BA Chicken Defense V2.56 (BA7.81)

[TheFatController]

This version has been reworked to be friendly to Balanced Annihilation, which has involved changing the way spawns work, changing the stats of chickens and adding my own personal touches, improvements and bug fixes.

You can download it here:
http://springfiles.com/spring/games/ba- ... -defense-1
You must also have BA 7.78 for this mutator to work!

[Machiosabre]

the squad dealie and burrows connected to turrets sound good.

[Otherside]

funny those 2 things were already in the CA version at some point :p hardly new

[smokingwreckage]

It'd be nice to see chickens working well in BA; CA is good but BA has a much more "TA" feel, which is all nostalgic for ancients like me.

[Regret]

Sounds quite nice :P

One question thou,

- Removed Eggs mode for now.

whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?;-;

[REVENGE]

I don't know why, but I just made the Chicken Defense / Tower Defense / Sheep Defense connection. Right?

Nvm, downloading.

[Saktoth]

Chicken was originally designed along the following structure: Aggression (killing burrows) makes the chickens tech, porcing makes the chickens spam (older and more burrows spawn more chickensm so you need to clean out the burrows every now and then).

This leads to an easy victory with aggression if you can shut down the burrows (though with the queen, it'd summon her really fast and you'd get creamed- queen wasnt in in this older version) and lots of lag with all the chickens if you porc.

So we removed this broken system and just stuck it on a timer. This makes the game really porcy and, honestly, not at all as good as chicken should play.

A better system is that chickens should tech if you defend (cuz, new techs like air, arty, and AT are best at circumventing defense) and should spam if you're being aggressive. We stopped devving chickens when every other mod took it though, lost its novelty. So, its really unfinished and pretty crap compared to what it should be. Its good to see it being made into a more dynamic structure again, even if its for BA...

It'd be nice to see chickens working well in BA; CA is good but BA has a much more "TA" feel, which is all nostalgic for ancients like me.

Play Hardcore Annihilation.

[smokingwreckage]

Chickens CA works nicely for soft-core gamers like me, but it would be nice for it to act in a more dynamic fashion. Still messing with Chickens BA, have yet to form a solid opinion.

[TheFatController]

BETA1 changelog:
- Each burrow now spawns its own squad which could make up a mixture of all types of chicken under the current tech level.
- Chickens now go after a variety of targets at once rather than each wave attacking one location
- Burrows do not always instantly respawn but they respawn faster if you kill them
- Burrows can spawn turrets early on if players are aggressive
- Killing a burrow kills all its connected turrets
- Dgun, Comblast, Krogblast & Krogkick no longer instantly kill the queen.
- The queen now rampages more and on normal and hard spawns waves of chickens.
- Do not expect to beat "Normal" or "Hard" on your first try, Easy should be fun to play for small games.
- Grace Period can be changed via mod options (30 minutes greenfields chickens anyone??:P)
- Removed Eggs mode for now.
- Plus many more changes?!

This is still work in progress but I wont release another BETA for a week or two unless there's a serious bug or gameplay flaw.

I do want to add eggs back in in some form but as I haven't looked at it at all I didn't want to leave it in unbalanced.

I'm thinking of removing anti-lag mode for the next BETA, (players should take up some of the role in managing lag too by spamming less i guess!) as it alters the gameplay too much; the alternative is somehow make it harder with less chickens while anti-lag is on but that seems difficult to balance.

[Hoi]

I'm thinking of removing anti-lag mode for the next BETA

don't! it will lag without anti lag(duh) especially for people with a bad cpu like 1ghz or even less (i see quite some people with that) they may drop, then youre doomed

[[Krogoth86]]

Removing terrain deformation for the chicken artillery should do the job - dozens of blobs that deform the terrain at high frequency lag the very most imo...

[Saktoth]

You can get anti-lag kicking in with 0 chickens on the screen, esp cuz of one player with a bad cpu. That kinda sucks.

Players really should play a map and mode their PC can handle.

The major killer is pathfinding though, not deformation. When you have hundreds of chickens all trying to path halfway across the map, you get lag.

Chickens CA works nicely for soft-core gamers like me, but it would be nice for it to act in a more dynamic fashion. Still messing with Chickens BA, have yet to form a solid opinion.

Back in the old structure you had to aggressively fight for control of the map and make raids to clean out burrows, if a player fell and a spot of territory opened up, it would quickly be swarming with burrows and you'd have huge armies of chickens pouring from the new nest site. It was pretty awesome and very organic and aggressive.

Some people like teh proce but thats not what it was originally meant to be. It was also meant to scale to the players aggression, so that if you played really well the game would end faster and the queen could be forcibly summoned up early. That way, you can compare how long it took to beat the chickens on a certain map with a certain number of players as a high score.

[Peet]

The major killer is pathfinding though, not deformation.

Each deformation requires new pathing calculations.

[TradeMark]

i can kill queen with com explosion = lame

[TheFatController]

i can kill queen with com explosion = lame

Damnit I changed the CORE commanders explosion but not the ARM one, it's fixed now.

The major killer is pathfinding though, not deformation.

Each deformation requires new pathing calculations.

I shall do as advised and remove any remaining terrain deforming from weapons.

[RogerN]

I tried playing the mod this evening, but encountered Lobby sync issues. Two different people tried joining, and neither of them would sync.

The mod checksum was the same for both of us, though:
Checksum=3953706570;

Any idea what might be causing this? A couple other relevant facts:

- both of the players told me that they had BA631 installed.
- they both received the following error message when joining my game: "This mod doesn't have any sides defined. Using default (arm/core)"
- I did NOT receive the above error message when joining one of their games. Instead, the lobby client just said "Your mod differs from the host's one."

[TradeMark]

might be the mod filenames, if their mod filename is like "ba631LOL.sd7" and yours is "ba631.sd7" it might not work? just a hunch.

[MOD]
{
Name=BA V6.31 + CA Chickens, V1.05;
Description=BA V6.31 + CA Chickens;
shortname=BAC;
version=V1.05;
mutator=;
ModType=1;
NumDependencies=1;
Depend0=BA631.sd7;
}

if thats not found, then it fucks up i think.

[smokingwreckage]

Played a couple of successful MP games, but not to completion. No synch problems.... no other problems.

Also, please keep anti-lag mode unless it massively breaks the game.

[TheFatController]

Also, please keep anti-lag mode unless it massively breaks the game.

I know it's called "anti-lag mode" but that doesn't mean it magically stops chicken defense from ever lagging due to factors like player base size etc, it only stops new waves of chickens spawning while its on which IMO compromises the balance of the game.

I've made many significant speed-ups to the code in BETA2 along with the removal of terrain deforming it should make up for it (people can also set the "max chickens" mod option low too instead, i'll change the minimum value below 200)

(also before anyone says a low "max chickens" value is as bad as anti-lag mode I've implemented a new queuing system for spawns so when maxChickens is hit they spawn in a "one out: one in" basis until the chicken debt is cleared :) )

[smokingwreckage]

Oh, I'm aware it doesn't stop lag. I've just been lagging straight to hell (is it even lag if it's not the network?) thanks to my slowly ageing machine.

The ability to set max chickens and max burrows is VERY helpful and much appreciated. At what point do either of these settings affect a change in game balance (or pressure, if you like, since people have aneurysms when the word "balance" is used) ? I've been keeping burrows around 30 on the assumption that more burrows = more bug-towers = heavier load on the PC and that their main function was to procide a variety of possible spawn-points.