Enabling power on rooms
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@artch said in Enabling power on rooms:
What if power is always automatically enabled when a Power Spawn is present in the room?
As an alternative idea: how about the power spawn is only active if power is enabled? That way you don't have to worry about current players having all their rooms have power active state and you get the same end result: power and power spawn are linked.
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If you can't process power without being vulnerable to power creep attacks, does that create a problem for latecomers?
E.g. a new player starts playing in Jan 2019, is processing power in July 2019, by which time all the players around him are running 10 separate max level power creeps. Once he hit RCL 8 he's been able to hold off their attacks by good defence code and judicious use of boosted creeps, but as soon as he starts processing power he becomes extra vulnerable to the more advanced players and loses his rooms.
Is this a realistic scenario?
Obviously higher GCL/power players should generally be more powerful than lower GCL/power players - it's fundamental to the game But wouldn't vulnerability to power creep attacks as soon as you start processing power subvert the entire design purpose of having powers be opt in?
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@wtfrank said in Enabling power on rooms:
Obviously higher GCL/power players should generally be more powerful than lower GCL/power players - it's fundamental to the game But wouldn't vulnerability to power creep attacks as soon as you start processing power subvert the entire design purpose of having powers be opt in?
I see your point. I don't think it's a major issue because:
- You get to choose. It's not like regular defenses will suddenly become useless. Place your power spawn in a defensible room in your core.
- You get a lot of power levels very quickly.
- There's no chain reaction. Maybe you lose your first room with a power spawn, but you still have other rooms and they are only vulnverable to the same thing if you let them be.
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Tbh I don't think that the power spawn = power enabled will make a particularly large impact. Power is a fairly low quantity that could easily get sent to 3-4 rooms for processing, how often are you processing more than -200 energy of power at a time?
That also prevents the use of power creeps for building up a room, which imo was an interesting usecase.
I do really think it's something that should be linked to the room, and based on the controller. Making it something players have agency over is good. Also, the idea of fighting to activating power in an enemy bunker room so that you can break their defenses is a cool one. It gives multiple angles of attack and makes controller-based attacks more impactful.
I think having it toggleable with some delay/cost/limitations is the right way way to approach it in a non-hacky way.
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@davaned said in Enabling power on rooms:
Tbh I don't think that the power spawn = power enabled will make a particularly large impact. Power is a fairly low quantity that could easily get sent to 3-4 rooms for processing, how often are you processing more than -200 energy of power at a time?
How about power enabled => power spawn enabled? In other words, you can't use the power spawn in rooms without power enabled. The power spawn itself doesn't activate power.
You're right, maybe it's not wide reaching enough. I still don't like the idea of delayed toggles though.
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@Tigga I'm not sure how much that accomplishes. It'd be fine because it's not a huge swing either way... EXCEPT it totally screws new players. If you don't have any power and want to start getting some, you have to open up your rooms before you even have power of your own. And it could takes months to get enough power to be able to spawn decent power creeps.
Honestly, I'd rather not have power spawns be linked with powers being active. It doesn't accomplish that much along the vector we're looking to solve while increasing the barrier to entry.
I don't see a way you can have power activation only ever be a one way street without it being fundamentally broken. If I can't ever deactivate it, I'm incredibly hesitant to ever activate it.
Another idea: Turning on power in a room is free. Deactivating power puts the room on a safemode lockout period equal to a safemode duration + standard lockout (but does not safemode the room). You cannot deactivate power during a safemode.
That way you can't deactivate power during an assault without significant risk. Needs a delay on activation to prevent attack from activating then deactivating powers to deny safemode.
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@artch I haven't loved most of the suggestions for how to handle powers being active in rooms. The main problem seems to be that activating it is a permanent decision, so why not make it similar to how we do current behavior for controllers?
Make activating power like a controller claim/reservation. Creep walks up to controller and activates power, which adds 500 ticks of power usage to the room. This can stack up to 50k ticks of power activation. Add something similar to attackController that decrements the power reservation to weaken rooms which rely on it, and an attack can fight to activate powers for the room.
The decision is not longer permanent, and similar to maintaining a level 8 room it requires occasional interaction.
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I was under the impression that the latch nature of power enabled was on purpose. The thought is that after enough time most of the rooms will eventually have power enabled, then it can just be set on by default. I never imagined that power enabling was meant to be a long term part of the game.
I figured at least one person would code up a roaming power creep that just enables power in every unclaimed room in the entire shard.
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@davaned The power activation of a room is not permanent as far as I know. Unclaiming the controller will undo the activation. Its not too hard to automate that, I think.
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I don't really think I'm on the same page as you @Davaned
I feel:
- Power should change the way combat works in your room. It'll make it easier to kill if the other guy has power creeps (especially if you don't). It'll make it easier to defend if the other guy doesn't have power creeps.
- Power should be good enough that you want it in your rooms. The world is generally quite peaceful and so it doesn't have to be amazing for this to be the case: the powers just have to be designed so that it's in your best interests to distribute them.
Having a power opt-out is an important feature as it lets new players get started without having to worry about an "end-game" power creep coming at them. For high GCL players power enablement should be the default state. That's hard to codify neatly. The concept of any sort of remotely easy way to disable power will turn power enablement into a tool for the defender and will make rooms even harder to crack than they are today.
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@Tigga Only thing is that as you state, the disincentives are so huge for a permanent enablement (without ditching a room) that people won't opt in. If it started as a temporary enablement that could be modified to last longer durations as they have been out longer and are more balanced, I think people might be more willing to take a chance. Also, it could provide a smooth transition. If at first it was enabled for 1k ticks per trigger, and then that was upped to 10k then 100k you can gradually cement power creeps.
End state I do expect it to be default enabled and end up like boosts, where a new player basically instantly loses in a challenge so the goal early is to survive and grow until you have your own. That's why I don't like the "power must be is enabled to process power" because it hurts new players much more than established ones.
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In that case I'd say just force power enabled on any RCL 8 room and be done with it. Lower RCL rooms can be optional.
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@tigga So that a player that is still working out how to even farm power can be kicked over without hope of counter by a player who has had a chance to figure out how to get at creeps that can literally cripple (or in extreme cases, shut down) a room?
This has to be opt in.
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I'd argue that power creeps are new game+
One of the biggest concerns with this game is the shear volume of code you need to be "ok". And each step below "ok" leaves you utterly vulnerable. If you don't have defense, you get totally stomped. If you don't have boosts, you get totally stomped. And now if you don't have power creeps, you get totally stomped. Each represents vast amounts of code that needs to be discovered, written, tested, fixed, and thats all without factoring in all the other roadblocks on the game.
Power is a vast investment of resources (energy, code, credits, time), and very much seems like lategame content for experienced players. Don't force everything on new players at once, let them unlock things naturally and not permanently be at a hopeless disadvantage. No need to put kids learning to ride a bike up against tanks. My 2 cents on the issue.
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Getting the first 10 power levels is both cheap and quick. It does not require a vast investment of resources. ~75000 power, ~3.6 million energy.
I understand the desire to have give new players time to ramp-up. I personally feel that the "power once enabled in a room is always enabled" and "power spawn is only active if power is enabled" is a good start but doesn't go far enough. It's not like the moment you enable your first power spawn all the vets are going to jump on your and murder you. Getting to a reasonable number of power levels with a single power spawn is not a huge investment. Losing a single room because your neighbour used the fact that he has more power is not crippling.
Ramp-up time is great but I don't want to see high GCL players with the resources to support power code leaving it enabled in one or two rooms or opting out completely. I don't want to see them disabling it the moment they feel it may leave one of their rooms vulnverable after reaping hundreds of thousands of ticks of economic benefits. Pretty much any suggestion about even marginally easy disabling of power will just lead to people reaping all the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Power on everywhere should be the state that everybody wants to be in or it should be forced upon people. Given the current design of power creeps doesn't really give incentives to enabling power in all your rooms, something has to change. Having pre-power and new players have RCL 8 rooms vulnverable (but no other rooms) seems fine to me. An alternative would be a rework of the powers to make you really want to enable power in all your rooms. Today we're quite a bit away from that, though I may make a separate post with ideas along those lines.
Either that, or power is DOA. It's either part of the game or it's not. If it's only in a tiny percetnage of rooms, a large proportion of the powers are not part of the game and the feature is a giant waste of time.
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The end-goal is surely that power is on in every room throughout the game, apart from perhaps novice zones/respawn areas.
What if we just have it on everywhere other than those already-protected areas?
Or, rather than having power-enablement a property of a room, what about having it a property of an account? When you respawn power is off, until you call "Game.enablePower()" then it's on until you next respawn. If power is "off", it means that powers cannot be used in rooms that you control (perhaps also reserve), nor can you spawn any Power Creeps. This means that nobody can be subject to power attacks until they're ready. Once, you're ready, you decide to join "new game+" that @Davaned mentions by making that one-off call.
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I am not understand what is problem with enabled powers? I agree that we need to have option to enable or disable power until this feature is in the beta test. But after this we do not need to have option to disable this option. This is part of game why we need to have logic for power and without powers. I agree that power is give you advantage over unpower players, same is the boost give you advantage too. But we do not have option to disable boost attack. But to use boost you need to write code too, so why we need to disable power and do not disable boost?
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@flyasd1 There was a post which I can't find, where artch announced something like, some players are worried that when power creeps are introduced to the game, players who have been stockpiling power will be able to launch devastating attacks against otherwise well-defended rooms belonging to anybody who doesn't immediately update their code to handle power creep attacks, therefore to prevent this "breaking change" to gameplay/code, power will have to be explicitly enabled in a room so that players can opt in when their code is ready.
I think if boosts didn't already exist in the game, but we were to add boosts to the game right now as a brand new feature, it would be reasonable to have some sort of soft implementation, as has been proposed for power creeps, to give players some time to prepare to handle boosted attacks.
As another solution to this problem, how about delivering Operators with the offensive abilities disabled for a period such as 3 months? Once the 3 months are up then power creeps can be used in every room. This means that people have 3 months of reminders about power creeps (while they actually exist in the game and are showing up on the UI) to prepare their code to defend against attacks like disruptTerminal. (Of course people who are active on the forums will already be thinking about how to defend against power creep attacks, but not every player is on the forums or good at English).
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@wtfrank This is why a say about beta test. After power creep is came to the game we will have few or more month with balancing parameters. This is how I imagine it. Because without real usage it's very hard to balancing this. So we have a few month to prepare for power creep, but after this we should not have option to disable power creep.
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Coming back to this topic. We have a few ideas regarding this:
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A new Operator power will be added soon:
PWR_FORTIFY
Makes a rampart or wall invulnerable to attacks for 1/2/3/4/5 ticks. Cooldown 5 ticks. Range 4 squares. Consumes 5 ops.
Upgrade on level: 0/2/7/14/22
On max level it will allow to maintain one rampart/wall tile in fully invulnerable state, but with huge ops consumption: 6 times more than one Operator generates. So you either need to store up ops in this room or import it from other rooms (but don't forget about vulnerability to
DISRUPT_TERMINAL). -
A totally new economy/trading/crafting mechanic (and a new structure!) will be introduced which leverages some Operator hi-end power. It will be so important to your economy, so that you will want it in every RCL7 room to gain maximum credits income. In fact, this mechanic will become a major influx of credits in the game instead of NPC buy orders for minerals. A player who manages to maintain and defend a number of RCL7 power-enabled rooms will gain huge trade benefits.
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