[GCL] GCL - Circumventing the "cap" is ridiculously easy
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>>> "No, non-root rooms simply don’t contribute to GCL at all, i.e. the limit is zero."
While I think the root controller idea is interesting, this seems very prohibitive to me. I'd be curious to see how the root controller idea works without imposing this restriction on other rooms. This allows the player to choose whether they want to live with the limit or choose to route energy to the root. Otherwise you force everyone to route energy to the root. I assume the root will usually be the newest room your are building up.
At the very least I'd request that this change would be rolled out in two updates where the first adds the root controller and the second later removes the GCL contribution of other rooms.
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@heggico you wont get GCL point anymore for those rooms, only room upgrade points. Only the root controller will increase GCL for your empire.
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@Dissi I missed that, yes then it would work as intended
It would limit me quite a bit since I have a few rooms spread out, but I'd be able to figure something out (I hope).
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I like the idea of the root controller, but I'm not a big fan of making no GCL progress from any other room.
What if the "Root Controller" was a structure you built, limited 1 per player, buildable at RCL 8 for 1 million energy. Upgrade points put into a normal controller give half a point to GCL (in addition to upgrading the RCL at a normal amount), and points in the root controller give double.
You could even put in a danger aspect to it - If the root controller structure in a room is destroyed in any manner, you instantly lose claim in that room. That would also act as an impediment to players changing their root controller locations.
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Not being able to easily move the root controller around would definitely hurt players who are more distributed (like me), but I understand that most people don't choose to spread themselves out that much.Other than that, it sounds like an interesting idea! You'd still be able to pour lots of energy into GCL, but you have to choose how you balance your empire's energy carefully, and there's more than one viable strategy for using it.
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I'm not a fan of this change as is. It is going to affect the lower level players far more than the high level ones. A high level player gets a new room (GCL increase) very rarely, while the lower level players get them more often- if you look at the lower level players they tend to have more than one room below RCL8. The way this change works would only allow one of those rooms to "count" towards GCL.
I think a universal "cap" at 15/e/t combined with this "root controller" that does not have any limits would be a bit more fair.
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That will result in never overtaking high GCL players.. They will always have a higher gcl, thus a higher GCL/tick ratio.
I can easily see smaller players be more efficient at moving energy to this room than me and taking me over at some point.
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@ScottyC I don't think this root controller should be build able, or special for room level 8. I think it should apply to everyone. I also think that 0 GCL progress without a root controller but normal RCL progress is a good thing.
Right now I have one goal in every room. Push RCL to 8. Screw everything else. All other decisions depend on pushing RCL to 8. The truth is after RCL 4 or 5 I really don't do anything in a room. That's not to say that the higher RCLs are not nice, they are, but one room isn't going to cut it. I need boosts, or remote mining, or something else to keep forward progress and not get killed by a wondering creep.
By making this change (root controller) I now can choose to either stop at 4 and push GCL, keep going slowly to 8 while pushing GCL, or seed to 8, ignoring GCL on a per room basis. I can see a lot of potential here.
For example I could see at GCL 5, 1 root room, 4 rooms to RCL4 and dumping all energy to the root room, even though it means a lot of turn over on the 4 "satellite" rooms.
I could also see 1 root room, 1 "blocker" room that creates a choke,point, and 2 rooms that are barely RCL 3
I can see a "far flung" empire that has 5 rooms so far apart the claimer almost didn't make the trip, that rapidly push to RCL 6 for the terminal, and then use it to push all rooms to 8 in a sequence almost totally ignoring GCL.
I like that there are a lot of options and configurations, and I like that it add an easy, but important layer to logistics.
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@Artem from Screeps
I would prefer one root per player.
I means that one way or another a room has more value and is a better target.
If I attack Dissi's root room, and make it though all the outer rooms to do it, that should cause a major disruption. It adds a different tactic. Ignore the satilite rooms and go for the heart.
It also makes dead end one source rooms have a lot of value. Where better to put your root room. It also allows for some interesting tactics.
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if you look at the lower level players they tend to have more than one room below RCL8. The way this change works would only allow one of those rooms to “count” towards GCL.
It seems to be a strategic misstep of such a player then. He should do his rooms one by one - get one room, upgrade it to RCL8, get another room, move the root, repeat. However it has its downside - you always will have your root in the most exposed and unprotected room with this strategy, however it is the most efficient way to use your energy. Decisions, decisions.
It is going to affect the lower level players far more than the high level ones.
High level players will have more transfer expenses than lower level players.
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An excellent discussion. Makes me glad to see such ideas flying around.
I always struggle between the effects changes might have to my own play style and the effects they have to the health of the community.
My first instinct is always to analyze the consequences on myself. From that perspective, the root controller sounds like a really cool change. It would fit quite well with my own distribution and management. It would be a net benefit to my overall development and would allow a nice optimization in terms of CPU/GCL.
However, when looking at the suggestion of a root controller from the other angle, I believe the effect will be negative. It would add complexity to early game style without any clear added benefit. Gaining access to your second room is already a very confusing experience. Having to then differentiate between GCL/RCL growth makes it worse.
Overall, I do get the feeling that the devs are trying to "direct" the strategies and development plans employed by players. This is fundamentally wrong. Focus on simple mechanics and allow the game to evolve freely. Ensure balance by tweaking mechanics, not by introducing artificial limits or complex rules on top of the existing mechanics.
In short, I suggest just applying the terminal adjustment proposed in the PTR. If people want to keep an open room slot to perform this sort of "high growth" strategy, I find it an acceptable trade off.
The optimum solution imho is to remove the RCL 8 cap all together. The market and in the future the power creeps already present alternative energy sinks.
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Gaining access to your second room is already a very confusing experience.
I agree, but if a novice player managed to parallelize his code and is running 2 rooms already, then it won’t be a huge problem for him to implement a simple terminal-based pattern to move all energy surplus to one particular room.
In short, I suggest just applying the terminal adjustment proposed in the PTR.
The terminal change doesn’t address this particular issue, it’s just an inconsistency that should be removed, it is not supposed to solve the unclaim/claim exploit.
The optimum solution imho is to remove the RCL 8 cap all together.
RCL 8 limit is supposed to create incentives to leverage energy exchange between rooms. The strategy of pumping all your energy into one room to increase growth is absolutely legitimate. It is the unclaim/claim exploit that should be addressed, not the high growth. The valid solution to the high growth issue is power creeps indeed.
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I agree with @Atavus - this new root mechanic has no actual benefits towards all players, but only negative ones. For instance:
- players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized
- will limit the growth and returning of the news players to the game
- the "root" movement is once more very penalizing for the low GCL players that should keep it constantly moving while the high GCL players that have their codebase ready will not need to worry about such issues but just pick the most appropriate room of theirs for root and they'll be all set
If the claim/unclaim exploit is all that you find wrong here, - just add a week/month timer for manually unclaimed rooms and that's it
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You raise good points SteeleR,
I think the overal impact can be limited by taking the following considerations
- players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized
You can still "collect and save" energy between transfers, players can also choose to have more rooms clustered together. Single rooms are vulnerable as it is.
- will limit the growth and returning of the new players to the game
- the "root" movement is once more very penalizing for the low GCL players that should keep it constantly moving while the high GCL players that have their codebase ready will not need to worry about such issues but just pick the most appropriate room of theirs for root and they'll be all set
This is a valid concern. The cooldown of switching the root might be prohibitive for certain play stiles. I think if we can couple cooldown of switching the root controller to the GCL level of a player ( 10K ticks * GCL ?) that this might be mitigated. Switching root controllers in early stages should be fairly cheap. This also allows for more flexibility in the early days.
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If the claim/unclaim exploit is all that you find wrong here, - just add a week/month timer for manually unclaimed rooms and that’s it
Yes, this seems to solve the immediate issue, but the root mechanic not only makes the process more complicated, but also adds some new fun to it, the centralized aspect to your empire.
players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized
Only if they don’t make use of the market and its credits empire-wide sharing ability.
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I agree with you Steeler, but I don't think your solution is enough to stop the problem. A sector has 72 rooms? If you make the delay a week, it takes a week or more to get a room from 1 to 8 when you're big enough. That means you just need 2 rooms. If you're smaller there is less of a need for more rooms to do the same thing. If you make it a month its a little more difficult but you'd still be able to cycle through 3 or 4 rooms to do the same thing.
The root controller is way too restrictive if it is the only room that can contribute to GCL. Even if you get a second root at GCL 10. What if you got 2 root controllers to start and then a third at GCL 10 and a fourth at GCL 20? Or something along those lines.
It seems like the intention is that minerals get balanced while energy gets funneled. What if all rooms had a max energy into the controller which then resulted in a cooldown period. This would allow you to put as much energy into a controller as you wanted at a time but once you hit the limit you see the cooldown and have to move energy to a different controller until the cooldown expires. The cooldown could be different depending on your GCL. Shorter for low GCL, longer for high GCL. You'd have to do some modeling to see what the cooldown should be and how it scales with GCL, otherwise you could just dump energy from storage when a controller is in cooldown and then stock up until its available again. i.e. the cooldown needs to be long enough at higher levels such that storages would overflow if you had a clump of 3 or 4 rooms you filled to 1 million energy. But alternatively, I do feel this would allow people to develop different strategies to deal with it.
Still think caps should be universal whether they exist or they don't.
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I think Atavus brought up a very important point:
> I do get the feeling that the devs are trying to "direct" the strategies and development plans employed by players.
Consider what Artem has said, talking about the current 15 energy cap for upgrading an rcl8 controller:
> This limit is more about the fact that RCL8 room is considered “completed”, and you’re supposed to shift your focus to other rooms.
Without the cap, there are already enough game mechanics to encourage players to do this. It is already better to put energy into a controller for the purpose of increasing both RCL and GCL at the same time, rather than just GCL. To completely stop developing new rooms will put a player at an obvious disadvantage. The cap is completely redundant for this purpose.
A game needs rules, without limitations there isn't a cohesive context for making player decisions, and the game falls apart. Sandbox games aren't games that lack rules, they are games that have the fewest rules possible that still provide a background for game play. Screeps is great at this. It should be a sign that you've made an amazing game when you have players doing things that weren't necessarily intended in the original design. Amazing art projects, clocks made out of creeps, diplomacy and social aspects emerging that are completely designed by players. Creating the canvas that produces this kind of behavior should be seen as a great accomplishment for the developers of screeps.
I don't see over-directing of players as a systemic problem in screeps. Rather, this seems like an isolated case, and hopefully something that will be taken into consideration as new game mechanics are developed.
For the record, I really like the root controller idea. If you are looking for the simplest change to solve the current problem, it fails. But it seems really interesting in its own right. I'm spread out too, it will hurt in the short term. But it has already been the context for a lot of interesting discussions in our alliance. Having some kind of "Capital" is reminiscent of classic war games and I think a lot of interesting strategies and counter-strategies will emerge from the mechanic.
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If the claim/unclaim exploit is all that you find wrong here, - just add a week/month timer for manually unclaimed rooms and that’s it
Yes, this seems to solve the immediate issue, but the root mechanic not only makes the process more complicated, but also adds some new fun to it, the centralized aspect to your empire.
Yes, it really seems like a nice new mechanic, but not appropriate for the time being (mostly for the reason below)
players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized
Only if they don’t make use of the market and its credits empire-wide sharing ability.
The game is already alliance-based and probably all of them trade firstly between each other and then on the market. Meaning that any new player, small alliance or a separated room/group of rooms won't succeed having to utilize only that kind of a market to "connect" to it's empire "center"
You've said that the rcl 8 rooms upgrade cap is because those rooms are considered finished and thus should have limiting factor to the progress of your empire (which seems like a totally wrong assumption given the fact that only when the room reaches rcl 8 u can actually start playing with it, unless in the novice area of course, and each such room is the engine for your empire in that part of the sector/map and thus should not be limited in how we chose to utilize it)Having the power creeps added will result in a huge energy sing, unless your intention is for them to bring more energy/resources to the empire than they require to develop so whether that upgrade cap is lifted or not won't matter at that point, right?
About the claim/unclaim functionality that this thread seems to be - by your explanation for the cap limit, as mentioned above, the intension is not to limit us in any way of how to spend the energy we get or how fast to progress, so why this mechanic seems wrong?
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This mechanic does definitely seem interesting, but I would be much more open to it if there was a smaller cooldown.
As is, as Steeler said, it very heavily penalizes spread out empires, and practically makes portal-expansion completely pointless.
As of now, my furthest two rooms are have a linear room distance of 104, and all of my rooms are either claimed by moving a large distance, or by moving through a portal. I felt this was a good strategy at the time, both because it allowed for more remote mining, and so that it was harder to "attack" my empire.
If this change goes through as is, it will leave players like me at a huge disadvantage compared to the ones who just chose to "dominate" an contiguous block of rooms.
