Nice @artch. Lowering the cost for boosting, increasing flexibility, and adding room for future optimizations. My one complaint is that a boost shouldn't break the renewCreep, it would mean you can't renew anything boosted in a lower level room. Might be nice to be able to force a renew.

@Atavus Great idea, thanks for driving this! I highly recommend people tune in to watch, I run the server as fast as possible so in the beginning it'll run at multiple ticks a second. Very fun to watch the bots autoexpand at great speed.

Would be kinda interesting if there were periods of very high spawns of trains. Having a couple event days a month where there was 15 active trains per shard could be a cool community day and could incentivize people to write code/engage more on that day.

Overall, I'd rather see how power creeps affect the strategy side of the game before working on content that has a parallel impact. I think if after power creeps have been out for a bit it's worth looking into, although I'd rather have arena.

I think we need a screeps RPG. I want to watch the birth of a creep, experience their struggles in making to their source, the tireless effort they put into mining, and finally the sweet rest when a younger stronger creep comes to take their place.

I kinda like the idea, although tbh with power creeps coming we are unlocking enough new dynamic content that I feel no need for this. Also, if there were super structures, I'd much rather they were an upgradable structure like a controller that you can keep building and improving rather than 100million energy to turn it on. This gives players something new and cool, while retaining a goal to work towards. Basically another long-term energy/mineral sink that players can use to work towards an ultimate room.

Eg, for a teleport pad, range would increase and cd would decrease as you upgraded the building. Upgrading would have the same scaling cost increase, so level 1 would be ~10 mill, level 2 would be 20 mill, lvl 3 40mill, etc possibly forever. Makes rooms high value targets and makes players extra invested in them.

The idea of upgradeable towers with modules kinda falls into this. Eg you could have an in-room teleport with a bunch of speed modules but no range ones, so you can just port your creeps around your room. Or a ton of range modules and no speed to drop creeps off 5 rooms away.

Munitions factory is an interesting concept... I'd be interesting in seeing one that produces barricades/shield that are deployable, like on-demand weak rampart/wall creations. But all this feels very much like overlap with power creep goals.

Great suggestion! I'm all in favor of it, I was just thinking about it a few days ago @davaned said in PTR Changelog 2018-08-28:

Remember when the carry boost also made you require more move parts to get around? I'm all in favor of making logical changes to get it in a more balanced state. Honestly I think harvest would be another good one to look at, maybe it should make you mildly more efficient as well as faster.

It might not be bad to keep it faster AND make it more efficient, considering we are going to have ways to increase the raw source amounts. Something like mining twice as fast and 25% increase in returns.

You could also split the mineral/energy effect too. Getting bonus minerals might be a bit too strong comparatively, getting 100% increased return on mineral seems too good.

The "get knocked down a lot in a single attack" isn't the big issue imo. That just means that every target is an incredibly high value that players want to attack. The whole "unable to rise in rankings" is what makes this a lot less engaging. Maybe if you had a leaderboard for the kills of these rooms. Still, your ability to attack a single specific room is very limited by location and portals, so a motivated player would have to wait a long time for an opportunity to attack.

@likeafox Whoah whoah what do you have against doctors healing? I personally find the unflagging cooperation of thousands of individuals far more unlikely, we should add a rebellion mechanic to screeps.

Remember when the carry boost also made you require more move parts to get around? I'm all in favor of making logical changes to get it in a more balanced state. Honestly I think harvest would be another good one to look at, maybe it should make you mildly more efficient as well as faster.

What would people feel a balanced amount for carry to handle? I'm not sure it would be a good idea to increase the price of carry, given how crucial it is in low level rooms.

I'd argue that power creeps are new game+

One of the biggest concerns with this game is the shear volume of code you need to be "ok". And each step below "ok" leaves you utterly vulnerable. If you don't have defense, you get totally stomped. If you don't have boosts, you get totally stomped. And now if you don't have power creeps, you get totally stomped. Each represents vast amounts of code that needs to be discovered, written, tested, fixed, and thats all without factoring in all the other roadblocks on the game.

Power is a vast investment of resources (energy, code, credits, time), and very much seems like lategame content for experienced players. Don't force everything on new players at once, let them unlock things naturally and not permanently be at a hopeless disadvantage. No need to put kids learning to ride a bike up against tanks. My 2 cents on the issue.