Carrier role idea for the Commander class of Power Creeps

Orlet

Have been discussing the general idea on the Slack, but I think it's concrete enough to make a suggestion now.

Basically, I feel like it would be a great idea to have a mobile factory style power creep. Think along the lines of the Carrier in the Homeworld/Homeworld 2 series, a pretty defenceless capital ship by itself, however, extremely useful when at the heart of a small battlegroup or mobile task force. I can already imagine uses for such class in Screeps to create and maintain small-to-medium skirmishing forces that can operate well outside normal colony range (but would not be overwhelmingly powerful to threaten high-tier claimed rooms on their own), or as mobile resource gathering operations, or new colony bootstrapping support, or whatever else can be done with them, your imagination is the limit here.

Since Commander already has RENEW_CREEP power, and the overall teamplay-oriented theme of the class, it seems like a prime candidate for it. The idea would be: add a SPAWN_CREEP power to it, of course, a more limited version of the one found on Spawn:

Cannot .move() during spawning (but spawning can be cancelled, like with Spawn, at the cost of total loss of invested energy).
Uses energy from Container/Storage/Terminal (or just Container if you will).
Spawn speed: 5/5/4/4/3 ticks per body part.
Maximum creep's energy cost: 500/1000/1000/2000/2000 energy.
Cannot spawn creeps with CLAIM parts.

Numbers, of course, could be tweaked.

Davaned

Personally I liked the idea of renew creep. I worry that renew creep would lose most of its usecase (and interesting long range gameplay) if you don't have a good reason over spawning a creep.

The kind of spawning idea I would be interested in would be a certain creep type you define, eg. you have have ability to spawn large numbers of a particular creep body. Basically like an aircraft carrier that can cheaply produce fighters, rather than a mobile manufacturing plant than can create anything.

However, that just because I think the challenge of going a far distance with renewing along the way sounds interesting. No strong reason against spawning as a power. The idea of building a container to start producing creeps from just outside an enemy base is an interesting concept. Cool thought and good limitation with max energy cost.