Terminals and Credits seem overpowered
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So it seems that with terminals and credits, I am able to completely liquidate all of the assets in my entire empire, so that not only do all of my resources exist in every base simultaneously, but I could even just convert all of my resources to credits, and buy whatever I need whenever I want it. This means that an opponent cannot steal my resources even if they kill me, and I can amass a very large amount of credits well beyond my normal storage limits.
Assuming I have enough code to defend myself, how is an attacker supposed to be able to even stand a chance against my bases if they are fighting all of my bases at the same time? Or worse, if they are fighting my stockpile of credits and every player's base in the nearby area because I can just buy my stockpiled resources from the nearby players?
I can see why people wanted a power creep to be able to disable this extreme power, but should this really exist as a power for power creeps, or are terminals by default just far too powerful?
I like that this game has a defensive focus, but these seem a bit over-the-top, and granting the counter to power creeps means that terminals are balanced around power creeps disabling them, which means power creeps become a requirement for attacking.
Why not change terminals to a more balanced state before trying to create a counter for them? Maybe disable terminals while hostile creeps are in the room? Maybe make credits a physical resource? Maybe only allow trade by carrying resources to and from NPC terminals :trollface: instead of allowing players to do it from the safety of their base?
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I don't think so.
Sending stuff invokes a 10 tick cooldown, creating orders cost a fee and dealing eats energy.
Sure someone with a big wallet has an advantage for a period of time but you will quickly burn your assets once other people notice that you are desperately buying stockpiles of certain res.
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@mrfaul On pretty much every shard there is a massive supply of any resource you want currently on the market... the only question is how much you are paying for it. And if you really wanted to, there is nothing stopping you from buying it on a different shard, shipping it to the attacked shard, and then sending it to the dangered room through a terminal even if the market were emptied on the shard in question (although that's a lot more complex). like I said, if you invested your resources into credits, people are no longer challenging just your room. They are challenging your room, your other rooms and every neighbor exporting the resources you need.
The 10 tick cooldown is nothing, and the tax/inflation/sell vs buy prices are a small price to pay for an untouchable investment.
I would like to hear your plans for sieging a room owned by a long-standing player with 10+ other rooms on the same shard. I want to know how you ever run them out of that room with terminals balanced the way they currently are. You can use whatever tactics you want, but the defender is active and will edit his code to play just as perfectly as your theoretical perfect attack, and if it becomes a war attrition between who has the most global resources, you lose.
It's a defensive game sure, you want a defender playing perfectly to win though right? Well sure, but if "play adequately at a base level" is the same as "play perfectly" it might be a bit one-sided.
The point is that the defender doesn't have to make their room survive a long siege. There is no such thing as a siege in Screeps. You cannot actually cut off supplies to a room. If the defender's code has the ability to spawn defenders, repair creeps, and isn't fooled into being drained (or something even if it is fooled into being drained), it becomes a war of attrition with the entire player's pool of amassed resources, not a strategic battle.
The first person to globally run out of boosts, credits, or the will to continue using their boosts/credits loses. That's not strategy. That's an idle game.
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OK then let's ask people who had bigger battles like @bonzaiferroni
He should be able to validate your theories.
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@mrfaul Sure although I'm not sure how many of them actually check the forums. Others might include
@Kasami @o4kapuk @Tigga @SteveTrov @Geir1983 @Issacar @Dissi @CaptainMuscles
And many others if we wanted to just start pinging the world
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"Man attacking California is so hard, they keep getting support from the rest of the country!"
But I get your point. The main issue is that you can't effectively blockade like you could in real life due to terminal's teleport mechanics.
Perhaps impose some extra mechanics related to sending to a room with enemy creeps in it. Maybe a transfer cap so you can only send 1k resources at a time, so that the 10tick transfer cd is more impactful.
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@davaned yeah and I guess the topic probably should have been in "power creeps" since the main question is:
Should this really be a function of power creeps, or something else?
Since it was already placed in the power planner (not that it means it will exist).
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Honestly the new operator power creeps would help with this, if they were actually allowed to be used in every room. A player can just ignore the power mechanic altogether in exchange for an unbreakable supply line for all of their rooms, negating the whole purpose of power creeps.
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I could even just convert all of my resources to credits, and buy whatever I need whenever I want it.
This isnt really true, the difference in the sell and buy prices and the low volume for anything other than minerals means you can neither liquidate all your resources or buy them back when you need them.
e.g if I sold my stockpile of XUH2O on shard2 the best price I could get right now is 0.01 and if I wanted to buy it back it would cost me 2.249 ~ 250 times as much.
However, terminals do allow you to move almost arbitary amounts of energy, minerals and boosts around your empire. Meaning that rather than draining a single room of resources you need to drain the empire.
But the reality of it is that most players do not have defense code that is unbreakable without draining.
IMHO the terminal does simplify things too much, it makes it too easy to move the resources to where they are needed. I think a terminal blocking capability is exactly the type of ability a power creep should have. I.e. its a very powerful ability but not one that is going to win a battle without other creeps.
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@stevetrov Sorry, I didn't clarify the credits thing well enough. Regardless of price, if you reach the capacity on all of your storage locations, you can then continue amassing more "boosts" by converting it to credits. Given a large amount of time to generate credits in this way, it no longer matters what the ratio you sold your energy (or whatever) for, since you couldn't have held it in the first place.
Long standing players then have an absolutely massive credit pool to pull from that is essentially like trying to drain the entire shard (assuming they wanted to continue paying to keep the room).
EDIT - and yes I like assuming that everyone has perfect defense code, knowing full well that they do not. I cannot see a way to even contest the room of players who have perfect defense code, since there is no strategy I can deploy against a properly defended room that even stands a chance of success... besides simply owning more resources.
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@Gankdalf AFAIK the devs stated they were ok with the possibility that there is a "perfect" defense that can't be cracked with a frontal assault. They'd rather err on the side of defense than offense.
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@davaned I know, I like that. What I don't like is by how large the margin is.... or at least by how large the margin seems to be from what I can tell.
With DISRUPT_TERMINAL and the other operator powers, I can see ways to break bases. At least... possible ways. Even if the defender still has an advantage, there are possible strategies that can force their base into positions where it must make correct decisions. If the defenders makes the correct decisions, they always win. That's perfectly acceptable.
But, what I am seeing with the current state of the game though (without power creeps) is that the defender simply needs to spawn some generic attackers+repairers, and can mindlessly hold off any attack until one of the players runs out of resources. It doesn't even matter where I attack or what I attack with, they can always respond with the same generic defenders.
It's so lopsided, that ignoring my attack, and just repairing walls at a faster rate than I can damage them is a valid strategy if I don't bring an absolutely massive attack force. They don't even have to fight back, or at least not very much.
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I think what you are seeing is distorted by the fact that the best defense that I am aware of in the game (o4kapuk) is also the most written about.
In fact his is the only defense I have looked at or poked that I could really see an effective way of attacking. Other people have good defense, but nearly all have some weakness a skilled and determined attacker can exploit.
Base defense in screeps is similar to network defense in IT. In theory you can make it impregnable but in practice there are many things that can go wrong that its likely to be vulnerable.
I havent read the power creep docs in detail, but my understanding is that DISRUPT TERMINAL will consume ops much faster than you can generate them, this seems to be the way things should be.
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I think what you are seeing is distorted by the fact that the best defense that I am aware of in the game (o4kapuk) is also the most written about.
That is indeed quite possible.
EDIT - or maybe it's just my hate for the terminal mechanics in general.
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I think it is fine adding this as a power creep ability.
Terminals are powerful in sieges, but without backup of active and well coded defender-creeps most rooms are probably breakable with enough effort (resources and code).
I think very few players have defenses that can be considered unbreakable, I certainly do not. With actively modifying the code and instructions to attacking creeps, I think almost any room is breakable, unless the defender puts in the same effort in code and time. If they do, I think it is fair that they are basically unbreakable. The terminal-blocker ability will be a way to maybe break them.
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Also, honestly the biggest issue with defense is that it's all reactive. So all the attack has to do is find an exploit and they can cause tons of damage. The more advanced your defense code is, the higher the chance are some interactions that break it. And if not, then its probably very cpu intensive, so it means that they have less spare for their economy.
Basically, if you're persistent enough, anyone is beatable in the long run assuming they don't actively defend themselves. But honestly anyone with better than decent defense code is rarely worth attacking given there is no gain to be had and only vast losses.
Now... if there was a way to effectively collect resources from a player... or even cannibalize parts of them (maybe steal CPU or something) then it would be a different story.
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@davaned said in Terminals and Credits seem overpowered:
Also, honestly the biggest issue with defense is that it's all reactive. So all the attack has to do is find an exploit and they can cause tons of damage. The more advanced your defense code is, the higher the chance are some interactions that break it. And if not, then its probably very cpu intensive, so it means that they have less spare for their economy.
Basically, if you're persistent enough, anyone is beatable in the long run assuming they don't actively defend themselves. But honestly anyone with better than decent defense code is rarely worth attacking given there is no gain to be had and only vast losses.
I agree and I don't agree. Take bunkers for example: with a manually placed bunker to cover the controller you can reduce a lot of the variables. A single repairer for a bunker can quite reasonably repair 5k/tick, 8k/tick or more if you push it. Nobody should be able to reach your walls as 40 T3 Attack parts combined with short range towers melt everything. The repairers out-repair ranged attack. At this point it doesn't matter what you do as the attacker so long as the repairers are reasonably well coded.
As people's code improves this becomes more common. It seems to me the only way to take out certain rooms are:
- Flaw in the defender's code which doesn't get fixed.
- Defender running out of energy/credits globally.
- 31 nukes on the terminal.
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Again, if there was a way to forcibly enable powers in opposing rooms, bunkers would be beatable, but until there's a way to enable powers in opposing rooms, bunkers can just not enable powers and there's no way to take them down.
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@tigga said in Terminals and Credits seem overpowered:
31 nukes on the terminal.
I wonder if anyone has 31 RCL8 bases close enough to an enemy room to do this?
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@stevetrov multiple people?
