3. Power Abilities Adjustments. Labs/Spawn/Storage/Terminal and Regen Mineral.

Power Abilities Adjustments. Labs/Spawn/Storage/Terminal and Regen Mineral.


  • Hi,

    Enjoying powercreeps, but feel like some abilities need small adjustments.

    Operate Labs/Spawn/Storage/Terminal - Please scale the Ops used per level. Example - labs use 2/4/6/8/10 ops used per level while it gives 2/4/6/8/10 increase.

    Regen mineral - Can it do something while the mineral has cooldown? Maybe reduce cooldown by 10/20/30/40/50 level.

    Thanks,

    likeafox

    P.S. I just used operate power once, and I don't think I'll ever use it again. The energy and power consumption in one room is too much.

    P.S.S. Regen Minerals gets weaker if you boost and mine minerals, it seems weird that the more efficent you are at mining minerals, the weaker this is.

    P.S.S.S. Can we adjust the operate controller to be 1500 ticks lasting and 250 ops cost?

  • Culture

    I don't think that makes much sense. Efficiency is one of the main reasons to upgrade those skills.

    I do agree with the REGEN_MINERAL though, it shouldn't be inactive while the mineral is on cooldown.

    👍
    1 Reply

  • I do agree with the REGEN_MINERAL though, it shouldn't be inactive while the mineral is on cooldown.

    One one hand I think i's good as good code will lead to an advantage. It forces your power creeps to roam to maximize their utility and optimizing that path is an interesting challenge. This is the only power where this is the case. I think that's a good thing.

    On the other hand 1 mineral/tick maximum yield seems far too low given how much extra effort it is. Just mining out a mineral as fast as possible and waiting for it to regenerate naturally gives you about 1 mineral/tick, and doesn't require any power creeps. These are mutually exclusive - we can't both maximize natural regen and forced regen.

    When you compare to REGEN_SOURCE which gives 50 energy/tick for lower effort, it's clearly way out of balance (just look at energy vs mineral prices on the market). If it was 20x higher yield it would be more interesting. Or maybe 10x if you could camp out a single room with it. I'm not really sure what the best solution here is, but it's pretty clear to me this is a very low value power right now.


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  • What's wrong with regenerating mineral in a base and adjacent sk room or other nearby base? That will get quite higher uptime. And if you have X or H in those bases that will be quite high value return on that power...

    1 Reply

  • @wtfrank said in Power Abilities Adjustments. Labs/Spawn/Storage/Terminal and Regen Mineral.:

    What's wrong with regenerating mineral in a base and adjacent sk room or other nearby base? That will get quite higher uptime. And if you have X or H in those bases that will be quite high value return on that power...

    No matter what you do it's still capped at one mineral/tick. You're right in that to make good use out of REGEN_MINERAL you have to roam (SK rooms, multiple owned rooms), but that doesn't make it go beyond one mineral/tick. Even if that mineral is X (which it won't always be) I'd say it's significantly less valuable than 50 energy/tick.

    1 Reply

  • @tigga you might well be right, at least about the current market values of X and energy.

    It might be that in the future, there is huge amounts of spare energy, because people can renew_source far more than they can contest power spawns. I.e. the economic calculation could conceivably change. Although realistically, it's more likely to happen in the opposite direction - people will use renew_mineral to get more of the most valuable mineral which will tend to push the market price of it down compared to the others. If that's the case, it might be that the economics of renew_mineral deteriorate further!

    Honestly though I did expect from the description that renew_mineral would work all the time, not just during the 10k/60k ticks that a mineral is active. That's not necessarily a reason to change it, but still, it's unintuitive that it works this way!


  • I might as well add my theoretical "bug" / expected behaviour. I haven't tried this, but looking at the source I think it should work. Mine a mineral down to a very small (put positive) amount. Active REGEN_MINERAL. During the 100 ticks duration quickly take the mineral to 0. This will trigger the regen timer. The Power will still be active and pull the mineral amount above 0 again, but the regen timer will still be active (set). Keep the power going and don't mine it below 0 and you can get the 1/t mineral during the regen timer. Once the timer would have expired, mine it to 0 and it should instantly be regened.

    It's not a great gain, but allows the power to be used with 100% uptime and normal mining. So takes the overall income from 1/t (from either natural regen, or power) to 2/t with both. ... assuming it does actually work


  • Fixing the mineral problem should be as simple as changing line 8 in src/processor/intents/mineral/tick.js to if(!object.mineralAmount || object.nextRegenerationTime). Then disable the checks on the power allowing it to be applied anytime.

    This preserves the mechanic that minerals don't start regen until it is depleted while allowing PWR_REGEN_MINERAL to be as useful as PWR_REGEN_SOURCE.

    ☝