When is boosting useful?
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So having gotten some rooms to level 6 I've started to merge O and H minerals to prepare for boosting later down the line. I thought that if I renewed creeps I would be able to keep creeps alive and really make those boosts last, but I just read that renewing removes all the boosts.
It seems like the costs are going to be pretty prohibitive. Is it even possible to maintain a boosted workforce, or do the costs in resources and CPU outstrip the gains? And if you can only use them sparingly, when and how are the best uses for them? How have you been using them?
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> When is boosting useful?
Always. The costs aren't nearly as high is first impressions make it seem.> Is it even possible to maintain a boosted workforce
Depends on what's being boosted. Can you boost every creep? I'm not sure, it depends. Is it always desirable to boost creeps if you use the boosts to their full advantages? Yes.
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I wondered that question myself because it didn't seem worth it. Do the math. It's worth it, except maybe Ghodium based compounds at <RCL8.
2 things that helped me understand -
1. A single reaction will yield 10 compound. 2. Compare the boost with the energy cost of the same parts.
PS: congrats on clearing your quarter
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The advantage to boosting for combat purposes is more obvious. Properly boosted, a creep could withstand all six towers at close range, or tear down a very high wall in a short time. The best time to start using them for that purpose is as soon as you can.
As for non-pvp purposes, a boosted creep makes clearing creeper nests a piece of cake, opening up the opportunity for the best energy harvesting possible in those middle rooms. This will probably be the best way to get into boosting early on, you won't need all the minerals to make it effective enough.
The other fairly significant non-pvp boosting is +controller upgrading, and that is probably where the majority of your minerals will go once you have established a complete network. Even in rooms that are RCL 8 you will eventually want to boost the upgraders, just to make the GCLs arrive sooner.
Almost all the boost types have their uses, the only ones I struggle to find a practical use for are +harvest (it would be cool if the bonus was on top of how much resource is generated per tick) and +carry. I just can't think of a very convincing way to use those. Maybe someone else can mention some.
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A boosted miner only costs 68% of a normal one...
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Just to add a bit more detail than anyone is probably interested in, ghodium acid and catalyzed ghodium acid (+controller upgrade) are probably the biggest question mark as to whether it is worth it, and I probably have some explaining to do since I just said it would probably be your most used compound.
+100% controller upgrading without increasing costs obviously sounds amazing at face value, but lets find out if it really pays off considering all the costs. Lets use the case of a single upgrader creep with 10 WORK parts, and the question is whether it would pay off to boost them. Boosting 10 parts would require 300 XGH2O. In reality you'd want to use it on a much larger scale but all these costs should scale in a linear way, so lets use small numbers just for ease.
There are three types of cost for making a compound:
1. Creating the creeps to harvest the mineral: 400 energy
XGH2O has five minerals that went into a single compound, a total of 300 * 5 = 1500. Lets pretend we are all getting these from the same room for the sake of simplicity. Although the CPU cost will be much more with 5 creeps vs. 1, you will actually be harvesting these on a much larger scale so it will even out. Our upgrader will live for 1500 ticks (at which point we will want to boost the next one) so that comes to the need to harvest 1 mineral per tick. A single WORK part yields 1 mineral per tick. Assuming we have a carrier to take the mineral back to the base, and it can make the round trip in 100 ticks, we can just use 2 CARRY and 1 MOVE for both the harvester and the carrier, bringing our total cost to 1 WORK, 4 CARRY, 2 MOVE = 400 energy.
2. Transferring the minerals: 720 energy
This is going to vary depending on how spread out your rooms are, and how you set up your synthesizing process. You can make things more efficient by setting up a chain, using the product of one reaction as the reagent in the next reaction. If you are making the minerals in large quantities you can re-use reagent labs as a source for multiple reactions. You can't do the entire chain in a single room however, so in addition to transfering our five base minerals we are going to have to transfer them at least a couple more times, especially for sending the final product to its destination. Each time you transfer a mineral you pay a cost in energy, which is 1/10 of the quantity of mineral that you sent multiplied by the distance between rooms.
Without getting bogged down in details, I'll just use the numbers from my setup, which could probably be better but I did make a half-hearted attempt at optimization. In total it takes me 12 transfers over a total distance of 24 to make a single compound of XGH2O. In that case, I can just multiply my desired quantity by 2.4 to find the cost of transfering. 300 * 2.4 = 720
3. The actual energy cost of the boost: 200
This one is easy, it costs 20 energy to boost a single part. 20 * 10 = 200
Yikes, that is a grand total of 1320 energy just to make 300 compound to boost our upgrader with 10 WORK parts. Was it worth it? Let's assume our upgrader has a link handy with a steady supply so he can just spend his entire lifespan upgrading constantly. Assuming it only takes it 50 ticks to boost itself and make it over to the controller, that means 1450 ticks that it was able to use its work parts. A normal WORK gets you 1 progress per tick costing 1 energy. So our creep would normally burn through 14500 in a life cycle. Since our boost bonus happens without adding to the cost, basically, we get to double that! With an additional 14500 energy you just pulled out of thin air, you are already looking at a 1000% ROI. In addition, now our creep is pretty much doing the work of two. For the purpose of considering our rate of progress, it is the equivalent of having a whole other active creep. So it is fair to add the cost of spawning an identical creep to the reward pile, which piles on at least another 1000 energy.
14500 + 1000 - 720 = 14780 profit for just boosting 10 work parts.
Just having a single copy of each mineral, I am able to make 2 XGH2O per tick (in addition to some other boosts), which puts my total boosting potential at around 3000 per life cycle, or roughly 150,000 gain in energy. Not too shabby! At that rate of progress, the only downer is that you will soon hit a problem you probably weren't expecting, you don't have enough rooms that are below RCL8 to use it all in. At that point you will have to ask yourself whether it is worth it to boost some of your RCL8 upgraders. Maybe you'd have more fun using those minerals to poke holes in your neighbors walls. Either way, tons of fun!
To put things back into perspective, 15000 energy is nice but it is roughly the equivalent of what you'd get from a single energy source per lifecycle. The bonus you get from minerals won't overshadow your regular harvesting income. The main advantage is it lets you widen your bottlenecks. Before RCL8 it is an energy bottleneck. At RCL8 the bottleneck is the 15 maximum energy you can put into a controller per tick. It will definitely pay off over time to make those a tad wider.
