"Roaming" economy powers

Tigga

Right now all the powers except REGEN_MINERAL seem to be aimed at allowing people to get close to optimal economy benefits without the power creep leaving a single room and one of it's remote rooms. The cooldowns roughly match the effect period. REGEN_MINERAL is a bit different as you either need to do some "fun" things to overlap regen and cooldown or migrate between rooms to keep using the power.

It looks like OPERATE_FACTORY will be the same: cooldown is higher than duration.

I think it would be interesting if we had more powers where the cooldown was significantly less than the duration. There are pros and cons:

Pros:

Advanced code can do advanced things. If you can find a many room route you can get more use out of the power. For example: if operate factory had a cooldown of 100 and a duration of 1000 (and, assuming it's like REGEN_SOURCE in that you want to use it a lot) you'd want to hit 10 factories in those 1000 ticks to get most use out of your power.
More rooms get power enabled across the world.

Cons:

Penalizes players who spread out more. I see spreading out a bit as a good thing as it encourages interesting interactions between players.
It seems many newer features have allowed advanced code to give small benefits. Done wrong and this would give advanced code a bit too much help.

Crusher48

Honestly, it would be a decent idea to rework those powers. Both should make a mineral/source's timer regenerate twice as quickly for a fairly long duration, with the duration increasing with extra levels. This, combined with a lower cooldown on regen source, will encourage power creeps to roam around to boost mining across the entire empire, and will also add pathing demands to put the power creeps in optimal positions to boost the optimal minerals. A side effect would be making power activation more prevalent in the game world.

MrFaul

In that case it must be assured that advancing levels brings more benefits than having multiple "low lvl" power creeps.