PTR Changelog 2016-09-09
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Although I should mention a few things.
First and foremost, modular code which fails gracefully is one of the cornerstones of proper software development and certainly one of the good lessons people can take from this game. Structuring your process so that unexpected code failures are isolated at the creep, room, spawn etc level is quintessential to survival in this game.
I have to agree with hernuander that the way the game is now, large empires cannot be taken down overnight anyways. They might lose a room or two in the initial strike, but that's the benefit of first strike, a fundamental aspect of warfare. It is indeed already quite difficult to envision how you might be able to overcome some of the more effective defense tactics. It is likely that future warfare among the big players will end up as a very long term grind where resource efficiency will be more relevant then actual tactical effectiveness. Where the key will simply be to drain all possible resources from the opponent. Although the introduction of the market allows players to bypass this restriction.
On the other hand, I have to agree with Artem, that this mechanism would allow screeps players to get a more comfortable sleep. If this mechanism must be implemented, I would strongly suggest:
- Make it empire wide rather then room based
- Extend the refresh timer to 50k
I can understand the desire to make the game more accessible and fully support any change in that direction. The game is already super niche and having a larger community would be welcome. As the community grows the challenge for the established players will certainly increase.
Suggesting that players which do not have the following:
- Modular error handling
- Effective automatic defense system
- Daily access and activity within the system
Should just suck it up, is not ok. Yes, people should just restart when they get wiped. People should do a lot of things, but they don't. What matters is the perception people have of the game. If you want this game to develop, a strong community behind it is quintessential. Constructing necessary mechanisms which protect and engage players is important. Just not sure if this method really has an impact.
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Atavus: if a player does not have daily access to the game, the safe mode system would not be helpful for them. That reason is partly why I think this design is a bit against the theme of the game. Without safe mode any player in a war can take shot at the other at their convenient time. With safe mode, it will let the one with more consistent daily online time some advantages (imagine the changes in a war between someone that can go only twice a week and someone that can go online daily, with and without safe mode). I do not know if said advantage is significant or not.
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if the sole role of this protection is to defend you against your own tiny and stupid defence bugs and typos - add some limit to it - 10, 100, 1000 protections per player per respawn.. but a limit so this is not abused in all other cases
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Not only typos and tiny bugs, but even if your entire siege mode didn't kick in - that will work as failsafe against it (or just normal bugs in defense logic). A hard limit on top of existing one, which resets on respawn, is actually not a bad idea as a limiter, although it will reward not-warring players more than the aggressive one, discouraging attacks even further.
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as it should - the more active defender you are, the more proofed your defence code is and you don't need such an almighty protection
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Don't forget if your code errors out your code can't activate safemode
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@dissi not neceserily. if the bug is not a syntax error, but for example calling a non object and its AFTER reinforce code checking, it will get executed. For example I can shove
Game.getObjectById('abc').memory;At the end of my main() and my empire will work fine, despite erorrs being thrown. So putting that as first thing in main will safeguard against non-syntax errors.
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Ugh, I really feel this change will be a big disadvantage for 'intermediate' players. We, the group at GCL 4 thru 8 that don't have reliable access to Ghodium yet (Which would be the bigger part of the active, subscribing, customer base I assume).
- Our sectors will see a bigger influx of new and respawning players that will be even more tedious and slow to clean out than they currently are. I don't see why a respawning player would spawn right next to a top 20 player, so it would be 'us' that gets the respawners, meaning less space to expand and even more waiting than we experience now.
- I can see lots of double boxing accounts popping up, just to grief someone. Base code to get a room up to RCL 4 is easy, which would entail 4 safe mode stints if you aren't able to time the window. Also, the 'free' 10 CPU limit will be plenty to achieve that.
- In the end 'we' will end up taking even longer to secure reliable Ghodium supplies, while the current top players will happily `generateSafeMode` away and Ghodium (and perhaps ingredients) prices on the Market will rise above the ridiculous, making the game pay-to-win to stay afloat with tokens.
The game is already so incredibly slow, and I feel this change will only add to that feeling in multiple ways. I can see how that would be good for subscriptions with everything taking even longer, but perhaps there will be an even bigger group of players that can't be bothered anymore and move on to pick up their lives again.
I guess we'll have to find out how it turns out in the end, but at this moment I'm not too thrilled with the prospect of this change.
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But you can buy the ghodium, or work with your neighbours and get it just fine, without their help, especially since you don't need much of it for either small back-up supply of boosts or reinforcing room (and you can get credits from selling your own stuff to players/npcs). It really isn't impossible or effect os some conspiracy theory that you don't have it up and running. But that is not to diminish the problem of large empire players, and lack of incentify for them to kill one another, just that it should be handled in separate topic as it's a much larger issue that need a large and separate solution. And blackballing something that is actually good for smaller players because it will also help the big ones doesn't seem like a good precedent to set.
And this is helping new players, especially boost-less players. Now if a boost-filled player will decide to take you out, he can do so quickly and swiftly, and unless you have monster walls it will be so swiftly that even sitting in front of PC won't save you as you won't code defences fast enough. With this you will have hours to get to pc and code in basic creep defence system which throws a massive wrench even in attack of boosted creeps, giving you a fair chance to repel it and continue fighting, rather than waking up from 7 rooms to a respawn button.
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Considering all the feedback here, I think we’ll go with this important change to safe mode rules:
Only one room can be in safe mode at the same time. Calling
activateSafeModewhile it’s active in another room will returnERR_BUSY.This still allows all players to protect themselves from fatal bugs, but doesn’t affect the balance for high level players so much however.
The PTR has the nice feature where you can summon invaders at will which is a great start. I think it would help if a feature like this was available in the regular screeps world.
This makes sense actually. We’ll include this feature in the same patch.
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Artem just make sure that those spawned invaders will not drop minerals/energy on death, that could easily turn into new improved mining ;).
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> Artem just make sure that those spawned invaders will not drop minerals/energy on death, that could easily turn into new improved mining ;
You're ruining my evil plan!
In all seriousness; If you spawned em manually you should be able to kill them as well, by hand. If you accidentally broke your code during these invaders it would be really bad to have em roaming for 1500 ticks or longer.
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I just realized something with the invaders
If you see non-NPC-attackers coming for your rooms, you could, theoretically, spawn boosted invaders at your walls to help you defense.
I think it's a bad idea to add invaders to production as well, as it could be exploited heavily.
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I was thinking of the same thing. You may be able to abuse this functionality to spawn large quantities of invaders when under attack.
I would suggest postponing the integration of invaders into the production system. Too many things which could go wrong.
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This can be simply avoided by setting an inner flag that these invaders are user-summoned. They will not drop anything, they can be suicided by their summoner user, and if any other creeps appear in the room, they suicide immediately.
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Cool.
Sounds like a plan.
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I don't know if I like this change.It seems like it will make the game less fun.
Right now I get a lot of warfare between novice players. Sometimes I win, Sometimes I loose.
I can see this being a good thing, when I expand into a new room, I can use safemode, to get the equivalent of noob walls for my new room.
But as an attacker this sucks. Now every defender gets an I win button. 3 or 4 of them really quickly as a matter of fact.
So I ATTACK then wait for 8-9 hours. ATTACK again, and maybe it works this time. Again I can see this being kinda nice for new players to get established to a point. But mostly it makes me feel penalized for attacking. Now instead of having to devote 1-2 hours to wiping out someone I have to commit 8 hours of time. Then what. I can attack them when I'm not playing? If I start an attack when I get home from work at 6pm then they smash their I win button, I have to wait till around 4am to attack again? When do I get to sleep. Ok so I go to work, come home, and nope 6PM again, I have to make them smash their I win button again.
That's just to much of a time investment.
Maybe smaller times with more activation, and smaller cool-downs.
Like 2000 ticks, 6000 tick cool downs, and you get 5 per level, or one per 10,000 ghoqium (larger empires shouldn't need to rely on this very much).
Then new players get nice noob protection. And established players get a "oh shit" button, but attackers don't have to wait till they should be in bed to continue an attack.
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That isn't a win button, it's a pause button in essence. And your complain seems to be basd on principle that while you, the attacker, must be online in order to attack, defender shouldn't be granted that luxury and instead be wipedout in 2 hours? Why won't you code your attacks to go automatically as timer expires? Of course that has has certain disadvantage of risking your entire colony and what you've worked for in hands of code, as attacking someone makes you very vulnerable to counter offensive, or offensive from someone else, and you want to be online to defend your colony when it's under attack, right?
Then why deny the other side the same right? This is a game of code, and so far the much higher code pressure (or even entire code pressure in pre-boost realms) is on the defender, as succesfull attack can be led with literally 90 lines of code across 2 roles + manual placement of flags and minor command line tweaks. And that is just not right compared to effort required on side of defender to compensate for it.
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Well as I said, I do like parts of it. But I don't think it fixes anything.
if(StructureController.safeModeAvailable && room.controller.findInRange(FIND_CREEPS, 25) > room.controller.findInRange(FIND_MY_CREEPS, 25)) room.controller.
activateSafeMode()There, 1 line of code, defeats the most awesome and complicated super duper attack squad. Provider the person writing that awesome code has a job or school or something other then screeps going on. ..... More to follow.
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So as I was saying,
My problem isn't with the fact that the I win button exists. It's with the fact that any player now has a unbeatable defense, with super low hanging fruit. A shorter duration would fix that, or at least make it better.
You want to talk about code, then here is what I have.
8 or so tactics, with different creep bodies for different goals. 4 of which work well to hit common pitfalls in tower defenses. the other 4 are more specialized attempts that I don't have working right yet. 7 or so classes of attack creeps like "healer" or "tank" that each use each tactic a little differently. So 56 code paths (to start with) for probing, attacking, and wiping a room.
On the defense side, I have 20 lines of tower code, and 1 "responder" class that does kiting, or brute force attack. In all, 3 code paths. Now I can improve that to the point of being able to defend a player like Dissi for week, with just one line of code.
And to make matters worse, the attacker now has to spend the resources to break my crappy defense 4-5 times. So 1 line of code, makes the attacker, online or off spend 4-6 times the resources to attack me.
What's worse, is that a more established player, can just feed his controller Gohdium while I can't do anything to stop it. I mean there are entire GCL levels where you won't have/make enough to actually produce/buy ghodium. So how am I supposed to defeat more established players?
