PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps
-
Definitely still need power creep LOOK and FIND constants, or roll them under the CREEP constants.
The disparity between operate_extensions and operate_spawn has me worried. I don't ever see a circumstance where calling operate_spawn at level 5 would be useful. The speed up is excellent, but the energy required stays the same and often that is already the primary constraint on how quickly creeps can spawn (3 healers can take quite a while to refill extensions...) Operate_extensions should alleviate this some, but the really low amount of energy moved + the really long cooldown (you can get 5 50 part creeps out of 3 spawns in the time it takes for 1 fill cooldown) makes the skill practically useless and the synergy between the two skills is non-existent.
I have a couple of proposals to alleviate this issue:
- Change operate_spawn to also reduce energy cost by a similar percentage, but also reduce the percentages. 10/20/30/40/50% reduction in energy cost and build time would make this skill much more useful.
- Change operate_extensions to instead treat the cargo hold of the power creep as a very large extension. This could be a buff the creep applies to itself (or maybe another creep could be possible too?) where its carry is now accessible to the spawns. The cooldown/duration could be something like 200/100, so you can't always use this, but it's good for a quick boost (also high ops cost? 25-50?) This change would move this skill from practically useless due to its cooldown and extremely subpar performance, to one that would become very useful in the right situations. And better yet, those situations work synergistically with operate_spawn.
Either of these changes would be good and make these skills much more useful. Right now I don't see myself ever using either, even in situations where spawning fast would be desired simply because it won't be possible to keep up with energy demands.
-
@artch 24 isn't negligible, what it's meant for is so that if you have no offensive/defense creeps you can't immediately make them when you're attacked. It's to make offense more powerful and defense less powerful when its purely reactive.
I disagree that the goal should be to prevent players from being able to change their creeps. I think creeps will naturally gain identities because of the code it takes to run them.
If anything, it is more likely is that all creeps will follow particular patterns if you don't allow changing them once they are made. If you make a bad creep its a high cost to change it, so experimentation is not incentivized.
Why add this artificial cost? Just let it grow naturally, and later if it is an issue you can add a cost to rebuilding creeps.
Also, if respeccing is a high permanent cost, I highly doubt players will build much offense. If we're generous and assume that screeps is 90% eco 10% offense (more like 99%), then that would mean that dedicated offensive creeps would need to be scaled to be 10x as powerful as pure eco creeps to an effective use of resources.
-
Definitely still need power creep LOOK and FIND constants, or roll them under the CREEP constants.
FIND_*_POWER_CREEPSshould work on the PTR currently, have you checked?Operate_extensions should alleviate this some, but the really low amount of energy moved + the really long cooldown (you can get 5 50 part creeps out of 3 spawns in the time it takes for 1 fill cooldown) makes the skill practically useless and the synergy between the two skills is non-existent.
OPERATE_EXTENSIONS just seems a bit underpowered. I think a better solution is to increase its effect rather than change the mechanics. What do you think is an appropriate value?
One idea is to change its effect to a percentage of all extensions in the room: 20/40/60/80/100% of all extensions in the room are filled rather than some energy amount is sent.
-
24 isn't negligible, what it's meant for is so that if you have no offensive/defense creeps you can't immediately make them when you're attacked. It's to make offense more powerful and defense less powerful when its purely reactive.
Right, and this is a big problem. In an MMO like this, the attacker is always at an advantage due to the time he spent planning the attack, and if some mechanic gives him even more time-related advantages over the defender, it's a bad mechanic.
I think creeps will naturally gain identities because of the code it takes to run them.
I don't see how. If there is no delete cost, then the delete and rebuild process itself would become a part of the player code, when a PC is not treated as a constant "hero", but is deleted and recreated dynamically as a regular creep. The need to code them doesn't impose any restriction on that, it can be applied to very simple PCs like level 2 ops-generating Operators. It would be beneficial to use "spare" levels to temporarily create such operators, then delete them to spend levels somewhere else according to circumstances, then delete and recreate operators again, rinse and repeat. Such usage of Power Levels as a dynamic resource makes the entire leveling system pointless and weird, it doesn't provide any additional value and fun to gameplay, although it might seem to be more convenient and practical from the "effectiveness" viewpoint. But Power Creeps are introduced not to increase someone's effectiveness in game, but to make the game experience more varied.
Just to give you some idea about the motivation behind Power Creeps design, these possibilities were considered when I designed Power Creeps concept initially:
-
No delete at all. You create a Power Creep, and it's with you forever until you respawn.
-
Don't allow to choose skills. You choose class only, and then when you level up your Power Creep, it receives some random skill like a growing child, and you have to learn how to use it effectively.
These ideas are a bit extreme thus not implemented, but they are more aligned with my understanding of this game system than delete-free Power Creeps.
-
-
@geir1983 What exact steps are trying to do? How does your room look? A screencast might be helpful.
-
@artch I logged in to the offical PTR server today with the steam client (and freaked out a bit because i though i was logging in to the normal mmo server, I did not expect the steam clietn to take me to the ptr server) and here my power creep spawned immediately. On my private server i tried pretty much everything to spawn it in, different rooms/power spawns, different power creeps, from code/console but i never got it working. Either its related to private servers or some combination on my system makes it now working?
Btw, its possible to select higher levels than allowed when selecting powers for a power creep if you just spam click the button to increase a level. There is a check that gives an error message when saving, but should probably be looked at.
-
@geir1983 I'm still not able to reproduce. Power Creeps spawn perfectly for me on my private Steam server just installed from scratch. Please record a screencast or something that helps to figure out a repro case.
-
@artch i found the reason, its working for me also on private steam ptr server once i unload the [screepsmod-mongo] mod. I thought i already tested that, but i guess i only tested the cli after disabling that mod.
-
@artch I strongly disagree with
Right, and this is a big problem. In an MMO like this, the attacker is always at an advantage due to the time he spent planning the attack, and if some mechanic gives him even more time-related advantages over the defender, it's a bad mechanic.
I think defense is definitely at the advantage. Walls, ramparts, towers, closer spawning, safemode, TTL travel distance. They all are 100% in favor of the defender and are huge advantages. The time spent planning and honestly just that you can attack when players are AFK is the only thing that makes it even feasible to attack a properly reinforced room.
I don't think that purely reactive defense should be as strong as a prepared defense. Right now the only difference is a few hundred ticks of spawning to get defenders out, which is negligible in terms of wall damage.
The cost with deleting and rebuilding PC is that you are missing millions of power worth of power creep levels for 24 hours. That's a HUGE opportunity cost, especially for a fully upgraded PC. Also, if your rooms are designed to run with them in mind you're operating at a position of weakness for that duration. I'd put it akin to suddenly restricting yourself by 50 cpu for 24 hours.
I do agree with making power creeps feel special. I see how you've arrived at this, especially given your starting point and I like the idea of a power creep being a commitment. The one thing that having freepass tokens for long periods of time does is that it makes it painful to programmatically control power creep creation. Which I think might be one of your goals based on previous discussions (not even wanting to make an API for power creeps etc), but is a very strange goal for a programming game.
Obviously the punishment of losing a level is way too high, and giving out tokens is weird and unintuitive gameplay that will especially punish newer players. I'd like to propose another approach:
- When a power creep is spawned, you are locking your power levels into that creep for a long duration. After X ticks since that PC was first brought into this world, you can choose to retire it by reabsorbing it over 24 hours. At the end of 24 hours you can freely assign those levels again.
- Leveling a creep adds a fraction of the CD to the timer
- Optional: The CD scales in part with the number of power levels an account has, where having a ton of levels locks a player out of refitting individual creeps for longer.
- Optional: Recreating a power creep you had before offers a discount. (Builds identity)
- Optional: Every time you reassign power creeps, the constant that multiplies the timer goes up. This decreases with time. (Disincentives frequent swapping)
This will make power creeps a large commitment that players will have to think carefully and design around. This means that it's not free or easy to swap between options, but it is possible to do so. If you want to add shortcircuiting logic you can spend a level to immediately reassign, but I'd advise against that.
I think it's clear the tokens are a just a weird way of trying to limit player swapping, and level loss is a definite feel-bad mechanic. I think removing both and making it clear that building a PC is like building a room, a clear commitment of time and resources that you need to think clearly about.
-
@davaned I don't mean advantage and disadvantage in general, I mean time-related advantage, the time frame available for reaction -- it's always on the attacker side. Allowing attackers to switch in advance (24 hours, 48 hours, a week, whatever) and disallowing defenders to switch instantly aggravates this even more. No delay-based mechanics would solve this unfair feeling. We either have to allow everybody to switch instantly, or disallow everybody to switch at all (or restrict it).
-
@artch Thanks for the clarification. Do you feel that this is taken care of with the current implementation of a 24 hour delay and losing a level?
This will always exist if it isn't easy to programmatically respond to threats, because people can't be oncall for screeps 24/7. Any significant barrier to readying defense that requires more player interaction (no api, huge costs, long time, etc) makes this worse, with increased frustration if a player knows they are being attacked and can't respond.
I think lack of PC API is a great example of something that would have made for a terrible user experience in a game about automation. I think having a huge cost or an out-of-game resource experience (some sort of change credit) is a large barrier to being able to code a defense. If you're looking to have people able to react defensively in a programatic way I'm concerned this isn't a good approach.
-
@artch said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
Definitely still need power creep LOOK and FIND constants, or roll them under the CREEP constants.
FIND_*_POWER_CREEPSshould work on the PTR currently, have you checked?Okay, so that does exist, but it isn't in https://screeps.com/ptr/constants.js which makes it super hard to tell what constants exist. I thought that was the actual file the server used and it always had to contain what is used in game.
Operate_extensions should alleviate this some, but the really low amount of energy moved + the really long cooldown (you can get 5 50 part creeps out of 3 spawns in the time it takes for 1 fill cooldown) makes the skill practically useless and the synergy between the two skills is non-existent.
OPERATE_EXTENSIONS just seems a bit underpowered. I think a better solution is to increase its effect rather than change the mechanics. What do you think is an appropriate value?
One idea is to change its effect to a percentage of all extensions in the room: 20/40/60/80/100% of all extensions in the room are filled rather than some energy amount is sent.
That'll definitely make it stronger, but how will that factor into energy required by the power creep?
-
@davaned I can't seem to catch your point here. How exactly the current implementation of losing a level makes people not able to react defensively in a programmatic way?
-
Okay, so that does exist, but it isn't in https://screeps.com/ptr/constants.js which makes it super hard to tell what constants exist. I thought that was the actual file the server used and it always had to contain what is used in game.
This is the actual file used by the simulator, not the server. The actual server-side version is in the
ptrbranch on GitHub: https://github.com/screeps/common/blob/ptr/lib/constants.jsThat'll definitely make it stronger, but how will that factor into energy required by the power creep?
All energy is taken from the target structure, as it is in the current implementation.
-
@artch said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
Definitely still need power creep LOOK and FIND constants, or roll them under the CREEP constants.
FIND_*_POWER_CREEPSshould work on the PTR currently, have you checked?What about the LOOK_*_POWER_CREEPS constants? I could not find them. Also, does it make sense to make one that finds any creep, power or regular? for pathfinding etc i would need to find both kinds anyways.
-
@geir1983
LOOK_POWER_CREEPS(withoutMY/HOSTILE) is on the PTR. Private server is not updated yet.A constant for both types makes little sense since they have different prototypes. It's better to find both separately and just concatenate arrays then.
-
@artch typing LOOK_POWER_CREEPS in the console gives me an "is not defined" error message in return when on the ptr (through the steam client)
-
@slowmotionghost said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
I personally feel the power creep is too large, I think it should be the same size or only slightly larger than a regular creep. I get that you want to differentiate it from regular creeps but the way it overlaps other objects looks funny.
I agree. We've touched up on this on slack with o4, he said PowerCreeps are intentionally larger than normal so normal ones would cower in fear and run away just at the sight of it.
What we suggested is shrinking normal creeps and power creeps proportionally, and maybe also shrinking the Storage too, because that thing is huge.
-
@artch Significant, permanent loss based on a judgement call on what game state in 24 hours will be? Definitely falls under the difficult to code region imo. If PC are intended as a separate way of playing the game from a GCL focused player, switching a major PC from eco to defense represents a huge loss of your empire for the duration, and then another level loss again when you swap back. 2 level loss and 48 hours of missing a chunk of the engine that is driving your PC based empire is a harsh tradeoff to wrap in code.
That's part of why I suggested having power creep templates and make swapping back to your old heroes be easier. Otherwise you pay a double price.
-
typing LOOK_POWER_CREEPS in the console gives me an "is not defined" error message in return when on the ptr (through the steam client)
Oops, indeed, sorry for that. Fixed.
