks to prevent rushing.

 

What server was it.

 

I'm not sure. Maybe you could make a thread to ask? See if someone knows which one it was.

 

A collapse/destruction counter would be cool. Blocks in a collapse are tallied into the total, and destructible units can have static amounts set. Whichever team's counter hits the max first, loses. Not sure if each individual tile carries team information, that might complicate this idea.

Freshwater. A special factory can take in buckets of water, and outputs life count to the team. No access to water = no more respawns.

Warboats (and boats in general) need a gigantic life boost. Usually when two come together full of drill/bomb equipped knights, they last a few seconds and sink. If one does manage to make it, it's wiped out/overtaken when it hits enemy mainland. Boats should also have a longer takeover time, come to think of it. There's too much back and forth play when it comes to fights on the water, a big life boost to ships would solve this elegantly.

What happened to floods? Is there a flood scroll? I honestly have no idea. A team could prepare before hand then activate it, leaving the enemy team open to an attack when the water returns to normal. Floods should also put out big fires.

Stuff off the top of my head.

 

Tickets.

 

But that's too simple. The devs are obviously trying to make the game as complicated as physically possible

 

Just add bisonchopters, am i the only who remembers theses

 

Honestly the best way to break a stalemate is a longboat full of people, with a cata on top. When there is maximum rowers and a guy on the cata, most of the time you can destroy their defences before they get the chance to prepare. But this requires teamwork, which is somewhat lacking in public games.

 

I remember when my team just got greifed and was at the verge of losing. I went underground, made a nursyery, barracks and a tree farm. When it was all fortified I decided to come back and there was some awesome base up top. I dont think the round has ended yet. It was yesterday btw.