I thought it would be fun for the community to brainstorm a bit on modifications to make to the game that make it different and maybe more interesting. I actually think the balance of the game is quite good currently so I am not necessarily looking for change, but I think it would be a fun topic to discuss. No idea is too crazy. Let’s see what we can come up with.
I’ll start of with some ideas of my own:
Payment in blood
Algorithms have the option to exchange their own life points for cores. I would think that for every 2 life you get 1 core. It makes for an interesting situation with some dangerous rushes and some clutch defenses where you prevent the opponent to score by subtracting the amount yourself and build defenses instead. I would suspect this decision to perform payment in blood would only be performed by very confident dynamic algos, or some very aggressive rushes.
Repair hull with cores
Opposite of previous one and slightly less interesting. Pay 2 cores to repair one hull. If you want to safegaurd against a certain rush and think saving cores is more risky. I am not sure whether I would use this option, but maybe if I am very low on health yet in a dominant position.
master thief turret
Turret that steals resources (cores or bits) from opposing units when it is in range. This would be to gather more resources and punish certain types of attack.
savings account
Put cores into a savings account for 5 turns. After 5 turns you get double the cores back. (The aelgoo series would probably be happily using this). It is a risk taken by the algorithm, so the opponent is incentiviced to quickly punish it.
throwing debris in opposing area
Some way to spend units/cores to mess up the structure of the opponent. Maybe it would take a turn to arrive, where the landing spot is already identified. When the opponent cleans up the mess he gets resources for it. (my own strategy would be but hurt by this). I feel like this option could have some interesting strategic implications, and very difficult to use correctly
Modification Challenges
Temporary changed game modes with their own competition where the rules of the game slightly change for just that competition. As a way to send everybody back to the drawing board, and old dogs cannot simply rehash their old algos.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have interesting ideas of your own that could change the game? I am very interested to see what you guys can come up with
I like the idea of mod challenges so new players feel like they can get into something on the ground floor and have a chance!
No man’s land:
Either player can build in the middle 4 or 6 rows of the board. This would lead to some cool situations where you could completely mess up your opponent’s paths with just a few filters, or go for aggressive but vulnerable forward building strategies
Headwinds:
Scoring gives cores to the opponent instead of the scoring player. This could stop a rush from cascading into a win and would also lead to strategies that take damage for more resources.
Fog of war:
You only see opponent’s spaces if one of your units reached within 5 spaces of it last round. This would give people the ability to have secret back bases and give an incentive to scouting and attacking back spaces instead of corners.
System glitch:
Temporary barriers appear on random locations on the board and last for one turn, they could disrupt paths and/or targeting
These are all really interesting! I think the idea of changing things for a specific competition makes a lot of sense. Another option is to add more interesting units. Most of the current ones just do damage or don’t, the encryptor is the only interesting one.
There could be a healing unit - an information unit, maybe, healing everything it passes. This would be too overpowered as an escort, probably, so maybe it only works on firewalls, or is really slow.
Or a mine, that looks empty to unit pathfinding but explodes on contact with an information unit (and destroys the mine.) This could create some interesting strategies - one player might close off all but a hole in the middle and put a mine there, and then the other player switches to a corner ping cannon to avoid it.
Another option would be an information unit that places a filter where it died. This would let you build on their side a little bit, and disrupt pathing or something. This would be really hard to use well, though.
There are a lot more options for more interesting units as well, but these are the first things I thought of. I think there is a lot of room for units that do more than just give and take damage.
And then writing a prediction algo that will perfectly stop all attacks with a few scramblers each round… O_o. Then just launch a ping cannon with a quadrillion encryptors…
I had a similar idea, where the modified version of Terminal would be called something like Terminal Sandbox. Would have similar rules and would allow C1 developers and us to play around with all these nice ideas. For challenges the prize pool would obviously be lower. The best Sandbox ideas could be promoted to the Terminal.
Lots of cool ideas here! I’ll through out a few just for fun, even though I don’t really think they should be implemented since most only really work for simulator algos:
Each player has 1 opportunity during the match to reset time to an earlier state. This would have to be done at the beginning of the turn and could revert back say like 5 or 10 turns.
The amount of resources you get per turn is influenced by how much health you have. The lower health algo gets more resources per turn (not a lot). This would make it harder to close out games if you have a poor attack strategy and for some interesting come-backs for those with good defense strategies.
At 100 turns, instead of ending the game, at random a percentage of units are removed from both sides, opening up the board.
The ability to move defensive units one space per turn (or every 2 turns, etc).
A mobile unit that spawns other units every other turn (or some other amount). Essentially like a carrier ship.
Going off of the savings account idea, maybe instead of being some abstract place, you have to actually build a bank unit (static). The number of bank units you create determines how much you can invest (and maybe rates?). This also makes it riskier, since in this scenario your investment can be destroyed (maybe stolen?) by the enemy player.
Make different areas of the board’s edges worth different amounts in scoring. For example, the same number of units that score in one part of the board would score more if they target a different section of the board. This could be (symmetrically) randomized.
Games with 4 players :). Pathing, scoring, etc all work the same. The difference is you only have 1 edge to defend and target, and you can only build in your quadrant. You personally are only competing against the algo across from you, but all units target each other. So while you aren’t strictly against your neighbors, their actions/units do affect you.
Again, most of these don’t really work since they need dynamic algos, but I thought they were some fun ideas :).
How about a gamemode where you only have one “kind”(not split between attack and defence) of money, so you could either be really defencive or really aggresive, or choose a middle strategie. So having a really strong attack comes with the cost of a really weak defence etc.
You could maybe do this just by allowing a transaction between currencies. So you could trade bits for cores and vice-versa. This would let you stay the same or go all out in one mode.
Or, for 4 players, you could have a square board, and everyone gets a corner. There would be a shared space in the middle, or maybe nobody could put anything there. This would change things more dramatically, and probably wouldn’t work very well, but would certainly be interesting.
This is a cool addition. To keep it simple I would suggest making a wall with 4 cost that self destructs for 2*cost(stability/max stability) after 5 turns. (or a different balance). Then maybe the placement of the bank should be encouraged to be risky. For example somewhere on the front rows, or cannot be within range of too many filters/destructors for example. So that there is some counter play.
Lots of other good ideas are appearing on this thread! Nice to see
