Posts made by Puciek

And that sounds like a bug because this means you are never able to send one energy. In which case, a better response would be for transferEnergy to either throw an appropriate error or take the cost of 2nd energy from the link if available (seems convoluted).

As you can see in replay link: https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/E36S32?t=14525440 despite the near-sources links transferring to the near-controller link, it doesn't fill up to 800. Instead it seems stuck at 799.

I wanted to see what's going on there; maybe some decimal value snuck in there somehow but no luck:

```Game.getObjectById('5797e8674596861a413fe9aa').energy
799```

I also checked with Laszlo, owner, and his code doesn't specify amount in transferEnergy, so it must be somewhere in game code.

Thanks for looking into it!

To bring some ideas from chatting in slack about it:

1. Something is needed to make the transition smoother. As it is PTR cannot reliably be used for it as it's a major pain in the ass, for multiple reasons. One suggestion that surfaced is that maybe, way before deployment of this patch, provide us with a  call that will give us a number of how much fill current flags cost under the new system. Something like Game.future.flagsWillCost() that returns the amount of CPU used to parse the flags with the new way.

2. We still want some way to visualise code and memory on the grid in an easy way, but without the cost. I love the idea that dissi suggested around the first page for icons which player creates themselves and most likely has to recreate them every tick so they won't be again used as free memory storage.

3. In CPU fairness, there should also be, very soon, implemented a way to stop players from paying for reset-storms. This is something we don't control, and yet is affecting our CPU and buckets on a regular basis, sometimes to the brink of shutting people down if they don't have code to handle that unexplained surge in CPU usage. Right now we are getting more and more cost thrown at us, fair enough, but can we in exchange have the costs we are not responsible for removed? It's fair that we pay for healthy-server reindexing, but it's not that we pay for server issues.

I kinda like it, but can we at the same time remove the high creation cost of them, so they will be more in line with how memory works?

The only person not in need of walls would be a newbie in an empty area. And that will only last this long, as sooner or later someone will spawn in and, if he wants, block the heck out of that person. So yea, every new player should, as very first action, mine and put 1hp walls at all the exits, as this is a very smart, cheap and easy thing to do. But then we are exactly where we were before, but with new players having one more thing to learn and worry about.

So every new player very the first action should be to put a wall at each room exit? Then I struggle what would be the harm in placing them for that new player in the first place, what is the benefit of burdening players with it, when instead they should focus on getting basic economy running as the click to 20k race ticks?

I think you underestimate the impact of moving from the sim, not to mention tutorial, to the real world. Because sim is only as good as what cases you will create in them, and how many cases can a player with no actual play experience create in there to prepare? Even if you are diligent through the tutorial, did it twice (like I did) and kept referring to it as you go through the first code, you will spend hours before everything is running. And it will be running too poorly to get you that tower before old walls would expire in most rooms.

But alas it's not my call to make whether you want to make it easier for new players to join the game or not. What worries me that the player base is already shrinking each month, and very soon we will have more members in #general on slack than total players in CP leaderboard at end of the month.

Yes Artem, that is all true, we can ask all players to spend days in sim preparing before playing in the game and then sitting for hours in their first day fixing bugs anyway, just to keep alive. And then spend hour more to deal with someone doing that, because that is something not covered in sim. Of course this won't work for someone who has out of screeps obligations and can't sit for hours on end adjusting to all the unpredicted stuff, that person will simply come back next day to colony making no progress and being on verge of protection mode without tower up.

There needs to be a point where this game need some newbie accessibility over "oh it's simple once you know how to do it and that you know it is going to be a problem", and I would say that walls were good at providing that.

As much as I like the reinforced mode, I highly dislike it's impact on newbie zone. We already have people on slack (and it is multiple talking, who knows how many are affected) where the very moment a new player spawns into a green zone he gets horde of 1move (or another cheap combo) creeps swarming into the room and being major pain in the ass, from blocking spawns to resources, controllers, routes, etc. A picture is better than thousand words:

https://i.snag.gy/lnV6sT.jpg

And granted, a newbie can spawn an attack creep and kill them, but that is stretching for a new player. Even in the old system, with 20k of serenity, many struggled to get to the tower before protection expired, and now they are also expected to code in attack creeps? It makes the game that is much less welcoming to new players, while not affecting respawns of "veterans."

That is just too much, can we get newbie walls back after a respawn till a better solution is available?

Thumbs up on that! Although it would be really good to have automatic detection of that and killing offending creeps (plus maybe notifying staff) as new player who are mostly affected by that already will not know to report it and will get upset, potentially quit, instead?

\In this case, this is a reasonable change, because as long as in the nuke flying period you will reinforce/rampart the walls enough to take the damage + couple K ticks worth of drilling, you will not wake up to every dead base. Although that brings a different problem altogether that earthed recently with safe mode and newbies - that even without attacking you can just spam room spawns with 1 MV creeps and disable it without having to kill. Would it be possible to fix somehow that, so for example during safe mode spawns can spew out creeps a bit further away?

Well, as from previous discussion it was also to protect you from buggy defense code and to remove, a bit, of the advantage from attacker he gets for being online. With those changes you will throw your nukes first, time them to come at edge of someones sleep time and start attacking couple thousand ticks before they land. If he triggers safemode in that before-nukes time, it goes to waste and he doesn't get a second one, if he doesn't then attacker whacked a lot of walls already and nukes are inbound to do the rest. And if his code broke, or has some issue, he won't have a chance to compensate for it.

So if someone wants to spend the 300k energy and 5k ghodium (even with mineral changes, not much) they can negate the point behind safe mode? I don't think that I like it one bit, as that together with the increase of damage and range turns nukes from, very much, useless to too much and for rather meaningless change in cost.

I dislike it as this entrenches large alliances even more by removing their worry about terrain or land-locking one another from further expansions (and doing that with only penalty being cost of portaling creeps around). If your alliance is so big that you cannot even support one another that is a good sign that it's too big.

Can be left out as an option, fair with me, but I would really love to be automatically logged in when I start the steam client. The need to start it and then click the "login" button seems like absolutely unecessary step to me, especially since this is the only action available.

That isn't a win button, it's a pause button in essence. And your complain seems to be basd on principle that while you, the attacker, must be online in order to attack, defender shouldn't be granted that luxury and instead be wipedout in 2 hours? Why won't you code your attacks to go automatically as timer expires? Of course that has has certain disadvantage of risking your entire colony and what you've worked for in hands of code, as attacking someone makes you very vulnerable to counter offensive, or offensive from someone else, and you want to be online to defend your colony when it's under attack, right?

Then why deny the other side the same right? This is a game of code, and so far the much higher code pressure (or even entire code pressure in pre-boost realms) is on the defender, as succesfull attack can be led with literally 90 lines of code across 2 roles + manual placement of flags and minor command line tweaks. And that is just not right compared to effort required on side of defender to compensate for it.

Artem just make sure that those spawned invaders will not drop minerals/energy on death, that could easily turn into new improved mining ;).

But you can buy the ghodium, or work with your neighbours and get it just fine, without their help, especially since you don't need much of it for either small back-up supply of boosts or reinforcing room (and you can get credits from selling your own stuff to players/npcs). It really isn't impossible or effect os some conspiracy theory that you don't have it up and running. But that is not to diminish the problem of large empire players, and lack of incentify for them to kill one another, just that it should be handled in separate topic as it's a much larger issue that need a large and separate solution. And blackballing something that is actually good for smaller players because it will also help the big ones doesn't seem like a good precedent to set.

And this is helping new players, especially boost-less players. Now if a boost-filled player will decide to take you out, he can do so quickly and swiftly, and unless you have monster walls it will be so swiftly that even sitting in front of PC won't save you as you won't code defences fast enough. With this you will have hours to get to pc and code in basic creep defence system which throws a massive wrench even in attack of boosted creeps, giving you a fair chance to repel it and continue fighting, rather than waking up from 7 rooms to a respawn button.

@dissi not neceserily. if the bug is not a syntax error, but for example calling a non object and its AFTER reinforce code checking, it will get executed. For example I can shove 

Game.getObjectById('abc').memory;

At the end of my main() and my empire will work fine, despite erorrs being thrown. So putting that as first thing in main will safeguard against non-syntax errors.

Not only typos and tiny bugs, but even if your entire siege mode didn't kick in - that will work as failsafe against it (or just normal bugs in defense logic). A hard limit on top of existing one, which resets on respawn, is actually not a bad idea as a limiter, although it will reward not-warring players more than the aggressive one, discouraging attacks even further.