3. PTR Changelog 2016-09-19

PTR Changelog 2016-09-19


  • Can multiple harvesters hit the extractor when its cooldown is at 0?

    Can you share your vision with the cooldown? Is the expectation that every room has a dedicated harvester next to an extractor that sits on it's laurels for 85% of its life? 

    I have updated my solver for optimizing a single unboosted mineral harvesting creep using the proposed cooldown changes.

    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 12 steps away with roads before change  ~.8 min/tick   ~4.6 mineral/energy     61456 ticks
    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 12 steps away with roads after change  ~.7 min/tick  ~1.25 mineral/energy  71500 ticks

    So for inside a base, it'll cost about 4x as much in energy to harvest and maybe half a day longer. not bad!

     

    And when you look at it for extractors in a center room:

    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 100 steps away with 10% roads before change ~.65 min/tick   ~1.3 mineral/energy  76450 ticks
    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 100 steps away with 10% roads after change  ~.52 min/tick  ~.6 mineral/energy  96250 ticks

    So going for a center room is still viable, but costs over twice as much and will take over a day longer

     

    Where the cooldown will effect me the most is SK rooms. I currently get about 300 ticks of harvesting per creep between fights, but that'll turn to 50. I don't have equations for this yet, but i doubt my current 'single creep kills Keeper and harvests' will continue to be viable.

     

    On another note, the ERR_TIRED verbage is an odd description for a structure.

     

  • Culture

    Another idea is that a cooldown could be removed by a continuous regeneration. The extractor "mines" the mineral up. You can later "harvest/transfer" the minerals to the creep.

    say every 5 ticks a mineral regenerates between 3,5 and 7 minerals. The max of a mineral storage could be extremely low as well.

     

    > Where the cooldown will effect me the most is SK rooms. I currently get about 300 ticks of harvesting per creep between fights, but that'll turn to 50. I don't have equations for this yet, but i doubt my current 'single creep kills Keeper and harvests' will continue to be viable.

    You can do 4 ticks of fighting, than 1 mine in between

     

    > On another note, the ERR_TIRED verbage is an odd description for a structure

    ERR_BUSY seems more suitable to me as well


  • @Revrick, Dissi: a link also returns ERR_TIRED while still cooling down.

  • Culture

    Oh cool, forgot about that.

    ERR_TIRED seems better 🙂

  • Dev Team

    Can multiple harvesters hit the extractor when its cooldown is at 0?

    Yes, they can.

    Is the expectation that every room has a dedicated harvester next to an extractor that sits on it’s laurels for 85% of its life?

    Yes, most likely. Another alternative could be a 100-tick cooldown every 10 harvests, but it would require complicating StructureExtractor prototype further introducing yet another property like harvestsRemaining.


  • hrm.. I'd rather see a cap on reserved rooms as well than a reduction of source capacity, mostly for CPU reasons...

  • Culture

    "And again, I repeat:

    This change has nothing to do with the market balance, supply/demand, orders, etc. It’s all about large-scale economy balance - i.e. overall resources produce and consumption in the game. Their distribution between players is unrelated."

    I understand that, but this did happen almost immediately after the Market was released. It's hard not to see a correlation when you don't supply the reasons.

     

    "Doing this means merely changing some constants. “Giving the reasons” means publishing (and polishing) a lot of inner raw info, which would require order of magnitude more efforts."

    Sure, but there was a lot of discussion that must've taken a good chunk of time on you guys' side. Of course, publishing the reasons would take more time, I'm not saying it wouldn't, just that such a dramatic change should've had pretty well qualified reasons.

     

    Overall though, I appreciate that you guys have decided to hold off until power creeps, when we'll have a chance to counteract these nerfs somewhat. If we had to change how fundamental aspects of our code works yet again in a couple months time, that would've been incredibly annoying and tedious, time we could've spent improving it instead. So thank you for waiting.


  • i don't want to complain much. I have no real insight, and i trust the devs about this.

    i can only speak from my own point of view, and that is: as a GCL 7 who gets all his energy from remote-harvesting, this nerfs me _very_ hard. It also doesn't help my CPU - because i already only mine with 1 harvester/source. I even don't have claimers everywhere - because of the CPU. 

    Regarding the SourceKeeper Rooms: we (NATO) have been _forced_ away from this room already by the much more powerfull Thunderkittens. This will give them a freaking super-advantage towards us. 

    So nerf the SK rooms? ... this sounds to easy for me, as many ppl already pointed out. 

    i think i will have about 30% less energy after this patch while needing more CPU.
    I don't really know how i can sustain with this.. we will see.

    praise the GCL :'-/


  • I am very late to this thread, but just wanted to say that if we require power creeps to "boost" sources, that is heavily favoring higher GCL players, while heavily punishing newer players.  It takes a very long time for new players to even get to the point that dealing with power is even worth it.  We are dealing with more basic stuff like just getting our rooms to function.

    If you nerf remote mining, that only helps players like Dissi, who already has stock piles of power, and he can easily afford to boost his remote mining operations.  The newer players will basically never be able to remote mine due to this nerf.

    Maybe you plan on making power more easily accessible to new players, if so, then that might help.  But if not, then I see this change just making a larger gap between older players and newer players.


  • Just one more point I would like to make, is the technical burden for remote mining.  As a new player, I still haven't dealt with remote mining, since it would take a significant time to get code that would result in a profitable operation.  Right now, I am more focused on immediate issues inside my own rooms.

    If you make is such that we need this power creep to boost a source, I fear that will just increase the burden of remote mining for newer players, in terms of coding (and cpu).  

    I 100% agree that higher player remote mining operations are too profitable right now, but on the flip side, if you reduce those profits, you will make it such that newer players will almost never remote mine.  I would like to see a balance that limits higher players, without harming newer players.