PTR Changelog 2016-09-19
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| so easy to reserve and mine 10 remote rooms per one claimed room.
For bigger more experienced player, maybe, for newer/inexperienced player like me mining more than 1 or 2 remotes is difficult. I do have many inefficiencies in my code, and it could definitely be improved, but as someone who has limited time to work on screeps code it would be very frustrating to have even more energy problems due to lower income combined with the cost of keeping the room reserved.
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I’d say we’re nerfing not just energy income, but remote energy income. When we designed all the energy costs and sinks in the game, we weren’t considering the fact it can become so easy to reserve and mine 10 remote rooms per one claimed room. It was our design flaw that is revised now.
Among other things, I thought that was a good thing, because it means those rooms are not claimed, and that limits the # of minerals being mined, which certainly seems to be something your proposed changes indicate you desire.In Screeps, selling and buying is not a result of surplus (there should be no overall surplus of minerals at all, it means that game generates more minerals than it can consume), it’s a result of balancing between different mineral types in order to get proper compounds as quickly as possible.
Fortunes are made or lost over localized imbalances in distribution.
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I'd like to highlight this again. This change has nothing to do with the market balance, supply/demand, orders, etc. It's all about large-scale economy balance - i.e. overall resources produce and consumption in the game. Their distribution between players is unrelated.
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If the energy income is being cut, are you expecting empires to shrink accordingly?
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For bigger more experienced player, maybe, for newer/inexperienced player like me mining more than 1 or 2 remotes is difficult.
Another alternative to reducing unclaimed energy sources capacity (first two changes in the changelog) would be limiting the reservations count available to a player depending on his/her GCL. Say, three reserved rooms per one claimed room. You can harvest as many remote sources as you wish, but you can “upgrade” only 6 remote sources per claimed room maximum. It'd allow to achieve nearly the same effect we want to see with these first two items in the changelog.
What do you think about it?
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Being limited to only reserving a certain number of rooms would be just as limiting if energy is nerfed. unreserved rooms right now are barely worth harvesting. if energy is nerfed as is the plan, unreserved rooms will never be worth mining, it would cost more to mine and end up with no energy gain. I can understand nerfing minerals, but as others have pointed out, the entire game revolves around energy, reducing available energy makes it that much more difficult to advance.
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EDIT: I just noticed you mentioned it would be the same effect as the original reduction, implying this would replace the original nerf plan, I could see that working better than a straight energy nerf.
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Another alternative to reducing unclaimed energy sources capacity (first two changes in the changelog)
would be limiting the reservations count available to a player depending on his/her GCL. Say, three reserved
rooms per one claimed room. You can harvest as many remote sources as you wish, but you can “upgrade” only
6 remote sources per claimed room maximum. It'd allow to achieve nearly the same effect we want to see with
these first two items in the changelog.
What do you think about it?This looks like a much better solution if the issue is excessive reservations. I honestly doubt that there are that many people who would be affected by this change, but it does allow for GCL scaling, which I like.
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Another alternative to reducing unclaimed energy sources capacity (first two changes in the changelog) would be limiting the reservations count available to a player depending on his/her GCL. Say, three reserved rooms per one claimed room.
I like this idea much better. Having no limit on room reservations essentially means there is no cap on how much energy you can bring in(EDIT: other then spawn ticks), and simply adding a limit would be a better solution rather then nerfing everyone. My only suggestion, rather then basing it on GCL, it may be better to base it on actual claimed room number (ie GCL 7 player with 3 claimed rooms, would have 9 reserves not 21). This should make people spend more energy on defending their rooms too, as the number of claimed rooms with dictate how many remote mines you can have.
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I greatly prefer limiting reservations, but I'm concerned about how rooms you don't plan on mining but are still important for territory control would be affected. Could there be some secondary type of reservation where the sources are still capped down to 500 energy, but you obtain territorial control of the room to prevent players spawning in it?
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This looks like a much better solution if the issue is excessive reservations.
The issue is excessive energy. But we can deal with it in different ways.
I greatly prefer limiting reservations, but I’m concerned about how rooms you don’t plan on mining but are still important for territory control would be affected. Could there be some secondary type of reservation where the sources are still capped down to 500 energy, but you obtain territorial control of the room to prevent players spawning in it?
Some time ago, when reservations were not increasing energy sources, there were almost no players who reserved something just for control sake. I doubt it would be a very demanded feature.
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How long ago was that? The player population has grown substantially even since I have joined, and I'm concerned about territory control with the number of players who are looking for places to spawn being so high. I know for myself that the way the map features around me are designed that a few rooms are important to the navigation of my creeps around my empire, but I don't want to mine them for multiple reasons.
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My thoughts-
* Nerf the source keeper rooms more than you're planning on it. Even if you don't nerf the reserved rooms the source keeper income is really unbalanced right now, and if you do introduce a cap on number of reserved rooms then it will make the source keeper rooms even more valuable since they don't need to be reserved at all and thus wouldn't count against the limit. In the case that you do introduce a cap I would recommend putting the SK rooms down to 3k.
* Don't put H and O at exactly the same as ZKUL. Maybe nerf them a little, but not to the extreme you're talking- at least not until after we'd seen how these other changes take affect.
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Artem, first of all, thanks for listening to the community.
Thanks for explaining the problem, which really is energy abundance. I can certainly say that this seems plausible. When I turned off power processing for 1 day my storages were full within 5 hours, and bugs ensued. Let's battle that problem together.
For n00bish his statement about territory control, E6N11 is a perfect example of that. It prevents invaders from spawning at certain areas, which is useful, If we're going with this change this should be a must. It's also amazing for annoying players by preventing them from mining certain areas.
I DO like the GCL*3 change, my only worry is current player locations as well. some rooms will only have 1 source, which will probably become obsolete after this patch. this can be fixed by either "reserving" the territory compared to "boostSourceClaim".
It does raise the issue:
- Current player locations are picked based on certain expansion idea's, these might be thrown overboard now.
- What happens with current reserved rooms? Will random rooms be unreserved?
I currently got 134 reserved rooms and 28 owned rooms. With this new proposal I would have to cut back on 47 rooms. Which is fine by me. I will probably drop the 1-sourced rooms, and just reserve the territory.
Theoretical resource limit for my GCL will be ( 29 + 87 ) * 2 * 10 = 2320, which isn't close to what I'm running on now, but I can adjust.
For me personally It will also require less code changes to get this running, I don't have to re-look into the energy calculations whatsoever.
------------------------------ Mineral thoughts ----------------------
Minerals did get hefty nerfs lately:
- 20K to 50K timer increase
- Now 50% mineral decrease for all minerals, and H and O by 75%
What is the real reason behind it? It now seems impossible to boost all your rooms 24/7 with XGH2O. Was this the goal? The market was quite healthy lately, and was stabilizing. It seemed to work well. This change might throw it off again.
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Don’t put H and O at exactly the same as ZKUL.
Don’t forget there are twice as many H/O rooms as Z/K/U/L on the world map. That can be approximately matched to XGH2O formula (the most used compound).
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I know there are twice as many rooms, but people have been claiming rooms based off of the current structure. That means that for the market, and peoples empires, to properly respond it's going to take time as people unclaim rooms to reclaim and build to RCL6 the newly more valuable H and O rooms. For that reason alone I think it makes sense to phase this in.
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I'm totally against the reservations limit unless it counts towards sources and not rooms - e.g. u get 6 boosted sources in the reserved rooms, but not allowing us to reserve rooms basically negates the idea of it.
All the players that complain about the reduced reserved room sources are at low GCL, so increasing the owned room energy sources from 3k to 3.5k should fix their concerns with not much extra energy input into the game
SK rooms definitely need more nerfing
I'm also sharing Dissi's and tedivm's concerns about the H and O minerals - there may be twice as many on the map, but noone has claimed twice as many of it, so maybe reduce them by 50% as the rest?
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I'm totally against the reservations limit unless it counts towards sources and not rooms - e.g. u get 6 boosted sources in the reserved rooms, but not allowing us to reserve rooms basically negates the idea of it.Id suggest seperating claiming and boosting sources, and requiring a claim to unlock the sources.
1 claimbodypart doing creep.boostSources(controller) gives... 100ticks of boost, but they disappear if the claim runs out.
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> 1 claimbodypart doing creep.boostSources(controller) gives... 100ticks of boost, but they disappear if the claim runs out
This makes claim creeps more expensive than the source gain.
I think the gcl limit is a great idea, but maybe we should call it mining outposts and normal outposts.
Mining outposts can be reserved like now and increase source count.
On the other hand we have outposts, which can be reserved. This should yield 2 "reservation ticks"
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So, my own two cents are that the original balance changes seem like a good idea. It takes some adjustment in the meantime, but it's not a "breaking" change. It just means that the current behavior of some AIs would become inefficient or counterproductive. I like the original plan because it places a natural limit on energy (i.e. a point at which it's impractical or unwise to reserve another room) rather than just implementing a hard cap. Natural limits are, I think, more interesting from a gameplay perspective. Viability of remote mining is then limited by how efficient you can make your mining operation, not by some arbitrary number.
Big thanks to Artem so far for engaging with all the feedback, it's great to see you're interested in (and responsive to) our thoughts. I think some of the concern stems from the fact that, as players, we are all constantly seeking more resources. This makes the thought of scaling them back both unpalatable and scary, but I totally agree that excessive resource abundance is a gameplay problem right now. I would much rather experience short term pain in adjusting to a change in how efficient some processes are, then end up with a lot of artifical / arbitrary game limitations in the long run.
