I like it. I will miss exploring the new world from shard0, but I think it makes good sense for players who are thinking about respawning as well as new players.
Thanks for being patient with your vocal, fiesty community and working toward a solution on the API question. I know you here a lot of complaining when new features like this come out, but I think for most people (definitely for me) the complaining is because we enjoy the game and care about the direction it takes.
My two cents on being able to control CPU distribution from game code:
One of the things I would love to do with my AI is implement nomadism; code is always looking for new homes, never keeping a room for too long, exploring and finding new neighbors to interact with, whether the result is friendly trade, unbridled conquest, or crushing defeat. It sure would be nice to be able to have my code opportunistically expand into a shard without having to check on it myself, carefully evaluate the CPU / GCL allocated to each shard I'm currently on, and manually redistribute based on how much I think my code might want there.
First of all: I'm impressed and super excited that you have a prototype of this up for testing. Great work!
I like the idea of reducing TTL on creeps that use an inter-shard portal. I am a little worried about how difficult it will be to claim a room in another shard with the 200 tick penalty. But that may just be motivation for me to claim rooms closer to highway crossroads :).
I think the aura idea is interesting, but I have to disagree on the commander being the weakest. Here's some ways I plan on using mine:
* RENEW, and bring a healer along with the power creeps. Paired with an executor with HARVEST_ENERGY, the healer can tag along indefinitely, and avoid the need to return home to heal power creeps.
* SUMMON isn't as obviously useful for harvesting as Executors, but it essentially lets you replace the CPU cost of moving a hauler creep 48 steps across a room with a single action. This would be a huge CPU savings Seems like it could also be useful in combat situations.
* Being chased down by a sniper / killbot Executor? Put SIGHT on your own Executor and kite / instakill them.
* Being chased by a group of boosted creeps? Keep hitting their healer(s) with EXHAUST and force the attackers to stay back or risk getting shot down.
* BERSERK + cloud of snipe executors.
I can see HARVEST_ENERGY being useful if you pair it with a Commander that has RENEW. Then you can bring a normal creep with HEAL parts along with your roving band of power creeps and keep it sustained, as long as you regularly find neutral rooms to harvest energy from.
Unfortunately, safe mode wasn't a feature in August 2016. I must admit this would have been a good use case for it; I didn't have the code to do a sustained patrol to keep him from rebuilding his other rooms at the time, and it would have given him time to launch a counterattack. Either of those situations would have made the fight Too Expensive To Continue for me.
It seems like one of the problems is that newer players don't get a feel for how dangerous things like boosts are until they get wiped by someone using them. I don't think power creeps will be quite that drastic, but I can see similar situations arising once they are released into the wild. So: what if the feature that lets players spawn NPC invaders in their claimed rooms was extended to include a "T3 boosted" tier, that had creeps with 10 tough, 30 of ranged attack / attack / work / heal, and 10 move, all tier 3 boosted? It gives players who are interested in testing their defenses a taste of fully boosted creeps, but they can be banished at any time, and it still leaves room to be surprised by how real players choose to use those creeps as opposed to the NPC invader AI's smash and grab.
Nice! You are a gentleman and a scholar.
https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/E5N61?t=17143606
Play it for a few dozen ticks. Tell me what's wrong with this picture.
If more than one players has creeps in a room at the same time, often you get the "NO DATA" message when looking at room history, rather than being able to see what happened. This is kind of a bummer, because room history when two players are interacting is usually the most interesting. I suspect this started weeks ago, but since room history works most of the time, it took a while to narrow down when the problem actually occurs.
Recent example:
https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/W44N47?t=15944033
https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/W43N47?t=15944033
Here you can see an errant bootstrapper of mine in W44N47 wandering toward FuddyDuddy's room at W43N47. He does have a creep in W44N47, so it's not 100% of the time that more than one player is present. Maybe just if there's combat? Or if the room is claimed?
https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/W43N47?t=15944079
Here's the last tick that room history data is available. My bootstrapper is two steps away from entering the room.
Ticks 15944080 - 15944099 are unavailable. I suspect the data gets saved serverside in 10-tick blocks, and something in those blocks ended up as invalid data and can't be retrieved.
https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/W43N47?t=15944100
Here room history has returned, and the only evidence we have that something happened is a pile of corpse energy by the west entrance and towers that aren't quite topped off anymore.
What happened in there? What did my creep see that had to be silenced!?
Seriously though, this happened a lot in room battles a week or two ago, and it made it hard to watch how well automated defense code did.