Enabling power on rooms
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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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The second one sounds interesting.
Another idea that came up on slack was to tie power creeps to a room with a cap on how many can be "attached" to each room. That way if you wanted more power creeps you'd need to enable it on more rooms.
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@artch RCL7? What happens when the room gets to RCL8? And why RCL7 and not RCL8? Obviously, I'll just put the credits pooping structure in a room that's an oubliette (Ultra defended with few entrances.) and never raise it to level 8 if it HAS to be at level 7.
And: What, the credits inflation we already have isn't enough? When I first started tinkering with labs, a token got you 1.2M credits. Now it's north of 6M credits. A structure in your room that poops out credits will just drive that higher.
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@tigga Connecting the number of PCs to the number of rooms is a bad idea, because it contradicts the principle of Control Level and Power Level being two separate independent player metrics. If we limited PCs to the number of Power Spawns, Power Level would become a secondary metric that depends on GCL, this is not the droid we're looking for.
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@smokeman RCL8 works too of course. That new structure will be available starting on RCL7.
Tokens price growth shows not the inflation, but former underestimation of them in the past. I always wondered how people are willing to sell 60-day subscription for the amount of credits farmable within a few days. Now it's closer to reality.
Also, this new mechanic will not generate credits from thin air, it will be tied to NPC orders and their supply/demand balance.
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@artch said in Enabling power on rooms:
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).
Fortify a rampart before nuke hits. No repair cost!
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@orlet @artch Clarification for the new totally invulnerable rampart:
Would that make a creep beneath it totally invulnerable? A perfect bunker to let a creep survive a nuke hit?
Could make for some interesting anti-nuke strats.
