4. [Idea] Compound breakdown reactions

[Idea] Compound breakdown reactions


  • Yes, it's that time of the month again, me and my brilliant crazy ideas. Here's a new one for you!

    Compound breakdown reactions. Very much like boostCreep and unboostCreep, runReaction and drumroll breakDown!

    I'm sure many of us have looted a crapton of compounds you don't have need for, and that doesn't really sell well, so it ends up just cluttering your terminals and storage spaces. This is the solution for that! A way to break a compound down to constituent parts, in reverse way of reaction. For a price, of course.

    Say you, like myself, find yourself sitting on a rather phat stack of GO. You surely could find a nicer way for all that ghodium, right? If only you could somehow extract it from the compound... breakDown to the rescue! For a little price of energy and lab time you could break it down to G and O. Say, 3× GO + 2× energy => 3× G + 3× O + 10 ticks of cooldown on source lab. But why energy you ask? Reactions don't need energy. Yes, but very much like in real world, most reactions will only happily run in one direction, and in order to run in the opposite way it may require some, uh, convincing. That's what the energy is for.

    edit: possibly only limit it to breaking down T1 and T2 compounds, so the catalyzed versions are final and irreversible, to preserve the rarity thereof.

    Syntax would be StructureLab.breakDown(destinationLab1, destinationLab2) on the lab containing the compound to break down, and parameters being labs to put the completer materials into. Very much like reverse reaction, once again.

    I hope this makes all sense.

    👍

  • Nothing wrong with this idea, it pops up every now and then. The big problem is that almost no one would use it. CPU is a premium, so the cpu, time and energy that went into reacting those minerals in the first place is wasted, and it costs even more to unreact them. The only thing it would do is ensure market resources never cost less than their components, and slightly reduce the downsides of keeping war compounds in stock.

    99% of the time this won't be useful, but then again I see no reason why it shouldn't be allowed, if low priority. I'm in favor of it being added simply because it makes sense 🙂

    EDIT: Would make it easier to store larger banks of minerals in the form of G, albiet at a very expensive CPU and energy. TBH, the only place I could see this being actually useful in crossshard transfers, where the market doesn't work. But then why would you not just send over T3 resources that you want anyway rather than useless ones that you'd have to unreact.

    1 Reply

  • I occasionally wish that this feature existed. In practice, the market serves as a mechanism for doing this - albeit with some friction.


  • @davaned I have about 100,000 GO in my empire I can't sell because nobody wants it, but invaders drop it all the time. If I could break it down and sell off the base minerals I might.

    1 Reply

  • @warinternal yup. I've been slowly converting that crap into XGHO2, but no one's buying that either... I would definitely use this to break it down into G to fuel my nukes and O to, well, do other stuff with it.

    1 Reply

  • @orlet have you considered stoking demand for XGHO2 with mass declarations of war...


  • I feel like the real issue is why are some boosts "bad" in certain players eyes? If no one wants to use these boosts, why is that? Are they underpowered? Do they cost to much? Is there no demand for their ability?

    The devs could investigate the power of some of the less used boosts or the rate at which they are handed out. As Frank has pointed out the players could drive demand for some of the other boosts.


  • I think it has to do with two factors that both work against the "demand" part of the supply&demand on the market:

    1. Screeps mostly is economic game, with few players involved in active warfare. As such, there is not much need for the boosts that boost combat stats, such as damage reduction on TOUGH bits, damage boosts, and dismantle boosts.
    2. Players get a lot of "free" T1 combat boosts that can be rather easily upgraded to T3 ones, and this even further decreases the demand for such boosts on the market. As I'm sure many of us are sitting on a rather phat stack of those free T1 boosts.

    As such, there's no or very little demand for combat boosts, even high-end ones. And there is no capability to convert all the low end combat boosts we get for free into something that can be used in other places.


  • I do think the fundamental issue is that there isn't much of a reason to use boosts. Most challenges (SK, power banks, etc) are easily handled with non-boosted creeps. The only real need for a majority of them is for player combat, which isn't that frequent as there is no real reward for it. It's fine that there are boosts that are not frequently used as long as they are useful in their scenario, but it would be nice to have more reasons to use said boosts.

    I think Strongholds might actually help address this concern by giving more of a reason for these combat boosts.


  • Yeah, strongholds can possibly create some extra uses for combat boosts, which would be nice.