PTR Changelog 2016-05-25
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This post describes changes on the Public Test Realm. The estimated launch date is May 30.
- Increased portals decay time from 50k game ticks to 10 real days.
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StructurePortal.ticksToDecayrenamed toStructurePortal.decayDate. This is now a Date object. - Increased mineral deposits regeneration time from 20k ticks to 50k ticks.
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Will creating a new Date() object in game correspond to the in game time? (timezones :/) In my opinion it's not really a good idea to incorporate "real-time (dd-mm-yyyy)" with "screeps time (ticks)"
The increase from 20k ticks to 50k ticks seems quite steep, is it an idea to increase the mineral amounts of L, K, U, Z and X by a small bit?
Currently we got a 70k base, with 20k ticks, which means that if you got ~4 reaction labs you can effectively use all minerals for the lifetime of the mineral deposit (+ randomness).
With an increase to 50k ticks you could get around with only 2 labs.
If you bump up the minerals to 100k base you can get around with 2 labs as well, but you'd be able to build up a small surplus to sell on the market later on.
I think high-GCL players will probably not sell any minerals on the market if they have to use it all.
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Will creating a new Date() object in game correspond to the in game time? (timezones :/) In my opinion it’s not really a good idea to incorporate “real-time (dd-mm-yyyy)” with “screeps time (ticks)”
The server timezone is UTC. You can easily make some checks like:
if(new Date() < portal.decayDate) {...} if(Date.now() < portal.decayDate.getTime()) {...}This is the same way novice areas work right now. Real-world days are easier to understand than hundreds of thousands of game ticks.
I think high-GCL players will probably not sell any minerals on the market if they have to use it all.
Yes, the motivation is that high-GCL players will buy raw minerals from low-GCL players, or those who cannot/doesn’t want to make reactions, but would need some energy/power. In order to get a healthy market, there should not be an excess of resources in everyone’s storages.
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I'm really confused by the mixture of Date and Ticks, especially since Ticks aren't a consistent time. If the servers are going slower then it means less ticks happen before the date.
To me there is no confusion about ticks. A tick is the game unit time I'm used to working with. Now I'm going to have to estimate ticks based on date objects and that just seems awkward.
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Novice areas work based on dates for some time already, and they do the job well.
10 days period is too long for estimating something. It is hundreds of creeps generations. There is no point in guessing what you can achieve during this time, you can simply treat the portal as static. The need to estimate the time remaining comes only when there is less than an hour remaining, and then you can treat the portal as "unstable", it may close anytime soon, just stop using it. The hour period is irrelevant to the 10 days period, that's the point.
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I think you're missing our point.
Lets say there's an hour left. That's about 1384 ticks- it's enough to accomplish something, even if it's just hauling back more minerals from a remote colony or something.
However, it's not actually 1384 ticks. If the server is being speedy it could be 1800 ticks. Maybe there's a maintenance period where the game isn't processing, so it's only 100 ticks. There is literally no way to know.
Keeping everything on the same time system makes it possible for us to calculate time based things precisely. Having two time systems that are decoupled from each other forces us to guess when converting. You are right that it's irrelevant when the time periods are really high, but it's rather important as those time periods get smaller and more precision is needed.
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My original plan was to flood the market with all minerals as soon as the market hit on production, hence why I asked for the method signatures.
If the minerals are going to get a nerf I will not sell any minerals as I will need them, so I got no surplus at the moment.
The only thing I might sell is energy now, but that's it, I think making minerals more scarce is not the way to fill the market with minerals.
Currently, the minerals I got access to are:
Z - 4
K - 2
H - 5
O - 4
L - 2
U - 2
X - 1With the exception of L, U, K and X, I now got a surplus of the rest, and wanted to start using these minerals to sell to everyone, processed and refined minerals.
If I will get limited by the amount of minerals I will take in I won't be able to sell anything. I think even other high GCL players will face the same issue, they just won't sell their minerals as they need them badly.
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See, you have surplus of many minerals, so does everybody. Whom would you sell your O and H to, if everyone has a lot of O and H? Instead, you should buy raw minerals, produce compounds and sell them for the price that allows you to buy even more raw minerals. The situation when the lab processing time is the bottleneck rather than the raw minerals, is just not right.
Also, you forgot power. Someone will dedicate to power processing, and he would like to trade all his minerals to strong mineral users in exchange for their power. It would be impossible in the case when mineral users are self-sustained.
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When this change hits prod I won't have any surplus left to sell,
If I won't have anything to sell I won't have any credits, If I don't have any credits I won't be able to buy things.
I wanted to sell my surplus which I got now, and buy raw minerals, now I won't be able to do either.
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You still have surplus of some minerals in comparison to other minerals. You might exchange them to make your boosts more balanced.
Credits are simply the currency for performing such exchange and have nothing to do with minerals natural supply. Other players can establish buy orders for power and energy, you can gain credits trading with them.
Also, NPC sell orders will be very limited amounts (and no sell orders for X at all), you shouldn't rely on them in any way, it is all about player market.
Anyway, let's wait until market feature is live. It's hard to speculate anything at the moment.
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I get Tedivm's point about the screeps-time and real-time issues.
Is it an idea to not have a "ticksToDecay" until some point in time?
Internally you could use the date to determine when the ticksToDecay appears.
Example (all dates are in dd-mm-yyyy):
A portal is created by the server on 1-1-1970.
This portal is marked as active until 10-1-1990 on the server, this is invisible to the players/client.
On 9-1-1990 the ticksToDecay will appear with ~35k ticks, which is about 1 day. (roughly 2.5 seconds/tick), this will be visible to the players
This way we can have the best of both worlds.
Other idea's:
Have creeps being send through the portal make the portal decay more quickly.
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Dissi, very nice idea actually! We'll implement it in the today's patch.
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Fantastic
