Alright I'm not sure if this was mentioned anywhere but if it was I missed it so others may have as well. You can put a "-" sign in front of the bounty multiplier to make it a negative, and the game will give the player a resource penalty upon a kill. I find this to be more useful than the regular bounty as it acts as a bit of an equalizer in team games; you know those where 4v4s become 4v1s as soon as one guy dies and the others declare the cause lost. It doesn't penalize the entire team though it would be nice to have that as an option. It also seems like you can't set another digit as in "0.25" and it defaults to 0.2; if it doesn't the in game bounty shows as 0.8. Something Uber may want to look into.
Guys it's nice that you like my post but when nobody says anything it goes down and other people may miss this then. Second time this happened now.
I'm asking you to speculate about the impact negative bounties has on gameplay, it's not clear from your post.
I'd love to see kind of the reverse; a small negative multiplier that effects everyone but the killer, meaning turtling up become less effective over time as your opponents become relatively more powerful as each kill occurs as your limited eco decays over time
Oh, well, first of all it makes you think twice. My friend whom I played with while testing this out sometimes noted that he wished he'd have pulled his punches until he built his eco; as an early game kill will damage him more in the long run. Losing your ally early on is the worst thing that can happen to you besides losing your commander, but it gets better over time. So if you go for an early commander kill, you'll hurt yourself far more in the long run. The later you kill the commander, the less you'll hurt yourself but also the less your enemy will be hurt as their allies are more prepared. Of course, teams that are ahead consistently will only widen the rift over time, making the eco loss less and less significant as you probably have control of the majority of the resources. Negative bounties were never supposed to invalidate the advantage of halving the enemy team and/or playing better after all. It makes a good incentive for a player to stay in a 2v1, especially if they are in a good position. Consider this; in a game earlier today the starting planet got mostly overrun by the enemy and my ally lost his position, but the player who destroyed him got his economy halved (-0.5 eco). By then, I had the better position as we had delayed them on the ground long enough for me to block both the gas giant and the moon of the home system to them, leaving me outnumbered but also in relative safety as their industry wasn't much further ahead thanks to the economy penalty. Taking advantage of this, I set my foothold back at the home planet, and simply held there while I got an Atlas and a Zeus up. I then used Zeus to snipe the commander that had an unnerfed economy; again you see the same dynamic here, I lost my ally but he lost half his ally in return; an ally who chose to spend his halved resources on more essential things. With him gone, they lost their orbital units, allowing me to dig in properly, set up a Ragnarok and take the win home. I don't think that victory would have been possible without this mechanic, but I also don't believe that I was saved by it. It simply acted as an equalizer; a half income teammate is infinitely better than a destroyed teammate, but the difference seems to be large enough to trigger some comebacks provided the clutcher (I'm using a CS:GO term here, sorry hehe) can read the situation well and act carefully that would otherwise have been impossible due to sheer spam from two players. I have yet to try an "eco kill" version with -1.0 eco, but I feel that ruins the advantage of having forced a 2v1 in the first place. You are still left with your storages and leftover units, so I hypothesize it would make people reluctant to destroy an enemy commander unless they had a sizable army and numerous full storages of either resource. As for its applications in free for all, I believe tamer amounts like -0.1 can shave some momentum off a leading player, which may result in more drawn out and interesting games. Anything much higher probably would turn the game into a grinding halt where everyone is terrified to move before building as much stuff as they can, but that kind of gameplay is probably not as popular among intermediate and above players as opposed to how popular it seems to be with beginners. That said, I can't say anything for sure about Free For Alls as I've stopped playing them since I made in-game friends. I hope this is a satisfying analysis of the possible applications and implications of this mechanic. If turtling was ever a problem it certainly isn't anymore with the Titans, asteroids, and instant kill Halleys.
Thanks! I'm still not sure I 100% understand the appeal, but I am happy the engine is flexible enough for you to discover this game mode. I'll have to try it out.
Well if you are asking for a TL;DR, it gives the losing team more reasons to keep fighting and less reasons to quit without trivializing their loss of an ally. It also makes it harder for single player to dominate a team game and carry them to victory.
Hey guys, so I'm back to PA:T after a long while. Any chance this could finally be fixed for the next patch?
Yeah by fixed I meant that it should be allowed again. I'd appreciate it if a developer could comment on why they would remove such a useful feature just because it was made so by accident.
Honestly I think a negative bounty upon a kill just incentivises turtling - as you'd want to build your forces up to kill them all in one knockout blow instead of being aggressive. The scenario you're giving reminds me of a match I was playing in Supreme Commander, it was a 4v4 and I killed the weakest link, and we lost because the three competent players on their team used that mass much more effectively. edit: I didn't read the post date holy crap There's nothing to fix, it's working as intended. It's also easily moddable as the above says.
