the friendly war of ninja mex

I shamelessly reclaim any mex frame placed by such shitters.

rookstoo your suggestion doesn't work because it doesn't matter to whom the mex belongs because metal is shared. mex payback has to be made proportional to the investment as SmokeDragon said.

some good ideas here it sounds like we are all on the same page so far =)

the payback for a mex, is, like, what? 45 metal? (IIRC)
I'm pretty sure your team won't turn over and spontaneously combust if you give a teammate 45 metal
similarly, you won't be able to build a starlight at the 5 minute mark if you steal 45 metal from a teammate
I mean, it's annoying, nobody likes being cheated, it's a shitty feeling.
soo... can we just, not? like, don't spend all those APM and brainpower trying to 45-metal-up your teammate with super niche nanoframe mex exploits, and instead spent it trying to 45-metal-up your enemy with better pewpew micro.
And, if somebody does build a nanoframe on the mex spot, no big deal. mex is mex, and metal for team is metal for team.

Just, don't ninja mex, You, your teammates and your elo will all appreciate it
And live and let live, it's not something to declare war over


PS:
If we do end up implementing a per-contribution payback system, could we also apply that to energy? I'd sometimes ask my teammates to donate their geo so I can morph it with my own metal, and I'd still like my teammates to get their payback. (ofc there's more examples I can list)
Thank you~, whoever implementing this

I agree that it would be good to split the payback by how much is spent on the mex. While the payback itself is probably fairly irrelevant, I think it is pretty bad for cooperation and team moral to have people ninja mexing each other. Being able to just build without worrying about this stuff would be nice. The same could go for shared construction of fusions and singus (probably not worth the complication to do it for wind and solar).

A technical solution may be a little tricky. Reclaim exists.

quote: Can the nanoframe fade out like in classic TA?

Yes, it can according to modrules.

quote: a con on repeat constructing a lotus to waste enemy shots

I'd rather lose a game than nanoframe spam.

yea. const set on repeat and placing shit in shift Q to only plop nanoframes. <3

SmokeDragon btw, remember when i said ppl go ballistic over slight inconvenience. there you go...

quote: Can the nanoframe fade out like in classic TA? I can't think of many good reasons for a nanoframe to hang out.

Nanoframes hang around for two reasons:

• Avoiding free BP.
• Decay seems to just introduce UI issues, rather than reduce the power of the worst nanoframe spam.

Decay was initially removed due to an aversion to the free buildpower implied by decay. The free BP comes from the fact that decay returned metal to the players storage, so the nanoframe was essentially reclaiming itself without requiring any constructor. I like this approach, it's neat, but it was Saktoth that really pushed it. He generally wanted BP to be quite limited, to reduce the size of "forced stalls", while I thought having 20 BP and 6 metal income at the start of the game was fine as it makes construction prioritisation starker. But I generally think constructor-like logistics abilities should be mostly limited to constructors. The exceptions (morph, Puppy) have the ability to stand in for constructor BP as a central ability, not just an extra bonus.

The UI issues come from a conflict between the principal of smart units and the goal of using decay to prevent nanoframe spam. This is due to the abilities implied by the existence of decay. The way decay worked is that nanoframes would hang around for 10 or so seconds, then start reclaiming themselves, with the reclaim rate (maybe) ramping up over time (not sure about the ramp up, it was a while ago). Constructors working on a nanoframe would reset the decay timer. But here's the thing, the constructor just has to be "working", it doesn't actually have to spend any resources. If the constructor had to spend resources then manual priorities via 'Wait' would lead to unwanted decay, and full ZK construction priorities wouldn't work either. Anyway, the implication is that constructors have the ability to reset a decay timer just by being close to a nanoframe and looking at it for 1/30th of a second. In theory a single Caretaker could negate decay for dozens of nanoframes in its range and still have plenty of time left over to build or repair at a slightly reduced rate. Not giving all constructors such an innate ability would be a case of stupid units. In short, adding decay does nothing to:

• Nanoframes that were created in the last 10 or so seconds.
• Nanoframes within range of a constructor.

I very rarely see nanoframe spam that doesn't fall into at least one of these categories.

On top of all this, I consider combat nanoframe spam mostly "solved" by the following systems:

• Nanoframes start off very flat, making them unable to block projectiles.
• The Avoid Bad Targets state include anti-nanoframe spam measures at one of its lower settings, for nanoframes below some cost threshold.

Finally, not decaying just seems convenient. Accidentally moving a constructor away isn't so punishing. New players who do so can see the partially constructed building, instead of having the building disappear confusingly so that they can't find it when they look back.

My ideal metal extractor gameplay:

1. Building a metal extractor uses resources of every ally member equally, with unchangeable highest priority.
2. Nobody gets any refunds since everyone contributed equally.
3. Finished metal extractors cannot be reclaimed, only destroyed by taking damage. There's no legitimate reason to reclaim a metal extractor, feel free to write a few pages about semantics and hypothetical scenarios that never happen in a real game if you disagree.
4. Finished metal extractors cannot be controlled in any manner and accept no commands from any player, such as for self destruct.