Introduce an upper limit for terminal transfers



  • +1

    The idea of encouraging trading with neighbors is good. However, excessive cost of trading from one side of the world to the other will hurt the overall health of the market.



  • Agree that this limit could need adjustment for trading. Otherwise trading might be kinda dead


  • Dev Team

    Transfering 5000 something for a cost of 20k seems weird, you could not even buy energy from rooms which are more than 10 rooms away.

    Yes, you can’t. Trading energy on market is not supposed to be a very popular thing. But it is only about energy. When you rather trade catalyzed ghodium acid (which is 8x less in volume than energy), you may find it a very attractive deal.


  • Culture

    Well practically you're always trading for energy due to the costs. If you could trade 500 ghodium for 500 lemergium it would be ok. Any 10 rooms away now costs a shitton of energy.
    We can wait for live markets to see the impact though.


  • Dev Team

    Well practically you’re always trading for energy due to the costs. If you could trade 500 ghodium for 500 lemergium it would be ok. Any 10 rooms away now costs a shitton of energy. We can wait for live markets to see the impact though.

    You pay energy for transfer because it is just a replacement for spawning the corresponding amount of courier creeps, which also costs energy, not minerals.

    The point is that even huge amounts of energy become profitable when you transfer low-volume high-value compounds instead of raw resources.


  • Culture

    Well if it's a replacement for creeps can we take portals into account?

    If a portal shortens the range to a certain room by 10 rooms the cost could also be deducted from energy costs.


  • Culture

    +1



  • +1 for this.  The scale really needs to be lograithmic to be fair.  As it stands today, I can't trade with dissi without it costing prohibitive amounts.  To send 10k energy it would cost me 30k in fees.  The scale should really be changed to something logarithmic - I took a very quick look at the formula and came up with this one:

    cost = 0.25 * amount * log(distance) 

    The formula above would give ~8050 energy fee for a 10,000 energy transfer at 25 distance

    The formula today would give a fee of 25,000 energy for the same amount.  I'd really like to see a change so I can participate in trading with other players.


  • Culture

    "You pay energy for transfer because it is just a replacement for spawning the corresponding amount of courier creeps, which also costs energy, not minerals."

    You say it's a replacement for carrying the minerals but I specifically built a system like that before terminals were even a thing and terminals utterly demolished that system in both cpu cost and energy cost. The cpu cost alone of handling so many creeps carrying around items is something like 10+ cpu, compared to an instantaneous .2cpu hit with a terminal. Not to mention the coding complexity.

    So no, claiming parity with courier creeps is definitely not a valid reason.

     

    Not to mention creep life is limited to something like 15-20 rooms, so at the least the hard cap on terminal energy costs should be somewhere around there.


  • Dev Team