the meat grinder / scoring

[Alex's Yellow Bellies]

> The reason why storylines are important is that it became clear to me
> that I was losing players because they didn't want to get ground up in
> the meatgrinder/Alex, but they would have been willing to co-op with
> their friends. Thus, I think a bunch of quest maps, especially to get
> people started, would be really good.

I wonder if it would be sensible to implement handicapping? So when
someone goes against players of higher rank, they get more points to
place units with. Giving a noob 4 extra firebots against the meat
grinder evens things out a bit. You'd probably need to rework the
scoring, and it would take some playtesting to determine how many
extra points to give per difference in rank**, but that might be an
easy and satisfactory way to let vets and noobs commingle in general.

Cheers,
Alex

** it could be as simple as: max(ranks of players in match) - (your
rank) = number of extra build points you get; you can then scale by
the number of build points on the board to give fewer extra build
points on small maps and more extra build points on larger maps; for
example, you could use (build points on map)/20 as a multiplier.