Topics created by Gankdalf

As someone who have one of the best defense systems, I'd like to add my two cents. There are indeed many of clever thoughts I see here, but still there is something to be said. It's theoretically possible to have a perfect defense, but, in practice, it's extremely hard to write. First of all, you need time for coding, and, more importantly, you need test cases for your code. On other words, you need someone to attack your rooms. The stronger the attack is, the better defense you can create. I was lucky enough to be attacked by one of the most capable raiders (of course, in times of that battle I didn't see it this way, but now I do), but this is rare. And without a good attack on you, there are too many things you need to consider, too many things could go wrong... and you have no motivation to do it. Terminals? Go ahead and overflow them all with some cheap mineral, it's extremely unlikely that anyone has a code to detect this kind of attack and create market orders to free his terminals. Be creative! As said before, an attacker have the advantage of being proactive, he is able to find a breach or uncovered case. Like, throw a nuke into a wall. Boosted repairers spawned? Ok, throw a nuke into labs block (not many people cover them with ramparts everywhere). Rampart construction sites didn't appear? Congrats, you just found a breach. The game mechanics are deep. It's always possible to find a way to fool any defense, and the only way to have a perfect defense is to experience all kinds of attacks ever possible (and if a defender survived them all... he probably deserve to sleep well). The only perfect defense is a defense that being upgraded.

For anybody that encounters this issue now, I was able to fix it by copying the assets directory out of node_modules/@screeps/launcher/init_dist into the location where by db.json file is located. I had messed up launching the server initially and removed some files and assets must have been one of those things I removed.

The variance is fun, I think rooms like that have their place in the game.

Rampart juggling is also effective. Just keep the invader marching back and forth between two of your ramparts. Sure that doesn't kill the invader but it dramatically reduces the amount of damage it will do to your wall. The real point here is there are multiple effective techniques to deal with them. In a tight combat scenario against an aggressive human neighbor strong invaders could be a real problem but that is true regardless of RCL. It might be a good idea to disable invaders in a battle arena but I think they're fine on the MMO server.

@davaned I assume it would follow the same rules as withdraw() and prevent it with ERR_NOT_OWNER

Fixed, thanks.

@tigga My original thought behind the sniper was that it would actually be very effective at killing shielded creeps by doing that 1000 damage, but it fires one extremely expensive (like 10k power or something) as its entire capacity

I have several creep types that are intended to stay beside the spawn at all times, so they are spawned without MOVE parts. If someone entered my safemode base and sat where one of these creeps go, it would completely kill my base, unless I canceled the spawning creep and spawned an attacker to kill them. This seems like something that shouldn't be required in safe mode.

@alaricdragon Yeah the "can't be removed" may be a little harsh. It might make more sense to have them "researched" over time with a cancel button in case you messed up. The proposed power creep design doc would also give existing players a huge advantage. Power has diminishing returns though, in that the more mutations you have, the more they cost. You can see the original design doc for an example of this. Even the most power hungry players on the server can't even reach max level with that chart. That being said, the old design doc had no way to remove power from the game. Once you obtained it, you always had it. This adds a cost in: respawning power creeps costs power. It's minor, but I don't really think it needs to be that excessive if the diminishing returns are setup properly. Power creeps in general I think will be very hard to implement into the game, or at least time consuming. I don't know how much effort the devs have already put into the system, since they have been in total silence about it. I have been poking around in the open source server code though, and I am thinking it might be possible to implement as a mod on a private server.... but I think I need to finish the rewrite of my normal in-game codebase before I take on that one lol.

Another modification of the idea would be that every 1000 ticks, a certain amount of GCL progress is given out split between every player who successfully reached the obelisk with a claim creep in the last 1000 ticks. This would make it beneficial for even a single successful attack against the obelisk holder, while still encouraging the defense of the obelisk to increase personal reward.

On the one hand I really like the idea, on the other I think the return on investment and opportunity costs are too high. A feature like this will take tremendous amounts of time to design, implement and balance. The trade-off is what else could be done with that time (power creeps ) and what that would gain. I think while this is fun, the costs to design it are disproportionate to what it gives back the players. Then again, it would really contribute to the "end game" - I can imagine a point where your code nears 'completion', and this would throw in a reason to stick around. It's a trade off and I don't really know what my choice would be.

Actually it is worth noting that this likely would cause accounts to have to be recognized by a unique number instead of their name, but it would make at least me very happy.

@jbyoshi said in Screeps Discord?: Why not set up a Discord/Slack bridge? I'm part of a project that started on IRC and then later added an "unofficial official" Discord server. To prevent fragmentation, we then added a chat bot to link them. Screeps could do something similar. This would give us the benefits of both Discord and Slack, whichever you prefer to use. I did something like that for a eve alliance some time ago, and it failed because of rate limits. I don't remember which side was the problem, screeps or discord, or if they changed the limits.