3. Power Sink

Power Sink


  • Regarding power itself, will there be any way for power to "drain" out of the system to prevent oversaturation of the power market?

    Every other resource has this, except power.

    It is my understanding from the design doc that when a power creep dies, there is no loss of power. You regain 100% of it.

    Once the majority of players have as much power as they need in their account to do whatever they want with power creeps, they'll most likely sell all the excess on the market , which would eventually saturate the power market.

    This of course has a knock on effect for newbies if the price drops far enough for power to be much easier to buy than to acquire from power banks themselves during earlier GCL levels.

    Obviously, this will take months to start showing signs, but I'm just wondering if it has been considered at all.

    Perhaps there is already a sink and I'm just too blind to see it being the relatively new player that I am. 🙂

  • Culture

    Personally, power creeps have such a large benefit that you'll always want more of them (or at least more levels).

     

    To put this into perspective:

    Hernanduer has "239" levels for power creeps. Ideally you'd want level 24 PC's in all your rooms doing all tasks. Even after nearly 2 years he's nowhere near that count. He has 41 owned rooms which can benefit from the PC's.


  • Ah that definitely puts some perspective on it.

    Thanks Dissi!


  • I think that a power sink is probably a good idea.

    GCL is the only other non-sink item in the game (once you gain it you keep it).

    But there is a big big difference between GCL and Power:

    -- GCL aids expansion only. Rooms are a "static" resource that doesn't change frequently. And in order to expand, you have to (usually) take from someone else using creeps with a sink, against a room that has (potentially) the same resources you do. Yes you can send multiple rooms against a single room to give you a force multiplier, but that seems ok. This is also why newbie areas only allow 3 rooms, so that someone with a high GCL doesn't get TOO strong a lead.

    -- Power aids in the taking of rooms and blocking of resources. PCs are a "fluid" resource that moves and can be reallocated constantly. They allow for asymmetric warfare (PCs against non-PCs is potentially massively unbalanced). If you can't beat a PC supported army with regular creeps, you will never be able to unseat a strong player, and there is no limit to their use of PCs.

     

    @Dissi - if I were Hernanduer, the first thing I would do with those 239 levels is to put them into offensive PCs to clear out a nice buffer around me to let me spread my empire and use my regular creeps to back fill. Then kill off most of the army, leaving enough to take out any newbies that move in, and focus my power on protecting as many Power Banks and harvesting those as much as possible to keep my edge. Only then would I fall back on operational creeps to take over my most CPU intensive tasks.

  • int_max

    Please remember, he can only grow so big, CPU will cap him out.