What is a spawn?



  • Yes, of course a spawn is a structure that spawns creeps. I want answers here to be more philosophical: Which protection should a spawn give to the spawning creep? What belongs to the spawning process? Which influence on spawning creeps should be allowed? Which creeps can be recycled?

    A discussion of this topic seems to be necessary for a good reasoning about preboosting.



  • Well since I view screeps as litte roombas and the spawn is the place where they get assembled.
    That means they start as empty nonfunctional hull slowly filling with functional parts until they are finished and activated.
    While in this state they are unable to do anything or being accessed from out side the spawn.

    I view boosting as a sort of overclocking so basically tweaking parameters and not a physical thing so I have no gripes with it applied directly in the spawn process.



  • I tend to view spawns as a container for creeps - the creep is entirely isolated from the outside until it has finished being built.

    • Spawns should entirely protect the creep from attacks (unless the spawn itself is destroyed), although this is inconsistent with the current behavior of nukes.
    • Spawns collect all their energy at the beginning of the spawning process. If anything, to be consistent with this, I'd like preboosting to occur as part of the spawnCreep() call.
    • During spawning, creeps cannot access or be accessed by anything except the spawn itself (which excludes preboosting).
    • I'm still OK with the spawn recycling a creep that it's still building, but it has to be the same spawn that is building the creep.
    👆


  • @jbyoshi said in What is a spawn?:

    • Spawns collect all their energy at the beginning of the spawning process. If anything, to be consistent with this, I'd like preboosting to occur as part of the spawnCreep() call.

    That actually makes way more sense then being boosted by the labs, I would go so to say that you should even deposit the minerals to do so in it.
    This is really interesting in conjunction with low level outpost, they could stock small quantities to react more flexible on sudden threats.

    Also makes it more interesting for newbies since they could actually use the stuff. Even if they don't have RCL6 invaders have sometimes small quantities of stuff.

    👆


  • @jbyoshi I really like this idea too. What if normal spawns had two reservoirs similar to power spawns? One for energy and one for minerals. This reservoir could also be used for renewing the creep. Some inventory management might be needed for that which could add some new challenges to the game.