Knee-jerk reaction to 2015-05-27 update



  • Gah! My controller only stores 300 energy! That breaks my strategy of using the spawn point as an energy store for transferring/insurance, so there's no safety margin if I lose all my miners. I guess I'll just spin off a full-carry creep to store a bit more. Also, that makes starting off annoying, since you can't build a 300-cost miner and a 300-cost carrier, so I need to tweak my start.

    Also, the creeps documentation page still has work body parts costing 20, when they're 100; that confused me for a bit when I couldn't build a new high-work unit.

    Links looks interesting, but I probably won't bother with them for a while since they're one more complication. I haven't even started on structures while I focus on optimizing mining and upgrading the controller, so those tweaks won't affect me, though they look a bit overpowered (millions of hitpoints on ramparts? They may have been underpowered before, but that seems to weight things pretty heavily for the defender.)

    Overall, ignoring the "oh no I need to fix my scripts" annoyance, I feel like the change in extension system is probably for the best, though it's going to be irritating that the spawn can only hold 300 energy.



  • One thing that might become common is to simply store energy on the ground in a big pile. You only lose 1 energy per tick, which even with just 2 sources is only a 5% loss.

    I agree that the new extension/creep building system seems better, though I'm not sure why they lowered the spawn to 300 energy total.



  • Did they change the rate at which energy on the ground degenerates? I had a pile of 1.5M or so before the update and it is now at 15K, and seems to be dropping by 10% every tick.



  • "Did they change the rate at which energy on the ground degenerates? I had a pile of 1.5M or so before the update and it is now at 15K, and seems to be dropping by 10% every tick."
    I have a pile with 22.3, it seems like the rate is the the same.

    While storing the energy in the pile is kind of ok, I would much rather prefer the new structure type: something like 'storage' which can store a lot of energy without losing it.



  • While storing the energy in the pile is kind of ok, I would much rather prefer the new structure type:
    something like 'storage' which can store a lot of energy without losing it.

    I actually had the same idea. If you made it able to transfer energy to spawns and links, it'd have some interesting uses as remote storage and such.



  • Yeah, the update nearly killed my colony because workers spent all the energy trying to repair the badly damaged ramparts, also Ramparts at my level should have 4 million health, but seem to have 8.



  • I just noticed that ramparts are built at 1k, and repairable up to millions. That actually seems pretty well balanced.

    And I see that the creeps page is now updated to cost 100 per work unit. Thanks for fixing that!



  • Overall I think the changes will improve the game. I like the new extension system, mainly since it reduces the number of creeps to complete the same task, saving on cpu and bottlenecks.

    Spawns now only holding 300 energy is going to be a difficulty to overcome in terms of the ability to recover from a mistake. However, if links are able to hold a good amount of energy, that issue can be remedied.

    The need to repair walls and ramparts up to their max is quite time consuming, but I do like the ability to increase defenses. I do agree this is made in favor of defenders, it is too early to tell how it effects balance though.

    I would love to see an interface to help with coding in IDEs. I found a repository that has some of the functions, but it is very outdated now. https://github.com/Garethp/ScreepsAutocomplete



  • I saw some comments about the dropped energy degradation, in the patchnotes it was stated that this is changed but can this be clarified a bit more?