Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds
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@artch said in Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds:
Decreased lesser (level-0) cores spawn interval from 15k to 2k ticks. This means a stronghold can spawn up to 40 lesser cores during its lifetime if remained untouched. But they are now quite weak and can be handled easily.
I hope this isn't too much of a challenge for newer players. It's also going to really hurt players who are inactive whose code can't deal with hostile structures appearing in unowned rooms. Or those who can deal with it but use dismantle on them, because that's what you can do to everything else.
EDIT: Wanted to say the other changes look great, thanks!
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@tigga With reservation power equal to 2 your reserver can simply overdo the core. And with 100k hits you can manage the cores using your regular invader creeps hunter.
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@artch continued reservation of a controller owned by a lesser core will end up removing it? I don't understand what you mean by overdo?
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@tun9an0 The core works with the controller using regular
reserveController/attackControllermechanics. If your creep has more than 2CLAIMparts, it will attack faster than the core reserves. Or, if it's still your reservation, then your creep will reserve faster than the core attacks.
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@artch Aha thank you, I shall observe that. I thought it was just wiping the (my) reservation on arrival.
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@artch said in Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds:
@tigga With reservation power equal to 2 your reserver can simply overdo the core. And with 100k hits you can manage the cores using your regular invader creeps hunter.
On the first point - yes - that makes it just about ok.
On the second point - I'm more concerned about all those players who aren't around right now. Maybe it doesn't matter. Personally unless I'd updated my code it wouldn't deal with the invader cores in my rooms like this. Firstly my anti-invader creeps don't look for hostile structures because why would they need to? Secondly my anti-building creeps used dismantle, because it used to work on anything that could possibly be in my remote. I've since changed my code.
All in all, I think given the first point and the fact that cores don't spawn next to the controller any more it's probably alright.
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@artch said in Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds:
Decreased lesser (level-0) cores spawn interval from 15k to 2k ticks. This means a stronghold can spawn up to 40 lesser cores during its lifetime if remained untouched. But they are now quite weak and can be handled easily.
This doesn't seem to be right. I've had 3 lesser cores spawn since they regenerated. The stronghold has been around (and indestructable) for 1250 ticks.
Seems to be true with most strongholds.
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@tigga It was just a testing run. We've spawned 3 additional cores for every stronghold to test how they expand.
UPD: Removed them.
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"Strongholds are now always spawned in center rooms (or more precisely, SK center rooms, i.e. excluding the most center room)."
Can this occur in SK rooms that aren't occupied?
This seems a bit game/empire breaking for those who are already Source Keeper harvesting.
Looking around, I'm already seeing people losing 2K parts in less 1000 ticks the stronghold has been active.
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Yeah I agree. I was fine with the original patch a few days ago. Now that you changed it I am getting emails about sk rooms having trouble. This was not documented or put on ptr for the sk room change. Grrrr
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They could always spawn in SK rooms before. It was just rare rather than all the time.
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SKs already being marginally beneficial for energy everyone is probably better of just dropping them altogether until you can effectively tackle and loot strongholds. With the reduced invasions the energy actually becomes more efficient, and stronghold loot is probably selling better then looted boosts from invaders.
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There is no such thing as "breaking" when we talk about SK rooms. They are not yours. Even when you manage to farm them steadily, they're still not yours. Any hostile player is free to come and mess with your algorithms. The "Invader" player is just another player in that regard.
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A player with 6 towers and unlimited boosted creeps
It is fairly rough, although I do expect we'll see some tick times gained due to players dying off.
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I'd like to suggest the spawn rate for L3+ strongholds be reduced for a period of time to allow players to ramp up to them.
Making a hard stronghold be a rare occurrence is reasonable imo and would reduce some of the sudden overwhelming emergency players are feeling
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@artch : Building towers in a room without a controller is not something that "any hostile player" can do. Invader is not just like some another player. It has some special powers. If game mechanics are changed it may seem to break something that used to work differently (predictably) earlier.
I understand you need to add new content to this game, but you could have some mercy on us
IRL software specifications/requirements changes too and it causes sometimes extra work, so I think we're all good here...
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@hattu It's a game though, it can have new game content, events, mechanics, systems, items, all this is good. We never promised the Screeps world is going to have all guarantees that regular software provides. It's an MMO game, not an enterprise programming framework.
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@tigga Yup. I'm one of those 'not around' players. My code has been happily running itself for a long time, but having a level 3 stronghold pop up next to my room effectively shut down my SK harvesting and crushed my energy economy. It's essentially invisible to my code, so, ya know. Just kept pumping out creeps for the meat grinder until I ran out of energy.
Never being an 'offensive' minded player, I don't have code for attacking fortifications. I always just enjoyed base building, economy, etc side of things and only really wrote defensive code. Oh well. Devs gonna do what devs gonna do. I went not around in the first place as it felt more and more there became a "right way" that we were expected to play that didn't mesh what I enjoyed most.
Can't expect my non-updated code to stay relevant forever, but I'm sure I'm not the only one getting messed up by strongholds, etc. right now.
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I looked at the expandStronghold code. Currently the next room reservation is deterministic. Perhaps it would be a bit nicer when the floodfill algorithm would use non-deterministic directions. And I would vote for a higher INVADER_CORE_EXPAND_TIME. Currently with 2000, if you're in the primary expand spot and don't have the ability to clear the stronghold, the reservation outtime is too high.
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@gink Screeps world is a lot less fun if scripts are just happily running and their owners all are not around. For such passive gameplay we recommend playing on a private server, MMO is for PvP and PvE interaction.
