Request: Remove Range Limitation on Observers
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Lots of players want to go as automated as possible, and it seems that it's one of the goals of the devs to have long term automated wars and interaction. However, players who manually scout are at a huge advantage, as they can move around the map at will to find players and their territory- there's even a search feature built to make this easier for players.
One way to counter this would be to remove the range limitation on observers. This would allow player scripts the same power that humans already have- namely, to load a room and look at it. Just like a human with a browser can look for nearby portals, so could a script. This would be a great equalizer and could encourage more automation.
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This is a good suggestion, especially with the rapid growth of the map, and the lack of scouting that can be done through the portal in an automated fasion.
Without a limit you can actually see what's going on on the other side of said portal. Seems like a good suggestion!
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Sweet idea. I love it.
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I would also be in support of this idea, but perhaps if it's decided that this is "too much information", I'd have an alternative that I would think of as just as useful:
Don't modify the observer behavior, but give something of a "room overview" equivalent to all players to be used maybe at most 10 times per tick. This would give just the information available on the world map to the script next tick: room owner, controller level, reservation, controller message, and a 50x50 grid of numbers 0 through 3, representing empty space, road, wall, or owned (non-public-rampart) structure.
For someone with 10+ rooms, having an observer in every room would give the ability to get detailed data on at least ~0.3 seconds per room. I'm putting it in time to compare with a not-as-automated player, who would be able to manually look at and think about room data strategically maybe at ~10-15 seconds per room. Just giving an "overview" though, and giving it equally to all players (regardless of number of observers), would be on par with what a more manual player can do scrolling around the world map. I'm all for automation, but also I don't want to let players who are joining the game with a community or pre-built AI have too much of an advantage of those who are starting out with manual control, and only just starting to automate their scripts.
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Increasing observers range is a nice idea, and we're going to address this through power creeps abilities. More details will be published in the power creeps design doc soon.
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Just FYI in case anyone else wonders if this happened, it was added to power creeps, see OPERATE_OBSERVER https://docs.screeps.com/power.html#Power-Creeps
