Is this ready for public announcement?

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Google Frog: A few major fixes are needed if chicken faction is going to be added to the main game.

• Chickens need to have no metal or energy income so M sharing can't be exploited, atm drones can be spammed for M.
• Drones need reclaim so chickens can't just be stopped with t2 DT.
• Listener will have to be temporarily removed(or given no attack) until it is better integrated with the rest of the game. (Or could it just cloak and stealth much like the spy? Chameleon chicken)
  • CarRepairer: I believe you mean Digger, not Listener. And I prefer that my burrowing babies were hidden from the faction than changed so that they are just cloak/stealth like your common robot :( I hope to eventually come up with a solution that pleases everyone in allowing blind mobile burrowed units a chance to be a part of a real game, something I always envisioned should be in starcraft. Cloak/stealth for the chickens is just a copy. I like that burrowing is a different way to hide. I did like your idea that terrain-warping weapons damage burrowers. Perhaps we can try assigning damage to underground units equal to the amount of cratering a weapon does. And with enough blast, this could force the unit above ground. Then the seismic issue can be revisited as well.
• Disable assist to prevent teamgame exploits.
• Regen for chickens

Then there's balancing the faction. Spikers are probably still OP vs t1. The unit costs are probably wrong too. Better early AA is needed.

Some kind of mex overdrive will need to be added but it doesn't have to be done right away.

An adv drone that makes bigger builds and costs a lot more BP. With a BP economy cost is defined by how long it takes a nest to make something not how long it takes the unit to morph. This adv drone could also be used for other things like antinuke and bigger turrets. Can make overdrive building is morphing isn't used.

KingRaptor: In addition to the above, chickens also need:

• A light air unit, and perhaps a bomber
  • Car: Pidgeon is all set.
• Sonar?
  • Car: I'll give sonar to Listener for now.
  • Sak: I had sonar on all chickens that could hit underwater. They have to have it cuz the chickens arent smart enough to bring their own sonar. What happened to this?

Google Frog: T2 chickens are too expensive. They take too long to build which makes them completely inviable. The big chicken roles need to be split or some kind of overdrive is needed. If they cost less they'd probably be op so all big units need to be reduced.

Chicken Faction

The Chicken faction is a work in progress. To play as the chicken faction, change the 'commander type' (under Mod Options) to 'Constructor/Chicken Start'. Under Con Start, you have the option to morph your (otherwise useless) commander into 3 constructors (air, bot, veh, ship, hover) of your faction, or into 3 chicken drones. Morphing to chickens will mean you do not get access to the units of your previous faction- you are now playing the Chicken faction.

See UnitGuide's chapter on chickens for chicken units and defenses.

Economy

Chickens dont use metal or energy, instead, they must place their burrows on metal deposits (burrowing through fissures in the earth). The burrow acts like a factory, and builds at a rate equivalent to the metal amount in the metal spot. You place burrows (and other structures) by morphing your drones. Thus, chickens treat every mex like a factory and have a totally distributed, decentralized playstyle. Be warned that a burrow not on a metal spot is useless, and has no production power.

Google Frog: Skirming is a problem for swarmer. My solution to this is to give them a crouch mode where they are cloaked and stealthed with about 75 decloak radius and immobile. This gives them some chance against skirmishers as they can ambush them.

Google Frog: Make the queen less of an 'I win' button. Instead make it similar in power to a karg/razor and make it's BT feasible.
KingRaptor: Just leave queen out of chicken faction.

New Chicken Ideas

• Better defenses? More robust detection systems?

Other Notes

• Give all structures a groundplate similar to Zerg creep. (Groundscars are CPU intensive and most people have them off due to bugs).
• Chickens neither leave wreckages nor do they benefit from enemy wreckages.
• Allow drones to "clean up" wreckage to prevent blockage within chicken base, but not as a reclaim. Chickens have no nanolathe.
• As chickens have no nanolathe, their factories are not be assistable. Their playstyle involve making roosts on metal spots.
• Burrowed units are undetectable when still. Use KDR's gadget to end game when only those units are left.
• Chicken names to toss around: Diatryma, Beast, Broiler.

Brainstorming from CAdev:

Most of this stuff has been implimented/fixed.

Chickens are like Kernel-Panic-for-mexes. You can only put burrows on metal spots (rate of production scales to the amount of metal in the radius). The burrows cant be assisted, and thus your production is totally de-centralized. Problem: Something cannot be a mex and a constructor. False units? The false mex would have to drain the full amount of metal from the spot, but not produce anything (to prevent arm/core player making a mex next to the spot). Maybe Gaia? The burrow would have to stop functioning if it is ever denied metal (IE, someone makes a mex in the upper left of the burrow- mex priority is always given to the upper left mex and the lower one produces nothing).

Drones make e, being mobile e generators. This offers the economic throttle. Effeciency Close to other factions, so its seamless and there is no incentive to farm for other players. Units would probably have to take a lot of e to produce, but this needs to be balanced in tests so growth rates are similar.

Alternative system: Chicken drones are given reclaim, and a new structure is made that spawns chicken plants. The plants are just randomly placed over a large area and harvested by the drones for e (That wander from tree to tree). Any other faction can harvest too. Chickens should probably have relatively fast reclaim- they should probably be best at this and even be able to use regular trees as a viable source of income, competitive with other factions. They probably shouldnt be good at reclaiming metal though (Or even capable of it...), so how to fix this? Perhaps encourage teamplay by having them make fast reclaim and just give it to allies, but thats a little weird that they're the best at harvesting a resource they cant use. Failing this, just make the chicken plants have a low reclaim time, so they are competitive with other e sources.

Chickens have no use for metal and excess it to allies.

CarRepairer: There must be a balance between making chickens different enough from robots to create a new type of gameplay style, but still maintain enough similarity to arm and core so that they can play properly on any map, against any faction, with or without allies.

For example: a large difference is that chickens leave no corpses for enemies to reclaim, but also cannot reclaim corpses. Thus there's a benefit and a flaw that balance each other out and add a different feel for playing as that faction. Two examples of a bad difference would be (1) an economic system that makes chickens not require mex spots, or (2) make them far more dependent on mex spots than arm and core. These would tip the balance too much depending on the map or other circumstances.

Right now the main difference is no chickens have no nanolathe of any kind. They rely on morph to make buildings. Buildpower for making units is only gained through building more "factories." If you want to build something really large and you can't actually speed it up so this would have to be resolved. Another issue is the clearing away of corpses which is less of a problem. It could be solved in several different ways of course, possibly using lua.

See starcraft for an excellent example of three factions that all play very differently, but all rely on the game's two (okay three, there's "food supply") resources to ensure the game plays different but balanced. I like to think of mex spots as "mineral spots" from the perspective of chickens. That way M and E can still be viable resources for this organic faction, and can be shared alike by allies and be equally as useful to chickens, arm and core.

Google Frog: Starcraft has the same economic structure for all 3 races so the variation is really in the units and abilities, much like some of the factories in CA. Chickens have a completely different economic structure.

CarRepairer:

• I like it so far. As we progress we have come up with some good ideas. Now that chickens rely solely on metal (translating directly into buildpower) this resource is not redistributable and cannot be concentrated. Metal under a factory only applies to it. Also, robots have overdrive to increase their metal output indefinitely on a sliding scale, even once they have capped their mexes. Chickens are disadvantaged at the moment. One idea that was tossed around is allowing chickens to build a structure that will increase their buildpower. Three possibilities: (1) A structure that globally increases buildpower. (2) A morph to a mexfactory itself that increase its buildpower. (3) A middle-ground, where a structure is build and all mexfactories in its radius are increased in buildpower, much like a nano assists nearby factories. Number 3 seemed most popular.
  • Saktoth: Not with me, sounds silly. Individual morphs sounds best, or just give chickens E.
  • CarRepairer: Giving chickens E and using it for overdrive is strange, complex, and somehow too much like robots. They would use 1 E for building a unit, and 1 E for increasing the chickenfactory's ability to convert metal into buildpower better so it has more buildpower? It is hard to even picture. I'd like to hear what quantum thinks since he made the gadget that converts M to buildpower.

• I would also like to explore chickens having really good regenerative abilities (zerg again) since they have no nanolathe repairing abilities. This would even make chickendefense games a lot more interesting and further simulate an enemy's ability to repair his units which have survived an attack. Saktoth: +1, regen for chickens.
  • Marmoth: regen for chicken will add incentive to play hit and run and not brute rush (like chicken do in the chicken defense). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but should be taken into account next to the organic feeling of a regenerative unit.

Marmoth - Economy suggestion all morph: To add a possibility for chicken to expand exponentially (as other factions do with overdrive) and prevent any assist exploit, i suggest an all morph economy. Principles:

• Morphing should be allowed only on mex spots (or around them) - big units morphing would take a whole mex when several normal chickens should be morphable on one mex.
• 2 kinds of morphing: evolve or duplicate (duplicate could require a structure - nest - to be used. Nests could have the ability to duplicate chicken around to remove some micro)
• possibility to evolve into structures that accelerate morphing around - burrows - (= investing current build power into future build power - equivalent to overdrive)

Next to the exponential expansion and no assist exploit, this system allows:

• More organic feeling by morphing
• Less regular production (groups made at once instead of continuous flow)

The weak point of this system is perhaps a heavier micro for production. The possibility of multiple units selection and morph should keep it not too important.

Saktoth: Too much micro, esp if you have to use mexes.

Total rewrite of chicken balance by HeadHunter?

1. Chickens start with 2-3 drones, which are more or less like cons, but faster and with no weapons.
2. Each drone can morph into nest which can build drones, or a plantation.
   • Nest spawns more drones and requires no resources for that.
   • Plantations are cool resource factories which assimilate everything around. This means they extract metal from M spots, create food and can be boosted if placed on geo spots. Each plantations has some activity radius, which slowly increases over time with some constant rate up to hard limit. Plantations also have spore cannons to protect themselves. Full-size plantation can be morphed to generate more resources. When needed, plantation can be converted into energy plant which will not generate any food, but energy instead. Energy can overdrive other plantations in large radius, and allows to boost mineral extraction.
3. Chickens have following resources
   • Food, which is somehow E, but gathered from area. It does not use normal E bar. Food grows on its own. Trees are automatically transformed into food by plantations. Plantations are linkable and will concatenate (zerg farms basically, but built anywhere).
   • Mineral, which is mined from metal spots. Unlike robots, chickens have to stock mineral and food to create unit, by morphing a smaller into. If needed, a unit can replicate itself loosing 50% of its hp and needs full food stock. Units can regenerate, but they need food for that. Notice that replicating units of same type does not take extra mineral. This allows exponential growth of army.
   • Energy which is only needed to boost production speed and to recharge shields and superweapons. It can be also used to shift the production closer to front.
   • When stocked, mineral and food are stored in the plantations. Each mobile unit can take as well, up to a limit specific to that unit. If the resources need to be transferred elsewhere, special transfer units can be built, which can collect a lot of resources from plantation and distribute them elsewhere. Of course, when they run out the unit will have to go back and get more.
4. Buildtime is proportional to cost and amount of E invested. Invest less food than needed into morph and you will get pretty damaged chicken in the end. So basically to maintain and army chickens need constant income of food from large territory, given that they can grow exponentially,
5. Fully morphed and healthy chickens do not consume food. So one can have as many of them as needed.
6. Chicken drones can morph into a variety of buildings AND units. Units can be left as-is. However, the gap between base species and destination morph is limited by the amount of food the unit is able to carry. So if the target is queen, the base should be relatively big. This way it is impossible to generate a stream of units, instead players are encouraged to do the morphing in big packs, and then attack.
7. Playing chickens
   1. build plantation & nest
   2. build several drones, probably another plantation and keep building drones=)
   3. morph drones into swarmers or basic air scouts, keep building plantations and drones until whole map is covered with them
   4. attack, build more basic units and start morphing them into something bigger.
   5. If some attackers survived, take them back to base and refill on plantations. It is a good idea to keep plantations in some close group so that units do not have to walk around looking for food.
   6. Wait till they regenerate and attack again.
   7. When it is clear that some plantations are so far away that the food they make is no longer usable by land units, the plantation can be triggered to produce energy. Energy boosts other plantations and unit morphing speed, each energy plantation works pretty much like overdrive pylon which generates own E.
   8. Chicken super weapons may include antinuke systems, chai-hulud like sandworms which can eat anything on the ground and are more or less unkillable underground, electroshock floating units with area stun which does not damage chickens and of course queen=) Dodo launcher might also look cool=)
8. Playing chickens in alliance with robots:
   • As plantations can assimilate energy, they can be boosted with pylons. This greatly increases their mineral production and food outcome.
   • Chickens are able to boost energy production by converting a plantation into a powerplant. It generates normal E and can be connected to the grid, as well as boost nearby chicken plantations. Energy plantation can be further morphed
   • Chicken bombers can be made able to transport smaller units, including robots.
   • Chicken mineral and robot metal are not interchangeable. Chickens can not be loaded into robot transports.