New Area Hazards (Racing and Catch)

[Sanaret]

Pretext:

Right now we have 2 damaging hazard types in racing (and catch)

1. Walls. You can think of this as damage proportional to your perpendicular velocity component. Or "damage by speed".
2. Shock areas. As far as I can tell this is "damage over time".

There is a problem with the "damage over time" approach though. There is a counterplay to damage over time areas by going over them extremely fast, rather than trying to avoid them at all.

In "Catch" it seems like there is more incentive for redundancy and raw speed than careful navigation. There is nothing wrong with a challenge in redundancy and speed, but there isn't a challenge truly dedicated to careful navigation in that regard yet.

In the racing maps, leaderboard-grade speeds fly over shock-areas so fast that they are totally inconsequential, making the Phoenix and Tournament maps practically as featured as Hydrus but with with less difficult turns. Example of shock areas made totally inconsequential by speed: https://youtu.be/MCeprgLvRqg?t=284

Feature Suggestion:

• New race/catch hazard area: Spikes/blade area. This type of area does "damage over distance", in contrast with "damage over time". The more distance you go through it, the more damage you take, up to very high damage. If you come to a standstill inside it, there is no damage over time. (But it will still take damage to navigate out once you get moving again.) The damage is low enough that escaping laterally (in races) should be feasible, but the damage should be high enough that pressing forward recklessly will be very punishing.
  • With only "damage over time" hazards, solving the map can be reduced to solving only one variable: speed.
  • With "damage over distance" hazards, the challenge again becomes to solve two variables, speed and hazard perception/reaction.
• New race/catch hazard area: Barrier. This is "damage by speed", just like walls, except...... cutting into the roadway itself, making an impassable lane.
  • It could be done in any way, but I imagine this like any other hazard: Center lane, Left Lane, Right Lane
  • This is again to prevent race maps from being reduced to solving raw speed alone. Think about what makes the Hydrus Highway more difficult to solve than the Sagittarius Drag Strip. It's the very tight turns that are very very difficult to control at high speeds. Roadblocks may have the same damage mechanism as raw walls, but the drone design challenge to avoid roadblocks is very different from the challenge to avoid walls.
  • This again makes the maps a challenge in solving hazard perception/reaction, not just speed and simple waypoint following.
  • This already exists in the Catch tournament! Which is good! You can see that drones get caught on it very often, and even smash one another into it. This enriches the arena very much. Maybe there could be even more catch maps, including one with more barriers?
• (Do not modify any existing maps, for obvious reasons. The above new area types would be good for new maps though. Particularly I would personally imagine these as higher difficulty hazards than what exists right now. Belonging to future, higher difficulty maps.)

[Markus]

Very good ideas here, thank you very much for sharing.

I'm not all that happy how "Catch" works currently, as the VTOL approach is the best now (Speed over logic). The original ideas was that you must focus on logic and speed-only would kill your parts instantly, but that was too frustrating, and resulted in mostly dead drones. So we toned down the damaging fields, but now if you're fast enough, they don't matter all that much.

I would like to rework the "Catch" mode in the future, so that more strategies are viable again. Your ideas about speed-depending damage is an interesting solution. For example if you are slower than a certain threshold, the field won't damage you. But the faster you are (above the threshold) the more damage you get. So finding a slower but saver way around the fields might be a better solution.

We once had slow-down fields instead of damaging fields, and another approach was no obstacles at all (only center pillar, moving target and damaging field at the border).

Another idea is, that as you progress in the tournament, the map would change and VTOL thrusters would not be the best solution anymore. Not sure yet  

I don't know when I get time to work on that game mode again, but your ideas are very valuable. Thank you very much for sharing and if you have more ideas, please feel free to post and discuss them  

[Sanaret]

Here are some more thoughts I'll add then:

• The reason that VTOL is overwhelmingly the best at Catch isn't because it automatically aims, but because it can change directions almost instantly
  • You can tell this if you try to make a drone that goes extremely fast in one direction and tries to turn towards the target instead of using VTOLs. Full drone turning can't compete with the instant direction adaptation of VTOLs
  • I personally don't think VTOL is overpowered and needs to be nerfed or anything. Just to be extra clear. Rather than saying "we should nerf VTOL because it does this map too well" I would say "We should create new maps where VTOL isn't automatically the best solution"
• The idea you mention of the map changing over time is awesome. Especially if with barriers.
  • How to create a map that is VTOL-nerfed is basically to reduce the number of waypoints that can be reached by following a straight line. That is the simplest way to boil down the issue

Thanks for your ears! or your eyes, as it were