Power Creeps update
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@artch Here is my review of each power given what I know and think might happen with the new skill system. The new system allows for many more options and interactions that weren't possible before. This is all obviously just theory, but it might bring to light some things that weren't thought about yet.
Hopefully I did the costs math correctly. I tried equalizing them all down to a per 50 interval for easy comparison with GENERATE_OPS, which I didn't directly rate, since... well... it should be obvious.
OPERATE_SPAWN
Cost: 5 ops/50 ticks (per spawn)
Economy: 3/5
Attack: 2/5
Defense: 4/5
Uses: Defense / Efficiency
Summary:
Increase spawn capacity, allows emergency or burst deployment, or to increase spawn capacity for more efficient mining/harvesting. It's an odd trade-off, but it looks like it could be quite useful for empires that are currently CPU locked.OPERATE_TOWER
Cost: 5 ops/50 ticks (per tower)
Economy: 2/5
Attack: 0/5
Defense: 2/5
Uses: Situational / Defense
Summary:
This is an odd one. It could be fairly useful for repairing roads, since it would reduce the number of times a tower would need to repair roads (CPU cost), as well as reduce the energy consumption per repair action, but that heavily depends on what the cost of ops ends up resting at.As a defensive tool, its value heavily rests on base layout format. If your bases relies completely on edge walls with the towers located far from the attack, this will likely be a waste of ops, however, if used on a bunker it could be worth up to ~1500 total damage per tick if placed on enough towers. It's nothing ridiculous, but it isn't nothing either.
Considering it would only be used on defense, or occasionally on one tower to burst out some repairs, it seems reasonably priced compared to other operator powers.
OPERATE_STORAGE
Cost: 5 ops/50 ticks (per storage)
Economy: 3/5
Attack: 2/5
Defense: 2/5
Uses: All-rounder
Summary:
After this was announced to hold its contents after the duration expires, it became fairly clear how powerful this was. In a game where the person with the largest stockpile with decent code wins, this the ultimate stockpiling power.The downside of using this power on a base though, is that you probably wouldn't want to keep sustained use of OPERATE_STORAGE. It's not terribly expensive, but it would be more optimal to run the room out of the terminal only to avoid the ops cost. This will be a tricky puzzle to handle, that may be best just ignored and bite the ops cost.
Regardless of how a player handles this interaction, each storage that is boosted in this way allows the player to store up to ~8x as many boosts in that room at level 5.
For economic purposes, this is the ultimate temple room power. It allows you to store enough energy in a room to reach RCL 7 without using any imports (oops I did this calculation without boosts).
OPERATE_LAB
Cost: 0.5 ops/50 ticks (per lab)
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 3/5
Defense: 3/5
Uses: All-rounder / Military
Summary:
Although this is a very simple power, boosts are powerful, and increasing the lab throughput by 300% is not situational. Boosts are always good to have on-hand.Although this costs the same as OPERATE_SPAWN to maintain all 10 labs (compared to 1 spawn), I can totally see myself with a level 23 power creep babysitting labs for this effect.
OPERATE_EXTENSION
Cost: 5 ops/50 ticks
Economy: 1/5
Attack: 1/5
Defense: 1/5
Uses: All-rounder / Efficiency
Summary:
I want to like this power. I have seen a few potential uses for it, but each time it seems to get outclassed by non-power creeps. The only true use for it that I could find, involved having it as a fill-in power that you choose to level up other powers, and then if the power creep is ever in range of a valid structure, throw out this power for some minor CPU gains. The primary issue with this is that it could really screw up filler code, which is usually fairly static. It could even require a full recalculation of all cached extension values, since the bot may not have control over which extensions actually get filled.Here are some other theoretical uses I thought of that I mostly couldn't find an actual use for.
To completely replace fillers with one or several power creeps. The advantage being CPU gains, the disadvantage being the rate limit. For this to work, it would likely need to lose the long cooldown, but keep a fairly high ops cost.
To allow extensions in unreachable locations. Because the power doesn't have a range limit, and fills any extension in the room, it could allow for extensions to be filled in unreachable locations. This not only saves space, but it allows for impossibly compact layouts that are braindead simple to automate. The issue again is that without enough throughput, a power creep cannot personally sustain the extensions. It could be implemented as a supplement to normal extensions, but would require deep integration into a spawn system in order to control when the power creep used the power, since direct control of which extensions are filled was stated as likely impossible.
To allow bursting out creeps in an emergency or offense situation. The issue here is that the amount is no minute that it could hardly be counted as burst. It really only ever fills one of the previously stated roles, never really a burst or situational role.
OPERATE_OBSERVER
Cost: 5-1 ops/50 ticks
Economy: 2/5
Attack: 2/5
Defense: 1/5
Uses: Situational / Intel
Summary:
This is an interesting power that I think is mainly useful for people dealing with portals. It's very hard to quantify just how much this power can do, since it heavily depends on how close you are to portals and if your codebase is able to take advantage of them.OPERATE_TERMINAL
Cost: 5 ops/50 ticks
Economy: 1/5
Attack: 0/5
Defense: 0/5
Uses: All-rounder / Efficiency
Summary:
A power that just decreases the cost of an already fairly cheap function. Now to be fair, it isn't that cheap, but it's energy... so it is cheap.This could become more useful if/when energy prices rise, maybe in relation to the number of players who start processing power.
I currently can't see ever using this power over another, just because the benefit seems too small. Even though this is a consistently used action, I just don't see it reducing it enough to matter as much as other powers.
DISRUPT_SPAWN
Cost: 100 ops/50 ticks (per spawn)
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 5/5
Defense: 0/5
Uses: Offense / Military
Summary:
Okay, the first truly offensive power. This description assumes that 5 tick duration 5 tick cooldown means that it is capable of locking a spawn permanently. Even just one of these has the potential to completely dismantle a room's defenses if the defender's spawn code does not have DISRUPT_SPAWN accounted for. Not just that, but if the attacker can afford 3x sustained use, it makes a defending room completely helpless. If the attacker is willing to pay ~40k ops for an attack, the defender's only defense against it is to bring creeps from another room or have a standing defense in place already.This power can be almost completely negated by using edge walls, or at least having walls keep opponents 20 spaces away from your spawns, but I feel like at that point, they might as well be edge walls in most rooms.
This power is extremely dangerous, and should maintain an extremely high cost. I think this power will be too powerful for a skilled attacker. I believe the range should be reduced, or the power adjusted in some other way, otherwise, this is probably the nail in the coffin for bunker layouts. I would be curious how @o4kapuk thinks he will defend against this power if someone shows up with 3x of them at one of his isolated bunkers.
DISRUPT_TOWER
Cost: 100 ops/50 ticks (per tower)
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 3/5
Defense: 0/5
Uses: Situational / Offense / Military
Summary:
I originally thought that this power should be used as a constant source of damage reduction in a room, however, I think that the cost of doing this for enough towers to matter might be a bit excessive. That being said, it can give a respite to attackers trying to recover from a particularly fatal barrage on the previous tick.It seems like a useful attack tool, but nothing that will outright destroy an opponents base. It's worth noting that assuming all damage multipliers are multiplicative, that even a tower that has OPERATE_TOWER on it will do less damage than a normal tower if DISRUPT_TOWER is used on it.
1 * (1 + 0.5) * (1 - 0.5) = 0.75.DISRUPT_SOURCE
Cost: 10 ops/50 ticks (per tower)
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 2/5
Defense: 0/5
Uses: Offense / Military
Summary:
This seems like more of a harass power than an actual attack power. Even with sustained use on a base, It shouldn't break it if it is connected to a proper empire. Additionally, due to the range, it seems more like a power you would use on all of the remote mines for a room, trying to just reduce their effectiveness wherever possible.The main advantage I see to this power over just killing the creeps at a source is that it works over walls, however, even then I just don't see it causing enough damage to be worth attacking a room in this manner.
I like the power, but I just feel like other options are more effective. There is a fairly real chance that this power could break someone's room code though, making it fall on its own face, so I wouldn't count it out just yet. Although it is pretty much completely countered by edge-walls.
SHIELD
Cost: 5-2 energy per tick
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 3/5
Defense: 2/5
Uses: Military
Summary:
This is a cool power. It is one of the only ways for the operator to actually defend itself. On offense, it may actually be very difficult for a defender to break through with just long range towers, which is likely the only opportunity operators will give a room to defend with. On defense, it's a bit lackluster, since the operator would have to remain stationary to remain protected. That being said, it probably would be far too good on offense if it followed the operator around.I like this power, but now that it can actually be taken with offense powers, it could potentially be too strong. Obviously live testing will make that clear.
EXTEND_SOURCE
Cost: 0
Economy: 5/5
Attack: 0/5
Defense: 1/5
Uses: All-rounder / Economy
Summary:
This power was immediately one of my favorites. This is an extremely simple power, but the CPU savings possible with this power seem extravagant.Assuming you can continue fitting more miners on a source, and power creeps in a room, it is possible to move almost all of your remote mining in-house. It might even be possible to expend any harvest boosts for this if you are truly CPU constrained.
The defensive ability of this is that without remote mines, you cannot be harassed in the normal way, and because it does not require a regeneration period, it could be used even with DISRUPT_SOURCE being applied on your sources during an attack.
As a final note, there is the potential to allow for burst harvesting energy using a combination of DISRUPT_SOURCE and EXTEND_SOURCE on your own sources to allow you to stockpile a massive amount of energy in a source without it regenerating. This has a loss in total energy created, but could have massive CPU gains, since you wouldn't need miners at the mine 24/7.
And it's free, so the operators doing this task can continue generating ops to use on another task while en-route to the next source.
EXTEND_MINERAL
Cost: 0
Economy: 4/5
Attack: 2/5
Defense: 2/5
Uses: All-rounder / Economy
Summary:
I labeled this as economy, but I am not 100% sure whether to classify mineral mining as economy or military, since boosts are mostly just used for military. The basic principle of this power is that if used in the most optimal way, it will result in doubling the output of the mineral you are using it on.The added benefit of this stockpile, is that it has no time constraint. You can continue stockpiling until you decide to actually mine it. A very cool power that I can see using in combination with EXTEND_SOURCE to boost mines.
And just like EXTEND_SOURCE, it's free, so the operators doing this task can continue generating ops to use on another task while en-route to the next source/mine.
DISRUPT_TERMINAL
Cost: 250-50 ops/50 ticks
Economy: 0/5
Attack: 5/5
Defense: 0/5
Uses: Offense / Military
Summary:
This is an extremely dangerous power. It may not have as much brute-force potential as DISRUPT_SPAWN, but it only requires 1 power creep, has no range limit, and can make a sitting duck out of an otherwise well defended room.This will disconnect a room from its empire, making it defend itself alone, or get help by walking creeps from another room. There has been much discussion on this already, so I will leave that aspect alone.
However, there is also the potential to completely destroy someone's transfer/resource balancing code if they did not plan accordingly, since it could indefinitely back up someone's queue of transfer requests. For the unprepared, this has the potential to shut down someone's entire empire by attacking a single room.
If someone chooses to longbow this power, it might be possible to defend against it with some cheesy swarm defense tactics, so that it misses its window. It will be fun experimenting around this power, although I feel like many people will also lose several of their rooms to this power... including myself.
To summarize in a tier list
S
DISRUPT_SPAWN
DISRUPT_TERMINAL
A
EXTEND_SOURCE
EXTEND_MINERAL
OPERATE_LAB
B
SHIELD
OPERATE_STORAGE
OPERATE_SPAWN
C
DISRUPT_SOURCE
DISRUPT_TOWER
OPERATE_TOWER
OPERATE_EXTENSION
OPERATE_OBSERVER
F
OPERATE_TERMINAL
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Here's my hot take:
DISRUPT_SPAWN - Seems weak, but I say that with low confidence. Probably you have to get level 4 or 5 on this or not bother at all.
DISRUPT_TERMINAL - Obviously powerful
EXTEND_SOURCE - Gives me free energy. Do I need that? I don't understand why it has a high level cap. Seems weak. Possibly cheaper to just sell the ops for credits and buy energy (especially if you consider CPU).
OPERATE_MINERAL - Underwhelming. I'm not tying up a level 23 creep to double the mineral output of one source. Ever. Even at level 5. Economically more efficient to generate ops and sell them with a bunch of smaller PCs.
OPERATE_LAB - Seems pointless. I will never use this. For it to be good, the effect would need to last for enough ticks that I could boost several lab clusters with the same PC. Even then, I do not think the effect would be worth the CPU required to move that PC around to each cluster.
SHIELD - Probably some good tricks you can do with this. Jury is out.
OPERATE_STORAGE - I was pretty excited about this one, mostly for temple rooms. Unlike OPERATE_LAB the effect lasts long enough that I can buff several rooms with the same PC, so it can't be too bad.
OPERATE_SPAWN - Seems weak, especially at low levels. I could see there being some edge case uses around bringing up RCL6 rooms to RCL7 faster. I find that I am almost never spawn-rate limited in Screeps, so this is a solution to a problem I don't have. If the effect lasted longer it would be more useful.
DISRUPT_SOURCE - Utterly pointless. Only useful on attack. Only useful when attacking someone who only has 2-3 rooms (will not effect bigger players who can terminal in resources). Only useful when attacking someone with no credits. Basically it's only useful .00001% of the time and even then it does not unlock any new capability, since I can crush that person anyways. For this to be good, you need to increase the radius of effect to be 3x3 rooms at level 2-3 and 5x5 rooms at level 4-5.
OPERATE_TOWER - Not sure about this one. If I can always scout enough to make sure my operate_tower PC is in whatever room is being attacked, then it seems like it could be good. I think probably most players don't get attacked enough to take this skill over one that provides constant benefit (as opposed to situational). I think if I take the situational skill, it needs to really pay off in that situation. Not sure this rises to that bar.
DISRUPT_TOWER - If it lets me clear RCL8 rooms with unboosted creeps, then this might be worth it. Haven't done the math, so I'm not sure. Otherwise I'd rather generate ops, sell the ops, and buy the T3 boosts I need to crack the room instead, which is a lot less situational. The problem with this is I need to be attacking all the time to get value. In general, I'm not.
OPERATE_OBSERVER - Would like to understand the use case for this. If it would let me scan other shards, then that might be a weird useful edge case. It sounds useless to me and I don't know that I will ever take this. I think it would be more useful if it upgraded my ability to get event-based intel. I.e. my observer raises events when NPCs, invaders, or other players enter my zone of control. This would be a CPU improvement over active scanning. Then I might take it. As designed, I don't think anyone will ever get levels 2-5 in this skill.
OPERATE_EXTENSION - Maybe useful with OPERATE_SPAWN? Otherwise I'm never limited by how fast I can refill my extensions. It's not an exciting skill. For this to be exciting, a single low-level PC would have to be able to replace all of my extension refillers. Then maybe I could save some CPU if I had a bunch of these PCs in a bunch of rooms. Basically, if this is only useful when I'm being attacked, then it's a bad skill. As it is, it's probably more CPU efficient to sell ops, buy energy, and turn off some remote mines if what I want to get is CPU.
OPERATE_TERMINAL - A skill that saves a little energy. That's what no one needs. Even if this made transfers free across any distance, I probably wouldn't take it, although it would at least be useful to some players if that was the case. To take advantage of this skill, I now need to queue up all my future transfers in a way that lets one PC do a circuit around a bunch of cities that want to send materials. Even just the CPU cost of running that PC around doing that is not worth the energy I'm saving, and that is assuming that those transfers exist often enough to get a good duty cycle.
TLDR
I'm probably only going to use powers that:
- Unlock new capabilities for my empire (i.e. DISRUPT_TERMINAL)
- Can create efficiency constantly (OPERATE_STORAGE?)
I'm probably never going to use powers that:
- Provide marginal or sporadic benefit (ex marginal: OPERATE_LAB. ex sporadic: OPERATE_TOWER)
- On the attack are situational but not significantly superior to regular T3 boosted creeps (lol at DISRUPT_SOURCE)
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A quick note on some skills like OPERATE_SPAWN. We had this case in mind when we were designing it: if you consider Power Level an alternative path competing with Control Level for your energy, then you may choose to control less rooms (and have less spawns) but operate them with power creeps to achieve the same amount of creeps doing economy/military tasks. OPERATE_SPAWN is not very useful for people who already invested in Control Level and got a lot of rooms/spawns; but is useful for new people who decide to go power instead of control.
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EXTEND_SOURCE - Gives me free energy. Do I need that? I don't understand why it has a high level cap. Seems weak. Possibly cheaper to just sell the ops for credits and buy energy (especially if you consider CPU).
K, lets consider the CPU real quick. The only requirement for this power to work, is to have a power creep with it reach a source (any source) in your room every 100 ticks. Lets assume that this then costs 0.2 move intents every tick because the power creep has to keep moving. You also need to increase the size of the miner at that source to something like a 31W15M4C instead of whatever you are currently using.
What does this benefit you? It means that you have 6 sources being mined by a single miner being transported to your storage by links directly from the miner. If your 5 remote mines plus haulers can somehow beat the CPU efficiency of this setup, I would be very curious how you are doing it.
Rough table:
Remotes EXTEND_SOURCE Item Cost Item Cost 6 miners 1.2 CPU 1 miner 0.2 CPU 5 haulers 1 CPU 1 PC 0.2 CPU
A key thing here is that the power creep is able to spend 100 ticks away from the source, so it could walk ~50 tiles away, take a few actions and walk back. This power creep may be dedicated to economy, but it will not be tied up to the EXTEND_SOURCE power. In theory, a level 25 power creep with this setup could maintain a lv5 extended source, a lv4 extended mineral, operate 8 lv5 labs, generate enough ops to be self-sustained and then be around this base in case it needs to throw some ops at some other powers (I just chose some random powers here) in case of emergency. It's worth noting that I probably would use a lv5 EXTEND_MINERAL though, rather than EXTEND_SOURCE
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@artch Hmm. What are the benefits of focusing on power level instead of GCL?
GCL has a lot of passive benefits:
- I control more rooms so I get more resources
- I am bigger and harder to wipe out
- I have a lot of control over my spawn density (I can go build closely together in contested areas and spread out more in uncontested areas)
Since a Power-focused empire is harder to manage (since it relies on actively using powers instead of just being large), it seems to me that there should be some kind of payoff if you actually manage to make it work. Also, some of the powers need to help you secure/farm/process power banks, possibly fighting with larger neighbors. It seems like the obvious missing power in this design is OPERATE_POWERSPAWN that makes processing power not require a huge amount of energy that you need high GCL to collect.
It's possible power empires will make more sense once the commander/executor comes out (the one that makes raiding profitable? I forget which it is).
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@artch Okay, so OPERATE_SPAWN ...
You are probably going to need to explain it better than that because you cannot just level power as an alternative to control level. That's just not how the rest of the game is setup. CPU doesn't increase with power... does it? Not to mention levels in either GCL or Power are exponentially harder as your progress, so if I devote all my energy into one, someone who is doing them equally probably has more total value than I do
Spawn capacity only matters if I have something to use it on, which requires land (sources/minerals/victims) and the CPU to move the creeps. Not to mention that there is a range limit here on a room that tends to be more limiting than spawn capacity.
There might be some situation where you can use an excessive number of power creeps to achieve what several rooms could with a single room, but other limitations are going to come into play before spawn capacity. Limitations such as: locations around a source, link throughput, mineral type diversity, traffic jams, power banks spawn rate, etc etc.
Hey wait a sec... is this an attempt to get us to agree to reducing the number of spawns we can build per room like the original power creep doc?
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I think the optimal case is that I have a pair of rooms with at least 3 sources total that are adjacent with every source within 100 ticks walking distance to each other (so a level 5 EXTEND_SOURCE PC can make a loop around boosting the sources every 100 ticks when EXTEND_SOURCE is on cooldown)
Instead of mining 1500 * 3 (4500) energy every 300 ticks, I now get 6500 * 3 (19500) energy every 300 ticks from these mines. Let's assume miners/carriers/links/whatever are free and this is pure profit.
That does sound pretty good. This power seems to be worth 50 energy/tick, or (at current rates), .45 credits/tick. If you are displacing remote miners for the same energy, it's definitely more CPU efficient since there is less hauling.
Basically I'm getting ~5 rooms of energy for free.
Now that I have thought some more about it, that seems pretty good. I suspect that most of the other powers do not rise to the .45 credits/tick value threshold.
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Spawn capacity only matters if I have something to use it on, which requires land (sources/minerals/victims) and the CPU to move the creeps. Not to mention that there is a range limit here on a room that tends to be more limiting than spawn capacity.
You can leverage other powers to extend your available tasks list (e.g. EXTEND_SOURCE) without claiming more land and using more CPU.
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It's possible power empires will make more sense once the commander/executor comes out (the one that makes raiding profitable? I forget which it is).
Absolutely. The Operator is just the first part of the big picture.
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@shedletsky Uh, the biggest benefit with focusing on CL not PL... You get more CPU. Constantly. And in this game, CPU is the single most valuable resource because you can just plain do more stuff.
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@davaned Our intention is to tune powers in such a way that they allow to achieve the same economy/military goals doing less actions, hence using less CPU. Control Level is about quantity, Power Level is about efficiency. Extensive vs intensive growth.
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@artch Could we see some numbers on this? The way I see it, even a player who only owns one room, can easily support ridiculously high numbers of EXTEND_SOURCE power creeps without the need for OPERATE_SPAWN. Like... +200 levels of power creeps just using EXTEND_SOURCE, and then mining it.
Give them a more realistic 5-7 rooms and I don't think there is a player in the game that has enough power to create enough lv5 EXTEND_SOURCE creeps to need that extra spawn capacity to function. A single room can support something like 5 level 5 extend sources by itself if they are used locally on sources with enough open positions for miners.
Could you explain when a player actually needs this spawn capacity, not just naming things that can increase it? And even if they did need it, why does it cost enough ops that it would prevent other functions on the same power creeps, such as labs?
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@gankdalf What do you mean? EXTEND_SOURCE increases body parts count needed to harvest sources before they regenerate, how can you do this without increased spawn capacity?
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@artch Because the spawn capacity of a 3 spawn room is ridiculously high. You can maintain 1500 body parts (slightly less in reality) from a single room. You need 25 WORK parts per EXTEND_SOURCE along with the MOVE/CARRY to operate it. This comes out to aprox 50 parts per EXTEND_SOURCE to mine it. If we assume about 100 capacity for safety reasons and 200 capacity for management creeps, we have 1200 capacity to use on miners.
That's 24, 50 part miners. We can drop 4 of them just in case someone wants to count spawn/travel time overlaps. So we have 20 50 part miners that each can support a power creep each. That's 520 power levels.
Wait... there aren't 20 spots open around the sources or not enough energy throughput on links? No kidding? Okay, so lets remote mine these instead. Remote mines up to 75 tiles away can be managed by a single 48 part hauler creep without any issues, so lets assume we can only have 1 power creep per 100 part for remote mined super sources.
safety = 100 parts
management = 200 parts
2 in house sources = 200 parts (4 miners), 4 power creeps
8 outsources = 400 parts (8 miners), 400 parts (8 haulers), 8 power creeps
100 parts extra for spawn times and other safety
... You are still looking at 12 copies of EXTEND_SOURCE lv5, which is 312 power levelsOnce you get into this range, it even starts becoming an issue whether containers can even hold the energy you are outputting, since they hardly can hold what they did before. This is another limitation to this efficiency over quantity issue. It's one of the reasons harvest boosts don't work too great even with the addition of EXTEND_SOURCE. Links and containers are quite limited on what they can do.
I am obviously not counting invaders, defense, mining minerals, and a few other things, but then.... why in the world do you only have one room. This is the calculation for ONE room. Just reaching RCL 8 should give you 2-3 rooms worth of GCL, so why do you only have one room?
The point is that you will hit so many other limits ages before you will hit a spawn capacity limit in any situation that isn't war, and even then it is very likely only for a brief period of time.
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@gankdalf Your calculations are wrong.
8000 energy/300 ticks = ~27 energy/tick 1600 carry/150 tick travel = ~11 energy/tick moving
You'd need about 2.5 carriers/haulers per single mine at a distance of 75 one way to handle that volume of energy. Take 100 parts off for the two miners at home (who need slightly larger carries to not waste ticks transferring to the link). That leaves you 1100 parts for remote mining. With the numbers above, you can mine 7 sources, assuming a miner with 25 work/1 carry/13 move and a carrier of 32/16.
I'm also not sure what you're doing with your power creep calculations. 1 PC should handle 3 mines with 100 distance between them. You need 23 levels to reach level 5 EXTEND_SOURCE. I have the highest power in the game at 329 levels and that's still only 14 operators capable of doing that. That gives me the potential to have 42 extended sources (assuming I do nothing else with these guys), giving me a whopping 210000 energy extra per cycle, or 1.05million per generation (roughly 800k/hour)
So I'll agree with you, I don't really see how this can compare with just getting more rooms.
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@artch I'm curious about the design choice that led to "ops"
It seems weird to me that it would only exist for one creep tree, and that its a resource that's tradeable storable etc. It's like its a secondary balancing mechanic for some powers thats not an actual limitation.
Was it a variant of the classic "mana" resource? How did you guys settle on it? I think that having mana with regen could have the same effect with a fluid implementation. It would allow commander creeps have things like "energy aura" that makes your power creeps regen faster or an overload that burns up all of a power creeps mana.
So from an interesting game design: what are the gameplay patterns the ops aims to enhance? It gives some consumer vs producer market, but I'm curious to the rest.
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@hernanduer Sorry I was in a bit of a hurry to explain some of that.
It was already asked and answered that you could use EXTEND_SOURCE on the same source multiple times, so the thought experiment involved having power creeps camp a source and flood it with the entire 15,000 per regen period. This takes 25 WORK parts to mine (before the default 3,000), which takes 30 WORK parts to mine the full 18,000 before the regen period. I had then allowed for 4 CARRY parts, transfering every 3 ticks because quite frankly I see no reason to care about CPU when I am harvesting 6 sources with a single miner and some links.
I fudged the math a bit for the remotes because quite frankly I think that the whole equation is trivially solved by "own 3 rooms". The fudge was the fact that the 75 range only applied to 3k sources, and is set by the container size and mining speed (which is obviously much higher with super sources), which I did mention, but didn't go into detail on how it was wrong, since again, the scale and proportion are not even in the ballpark for OPERATE_SPAWN to have any type of a chance.
Personally, I would like to see how many operators I can get extending the sources in a single room just to see, since in theory if you can fit more miners around a source, you can throw more operators at it. You lose some of the efficiency, since you don't have more +3ks from a new source, but gain the ability to transport it from extremely short range or with links.
With how it was stated, it doesn't matter if you use your power creep on the far source or the near source. Both will, in theory, net the same total. As long as you can harvest all of the energy before it regenerates, the near source will be more efficient, even if it already has power creeps boosting it.
** reference https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2183/power-creeps-update/87
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@artch Actually another big flaw in the whole GCL vs. PL choice is that PL rate is directly gated by the number of RCL 8 rooms you own. Obviously it is also gated by energy production after a certain point, but if you only have one room, you aren't going to be generating power as fast as the owner of two rooms because you only have one power spawn.
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I still believe that operate_extensions works better as a power that increases extension capacity so that your creeps can fill fewer bigger extensions. This would result in fatter claim creeps, but in most cases extension capacity isn't a limitation for an RCL8 room's spawning size.
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Of course nobody will choose having just one room literally, it was just an example, all players will try to find some balance. But higher Power Level extends your capability of doing more with less rooms. You choose between having more rooms (and spending more CPU), or having less rooms and boosting them with power. Math and numbers are still under discussion and can be changed while testing on the PTR, but that's the idea.
Commander and especially Executor should be included in this equation to make it work.
And Power Levels don't correlate to Control Levels 1-to-1, they are not equivalent replacements to each other, but different assets aiming at the same goal - making you more capable to make an impact on the game world.
