I don't like the power level cost of deleting power creeps. The cost should not scale so much, it would be easier to digest if it were a constant. I also don't like that deleting a high level power creep and deleting a low level power creep have the same high cost.

@artch said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:

Each player has 30 experimentation periods initially, and we will replenish them from time to time when major balance changes occur.

These experimentation periods do resolve (though somewhat artificially) the issues above, but would any of these replenish naturally over time, even without major balance changes?

There will definitely be times when I (and probably other players as well) will want to do a massive change in code base or strategy, just for fun or to change things up. Losing potentially dozens of power levels to do this would be devastating, and in some of these cases I feel like I would rather respawn than lose those power levels.

I would rather not have to respawn, but it does seem preferable to me over losing many power levels in some cases.

Can we have our experimentation periods replenished when we respawn?

Yesterday (October 10, 2018) at 3:10 PM GMT-6 I received a notification email with the following content:

1 notification received on shard0:
[Priority 0] W44S27 storage and terminal full 

The problem is I do not own that room, nor am I near to it, and my code does not generate messages like this. I believe that this must be a notification generated by another player and somehow mistakenly sent to me.

Not really game breaking or anything and I don’t have any way to reproduce it but I just thought it should be mentioned.

I guess really i'm more interested in something to paint a target on players who've been alive for a long time rather than something in which you can "rise in the rankings." Granted whoever ends up at the top of it would have something to brag about if they can stay there, but i thought of it less as something you can quickly rise in and more of a prioritized list of targets

@Atavus what would be difficult or destructive about it? Really i kind of just want something to encourage people to attack, and if the targets of those attacks are people who have not been attacked in a long time i feel like that is a really good thing. In the 2 years i've been playing you are really the only person to have attacked me. If there was something saying that player [insert player name] had not been killed for 2 years, it might encourage people to attack them.

Even if it was in the form of stats. Like if there was a sortable stats page that showed different stats about all players and one of those stats was how long it has been since their last respawn that would be pretty cool. Could add lots of different interesting stats.

Also i believe something like this would encourage battle, even if it did not necessarily show how good at combat you are: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2338/survival-leaderboard-time-w-o-respawn

There have been a number of requests for an additional leaderboard:

https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2330/warfare-ranking https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2305/a-third-leaderboard https://screeps.com/forum/topic/257/npc-strongholds https://screeps.com/forum/topic/200/leaderboard-by-unique-code https://screeps.com/forum/topic/183/credits-overview-leaderboards

and many of these would be great to have. Each leaderboard gives players one more thing to strive for. Something else at which they can try to be "the best." It also gives potential reasons for competition which I think is also healthy for the game.

I think it would be cool to add a Survival Leaderboard that would show how long a player has been in the world without having respawned. This leaderboard would not reset every month like the current leaderboards and a player's rank would only reset when they respawn (or are completely wiped out, maybe determined by having spawns?).

I would like this because I believe it would encourage people to target and attack those at the highest ranks much for the same reason that children feel the need to knock down a lego or block tower.

It would also encourage active players at high ranks to work on their defense code to prepare for such attacks.

In my mind, players would reach high ranks using one of the following methods:

1. Strong or clever combat code such that defeating them is difficult and they have therefore survived.
2. Creativity. Perhaps they have rooms spread out across the whole shard(s) and are therefore difficult to extinguish without coordination and portals. Maybe they have good "cockroach" code that automatically rebuilds quickly and is difficult to fully destroy.
3. Luck. They have not been attacked or are in a fairly inactive or peaceful area.

I myself have never respawned in the now 2+ years that i have "played" the game and i have little to no combat code whatsoever. I've (almost) never needed it. I started in a semi-peaceful area and then ended up joining forces with other players and was eventually surrounded by allies (and now dead sectors in shard0). I believe this was a bad way to play. I want to be attacked more and to have the need to work towards better combat code.

There isn't a high enough incentive to attack people. Its expensive. Unless they have territory you want or have angered you in some way, whats the point? This leaderboard wouldn't solve the incentive problem but it may help in some way.

If this leaderboard did encourage attacks in the way that I hope it would then it would also end up encouraging the killing of "zombie players" who are not actively playing or working on their code but whose empires continue to take up space and scare new players away from spawning near them for no good reason.

Any active players that are targeted would just be given reason to improve their code.

There could even be incentives/rewards for reaching certain amounts of time without respawning or for defeating players who have reached certain amounts of time without respawning.

I still think that a leaderboard similar to what i suggested in this post (https://screeps.com/forum/topic/257/npc-strongholds) would be a decent way of doing a combat related leaderboard.

If the NPC strongholds get stronger and stronger every time they are defeated until resetting after a certain amount of time undefeated then a leaderboard could track the highest level of stronghold that you have defeated. High enough levels may even require cooperation with other players.

This would reset (every month?) just like the other leaderboards so that you have to be attacking every month to keep your "battle" ranking high. The NPC strongholds would have to have good enough rewards to make it worth it as well.

Something like this would not be very "abusable" because it is not quantity based, but difficulty based, and if the difficulty scaled a lot then it would could also give bored players something else to work at or a reason to work together with other players in an attempt to beat them.

So i have a bug and a couple questions.

Bug: Harvesting seems broken in PTR simulation. I wanted to test if i could still harvest a source from a tunnel. I could, but at the same time i found out that harvesting does not work if it would give you more energy than you can hold and it no longer drops energy on the ground, the harvest just fails, even though it still returns 0. Energy still does not drop to the ground even if you have energy equal to your capacity.

The idea of harvesting from inside of a tunnel brings up other questions:

1. Will we ever see areas of rooms that are completely surrounded by natural walls? Due to the inability to construct tunnels in a hostile room i understand that these areas would not be fair in normal rooms, but what about in Source Keeper rooms? or center rooms? It would be interesting to have extra high yield resources locked behind natural walls so that we have a higher maintenance cost involved with collecting them. Or even high difficulty NPC strongholds surrounded by natural walls so that you have to construct tunnels while under attack in order to reach and attack the structures.

2. Are all actions intended to be able to be performed from inside tunnels? Upgrading the controller, attacking, ranged attack, heal, ranged heal, etc? I haven't delved too far into the combat implications of this change, but there will likely be all kinds of new defensive strategies allowed by this change that may not have been considered.

3. Tombstones and dropped energy will have to be able to be on top of natural walls, what about containers or any other structures besides ramparts?

EDIT: Also just found that roads show up on top of constructed walls now even though you cannot walk over them. I'm assuming that you cannot "tunnel" through constructed walls. If so, the road should probably not show up on top of the constructed wall.

@artch O.o I must have missed that, sorry and thank you. Has it been decided how to handle power in rooms without controllers? In this post (https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2183/power-creeps-update/19) it was mentioned that it had not been decided yet.

@artch so Room objects will have a property to tell us if power is enabled or not? If we can observe it this is good.