Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds



  • @artch said in Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds:

    Decreased lesser (level-0) cores spawn interval from 15k to 2k ticks. This means a stronghold can spawn up to 40 lesser cores during its lifetime if remained untouched. But they are now quite weak and can be handled easily.

    This doesn't seem to be right. I've had 3 lesser cores spawn since they regenerated. The stronghold has been around (and indestructable) for 1250 ticks.

    Seems to be true with most strongholds.


  • Dev Team

    @tigga It was just a testing run. We've spawned 3 additional cores for every stronghold to test how they expand.

    UPD: Removed them.



  • @artch

    "Strongholds are now always spawned in center rooms (or more precisely, SK center rooms, i.e. excluding the most center room)."

    Can this occur in SK rooms that aren't occupied?

    This seems a bit game/empire breaking for those who are already Source Keeper harvesting.

    Looking around, I'm already seeing people losing 2K parts in less 1000 ticks the stronghold has been active.



  • Yeah I agree. I was fine with the original patch a few days ago. Now that you changed it I am getting emails about sk rooms having trouble. This was not documented or put on ptr for the sk room change. Grrrr



  • They could always spawn in SK rooms before. It was just rare rather than all the time.



  • SKs already being marginally beneficial for energy everyone is probably better of just dropping them altogether until you can effectively tackle and loot strongholds. With the reduced invasions the energy actually becomes more efficient, and stronghold loot is probably selling better then looted boosts from invaders.


  • Dev Team

    There is no such thing as "breaking" when we talk about SK rooms. They are not yours. Even when you manage to farm them steadily, they're still not yours. Any hostile player is free to come and mess with your algorithms. The "Invader" player is just another player in that regard.



  • A player with 6 towers and unlimited boosted creeps 🤔 It is fairly rough, although I do expect we'll see some tick times gained due to players dying off.



  • I'd like to suggest the spawn rate for L3+ strongholds be reduced for a period of time to allow players to ramp up to them.

    Making a hard stronghold be a rare occurrence is reasonable imo and would reduce some of the sudden overwhelming emergency players are feeling



  • @artch : Building towers in a room without a controller is not something that "any hostile player" can do. Invader is not just like some another player. It has some special powers. If game mechanics are changed it may seem to break something that used to work differently (predictably) earlier.

    I understand you need to add new content to this game, but you could have some mercy on us 🙂

    IRL software specifications/requirements changes too and it causes sometimes extra work, so I think we're all good here...


  • Dev Team

    @hattu It's a game though, it can have new game content, events, mechanics, systems, items, all this is good. We never promised the Screeps world is going to have all guarantees that regular software provides. It's an MMO game, not an enterprise programming framework.



  • @tigga Yup. I'm one of those 'not around' players. My code has been happily running itself for a long time, but having a level 3 stronghold pop up next to my room effectively shut down my SK harvesting and crushed my energy economy. It's essentially invisible to my code, so, ya know. Just kept pumping out creeps for the meat grinder until I ran out of energy.

    Never being an 'offensive' minded player, I don't have code for attacking fortifications. I always just enjoyed base building, economy, etc side of things and only really wrote defensive code. Oh well. Devs gonna do what devs gonna do. I went not around in the first place as it felt more and more there became a "right way" that we were expected to play that didn't mesh what I enjoyed most.

    Can't expect my non-updated code to stay relevant forever, but I'm sure I'm not the only one getting messed up by strongholds, etc. right now.



  • I looked at the expandStronghold code. Currently the next room reservation is deterministic. Perhaps it would be a bit nicer when the floodfill algorithm would use non-deterministic directions. And I would vote for a higher INVADER_CORE_EXPAND_TIME. Currently with 2000, if you're in the primary expand spot and don't have the ability to clear the stronghold, the reservation outtime is too high.

    👍

  • Dev Team

    @gink Screeps world is a lot less fun if scripts are just happily running and their owners all are not around. For such passive gameplay we recommend playing on a private server, MMO is for PvP and PvE interaction.

    👏

  • Dev Team

    @demawi No, it's not deterministic. On the MMO directions are chosen randomly on each step. Private server is not updated with this code yet, it still has 15K ticks expand interval.



  • @artch said in Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds:

    Decreased lesser (level-0) cores spawn interval from 15k to 2k ticks. This means a stronghold can spawn up to 40 lesser cores during its lifetime if remained untouched. But they are now quite weak and can be handled easily.

    In my opinion the lesser cores respawn to quick atm, yes you can easily kill them, but a new one pops up to soon to take its place so it feels not worth it to go after them.



  • @artch ah ok.. I see the INVADER_CORE_EXPAND_TIME=15k on PTR but not on live it's still 2k


  • Dev Team

    UPDATE:

    Lesser cores spawn interval now depends on stronghold level:

    • Level 1: 4000 ticks
    • Level 2: 3500 ticks
    • Level 3: 3000 ticks
    • Level 4: 2500 ticks
    • Level 5: 2000 ticks
    👍


  • @artch this makes all the sense.



  • Some things looks strange to me with the store refactoring, is that intentional:

    • Using getCapacity with a not valid resource returns null, while using getUsedCapacity with the same resource returns 0.

      extension.store.getCapacity("power") // => null
      extension.store.getUsedCapacity("power") // => 0
      

      It seems inconsistent to me, maybe it should be aligned on one or the other behavior (I personally think returning 0 in both cases makes more sense, but the spec/doc seems to expect null in both cases).

    • Using getCapacity on tombstones returns null (I guess it is the same for ruins).
      I think there is actually no limit, so returning Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER or Infinity would make more sense and be more useful.
      For example, having this behavior looks inconsistent to me:

      tombstone.store.getUsedCapacity("energy") // => 500
      tombstone.store.getCapacity("energy") // => null (even though there is actually some energy in the tombstone...)
      

      Note that mostly, the issue is that when getting null, we don't know if the store does not accept this resource at all, or if the limit is actually infinity. So if my first point is taken into account so that getCapacity returns 0 when the store does not accept the resource, then it would be kind of ok to keep null for infinity...