Nebula lag

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posted on September 21st, 2010, 5:55 pm
I have a question:

I'm starting to make maps (balancing is hard...) and I have one map with some extra, unused space in the corners.  I was considering loading it up with green/purple/maybe red nebulas to make a "badlands" effect incase a roaming fleet wanted to take the risk and go hide there.  However, I'm concerned that the area won't actually be used very often and having it there may cause the map to take up more resources when it runs.

Is it a bad thing to have too many nebulas?  I'm talking 100-200 large nebulas, how badly will that slow down the game when playing this map, if at all?  The alternative is, if I can't use nebulas I'll need to make the entire area unreachable to prevent the player there from gaining an unfair advantage by building in the corner behind his base.

Another option, I could probably cut the nebulas down to 50 or even 30 if I changed the way they're arranged and left some space between them.

Finally, how do nebulas balance?  At first it was all purple nebulas but that would allow a borg ship to hide perfectly, regen, and strike against the player in front of the nebula.  I added green nebulas to allow a non-borg fleet to chase and engage such a strategy, and now I'm considering some red nebulas to make it less attractive.
posted on September 21st, 2010, 5:58 pm
well anywhere u place loads of nebs will make pathing bad.

if u put a neb far out of the way then it will be less useful. so purple nebs in the corner wont be that good for borg, as they have to get the battle to take place there.

purple nebs on top of exps ofc causes issues.

maybe try put some small asteroid fields with blocking triggers preventing access to pointless areas.
posted on September 21st, 2010, 11:42 pm
Hmm, hadn't thought about pathing...

Here's my situation, I'm making a 3v3 map thats bottom left vs top right.  It's important to the design of the map that the middle players on both teams not be all the way back in the corner, which leaves empty space there.  Also, the edges of the map are all purple nebula, to allow ships to hide behind the enemy base and move side-to-side trying to find a good place to strike.  The nebula line is 7 grid squares away from the starting positions, a bit farther than artillery range.

To keep this pattern going (even though it may not be used very often O.Q) I ran diagonal nebulas cutting across the corner.  Now I don't know if I should have 1 layer of nebula followed by blockers that make the corner dead space or if I should make the nebula cloud go deeper.  If it won't cause lag, I'd like to make a huge field of purple but I was concerned that a borg ship could harass endlessly with that.  Now that I think about borg speed, this may not be the case :)
posted on September 24th, 2010, 8:36 am
O a note about nebula sizes. 100-200 is almost certainly a game killer for those with weaker pc's. Tbh, if you're looking for balance, then a nebula of upto 5 large blobs is usually more than sufficient to serve a purpose.
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