Notoriety

What it does

Every zone you author carries a memory of what has happened in it. Work an area hard and the enemy there answers harder for a while. Hold ground against them and they answer worse, because the force that came for it has been spent failing to take it.

The value is signed. Above zero an area is stirred up; below zero it is picked over. An area nobody has touched sits at zero and behaves exactly as it would with this switched off.

It only ever reaches the response — the reinforcements and hunting parties that come after a fight has started. It never changes the garrison an objective is placed with, so a stirred-up area never has more men standing on a position waiting to be found. What changes is what arrives afterwards.

Bools in the JSON file are written true and false. A 1 is ignored, and the setting silently keeps the value it already had.

What moves it

Only a Defend or deny objective completing moves it, because that is the only objective that offers two ways out. See Configuration for the objective type itself.

• Denying the asset — destroying it — raises the area. It was blown up in front of the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood is on notice.
• Defending it — leaving it standing and holding the ground until the enemy give up — lowers the area.

That is the second half of what the slower route buys, on top of the larger payout. Players are told either way: a radio-intercept message names the zone and says whether enemy presence there has risen or fallen. Without that, an area answering differently reads as the server being inconsistent rather than as something anyone earned.

Two values, decaying at different speeds

A stirred-up area does two things, and they are not equally believable over time, so they are tracked separately.

Surge is bodies. A force that was not in the valley yesterday cannot still be there next week, so what it represents is the men already massed for whatever just happened — spent within the hour.

Standing is preparedness. A garrison that has learnt this valley is contested stays on a shorter fuse long after the men massed for any one attack have gone, and that needs nobody new to exist.

Both are held per zone, so a squad working one valley hard does not make the far side of the map answer differently. Objectives placed outside every zone share a single pool of their own.

Surge is the setting that costs server performance, because it raises how many AI can be alive at once. Standing costs nothing — the same men simply arrive sooner or later — so it is the cheaper of the two to lean on.

Settings

At the defaults, an area at maximum notoriety fields roughly half again as many responders and reinforces in about three-fifths of the usual time — a hard fight rather than an impossible one. A single denial’s worth of extra men is spent in about ten minutes, while the shortened fuse lasts about an hour.

Raise m_fNotorietyMax only with the two multipliers in front of you, since it scales both of them at once.

The response ceiling is never allowed below the garrison the objective was placed with, however far negative an area goes, and the wave interval is bounded at both ends — so a quietened area still reinforces eventually, and a stirred-up one never puts waves on each other’s heels.

Turning it off

Set m_bNotorietyEnabled to false and nothing records, nothing decays and nothing is announced. Set m_bPersistNotoriety to false to keep the mechanic but return the whole map to ordinary on every restart, which suits testing.

{
  "$type": "ATG_Scenario_Config",
  "m_bNotorietyEnabled": true,
  "m_bPersistNotoriety": true,
  "m_fNotorietyPerDenial": 1,
  "m_fNotorietyPerDefence": 1,
  "m_fNotorietyMax": 3,
  "m_fNotorietyDecayPerHour": 1,
  "m_fNotorietySurgeDecayPerHour": 6,
  "m_fNotorietyCeilingBonus": 0.25,
  "m_fNotorietyWaveHaste": 0.2
}