3. PTR Changelog 2016-09-19

PTR Changelog 2016-09-19

  • SUN

    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.


  • I like the GCL*3 limit for reservations better.

    Nerfing remote mining makes it much harder for new players to get a foothold.

  • Culture

    Another pile-on comment: GCL*3 limit makes a lot more sense. I had to rely on single source mines to get up through GCL4 given where I started. 3000 -> 2000 for a single-source room means actually very close to zero profit unless you size haulers, add roads built + repaired, add containers, have remote mine defenders, and don't have bugs in any of that.

    Having rooms surrounded by two-source rooms available for remote mines does seem to give a bit too much energy. SK's seem pretty heavy too. Some adjustment would be nice.

    The mineral changes seem harsh... but not as breaking as reducing single-source mines to be profit-less.

    If two workers harvest the same extractor in the same tick, do one or both succeed?

  • Culture

    So since the market has required essentially a rebalance of the entire game and a restructuring of the most basic ideas of the game that have existed for over a year now (that is, keep your rooms spaced out to mine the most sources), is it safe to assume we will be doing this incredibly annoying dance all over again for the next big update (which I am 100% sure is not power creeps)?

     

    Also I want to point out that it's ridiculous that you have the time to do this but you don't have the time to give the reasons for doing it because of "OSS server" (which I personally really don't care about)


  • I'm not a fan of most of these changes. Harvesters mining minerals every 6th tick? What will all these harvesters be doing for their 1000+ downtime ticks? It's not enough time to get anywhere else to do something productive. Why not just raise the cooldown and lower the amounts some more? Seems like an unnecessary energy/cpu sink. Even T3 boosted harvesters will be much slower than before the changes. 

    1 source reserved rooms will be much harder to get energy-positive. Why take away the option to control the nearby 1 source rooms? Is it to impose another cost on players looking to reserve nearby rooms to stop NPC attacks in their main room?

    I've been energy starved.. Maybe it's expected to be a requirement to have SK harvesters at mid-level GCLs?


  • If we go with the cap of 3 reserved rooms per 1 claimed room, can you just make all room having 2 sources right now? Otherwise it's just incredibly annoying with large swath of rooms being empty -- realistically no one will ever claim 1-source room anymore, nor reserving them.


  • First off, thank you for engaging with the community on this and sharing your rationale. It is difficult to see the big picture as a player, it isn't easy to look past how a change like this will affect you. I'm willing to bet there is a lot informing the decision that I have no way of taking into consideration.

    That being said, it seems like one huge energy sink will be power processing, and players just don't have incentive to do that yet. I share dissi's experience, once I turn off power processing I start to run into energy overflow problems very quickly. Perhaps power-creeps will bring their own bonuses to energy gathering that will offset that cost once the feature is introduced.

    Nerfing mineral quantities is probably a good thing. It will weaken my position considerably in relation to the other players who are contending for the top ranks, but it does seem a little unbalanced to be able to boost as many upgraders as I do. I think making the quantities consistent is also good. As it is, a certain room can be an otherwise great settlement choice if it weren't for the fact that it hosts an H/O mineral, and you already have that coming out of your ears. This re-balance should make those rooms attractive again, and make picking your next room a little less like finding a needle in an H-stack.

    I think the reserved-room limit seems like a bad idea. It will be harder to establish a buffer between you and other players. It will also be harder to reserve a future room choice to keep it from being turned into a novice area (which is bad for you and bad for the novices). If this were to happen, I think additional mechanics should need to be adjusted as well.


  • To add on to my previous comment, I don't mind if you make all rooms having 2-source AND nerfing their energy + reservation limit to GCL*3. My concern was more on the fact there would be a lot of rooms unused otherwise, which I dislike (it would limit some kind of room design/ game play). You can tweak the energy output to get to the number that you like.


  • after a heated coffee-less discussion here are a few more suggestions:

    - nerf the 2-sourced reserved rooms as intended, but don't nerf the 1-sourced rooms, giving some hope to the newly players that are surrounded by such rooms

    - boost the owned rooms sources so that the new players can more easily establish their empires

    - nerf the SK rooms even more energy-wise

  • Dev Team

    So since the market has required essentially a rebalance of the entire game and a restructuring of the most basic ideas of the game that have existed for over a year now (that is, keep your rooms spaced out to mine the most sources), is it safe to assume we will be doing this incredibly annoying dance all over again for the next big update (which I am 100% sure is not power creeps)?

    And again, I repeat:

    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.

    We were concerned with the resources balance long before the market had appeared. And yes, the next major gameplay feature after open-source server is power creeps, as stated in our Roadmap.

    Also I want to point out that it’s ridiculous that you have the time to do this but you don’t have the time to give the reasons for doing it because of “OSS server” (which I personally really don’t care about)

    Doing this means merely changing some constants. “Giving the reasons” means publishing (and polishing) a lot of inner raw info, which would require order of magnitude more efforts.

    What is the real reason behind it? It now seems impossible to boost all your rooms 24/7 with XGH2O. Was this the goal?

    This is exactly the goal - to not be able to XGH2O-boost all your rooms with your own minerals. Otherwise, you have no incentive in importing resources.

    The market was quite healthy lately, and was stabilizing. It seemed to work well. This change might throw it off again.

    We are not concerned with the market yet, it’s too young.

    What happens with current reserved rooms? Will random rooms be unreserved?

    It’s a legitimate question (in case if we go for reservations limit) that I don’t have the answer to yet.

  • Culture

    After crunching some numbers this morning I've come to the conclusion that the nerf of max claimed rooms to GCL*3 is better.

    Numbers on this with current change:

    Upkeep with 3k: [579.80] - profits - 1110.20
    Upkeep with 2k: [468.09] - profits - 658.57

    It will almost halve my energy income, but still keep my CPU usage the same, leaving me no room to focus on other parts of my code.

    If we get a GCL cap, I'd probably stop mining the rooms I only want to protect and own, but not actually mine.

    If the GCL change would go through It would also free up roughly 45 CPU on my part.

     

    > This is exactly the goal - to not be able to XGH2O-boost all your rooms with your own minerals. Otherwise, you have no incentive in importing resources

     

    I have optimized my mineral intake a LOT with the sole purpose so I could do this, I had to buy H, K and X on the market to sustain it. With the minerals I'm still wondering if this will become possible, even with buying minerals on the market, I was actually importing minerals before the change.

  • Dev Team

    I have optimized my mineral intake a LOT with the sole purpose so I could do this, I had to buy H, K and X on the market to sustain it. With the minerals I’m still wondering if this will become possible, even with buying minerals on the market, I was actually importing minerals before the change.

    Infinitely boosting all your upgraders with XGH2O (up to 15 WORK per room according to the RCL8 limit) in all rooms should be impossible at all. XGH2O should be rare and precious boost that is available only for either short period of time or a small set of your rooms. 

  • Dev Team

    OK folks, the decision is:

    We postpone first two points in the changelog until power creeps are released.

    The reason is that there will be a power creep class with the Power called PWR_EXTEND_SOURCE that allows to increase sources capacity for one cycle, including ones in reserved rooms. This skill will have a cooldown depending on the skill level (and thus on player’s power resources processed), it is similar to the GCL-based limit. After they are introduced, reservation itself will no longer boost sources capacity, but it instead will allow to apply PWR_EXTEND_SOURCE to sources in neutral reserved rooms:

    Game.powerCreeps['MyPowerCreep1'].usePower(PWR_EXTEND_SOURCE, theSource);

    This move will include all the good parts from this discussion - it will introduce a natural soft limit on remote harvesting depending on the player level while differentiating territory reservation and energy sources boosting.

    We estimate that this change will take place in two months. Enjoy your remote sources in the meantime! 🙂

  • Culture

    > Infinitely boosting all your upgraders with XGH2O (up to 15 WORK per room according to the RCL8 limit) in all rooms should be impossible at all

    Fair enough! Now I can plan my usage of those minerals accordingly.

     

    > We postpone first two points in the changelog until power creeps are released

    Since I thought this was the main reason for the change, I think it's the right choice. In the beginning people will struggle with the new code that's needed to support their empire again, but that seems to be expected.

     

     

    Can we get a "power creeps thread" going on which we could provide feedback on your plans?  

    I think presenting changes during the beta-stage will give you valuable constructive feedback from the community. 

  • Dev Team

    Can we get a “power creeps thread” going on which we could provide feedback on your plans?

    I think presenting changes during the beta-stage will give you valuable constructive feedback from the community.

    We’ll publish some design docs on power creeps classes and skills in the blog when we get the overall concept polished enough.

  • Culture

    Awsome, don't make it too polished 😄


  • Can multiple harvesters hit the extractor when its cooldown is at 0?

    Can you share your vision with the cooldown? Is the expectation that every room has a dedicated harvester next to an extractor that sits on it's laurels for 85% of its life? 

    I have updated my solver for optimizing a single unboosted mineral harvesting creep using the proposed cooldown changes.

    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 12 steps away with roads before change  ~.8 min/tick   ~4.6 mineral/energy     61456 ticks
    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 12 steps away with roads after change  ~.7 min/tick  ~1.25 mineral/energy  71500 ticks

    So for inside a base, it'll cost about 4x as much in energy to harvest and maybe half a day longer. not bad!

     

    And when you look at it for extractors in a center room:

    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 100 steps away with 10% roads before change ~.65 min/tick   ~1.3 mineral/energy  76450 ticks
    • RCL8 for 50k resource @ 100 steps away with 10% roads after change  ~.52 min/tick  ~.6 mineral/energy  96250 ticks

    So going for a center room is still viable, but costs over twice as much and will take over a day longer

     

    Where the cooldown will effect me the most is SK rooms. I currently get about 300 ticks of harvesting per creep between fights, but that'll turn to 50. I don't have equations for this yet, but i doubt my current 'single creep kills Keeper and harvests' will continue to be viable.

     

    On another note, the ERR_TIRED verbage is an odd description for a structure.

     

  • Culture

    Another idea is that a cooldown could be removed by a continuous regeneration. The extractor "mines" the mineral up. You can later "harvest/transfer" the minerals to the creep.

    say every 5 ticks a mineral regenerates between 3,5 and 7 minerals. The max of a mineral storage could be extremely low as well.

     

    > Where the cooldown will effect me the most is SK rooms. I currently get about 300 ticks of harvesting per creep between fights, but that'll turn to 50. I don't have equations for this yet, but i doubt my current 'single creep kills Keeper and harvests' will continue to be viable.

    You can do 4 ticks of fighting, than 1 mine in between

     

    > On another note, the ERR_TIRED verbage is an odd description for a structure

    ERR_BUSY seems more suitable to me as well


  • @Revrick, Dissi: a link also returns ERR_TIRED while still cooling down.

  • Culture

    Oh cool, forgot about that.

    ERR_TIRED seems better 🙂