3. The initial barrier to power creeps

The initial barrier to power creeps


  • Hello everyone,

    I've been on-off playing since December and have now hit RC 7 on my (currently) only room. My code is nowhere near efficient; it's taken me at least a month and a half to get to this level. As far as power creeps stand, getting from RC 7 to 8 will take over double the energy (time) as getting to 7 just to start gaining power levels and to get my first power creep, so either I ramp up my production greatly or just fend off until a couple of months from now.

    My question: With the amount of (excuse my pun) power creep that this feature will offer (which will only grow over time), should the barrier to begin getting in on this feature be lowered? I feel like lowering power spawns to RC 6 and limiting power creep level or preventing spawning power creeps in newbie areas would benefit newer players. This would allow people to begin processing power at the same time they can buy it off the market, and would allow players to choose to work on their power spawn code when they are still working on building up a single room.

    Thoughts?


  • without some major restructuring to the way power mining works, i don't think that having power spawns earlier is going to help much.  Remote mining and automated scouting are bare minimum for harvesting power at the moment, automated scouting (since you only get observers at rcl8) is already going to be a good amount of time to write.  And if you have remote mining, you can get to RCL8 pretty easily given you can pull in 2-3 reserved rooms that you remote mine for energy.  The only way this makes sense is if you use your terminal (at RCL6) to sell energy or minerals you mine to buy power with however this has 2 potential problems:

    1. power's value on the market is almost certainly going to rise if it hasn't already, which means you'll be selling a large amount of minerals (or energy slowing your gcl/rcl gain even more) for a small amount of power (expected).

    2. Even with all of the problems with the above, say you get a power spawn at RCL6, get enough energy to get a lvl2-3 power creep (processing this power also takes code and a large amount of energy usage) and spawn it.  How much time do you think it will take to code up efficient/useful behaviors for your new power creep? how much of this time do you think could be better spent just writing remote mining?

    If this is what you want (ignore gcl/rcl increase for power increase at low lvls), then I can understand your ask, otherwise i just don't think that it makes much of a difference when you can build power spawns.

  • Culture

    For the record the reason you are expanding so slow is that you aren't doing any remote mining and haven't claimed a single room despite your GCL having gone up. This game scales interestingly, so I'd recommend focusing on your multiroom (remote mining and new colonies).