Ramparts to public in uncontrolled rooms


  • AYCE

    Currently ramparts switch to public for any player that respawns. I suggest that this should also occur if control is lost for a room. If not in the case of losing control of a single room, then at least when a player loses control of all rooms on a shard. Shard0 is littered with collapsed empires where the player has not respawned, so we're left waiting for the decay or wasting resources (quite a bit in some cases) to reach the controller.

    For example:

    https://screeps.com/a/#!/room/shard0/E25S58

    ☝


  • The problem would still exist in the form of walled off entrances so the problem would surely still exist?


  • AYCE

    Agreed, but I'm not sure offhand that I've seen a recent case of a completely walled off room with HP high enough to cause as much trouble. Completely walled off rooms tend to be a new player single room tactic, not a larger empire tactic.



  • hmm there are 700k minerals in that room, that's surely worth the effort of knocking down the wall


  • AYCE

    That room is a single example. There are more with little to no payoff, they only serve to hamper expansion. Even in the case of that room, not really... unless you were starving for the Z. A storage full of unreacted minerals would be a payday for a newer player, but they more than likely don't have the means to pull down a 300M rampart in a timely fashion to make that worthwhile.



  • If you assume that you can consistently dismantle with 40 work parts per tick (2 creeps, each with 20 work parts), then at current tick times on shard0 a max HP wall can be removed in a little under nine days. (Wolfram Alpha calculation) That seems like an easily reachable stretch goal for a new player that's already gotten an RCL 6 room.

    You can probably even make more energy from the dismantling than you spent on the creeps, but that doesn't count the opportunity cost of not having those work parts get eight times more energy from harvesting sources instead.

    Overall, I'm not sure that this change is actually needed.

    👏

  • AYCE

    Agree as well. I'm not saying it's impossible. However, what is the difference between a player that has respawned, where the ramparts go public, and a player that has let their sub run out, gone zombie, etc. and lost all control of their rooms? The potential payoff (or lack thereof) in either situation is the same. Is slugging through old empire ramparts at shard0 tick times just to claim a room seen as a rewarding challenge? Are any players actually migrating to shard0 to do so? I haven't really investigated the other shards, I assumed that this really is not as much of a common situation elsewhere. Completely open to changing my mind, so I'd love to hear more thoughts.



  • I agree though on the original post. If player loses control over all rooms for, say, 7 days, make their despawn automatic? That should take care of ramparts too. Have plenty of rooms like this with 70M+ ramparts around me on shard1 too.



  • Guys there is a fairly easy fix today,
    which doesn't even require to dismantle one wall:
    Think with Por... ahm I mean tunnels 😄

    👏


  • @mrfaul good idea. Unfortunately, it requires bringing of your own energy, since in most of abandoned rooms the sauces are also walled-off. Though I suppose generating your own energy via dismantling the nearest wall would be an option, albeit slower one.

    I'll see about implementing this at some point. thanks.



  • You can get the energy from an adjacent room. Though given that a tunnel costs 45,000 energy, I'm not sure if that's preferential over dismantling.



  • You can get energy straight from the walls, dismantle them to build the road.


  • Dev Team

    @shibdib That's what I personally want to try.