4. Creep Races

Creep Races


  • This is just a random thought I had the other day that could cause experienced players to rewrite large sections of their code to take advantage of the many possible strategies, but should have low impact on players who don't want to explore it.

    What if when you spawned, you chose a race for your creeps that couldn't be changed without respawning again, and came with a few passive bonuses and downsides. Obviously this creates more balance work to make sure no race is too powerful or weak, but it was never meant as that serious an idea anyways. Just a random thought I had.

    This is what I mean by a few passive bonuses and downsides. These are by no means balanced, and were just random ideas I had.

    Screeps

    • Default race

    Nomads

    • Structures can be moved once every 10 ticks and are not affected by swamps
    • Structures outside your controlled rooms or over their current room limits cannot be used or moved
    • Nomads can upgrade their room controllers from up to 10 tiles away
    • Swamps only generate 2 fatigue per part for nomads
    • Nomads cannot build roads or walls (they can build ramparts)

    Assimilators

    • Claiming a room with structures does not destroy any structures and you gain possession of all of them
    • Killing a hostile creep drops its entire remaining value in energy and minerals
    • Your labs have 25% shorter reaction cooldowns rounded up
    • You cannot create sell orders or accept buy orders for non-base elements

    Hive

    • Creeps take 1.5 ticks per part to spawn rounded up
    • Creeps are 50% cheaper rounded up
    • It takes 25% less of an element to boost your creeps body parts
    • Your creeps last for 50% the normal duration
    • Your carry parts can hold twice as much
    • You cannot build towers
    • You cannot renew creeps
    🤔

  • This sounds like a lot of fun. Without giving an opinion about the specific bonuses or drawbacks, just the idea of having different races that have different effects on the game is a really fun idea.

    It could also be interesting to be able to "unlock" races at certain GCL levels, so that you start with the default and standard race but as you level up you kind of unlock different ways to play that would give an incentive to respawn. I like the idea that you'd have to respawn to switch races because then you have a good reason to respawn and work on your low level code again but with a new challenge or new way to play.

    More races could be added in the future as well that would give old players a new reason to relapse come back to the game and play again.


  • The race could also affect your power creeps too somehow.

    It could also be fun if somehow you started with a special power creep or racial creep or something when you first spawn that has no lifetime limit. You'd never have more than 1 and it could do different things based on what race you are. Heck depending on how it was implemented your "racial" creep could even be invulnerable and pathable but its abilities would be limited to utility functions or things that could not be abused.

    1 Reply

  • @rurik "power creeps" triggered! 😂

    If you were going to make them invulnerable and pathable, you might as well just give the power to room controllers or the general Game object though right?


  • On the one hand I really like the idea, on the other I think the return on investment and opportunity costs are too high.

    A feature like this will take tremendous amounts of time to design, implement and balance. The trade-off is what else could be done with that time (power creeps 🆙 ) and what that would gain.
    I think while this is fun, the costs to design it are disproportionate to what it gives back the players.

    Then again, it would really contribute to the "end game" - I can imagine a point where your code nears 'completion', and this would throw in a reason to stick around.

    It's a trade off and I don't really know what my choice would be.