Manual upgrading

[Serafine]

Gonna post this here so it can be discussed by a broader audience as I'm curious on the feedback.

The essential poit here is:

- Manual upgrading right now is extremely annoying. It kinda works well for level 2 upgrades but level 3 upgrades are a total disaster. You constnatly have to wait for neighbouring tiles to be upgraded, before you can upgrade others which results in a massively annoying minigame that keeps you from playing the ACTUAL game (like the good part of the game).

Here's a video where I spent FORTY SECONDS on upgrading already existing basic speed tiles to level 3 and it's not even completed when the level ends (and I might add that this is 1.2 where you have a TON of workers, much more than you normally have, which means in other levels this process takes even longer).
https://youtu.be/aVnui0GISvQ
That is, if done until completed sixty seconds (!) where I'm effectively not playing the game because this annoying little free-to-wait minigame completely ties up my attention. Now this is just speed tiles and not really important but upgrading soldiers can be decisive for winning or loosing an engagement and it's the same annoying process - even worse, you'll often have to build upgrades while simultaneously fighting opposing ants or trying to evade dangerous enemies like beach tiger beetles.


That's why I came up with this concept of automatic upgrades and Liam improved on it with the idea of adding timers.

The basic idea is that level upgrades happen automatically without any user interaction when prerequisites are met. If a tile has enough points from neighbouring tiles it will initiate a timer and when that timer has ticked through a worker will come to upgrade the tile (for free!).

With this change manual tile upgrading can be used for something with a much greater impact on the game -to change the TYPE of ant connected to it.
That means workers will only ever build basic worker tiles that then can be upgraded to various types of better and bigger workers and soldiers.
Manual upgrading essentially becomes the process of building combat and other specialized units.
This has the additional advantage that everytime you build new units you have to build workers first which can help in speeding up the process of placing eggs and upgrading tiles (before they change their type).
Also since these manual upgrades do NOT require any points from neighbouring tiles you can just pave them down like when you're building new tiles - the waiting for neighbouring tiles to get enough upgrade points first is completely gone.

It will also make food storage work better, speed up the early game and allow for much more variety with manual ugrades (certain polymorhic ants like Camponotus could upgrade tiles up to 5 or 6 times for increasing food costs until they get their huge supermajors)

I've actaully made two huge (low skill) paint pictures/charts to explain this in a more visual way:

https://i.imgur.com/UkXzwN6.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/g49bDqx.jpg

Obviously this would require some serious rebalancing but I think it'd be absolutely worth the effort in the long run (especially when the really huge polymorphic ants come into play).

[Twilia]

Only issue I see with the automatic upgrading for Worker/Solider ants.

Unless you tell the tile to go a specific route; you'll only get melee warrior ants - when you need more ranged rather then melee at the time.

[Serafine]

The idea with the automatic upgrades is that it does the current leveling process (level 1 - level 3) automatically.

It wouldn't change the ant type automatically. So if you want to turn a worker into a melee ant or a shooter ant you'd have to manually upgrade that tile (and it carries over the level the tile has).

[Lebtron]

Good idea, its really tedious to do those upgrades everywhere. But there should still be a manual way to stop auto upgrade. I consider upgrades not worth the invest on some missions. So a global "stop upgrade" button is necessary.

[Serafine]

Why would you want to stop them? They'd be FREE.
They wouldn't cost anything.

[Lebtron]

Ah ok, got it. As you wrote that would of course require some rebalancing. But that will always be a WIP as long as the game is in developing.

[Rubgish]

I think the situation you show is very unsual, it can only occur with speed upgrades or food storage, as they are the only things that cost low enough that you can afford to upgrade more than a few of them at once.

It's also worth noting that this is 40 seconds elapsed time, there is no reason you couldn't have marked them all for upgrade, done something else for 20 seconds, then marked all for second level upgrade, done something else for 20 seconds, then fixed up anything missed.

[Serafine]

No you can't mark all of them for upgrades. That works for level 2 upgrades (except occasionally a few at the sides) it does NOT work for level 3 upgrades, not at all.
You very often have to literally upgrade them ONE BY ONE, especially in small chambers (like a 16 ant chamber) where NONE of the tiles at the edges can get enough points until all of their neighbouring tiles are upgraded first.

And yes you DO get enough food to upgrade a ton of soldier tiles, in 2.1 and 2.2 you often get 500+ food within 10-15 seconds when your whole army returns after pillaging one of the large prawn piles.