Help me decide to buy this game answering me these negative steam reviews



  • I am a junior developer and aware of some programming concepts and I really want to buy this game, but I have some concerns such as monthly subscription and free CPU time (20ms currently). Can I enjoy the game using only 20ms per tick? Is it possible to create some cool automated colony with that? I am aware of shard3 server (which seems to be a cool place for beginners).

    Also, how fast Screeps servers can process a tick?

    I have seen what @artch has said about @VasVadum in this steam review, however, he has some reasonable points such as client lag and toxic community. Can someone help me on those?

    And then there is this guy and this other one.

    How optimized does screeps is?

    OBS: I'm aware of the massive positive reviews but these negative ones caught my attention.

    Thank you for reading my post 🙂


  • Dev Team

    Hello @vikto,

    Can I enjoy the game using only 20ms per tick? Is it possible to create some cool automated colony with that?

    Definitely possible, all game content is available with this CPU, it limits the scale of things, primarily (if you can run 2 rooms with 20 CPU, you can run 30 rooms for 300 CPU).

    how fast Screeps servers can process a tick?

    It depends on the shard, usually from 3 to 5 seconds per tick, feel free to check the status page.

    he has some reasonable points such as client lag and toxic community. Can someone help me on those?

    This community is the most healthy and friendly I ever saw. Of course, it sometimes happens to have toxic players (it happens to every community), but the count of those is fairly low (maybe a couple of persons per year or so). Client performance? It slowly gets better, still have a room for improvements tho.

    And then there is this guy and this other one.

    What about them?

    ☺


  • Greetings,

    Yes, from what I understand you can do some cool things with 20 CPU and to be clear you can exceed that in short-bursts with an overflow bucket of 10,000 (See: CPU Limit doc). The simulation to my knowledge from the site is also free, if you wanted to try it out first: (See Simulation).

    As of writing, the live severs are:

    Shard0: 5s a Tick Shard1: 3.4s a Tick Shard2: 3.2s a tick Shard3: 3.6 a tick

    Though that can vary, ~3 is average and decent for being able to respond to live-troubleshooting of code.

    I've never read that review before now. I've visited slack a few times but only started jumping on more recently, while tight-nit I wouldn't call it toxic most players I see get help relatively quickly and questions are answered.

    There are a few things I'd question about the post but I do not know the situation or what led up to it. I've only played with the private client a little, so couldn't help there.

    this guy's review - I'll admit I normally do have Screeps up on another tab when playing other games to make sure code-behavior is acting correctly or to update the code as needed for things, though I'd view the game as a game about automation more than active-action unless your mid-attack. We'll have to see how Screeps Arena is.

    This other one - Yep, there's a market for credits and Tokens similar to ISK and Plex in Eve-Online. Though you can play the market to get credits not just though selling tokens. There are two types of "Novice zones" a Novice Area in green which you need to have a Global Control Level (in-game-level) less than 3 to enter, and Respawn Zones that anyone can enter but you have to give up all your previous territory, not your account levels or code-base. Both zones are cut-off for an extended period of time from the outside world giving you time to prepare.

    See: Starter Areas

    In-fact if you haven't already I'd start reading the Docs Page and API Page Before I purchased I went though the Docs page several times to get an idea of the concepts.



  • @donatzor said in Help me decide to buy this game answering me these negative steam reviews:

    I've never read that review before now. I've visited slack a few times but only started jumping on more recently, while tight-nit I wouldn't call it toxic most players I see get help relatively quickly and questions are answered.

    There are a few things I'd question about the post but I do not know the situation or what led up to it. I've only played with the private client a little, so couldn't help there.

    I've heard horror stories from different people about the person in first review, and they all corroborate the response artch gave on that review.

    All in all, I must say Screeps community is probably one of the best online communities I've been part of.

    ☺☝


  • @Vikto at the start of the game the tick speed seems quite slow because you're watching about 5 creeps move around doing really simple behaviours. But before long you'll have tens or hundreds of creeps and when you're debugging odd behaviour I find that 2 or 3 seconds is about right. Faster than 2 seconds and it's hard to keep track of what all the creeps are doing, if you're observing a room and watching their behaviour. So 3s tick time isn't really a massive issue, apart from maybe at the very start when you have only a handful of creeps in a single room.

    In terms of optimisation the client seems to be a bit laggier than it could be given that it's basically rendering a webpage with maybe 100 objects every 3 seconds. It does the job though. Some community members have been experimenting with writing their own clients, one guy even wrote a 3d opengl renderer! Maybe in the future one of these community clients will end up taking over from the main web client

    ☺


  • @o4kapuk

    What about them?

    These reviews basically criticizes screeps client performance.

    Thanks for helping me out.



  • @Donatzor

    Definitely going to read the docs.

    Thanks.



  • Guys, thanks a lot for helping me out. Im more motivated to buy Screeps now. Just going to read the docs to know more about certain aspects of the game. 😄

    🖖


  • Yeah Screeps seems fine for you, however it really isn't a game for learning to code.

    But it is excellent addition while you are learning to code via one of the good external sources.
    You can directly use the new skills learned in your sessions afterwards to improve your script.

    And in regards of the "toxic" community, we have a lot of strong minded personalities here.
    But never ones have I seen a full blown shit storm or malcious personal attack on somebody. (Valid critic isn't a attack, it is a fact)
    As long you are reasonable and able to use common sense you won't have any problems here.

    ☺


  • heh, if you want to talk about toxic, Vas was the toxic one. This community is awesome, and full of people willing to help. He caused a lot of issues due to his attitude and general trolling. Of course he is going to complain about a community that doesnt put up with his BS... after he got banned in slack (due to recommending physical violence as a legitimate solution to political issues), he proceeded to create multiple additional accounts to continue being a nuisance. I ended up banning 3-4 alt accounts by the time it was finally said and done. Do not accept any opinions from someone like that... That being said, I am part of the slack's moderator staff. if you do see any issues, please feel free to hit me up and we'll take care of it.



  • Welcome Vikto,

    I can say, that I learned a lot while coding for creeps. I already knew languages like Java, C#, C++ and basic JavaScript but only because of Screeps I've learned much more details about JavaScript.

    ☺


  • I agree with @Xenofix. Screeps is a great way to pick up javascript or typescript as a second programming language. I haven't heard of any success stories where they picked up screeps and programming cold.

    I think it's possible to could craft online course around screeps but you definitely would want to run on a constrained server until the students were further along. I think PvP might not be the best idea in CompSci 101.

    ☺


  • Yeah, xeno and deft are right. Prior to starting the game, the last experience I had was 1 C++ and 2 Java high school classes over a decade prior. I had stayed in IT (netad/sysad) and remembered the concepts, but I started in JS from scratch. Learning the syntax of JS, the game's API and the concepts involved with the game all at the same time was a daunting, but surmountable task. Not having the knowledge of what a for loop, functions, etc was prior, would have crushed me and I never would have gotten off the ground.