4. Room blueprint feedback

Room blueprint feedback


  • The walk distance from terminal to labs could be shorter. But some players dont mind that. It would be an issue for me though.

    The towers are not in the middle of your design. That results in a harder to defend part of your bunker. That could be an issue. But again, some players dont have issues with tower distance, mainly because of strong active defense.


  • @keenathar a few thoughts:

    1. You have some "wasted" space in the middle which is rather annoying. I think you could open that up by removing one extension and put the low-use buildings in there (power spawn, nuker).
    2. The area on the top left could be moved one tile south or east.
    3. You have no links. The terminal is reasonably far from the labs and the storage reasonable far from the extensions. Minimizing these distances helps minimize intents and creep size.
    4. Towers are quite far from the south and east. Could be a problem.

  • Here's my current v2.0 bunker design:

    v2.0 bunker

    Feel free to use/improve!

    It may cause some congestion if you don't have any traffic management code, but it wasn't all that bad for me so far. And as soon as you get at least some creep jam resolution code it'll be smooth sailing. It also has the interesting feature of being an (almost) perfect circle!

    Things in there can be rotated as necessary.

    1 Reply

  • Thanks for the suggestions!

  • Dev Team

    @orlet this one is really good!


  • So after giving it more thought (thanks again for all feedback), and evaluating how my previous design did, I drew a few conclusions:

    • The design must be spherical / square to have centered towers
    • The design must have easily accessible exits for active defenders and lazy traffic management
    • The spawns must be on or near the outside to reduce congestion and save move intents after spawning
    • The terminal and storage must be near the labs
    • There must be a link near the storage and terminal
    • The design must be my own, instead of being a copy

    I came up with the following: planner link

    Bunker image

    It's 13x13, so not as compact as such designs (like Overmind's 11x11), but definitely not huge either by any standard. I'm pretty happy with how many open diagonals I was able to fit in, hopefully allowing me to postpone real traffic management until I've finished more interesting modules.

    The top and right edges have a blind spot for active defenders. I'm too much of a sucker for symmetry to move one of them to the spot top-right of the storage, and I don't want to block the diagonals, but particularly the right edge seems like the weakest spot because of the single full-damage tower. I might give up the topleft-bottomright diagonal by filling the gaps between the + patterns.

    I decided to go ahead and make a few more small changes, so I fixed the blind spots at the cost of the topleft-bottomright diagonal. Given the other parallel routes, it's not too bad to give it up. The image above is updated to reflect these changes, though the old version is here.

    Another downside of this design will probably be fill speed, though that wasn't high up on my list of concerns.

    I'm still considering the build order, and might swap the top-left spawn

    @Orlet I really liked your layout, but wanted something more "open". As well as my own design 😉

    Who's available for round 2 of feedback?


  • If you're demanding that spawns are near the edge to save move intents after spawning, you really should not have "fill speed...[not] high up on my list of concerns" as fill speed is connected to intents.

    By the way you have (diagonally) 3-deep clusters of extensions at the top left and bottom right... you might as well make them 4 deep and save some space. That might be enough to get you from 13x13 to 12x12.

    1 Reply

  • @wtfrank Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try rearranging for 4-deep clusters.

    I guess "saving move intents" was the wrong phrasing. I meant just fewer moves, so that miners are at their sources quicker without having to go through congested space.


  • I've tried slimming it down, but I lose a lot of mobility and end up with something that feels like an inferior version of o4kapuk / bonzAI's bunkers. (Planner)

    new bunker

    I'm not sure if I consider it an improvement. Placement will surely be easier (smaller and simpler shape) but I think I need traffic management to make it work. Additionally it'll be annoying to determine which orientation to place it, given that the mobility top-left to bottom right is much better than perpendicular to that. Additionally the old design guarantees all extensions can be filled from the inside of the bunker, whereas the new one does not. If I add a road around the base it'll suddenly have the same footprint as the old design again.


  • It is possible to have an 11x11 with all extensions fillable from the inside. Part of the way I achieved that in my newer rooms was by putting the observer/nuker/power spawn in the place of otherwise unreachable extensions. e.g. in your diagram at (4,1) and (1,4). On the basis you don't often have to refill the nuker/power spawn, I don't see it as a big deal that you have to go into the outer ring for those.

    One thing you've done well in this diagram that other people don't always do (and not to do this seems to me like a mistake) is to have all your paths as diagonals. That uses the in-base empty space most efficiently.