PTR Changelog 2018-08-20: tunnels

artch

This post describes changes on the Public Test Realm.

Commits on GitHub:

It is now allowed to build roads on top of natural terrain walls. Such "tunnels" open some interesting tactical opportunities in rooms with complex landscape. Construction and maintenance cost is 150x higher than a normal road on plain land, see documentation.

If you got good math skills and have any comments on the tunnel maintenance cost with regard to your own room, feel free to share.

~~Also, you can now build ramparts on walls as well in order to protect expensive tunnels.~~

Roads cannot be built on edge tiles, i.e. you cannot create additional room exits using roads.

Other usual rules apply: you can build roads in neutral rooms, but any construction in hostile owned rooms is prohibited.

This feature is supported in private server ptr branch:

npm install screeps@ptr

wtfrank

Wow what a fast feature turnaround! This will be interesting to see on the PTR.

Atavus

Very cool. Looking forward to it.

I don't see any change to the documentation, but I may have missed it.

artch

@wtfrank It was actually proposed a year ago, so not that fast really

artch

@atavus Do you use the PTR documentation?

duckymirror

In simulation roads on walls have no hits. Am I missing something?

artch

@duckymirror Have you reloaded the page? The popup message in the bottom left should disappear.

Atavus

@artch I'm using https://ptr-docs.screeps.com/api/#StructureRoad, but I see nothing related to wall roads.

Am I looking in the right place?

artch

@atavus This is weird, I see this:

Hard reload maybe?

duckymirror

@artch I loaded it when I saw this post. After reloading it the issue was still there. Additional information: I placed the road with the customize tool.

artch

@duckymirror OK this is fixed, please reload and try again.

duckymirror

@artch Yes, it's working now!

duckymirror

When a tunnel is destroyed while a creep is standing in it shouldn't the creep die? At the moment nothing happens.

artch

@duckymirror Nothing happens is intended behavior.

duckymirror

@artch I just thought that when a tunnel collapses onto you you usually don't survive... But I'm sure there are reasons not to implement it that way.

wtfrank

Do you expect that a creep could potentially get stranded in the middle of a few sections of wall if all the roads died or were removed at the same time?

deft-code

That diff has a few instances of _.any(roomObjects, {type: 'wall'}) or swamp. As far as I know walls, swamps, and plains are never in the roomObjects list in the processor. That check is always false and possibly expensive.

artch

@deft-code There are wall objects in simulation for user-created terrain walls.

Helam

So i have a bug and a couple questions.

Bug: Harvesting seems broken in PTR simulation. I wanted to test if i could still harvest a source from a tunnel. I could, but at the same time i found out that harvesting does not work if it would give you more energy than you can hold and it no longer drops energy on the ground, the harvest just fails, even though it still returns 0. Energy still does not drop to the ground even if you have energy equal to your capacity.

The idea of harvesting from inside of a tunnel brings up other questions:

Will we ever see areas of rooms that are completely surrounded by natural walls? Due to the inability to construct tunnels in a hostile room i understand that these areas would not be fair in normal rooms, but what about in Source Keeper rooms? or center rooms? It would be interesting to have extra high yield resources locked behind natural walls so that we have a higher maintenance cost involved with collecting them. Or even high difficulty NPC strongholds surrounded by natural walls so that you have to construct tunnels while under attack in order to reach and attack the structures.
Are all actions intended to be able to be performed from inside tunnels? Upgrading the controller, attacking, ranged attack, heal, ranged heal, etc? I haven't delved too far into the combat implications of this change, but there will likely be all kinds of new defensive strategies allowed by this change that may not have been considered.
Tombstones and dropped energy will have to be able to be on top of natural walls, what about containers or any other structures besides ramparts?

EDIT: Also just found that roads show up on top of constructed walls now even though you cannot walk over them. I'm assuming that you cannot "tunnel" through constructed walls. If so, the road should probably not show up on top of the constructed wall.

artch

@helam

Bug: Harvesting seems broken in PTR simulation

Thanks, fixed.

Will we ever see areas of rooms that are completely surrounded by natural walls?

That's an interesting idea, but requires some more development, so not for the moment.

Are all actions intended to be able to be performed from inside tunnels? Upgrading the controller, attacking, ranged attack, heal, ranged heal, etc? I haven't delved too far into the combat implications of this change, but there will likely be all kinds of new defensive strategies allowed by this change that may not have been considered.

Yes, all actions are allowed. I don't think it would be a game changer in defense since creeps in tunnels receive damage as usual (both ranged and melee). Regarding combat, it is more like removing wall tiles with maintenance cost.

Tombstones and dropped energy will have to be able to be on top of natural walls, what about containers or any other structures besides ramparts?

Only roads and ramparts can be constructed on walls, no other structures allowed.