[Suggestion] New overlap behaviour - Anti-Bastion

[Diet-Cola]

The current behaviour when Bastion A & Bastion B is that in the overlapping area, a player who is not on group A&B cannot place or pearl within that field. My proposed change would be to alter this behaviour in order to bring a balance element to Bastion.

New behaviour:
When two bastions are placed on different groups and have an overlap, We take the most recently placed bastion and define that as the 'Anti-bastion', the reason for this is that the new bastion will begin to assault the original bastion or in this case, the oldest bastion. The 'Anti-bastion' would break at a rate that is defined by the attackers that stand within the area of both bastions overlap.

Now that the original bastion is being attacked, this overlap zone becomes a zone that both parties have access to. The idea now however is to multiply the break effect of the anti-bastion by however many people are on the group of the anti-bastion. So 1 person stand in the area is equal to 1 person placing blocks, where as 5 = 5 etc.

Where as for the defence, their objective is to simply push out the attackers from that area so that their bastions are not being attacked.

The dynamic this brings is that vaults become more PvP focused which is the fun part of vault battles and gets away from the meta of attacking a vault being a 12hr block placing simulator.

Looking for comments and thoughts on these changes.

[Maxopoly]

We take the most recently placed bastion and define that as the 'Anti-bastion

Anti bastions should be a separate thing and not just a normal bastion. Maturation cycles/resistance of normal and anti-bastions have to be balanced separately, otherwise one of them is broken/useless. Additionallly I'd not allow damage simply by standing there as this encourages strange turtling tactics on the attacking side. Instead I'd make anti bastions a more dynamic temporary consumable (still a block though, like a beacon that disappears) which increase damage dealt to bastions by a multiplier within a certain range for authorized group members. Could even tier that with varying damage, duration, range, production cost, resistance against counter attacks etc. Speaking of, the same could be done for counter-reinforcement beacons.

[Maxopoly]

Also codewise I'd likely want to merge Bastion into my reworked JukeAlert if we were to go forward with these changes.

[DumbBumb]

Instead of adding in a anti-bastion, that is quite similar to a forced towny war type plugin, why not buff tnt? it is already a mechanic in minecraft with a decent learning curve and huge skill cap.

[Maxopoly]

Please elaborate on what you mean with "buff"

[DumbBumb]

TNT could be made so that it can damage obsidian, also perhaps a new "type" that is made in a factory that does more than 1 damage to reinforcements? Or tnt that if detonated in bastion rang damages bastions?

[Maxopoly]

Making TNT damage obsidian is too complicated to implement imo, it requires deep interference with minecraft code. I also think generally TNT is not a good mechanic and ranged sieging mechanics are not desireable due to how they change the gameplay . Aside from that I'm not really opposed to different types of TNT, but don't consider them a great approach to this issue. I'd consider them if someone else implements them.

[Diet-Cola]

turtling tactics

We can prevent this however with maturation times and such, there should be no way for attackers to exploit putting 20 newfriends in a 1x1 cube

Possible abuse I could forsee is temporarily placing an anti-bastion in order to build in a bastioned area and then removing the bastion, although a likely fix to this would be disallowing destruction of either bastions while overlapping in order to force a victor.

Although building on your thoughts and ideas as well as merging it with your new JA code base, it does seem a pretty good idea to do so given the modularity of it.

As for the tnt buff's, I mostly agree with Max, it's an underused block in civ servers but thats only because any use it is given is going to purely overpowered due to the fact it will damage blocks & cause damage. Especially while there are various dupe bugs with it in its entity state.

[DumbBumb]

Making TNT damage obsidian is too complicated to implement imo, it requires deep interference with minecraft code

There is a plugin called obbybreaker which does this already, im not sure if it is open source though.

Especially while there are various dupe bugs with it in its entity state.

I think these are all patched in spigot?

[wingzero54]

The passive nature of just sitting and waiting for your bastion to break the other bastion feels like a towny feature as DumbBumb says. But I support Max's idea of it instead buffing bastion break rates.

Current changes being implemented according to dsclouse would make bastions have a 4 day warmup period though, which would make this a pointless conversation unless this new feature of buffing bastion breaks would be done with a third type of bastion block that wouldn't have the same warmup period.