Alright, I finished it. We used to have it so that as long as a door was opened, your base would not decay for days. This had a few problems associated with it.
First, nothing ever decayed, because even if you lived somewhere near someone else and they opened their door, your base would never decay even after you had left the server with no intention to come back. This led to servers leaking entities like crazy and killing their performance.
The second problem was that there was no real cost to building absolutely enormous buildings that were almost unraidable. You could just farm a million stone, spend it, and that was it; no repair costs, no nothing. It stayed pristine as long as a door was opened once every few days.
This all changes today.
First, the tool cupboard can now store resources, and these resources will be used to keep your base from decaying. You can think of this like a tax system, where the first section of blocks are 'taxed' at a certain rate to maintain their health, and the more and more blocks you add to your base the more expensive it gets. These values are all configurable via a convar and will need tweaking, but right now it’s set up like this:
- 1-15 blocks = 10%
- 15-40 blocks = 15%
- 40-75 blocks = 20%
- 75+ blocks = 33%
This means if you have a two by one you'll have to pay 10% the cost of the base per 24 hours to maintain upkeep, which is peanuts. However, giant clan bases will need a very significant amount of resources to prevent them from decaying. The idea here is that you'll need to be smart with your builds, because it's not free forever. The entire concept of honeycombing is pretty ridiculous, but it made perfect sense with the old meta of the game. As I've said in many devblogs, we would like to move towards more intelligently designed bases, with traps and triggers as your defences, instead of simply blocking raiders with 50,000 HPs worth of stone.
Secondly, your base will decay from the outside in, so the very center of your base will be safest for longer. All the decay times are configured via convars in the console, but the defaults are like this:
- Twig = 1hr
- Wood = 2hr
- Stone = 3hr
- Metal = 5hr
- Armored = 12hr
This means that if you have an entire base of stone and are not maintaining its upkeep, every 3 hours you'll lose a 'layer'.
Thirdly, if you
are maintaining upkeep, your base will repair itself, very slowly, at the same rate that it would have decayed at. So if you do screw up, as long as you put the resources back in the TC, the hard to reach walls and sectioned off areas of your base will repair themselves.
Everyone is going to freak the hell out and downvote us on Steam, and I'll say the same thing I always say when we make a big change: it's not final, we're going to balance it based on feedback, and the goal here is to make the game better, not worse.
Some people have already said they wanted a 'grace' period before decay, but I can't see how that would happen. It seems like people would just put the resources in for a single tick, and then take them out to reset the grace period.
I'm going to have to add some help and pop-ups for this next week, so it's a lot more obvious what is happening, as well as do some things like visualize the building privilege zone when you have the hammer out.
Oh, and all of this is totally configurable via console commands. Server owners can do:
decay.upkeep false
And everything will go back to what it was before, but besides that, hopefully we'll be able to get a fine-tuned balance by next week if people experiment with these values.
At least for once people can't bitch that we are hurting solo players instead of zergs, eh?
