Portal Relays

Background

I was reading this thread and had an idea:
SUPER CRAZY IDEA : Sanctum Re-Worked as Official Portal Hub

Firstly, I believe that games should have a balance of challenging aspects and easy aspects. Easy aspects are those that make the player feel powerful and give them interesting experiences. Challenging aspects are those that make the player feel powerful when overcoming them and give them interesting experiences. I think that the game allowing players to make portals for easy transportation but making portals hard to maintain and sometimes confusing to use is a really great balance of those features.

That being said, if I were to change the current portal system in a way that benefits new players at the expense of older players, this is what I would do.

Introducing the Portal Relay, a structure much like the Portal except you cannot enter or exit into it, (so clearly it is less useful than the Portal in total utils) but vastly increases convenience at the cost of efficiency.

The Portal Relay offers N connections between other relays and Portals, enabling automatic forwarding of passengers. (N to be decided based on balance, but here I will just suggest the N=2 case, which is most painful for portal network managers, but easiest to implement).

Example

Imagine that currently the only way to get from planet A to D (and imagine A is already a Hub so there have been some previous jumps in the system) is A->B->C->D, and a new player has to memorize or learn this order if they want to access D. There are the AB portals, the BC portals, and the CD portals, with their associated Oort costs.

Now replace the 2 portals on B with a Portal Relay, using its two connections to connect to a portal on A, and the Portal Relay to be on C. And replace the 2 portals on C with a Portal Relay, using its two connections to connect to a portal on D, and the Portal Relay to be on B.
Each has the same total Oort cost as the portals they replaced, but are less versatile, as the Portal Manager needs to set up a separate AB portal if they want a hub on B. In the end, if the Portal Manager chooses to use Portal Relays, they will be paying more Oort.
The Portal Manager places a nicely labeled sign on planet A next to the Portal on A showing this portal goes directly to D. A new player has a relatively easy time finding it, and goes into A, and pops out at D. It is as though portal A is connected directly to portal D.

(A bit like the McCay-Carter Intergalactic Bridge.)

To be honest, this is also better for servers. Jumping through portals on intermediate worlds is a waste of bandwidth.

If the Devs desire they can make it so that you have to visit the Relay itself to refill it with Oort, but this is somewhat more annoying. I would prefer if you can refill the entire network by visiting any point in the network (A portal, B relay, C relay or D portal). This structure will have a relatively higher Oort cost than a single portal so it should also be necessary to include 1-2 extra slots to place Oort shard stacks, and a mercy period = the startup cost of the network. (e.g. in the current system, if a Portal takes 50 shards to start up, a portal should be able to incur 50 shards of debt before turning off, in my opinion. This is not breakable/abusable, this is just a kindness to portal managers.)

I don’t know how the blinksec math works out but to be honest I am not very bothered by the idea of people replacing shorter connections with relay connections to save on Oort shards either. Again, I’d like to re-iterate that currently a portal+portal hub acts as a portal relay with N=infinite possible connections, but less convenience. Portal Relay is strictly worse in util/oort shard but more convenient, particularly for helping new players find their way to more distant planets.

5 Likes

Rodney is clearly the smarter one…/

1 Like

Different kinds of intelligence! :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Desperately want something like this

1 Like

After discussing with a friend, I thought I should describe what I’d imagine as the N>2 case.
In the N>2 case, a number of connected portal relays creates an interconnected network, aka a portal internet.
You make portal A and connect it to the nearest portal relay to A, at the appropriate Oort cost.
You make portal B and connect it to the nearest portal relay to B, at the appropriate Oort cost.
You put A’s token into B and because both are connected to the network they are allowed to form a connection. B holds the token to A and also the token to the portal relay.
I think this would be a buff to portals: imagine this different scenario:
A1->B->C->D->E1
A2->B->C->D->E1
A1->B->C->D->E2
A2->B->C->D->E2
Planets A1, A2 connect to E1,E2 for 4 connections, using the B->C->D connection 4 times, but each additional connection only costs as much Oort as A1/2->B and then D->E1/2.

I recently saw this:

and wonder how the two ideas can combine. Maybe in the N>2 case, if a portal relay network can only have 1 destination portal and all other portals must be 1-way portals pointing to destination, it simplifies implementation of portal relays by reducing what they can do, but also is an appropriate nerf to a portal internet.