Factories, new resources, NPC Strongholds

[artch]

@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.

[Gink]

@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.

[demawi]

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.

[artch]

@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.

[artch]

@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.

[Geir1983]

@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.

[demawi]

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

[artch]

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

[Orlet]

@artch this makes all the sense.

[Mwaahahahaha]

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...

[WarInternal]

Since invader cores are hostile structures in room, we should be allowed to dismantle them.

[Davaned]

@warinternal TBH I agree. I don't think that dismantle not working on the core adds anything to the game besides not allowing miners to attack it, and it's a needless complexity. You can attack all room structures except this one means that there will be a lot of special cases in people's usual cleanup code.

[artch]

Power Banks are structures also, and you also cannot dismantle them. You can only dismantle what you can construct. Dismantling returns energy which someone else spent for construction. If there was no energy spent, dismantle should not work.

Think of it as a method to "disassemble" some piece of tech about which you know how it's assembled. If that's some weird tech like Invader Core which you cannot assemble, you don't have enough knowledge to disassemble it properly, you can only break it.

[WarInternal]

Invader cores can also apparently overlap structures

[o4kapuk]

@warinternal weird, where is it?

[WarInternal]

@o4kapuk That's in shard0 E55S37

[Davaned]

@artch I like that explanation. However how does Shield fit into that? No energy spent, no energy returned, but dismantle works.

From a gameplay perspective the invader cores not allowing dismantle makes perfect sense to make them require a non-eco creep to deal with them.

Does dismantle work on tombstones/ruins? I always thought of dismantle as kinda like bulldozing everything down and picking up the scraps.

[artch]

@davaned However how does Shield fit into that? No energy spent, no energy returned, but dismantle works.

Power-created entities are meant to be "magic" exceptions.

Does dismantle work on tombstones/ruins? I always thought of dismantle as kinda like bulldozing everything down and picking up the scraps.

It does not work on tombstones/ruins.

Dismantle returns 50% of the energy spent (for walls/ramparts). It's not just "scraps", it's a lot. Imagine if you disassemble a house and retrieve back every other item from it in a reusable condition. It cannot be done by a bulldozer, it requires accuracy and skills.

[Trepidimous]

@artch As we think about newer players. It was a little counter intuitive to discover that reservation cores cannot be dismantled and can only be attacked. I understand why because you could just simply have all of your drillers engage reservation cores but a design theme for screeps has been to dismantle structures and to attack living things. It may be too late to change it now but if the reservation cores were a living (and stationary) invader vs a stationary structure then newer players more easily see that dismantling it won't work.

[Trepidimous]

@artch Will this 10% variation on stronghold decays be added to the constants in the documentation?

Also the current value for stronghold_decay_ticks still says 150000 vs 75000 in the constants of the docs