To survive in the dark forest game of Dark Forest, you need to master these basic tactics and strategies.
Original title: “An article about the art of dark forest warfare in the eyes of top Dark Forest players”
Written by: Neronzz
Translation: Porridge Overnight
The encrypted game Dark Forest, which uses zero-knowledge proof technology, has gained a lot of fans in the Ethereum community due to its playability, including Ethereum co-founder V God and Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, so top How do players play this game? The original author Neronzz gave his answer.
On July 11, a large-scale battle spanning 58,000 units long and 21,000 units wide was fought between me and 0x000da38758 (the seventh-ranked player in the second round of testing), in a continuous battle that lasted 10 hours , We have consumed tens of millions of energy and used dozens of artifacts on the entire battlefield. For this war, the time we spent on deployment planning and preparation was as long as two weeks, and the result was an adrenaline-filled, chaotic tactical and strategic maze for participants.
You can view the time-lapse photography of this battle here.
This war is a milestone. It shows what players can get through 5 rounds of the dark forest whitelist in the highest level of PvP, and how far the current highest level is from the theoretically achievable skill limit.
PVP mechanism background
If you have never played the game Dark Forest before, let’s start with the war hell landscape mentioned earlier.
Starting from the second round of Dark Forest v0.6, the basic tool for launching a war is simply to transfer energy from one planet to another.
The purpose of sending this energy can be to reduce the energy of the enemy planet, or it can be to strengthen your own planet. In order to initiate energy movement, 5% of the planet’s maximum energy capacity is discarded as a tax, and the farther you move, the more energy is required (because the energy decays over long distances). In addition, you can send silver (resources for upgrading planets) and artifacts (with special abilities and attribute enhancements) while moving.
Ignoring other factors in the war, such as strategy and computing power (which determines the speed of discovery of map data), moving energy, silver, and artifacts to different locations, is to a large extent the only basis for war.
Although the movement is fairly simple, it is the planets themselves that create complexity in the game. Each planet has specific statistics, which have a great influence on how the war is conducted, including energy capacity, energy regeneration rate, defense, range, speed, silver capacity, and silver regeneration rate only for asteroids. . The impact of the arriving energy on the enemy planet can be calculated as x/Defense*100, which means that planets with defense less than 100 allow incoming attacks to cause more damage than they arrived, while planets with defense more than 100 will hurt Will decrease.
PvP elemental background of the dark forest
Since the first round of official testing of the Dark Forest (more than a year ago), the PvP skill level of this game has been quite primitive. Even if new features such as artifacts are added to the game, their use is usually only on the surface, and the origin of PvP that could have been developed in v0.3 remains unchanged. All in all, although the highest level of PvP gameplay is constantly increasing, the vast majority are almost always conservative.
But there are reasons for this. The outstanding reasons I have noticed are as follows:
- The game is still in its infancy;
- Since at the end of the scoring period of each short round, the player’s activity will immediately drop, so there is not much time to develop PvP elements;
- The new scoring goal introduced in v0.6 keeps the entire element away from the general war;
These reasons can also explain why other skills (such as effective expansion) develop so quickly compared to PvP.
However, there are indeed signs that skill levels are improving. More and more players are beginning to adopt some tactics, such as setting low defense planets to higher priority, using the non-linear energy regeneration rate of certain planets, and the higher utilization rate of asteroids.
I personally hope to see this area in the dark forest game expand faster. In order to achieve this goal, we will introduce several basic tactics and strategies, many of which are used in the war between 0x000da38758 and me of.
Background on 0x000da38758
0x000da38758 I started playing this game in the first round of Dark Forest v0.6. Compared with his skills in this war, this is very impressive. What is even more impressive is that Dark Forest is what he played. The first real real-time strategy game.
Most of his skills were acquired in the first round of testing against multiple enemies and the very aggressive development in the second round of testing.
The background of the war setting
A lot of the information presented later comes from the war between 0x000da38758 and me, so it is very important to understand how this war was conducted.
The general rules can be found here .
The rules are very long, so here are the main points:
- In the beginning, there are neutral planets among the players;
- All battles must be conducted in a destroyed space arena;
- Each planet that did not belong to the player’s empire at the beginning of the war will give the player a certain score;
- Only planets of level 3 or higher are allowed;
- Only use epic, rare or common rare practical artifacts;
- Bloom filters and Black Domains artifacts are not allowed;
- Both players have a complete view of the battlefield;
- Allow the use of plug-ins;
This battle was planned two weeks in advance between Jordan Spence (spencecoin) and me. We selected a destroyed space to use, and finally expanded and eliminated all players in that space before the war began. Initially, Jordan and I were the two sides of the battle, but because the war involved too long a continuous period of time, 0x000da38758 was brought into the battle, and Jordan is still broadcasting the battle. 0x000da38758 and I had time before the war to prepare our planets, as well as those planets that we will compete for at the beginning of the war.
Basic PvP skills
Now that all the basic information is finished, you can finally get access to the PvP components of the Dark Forest.
The four main components of the Dark Forest (and RTS games in general) non-autonomous PvP are as follows:
- Player mechanics-the player can keep track of attacks and timing, while being able to control the power in the way the player wants. This improvement is almost entirely driven by the time spent playing games.
- Strategy-the most important game plan, but by no means conservative.
- Tactics-an integral part of the strategy, used to execute the game plan.
- Game knowledge-I don’t think this needs explanation.
strategy
When fighting a war, always keep clear goals in mind. Based on this goal and the understanding of the battlefield, the next step is an overall combat plan.
Once the game plan is designed, priority areas can be determined, and then priority targets in the form of planets can be located.
Take the live broadcast of the starting position of this war as an example:
The green player is 0x000da38758, the blue planet is the neutral zone, and the white player is me. In this section, all strategies will be visualized from the perspective of the white player.
Although depending on the number of planets and the randomness of their locations, this map may look like a mess, but one thing that helps clean up the priority goals is to first determine where the planetary gaps exist. Through this filtering method, strategic areas, such as outposts or large areas of contendable silver, become obvious.
This can be better visualized by the heat map plugin (although I usually don’t recommend using it in actual warfare, this just provides a rough visualization):
The yellow area represents nearby planetary voids. Through this plug-in, we can clearly see which places can be used as powerful outposts, where the front lines of war may occur first, and which areas can be used as important sidelines for flanking enemies.
Once the points of interest are identified, they must be assigned specific priorities. Generally, the priority of certain areas will be assigned through a combination of the following:
- Planets in the current range;
- Compared with your distance, how close is the enemy to them;
- How long will it take to capture the area;
- The total amount of resources/renewable amount of resources in the area;
- The effect on your position when occupied by an enemy, and vice versa;
Visualizing on the current battlefield, it can be seen that advancing along the red line seems the most meaningful, because it is essentially a large road with high planetary density. Both players can easily enter the area, which makes it the main front line of the war. It should be noted that although the green player may take a little longer to build, once it is established, his frontline area will exceed your frontline area, which makes the war more difficult, thereby increasing the red line as much as possible The importance of rapid expansion.
It takes a little further along the blue line, but you are easier to approach than the enemy. Although the aforementioned attack on you on the front line seems inevitable, this outpost along the Blue Line can balance this. Therefore, it makes sense to transfer part of the resources used to expand along the red line to expand along the blue line.
Compared to other places on the battlefield, the Green Line is very far away, but in the later stages of the war, the Green Line still plays a role because it can slightly surround the enemy’s huge level 8 planets (and surrounding outposts). However, because it was so remote and ineffective, its expansion priority at the beginning of the war was very low.
Since the overall strategy of expansion was considered at the beginning of the war, the actual PvP part of the war needs to be explained.
In order to determine the areas of interest during the war, the details to be clear are:
- The overall planetary defense of a region;
- Planetary energy regeneration ratio;
- Your offensive/defensive potential in the area;
- The enemy’s offensive/defensive potential in the area;
- The effect on your position when occupied by an enemy, and vice versa;
This standard is very similar to the standard for specifying points of interest when expanding.
This planetary setting will be used as an example starting position. We are playing the green player this time, our enemy is the white player, and the blue player is neutral.
This situation is quite scary for us, because the white players have level 4 planets around our level 8 planets, and they have an overall concave surface in our position. However, it should be noted that a battle depends to a large extent on how much energy both sides can send to the front. In this case, green players have a clear advantage.
As for which area to focus on, the clear choice is to advance along the red line and around the 8th-level planet. However, the green line also shows other possible attack paths.
Reconfirming the planetary gap, we can see that for the North and South sides of this war, there is not much to support both sides, and both sides are quite annoying when they act alone. For the north side of the blue zone, because most of the larger planets there have space-time cracks, the overall planetary defense and energy regeneration are quite low. There are also several Class 4 planets that will be far from the front line, but closer to the northern planets. For the south side, there is a thin line of level 3 planets, once any support within the orange circle is cut off, it can be easily blocked. Once the North and South have at least a contest, the concave surface will no longer exist, and the main battle will start along the red line.
Tactics
The tactics in this game are more important how players control their planet. They are tools used to effectively execute the above strategies. Usually, using plugins in creative ways can also help players execute these strategies.
Since v0.3, the strategies and tactics in the dark forest have been greatly expanded. However, so far, most of the strategies and tactics are still not used by most players, and it takes a long time to explain each of them, especially because most strategies and tactics are only in very specific situations Only feasible. Therefore, it is more efficient to identify some common misunderstandings while determining how to discover and create new strategies. Hope this will help you create new tactics in the form of building blocks.
Although this sounds obvious, war is almost entirely dependent on the regeneration and range of available energy at different locations. Considering this information, the problems that were often faced during the war were:
- How can I conserve energy at the front line with maximum efficiency?
- How can I make a fatal blow to the enemy’s important energy source/energy regeneration?
- How can I gather and use the energy of the entire empire to assist in the war?
Combining these questions and game knowledge, we can eliminate two fairly common combat misunderstandings:
Just because your opponent has occupied a planet does not mean that they have a significant advantage in that position-if the planet does not have time to start generating energy at a sufficient speed, then ownership of the planet is meaningless. This also means that planets with energy close to zero will take a long time to become useful, because planets do not regenerate at a linear rate.
Just because your opponent has more advanced planets does not mean that they automatically have a significant advantage-although advanced planets have a high energy capacity, they are not good at achieving this on their own. There are almost always smaller planets that can exceed the energy regeneration rate of higher planets, making them useless without support.
With these measures, we can finally formulate specific tactics.
Energy exchange
Use case-the enemy is attacking on a friendly planet with less than 90 defense.
Execution-Send an attack to the target planet immediately after the enemy attack and land, and then transfer all energy from the target planet to other places before the enemy attack and land. The Voyage Time plugin can greatly help schedule these exchanges.
Why is this effective-if the defense of a planet is lower than 100, then the enemy’s attack will cause more damage, which effectively enhances the power of the attack. However, the energy to another planet cannot be intercepted. That is to say, if you transfer all the power of a planet that is about to be attacked, the increase in the enemy’s attack power will not affect the original energy of the target planet. This effectively preserves your energy potential.
Frontline energy interception
Use case-Without the support of large planets, the enemy’s front line seems unbreakable.
Execution-Launch a considerable attack on a large planet behind the frontline enemy, and then distribute the energy to the smaller planets.
Why is this effective-In order to prevent the front line from collapsing, players need to provide support behind, and support usually appears in the form of 3/4 planets. This means that in order to move forward and take over a new field, support for that field needs to be cut off in some way, at least for a period of time. Once this is done, when your large-scale attack effectively prevents the enemy from sending troops to the front, it becomes easier to take advantage of the energy regeneration closer.
Photon Cannon Strike
Use case-the enemy is building an army or possessing an important artifact on a certain planet.
Execution-Prepare a Photoid Cannon on the long-range 4 planet in advance, and then send an attack from it to the target planet.
Why do this-this is self-explanatory, the opponent has something important, use a photon cannon to use the energy of the back line and neutralize it.
Final thoughts
In my opinion, compared with other games, Dark Forest PvP is far from perfect, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Looking at the development of other aspects of this game, I believe that based on the content encouraged by the game, the player group can easily find the best strategy for the game’s goals.
Up to now, the active prediction strategy on the battlefield has only begun to develop, and these skills will be seen as commonplace in the future Dark Forest PvP. My prediction is that in the next few years, PvP will be implemented with more precise and active player mechanics than any dark forest player now. If this guide can really become a stepping stone to achieve this goal, then I will very much look forward to seeing and facing the new and interesting strategies you can propose in the next few rounds, and then seeing them continue for a long time. develop.
But now, in the chaos of the dark forest, I hope to see you in the meta-universe, GLHF!
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