Posts made by Atanner

I think the idea, in general, is great of having an alternative to creep only or terminal only resource transport. There are a few things that seem a bit awkward though like warp containers not connecting to neighboring rooms.

As an alternative proposal I would suggest:

• 1 Warp Container per room.
• Warp Container Transfer Range of 1 Room
• 100k Build Cost
• Internal Capacity of 5k
• Decay cycle runs every 1000 ticks and does 500k damage. Requires repair
• Transfer Damage = resourceAmount * 5;

New Functions:

• WarpContainer.repairFromInternalStore(amount: 500) // heals 25000 hitpoints
• Creep.opperateStructure(WarpContainer, {transferTarget: room, resource: energy, amount: 5000})

Decay Cycle That Decays on Timer 1000 Ticks Does Damage to Structure Can be Healed with a function. WarpContainer.repairFromInternalStore() at a rate of 50 units per energy. Or a creep can use a regular style repair for 100 repair points. I think the cost should be 5 energy units per tick equivalent. There should also be damage done during the transfer function.

Needs Creep to call a function to transfer resources. Range 1. This means that if you let an enemy player near it they can transfer out the resources forcing you to defend the warp container from enemies. This solves the issues around ownership.

If a player executes a transfer it becomes "reserved" by that player. If another player transfers it becomes neutral. This makes it similar to reserving controllers currently.

There currently is a very limited use case for the UO boost chain. But what if it was tweaked slightly. The repair and build boost currently has an effect where it increases the effectiveness without requiring more resources.

What if the UO boost provided +50% +100% and +150% effectiveness (A work part would extract 3,4,5 energy respectively) when harvesting energy. It would do this without additional depletion to the energy source.

This would introduce an interesting use case for UO and create a market for it. There would also be an incentive for early-stage players to develop boosting code for the additional energy gathering.

There have been a few more power creep types announced for some time. Any word or update from the devs about them? The Commander and Executor roles could be a great use of future power levels so I want to start planning for those.

I support the idea but the breaking change would be an issue my idea linked below would solve the issue adding a new structure similar to the existing extractor with a built in container. Maybe storage capacity of 5k-10k

https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2772/static-source-farmer-structure/7

@deft-code said in Static Source Farmer Structure: Hauling from a 2000 cap container isn't any less efficient than hauling from a larger capacity structure.

Cough Cough Carry Capacity Boosts Cough

If the structure has say 5-10k capacity it opens up some interesting mechanics like boosted energy haulers sharing multiple sources. May actually create a market for some of the non-military boosts.

@jbyoshi

In my code I calculate the value of an action in credits. For example how does extracting energy compare to power or minerals. Each has a unique cost in the number of intents and CPU usage relative to produced value.

I think there are other things to consider such as efficiency some players have better positioning or code to handle specific tasks. At different times they may consider themselves a buyer or seller of CPU based on their immediate conditions. Example ample power resource nearby or minerals to extract or wall construction times vs periods of relative stability and mineral cooldown.

There has been a bit of discussion on the slack:

So main concerns would be limiting max execution time of a player and total effect on server compute time.

I think the first concern would be taken care of because of a limited number of sellers and huge demand. I think that initially a lack of sellers would lead to high initial prices until the market has some depth and a "fair" price could be determined.

Unlike other resources, this is one that all players would be interested in which could dramatically increase market participation.

The idea is a market for CPU. The most simple way to implement this would be to transfer bucket between players.

For example:

Player 1 has 10000 bucket and player 2 has 5500 bucket.

Market order for 500 bucket at 1 credit per bucket.

Order executes and Player 1 Bucket -500 now 9500 Player 2 Bucket +500 now 6000

Benefits:

Increased CPU available in time of need.

Credit sink for game inflation w/ Market Fees (NPC's Buy and Sell increasing total credit supply)

Clear Metric for value of CPU when doing cost benefit analysis within code.

Cons:

Could be overused or abused by small group of players but in a market system supply and demand would balance out.

Suggestions:

Up Market fee to 25% on energy orders to remove more credits from the ecosystem.

Bucket is still limited to 10000 cpu.

As a late game mechanic static source farming could reduce server overhead by simplifying the process of energy extraction and also making it more uniform and predictable.

Concepts to consider:

Late-game concept by having a high build cost involving both energy and secondary resources.

Should there be a maintenance fee? (Need to periodically insert resource ex: ops resource?)

Size of internal storage container - 3000-10,000 would be my suggestion for sizing.

More Powerful Invaders in Industrial Mined Rooms - Requires Creeps to Clear it

Shorter range and quicker landing nuke option. Regional conflicts seem to have stalemated nukes are under powered and the delay makes them less useful except in the longest of sieges.

A shorter range option would be useful one with a quicker delay would be useful for base defense or offense.

2 ideas:

cruise missile - Can attack non claimed rooms. This could be used for strikes on enemy reserved rooms dealing enough damage to destroy containers, roads and standing creeps. Limited strike size 2-3 tile range.

artillery - Similar to cruise missile but 2 tick delay only from fire to landing. This would make it ideal for defending against incoming creeps when coupled with observers at range of 2-3 rooms.

Currently the game allows us to go past our max CPU by a maximum of 500. This can also happen when players have errors in the code and there is a timeout.

So here is an example. A node with 20 users on it:

Lets say that those 20 users have a total GCL of 200. Ok so they all get 20 because of Subscription.

20 * 20 = 400 cpu.

10 * 20 players * 10 gcl  = 2000 cpu

That is just the base number 2400 cpu or 2.4 seconds for this tick.

Now on this node 50 % of these players dip into bucket. And 1 has an error in his code that causes him to hit CPULimit.

Ok so those players exceed bucket by an average of 10-20 cpu each.

10 * 20 = 200 cpu

Then the resets:

that one player does not have his script killed until 500 cpu past his limit!

so in this tick player scripts cost 3100 cpu or 3100 ms.

Now this is without the game doing any updates to the 40-50 thousand energy sources, 30 thousand mineral spawns, checking portals, creating portals and power bank and more every tick.

The game tick rate is as held up by the slowest node of the server cluster so I am suggesting the 500 cpu rule be reduced to 200 cpu per tick. That way poor scripts would cut out faster freeing slow nodes more quickly and improving tick times.

I have been watching the league map as I am sure others have as well and I have been saddened by the number of players I have seen without remote mining. These are players who for whatever reason have decided to let their subscription run out and to leave the screeps community.

I wonder what it would take to add additional computing power to the screeps servers in order to deal with the high tick times. If not that could high cpu usage operations be moved to other server infrastructure in some way in order to help speed up tick processing? (Market functions etc)

I feel like the game continues to slow down. I have been playing since october of 2016. (Not as long as some of the old guard) And I remember how tick times used to be almost half of what they are now. I would love to see tick times decrease and the pace of the game return to what it used to be. Currently the game is becoming too slow for my liking - I don't want to leave the community and with it the time I have put into developing code. (I used to do a GCL every 10 days or so but with tick times increasing its now taking me much longer than that). 

I would ask that the developers add additional server infrastructure to support the growing community. 

Atanner

Just wondering about the ETA of the Power Creep Update. Any word on that?

Atanner

I would like to see two things changed about the market and terminals.

1. The first is that the market API only allows for buy and sell orders in .01 increments. For most minerals this is fine but it does not allow for much of a spread on the energy market.

I would love to see this changed to .001 or at least .005

So we could see orders like:

.0049

.00495

.005

Then for minerals a price increment of .005 as well which would allow for more options.

2. I feel like the costs for energy transport are too high. Mineral transport costs seem about right but the cost to transport energy eliminate the usefulness of sell orders of energy. It does not make sense to pay more to transport energy than the amount transported. The energy transport fee for market orders should be reduced by a factor of 10?  

Or perhaps this change of energy fee when transferring energy could also apply to terminal.send()'s