FTA Bonus on Highlevel Games means nearly Autowin

[Harti]

(08-15-2012 05:41 AM)CombatEX Wrote:  Harti, by less over-doing what do you mean exactly? Putting the wit spaces in more defensible positions? Only putting 3 wits per side on large maps but doing something like 2 wits per side on smaller ones?

All of that exactly.

By the way, the additional bonus spaces raised a lot of issues (i.e. crashes) with replays, stepping on bonus spaces and stuff; so I'd assume it isn't very easy to make adaptive changes to maps like that, shifting bonus spaces around, not even for experimental purposes in beta.

I'll still try to get OML to test that once again sometime.

What I used to suggest for spicing up gameplay (roughly): "Have more bonus spaces around so that a well-prepared flank can push towards a wit space" or something like that. I feared Outwitters would become stalemates in competitive high level play (which it does on SFI and Peekaboo, and probably will on other maps sometime).

What I suggested a few weeks ago (for balancing FTA) is basically that there's +1 extra bonus space per side on each map (that makes 3 on big, 2 on small maps), 1 of which is located very closely to one's base (only to make sure it nearly doesn't affect how the map plays), and reduce the wit income to 4. Make the bonus space pre-occupied by P2.

The math:
P1 has 4 wits. They have to use 1 wit to have a predeployed unit step on the additional bonus space. For the currently known rushing techniques they'll be 1 wit short even if they abandon all their bonus spaces.
P2 has 5 wits (+1). They needn't step on the bonus space (+1), granting them 2 more wit to spend for defenses.




@Teck: Good idea but this isn't helpful most of the time. You can remotely guess what they did (except on SP and Peekaboo) without messing up your own opening, so it wouldn't give P2 much of an advantage. Most of the time they will merely see P1 to be in a favorable position they cannot defend against.