4. Feature: RAM & BUCKET buildings

Feature: RAM & BUCKET buildings


  • I think the system is quite well thought out buuuut... it would be so cool if you would have buildings to setup your bucket so that not everyone has 10000 CPU from the beginning on... something like building CPU-Co Processors to increase the bucket... that way one has to build more structures and figure out how to automate that too.

    second would be RAM buildings to increase your memory abilitys... like starting with like 10 KB (it should effect raw memory too but i cant think of every value here) which would make early access to armys of harvesters and attack craft more of a challenge... like in the last statement i suggest adding a building that increases RAM. it would add a little more challenge to the gameplay in every regard...

    maybe make it optional couse the servers run without those features atm so some AIs might have problems else


  • I think its a great idea. The only hurdle would be transitioning from the current bucket system to a structure-based bucket expansion.

    I'm not sure it can be applied to RAM though. The main reason being that if someone has 20KB of data stored, then they lose a few expansion structures and drop back to 10KB, what happens to the excess 10KB of data? Deleting it would be extremely annoying for the player. Blocking access would require a lot of extra checks and processing on the server-side.

    The cost of handling it both in AI and on the server-side of things, would make it highly unviable.


  • I don't think I like this one. 

     

    The CPU bucket is a duct tape solution. It's not there to be used exactly, but there to cover issues with CPU counting that the framework (the platform the game runs on) can not do. For example I can make your script take longer to execute if I wrote some code that, some how, got a node to reset or forced garbage collection to fire (I shouldn't be able to do that but it's possible). 

    So the bucket, was the solution. It's "padding" that is there to work around a core technical limitation, while still being fair. Adding  (more) value to it by tieing it to a structure or cost of any kind, would start the entire "But I didn't use that CPU the system did, and not because of something I did" argument again. 

    Now it  is true that for new player the bucket seems always full. But that is only because you filled it. Once your a bit more established and your running closer to your CPU limit more frequently (say 80% of your limit 100% of the time) you will quickly see how important that bucket is to have. Things outside your control will "dip" into your bucket. 

    Some scripts use the bucket as a pool of CPU, to burst when doing some complicated tasks. This is fine, and where your structures would be nice, but there is currently no technical way to separate cpu of my script from cpu caused by the engine. (Which is why the bucket exists in the first place) So it's kind of a catch. We need to bucket to cover "weird" server related CPU costs that we have 0 control over. We can use the bucket for "burst" operations. But we can't tell the difference between a burst operation and, for example, a node reset.


  • My line of thought with the Bucked expansion was that at the beginning you have an almost infinite amount of processing power and with expanding territory it will get more and more difficult to maintain a stable bucket household... so making the bucked start small and be expandable is a good challenge for making your AI flexible enough to handle more than a few different resources. I also think it might look awesome to see AIs create their own Processors to work around a need of processing power...


  • That already happens today. 

     

    • Dumping energy into the controller is the same as building a CPU building(s).
    • You can't have limitless CPU, else how would anyone ever "catch up" so there are limits. "Levels" based on your GCL
    • Having a bigger bucket wouldn't really change anything. Bigger bursts sure, but that's not what the bucket is for, and if were going to say it is officially for bursting (and not just that bursting is ok) then "How dare you spend my CPU if I didn't tell you to!!!!" starts being a problem again.

     

    I think what is easily forgotten, perhaps because it's not documented well, is that the bucket is a stop gap solution to a technical limitation.  It the technical limitation was to go away, then one could easily argue that the bucket should too. 


  • I didnt say anything of "limitless CPU"... What i meant was that you have to build CPU Buildings to get to the maximum CPU you can have.

    And the easiest way of dealing with temporaty solutions is making them well thought out features.


  • IMO the CPU limit is an important catch-up mechanic for competitive players. Giving entrenched users the ability to further solidify their advantage against someone who has to respawns just widens the existing military gap between low and high GCL players.