BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

If scrambled is getting buffed heavily, it might be worth clarifying whether there’s any opportunity for a bot to act unscrambled if they’re hit with it every turn, or if you can be continuously scrambled all match long.

Does the scramble effect wear off after an opponent has acted on the turn that it will end or before they act, and does firing it again refresh the timer, or does it fail because they can’t gain a status they already have?

Mm, interesting. At the moment there’s only two ways to be Scrambled; the shock tile (whose effect is permanent) and the Signal Jammer (two turns).

I guess the hope with Scrambled is that the Opponent gets so janked up that it effectively self-destructs; I’ve made some tweaks.

Looks good, thanks.

This actually seems like a big nerf to the signal jammer! Why would you put the highest-consumption system in the game on your bot if you can only use it once for a temporary effect of uncertain value?

Uncertain, sure, but the impact of Scrambled is now much more severe; in a lot of scripts the order of the commands only semi-matters, as the circumstances that trigger them don’t overlap. Now you’re guaranteed to have the impacts come out weird, and the possibility of the impacts being major is much higher.

At the moment I think that Signal Jammer is hard to really use well; this makes it into a glass cannon, a hail mary. I like it for that.

I am going to strengthen it a little more though: the randomisation now re-rolls each round, so you have better odds over three rounds of having something happen.

Because it’s worthless against well written scripts in the old version?

(That answer was to Brendan by the way)

Only being able to Scramble your opponent once per Bout makes Scrambled a lot worse in my opinion, as it’s relatively easy to mostly shut down a scramble-bot by putting ‘if the actor does not have scrambled’ in all the triggers you can and dealing with the three rounds you most likely won’t move. If Bots can be scrambled more than once, then doing this makes you almost completely immobile whenever the opponent uses their signal jammer and they can keep using it until they get lucky, which makes it a lot less effective of a strategy to deal with a scramble-bot.

Ah, wait, if you can keep using the jammer to extend the effect indefinitely then this is not an issue.

I don’t think it can be extended—“A Bot may only become Scrambled once per Bout and ceases to be Scrambled after three rounds have elapsed.”