@helam Also, given that power creeps are essentially defenseless in non-power enabled rooms, it would be very useful to be able to avoid pathing through those rooms.

A few thoughts @artch

1. Being able to see enemy power creep "bodies" will be very important, but it would also be very valuable to see when a power has been used. For example, if you dodge an opponents "kill" power because you ducked under a rampart AFAIK there will be no indication that anything happened for the defending player. This is not a rewarding experience.

There are a lot of powers that are very hard to track down. Consider adding a way to see opponent power cds/usage to make it more interactive.

2. What do power creeps drop when they are destroyed? Other creeps drop a fraction of their body cost.

3. In-game Events Power Surge: Consider having a period every month or two where power spawning is quadrupled. This will give players a chance to catch up and lead to increased player engagement during that time period. There are some other events related to invasions and portals but given that this is a power creep thread...

4. Power creep spawning: What does it mean for a power creep to die? Does their body worth of resources get locked up for a respawn period? Can a given power spawn only spawn every x ticks with a long cd? Does actually spawning a power creep take a long time? I'd love more details on this.

Random spitball: What about rework operate spawn as a way to spawn bigger creeps?

Duration 5 ticks: Spawn is able to spawn a creep body of +5/10/15/20/25 increased body size (doesn't stack). When spawn has the buff it is able to start spawning a larger creep but doesn't require it for the full spawn duration.

Allows you to have spawn some huge creeps. Make it fairly expensive, but now you can save cpu by having some huge creeps to mine minerals, upgrade, build, siege, etc. You're still limited by total room energy.

Also, this would now make renew more useful. Now you can generate mega creeps and keep them alive with renew.

@artch I'm curious about the design choice that led to "ops"

It seems weird to me that it would only exist for one creep tree, and that its a resource that's tradeable storable etc. It's like its a secondary balancing mechanic for some powers thats not an actual limitation.

Was it a variant of the classic "mana" resource? How did you guys settle on it? I think that having mana with regen could have the same effect with a fluid implementation. It would allow commander creeps have things like "energy aura" that makes your power creeps regen faster or an overload that burns up all of a power creeps mana.

So from an interesting game design: what are the gameplay patterns the ops aims to enhance? It gives some consumer vs producer market, but I'm curious to the rest.

@shedletsky Uh, the biggest benefit with focusing on CL not PL... You get more CPU. Constantly. And in this game, CPU is the single most valuable resource because you can just plain do more stuff.

It's definitely not a perfect solution. And really, I think the best option is to just do a few rooms with power creeps and super amp their production so that you are generating tons of energy and minerals, rather than split it up.

The truth of the matter is that warfare in this game isn't that well done. It's got some interesting strategies you can employ, but there is nothing to gain from combat and the shear difficulty of cracking proper rooms means that stagnation is embedded in gameplay. It's more of an economic and management grind game with the option of combat. If you choose to partake its really only for the challenge, not because it gains you anything.

Yeah, which is why terminals are the main problem in sieges imo. Hence why I stated that we needed a power that would block terminals (and was grateful we got one). Its not that hard to do effective attrition strategies vs a room, but the issue remains that resource teleportation makes it an all or nothing. To destroy a room you must destroy the empire.

My argument has never been that things are stacked in favor of offense. Everything is tuned to give defense an advantage, from towers to ramparts to even just TTL. My point is that no passive defense is unbeatable. If you code something and then stay AFK, you can get taken out.

@Tigga Great, now you pop in and out periodically locking up spawning for expansions with the defense creeps. Oh you don't recycle? Then you walk in, spawn defense creeps, then come back when they only have 300 TTL left and trigger their boosting. The chain can go on. You can keep thinking up something, but the point that I'm stating is that no matter what code you right, if you aren't active it can be reverse engineered and exploited somehow.

The point you're missing is that defense is inherently reactive. You have to think up everything someone might use and come up with some basic defense for everything. But on offense you can be creative and iterate. And the more protections against edge cases you add, the more sacrifices on pure defense you make and more chances that something goes wrong.

I like it, I think its a great improvement and a much more flexible design. Also, although I know its not set in stone I like that kill has a huge level requirement now.

Level Requirements: It would be nice to show visually how close to unlocking something you are, eg how many more levels. "Unlock at level 7" is fine, but personally I'd prefer a red X over the options with a "3" more levels till this unlocks. You could also show the min level requirements on the power description. For example:

Disrupt Spawn

lvl 1 3 7 14

Add 1/2/3/4/5 ticks etc etc

Creep Templates: As a product enhancement, it would be great to be able to save templates. Eg, a mother hen creep that just sits in the base, generates ops and operates your base.

Offense/Defense Combinations: I still think it is worth considering combining some of the weaker powers so that the offense/defense versions are a single one. A flexible but weaker power is much more attractive than just a weaker power. For example, having operate observer also allow shielding a room from observation, combining disrupt and operate terminal, etc. Basically, thinking of it more like you're picking specializations that unlock certain abilities (this is an ops and terminal specialized creep).

Operate Extensions: And I agree, I think the operate extension should be tweaked a bit. This will be one of those powers that can make things much smoother. Allowing it to use energy from a creep/itself/links would be a nice touch. The energy throughput is a bit low but I think it might be reasonable to keep it low.