Posts made by QzarSTB

@artch Chronicle would still show total score (but perhaps periodically cached values in stead of real-time). The type-specific amounts could be shown when you select the deposit structure.

Sharing score with room owner/depositor does not fully prevent in-alliance boosting but it would at least be limited. The "boosted" player would only get half the score from everything he deposits in rooms owned by his alliance mates. This would also result in the small players getting score on the board if an aggressive neighbour forces them to give their score (like what smaykit and I have this season).

@artch If you keep the score separately for each type, you could sort them by value DESC. Each index would increase the multiplier to reward having score equally in as much as types possible.

Example: Player AggressiveNoobSlayer wipes everyone and gets 1k score op type A. His score is 1000.

Player FriendlyNeighbour works together and gets 500 A, 250 B, 150 C and 100 D : 500 * 1 + 250 * 2 + 150 * 3 + 4 * 100 = 1850.

Those are extreme examples of the multipliers but make it easy to explain. Also: Have you considered sharing the score between the room owner and player that turns it in? This would prevent an alliance boosting a single player which is the biggest concern with enforcing team play IMO.

This would force me from wiping everyone around me with the proposed rules to actually work together. Please don't forget about the players which actually want to see FFA gameplay, maybe alternating the seasons with FFA and teams?

@artch You see it as no incentive to kill players, I see it as no incentive to keep them around. The amount of "dummies" which cost a minimal war investment to wipe them (at least pre-RCL8) is about 50% of the userbase. But we'll see, I don't expect Tigga/Geir/Rob etc to become good samaritans all of a sudden and it's just a small group of players responsible for like 90% of the players being wiped this round.

@artch Yes but the score spawn in would still be similar as the current season right?

Let's assume I have 1 room myself and cleared my sector: I can gather all the score for 1 type and process it.

Let's assume I let my neighbours live and work together with 4 other players in my sector: We can process 5 types in total, but since we work together on AVG we only get 1/5 of each of those 5 types.

Both scenarios would give me the same amount of score.

@artch Top players will definitely work together unless they're competing for the same spot in the ranking during the later stage of the season.

If you work together with 1 other player you can fully control 6 sectors together if you just wipe all smaller players. You'll each have 10 rooms so if you pick those carefully you can together process 90% of everything spawning in those 6 sectors.

Compare that to working with 4 or 5 small players, it'll be a chaotic mess. It's true that you'll be able to process probably every type which gives you potentially a higher total score but you'll loose much more due to score which those other small players capture and "waste".

I think lowering the difficulty to get some score on the board is nice for newer players, but I'm pretty sure this isn't going to solve players getting wiped.

With the rule set proposed like this, I would definitely team up with 1 or 2 other players which ranked top 20 this round and still wipe all the smaller players in between. I would really urge to implement a mechanic which was proposed multiple times in the feedback topic to cluster the top 10 ambitious players together in the map center.

If you would just include that controllers in the sectors near the map center give you 10x the score, the sector sector at range 10-20 rooms 3x score and rooms further away 1x score I think you would perfectly solve this issue.

@donatzor Find the catan ref!

To keep a healthy player base I think it would be very important to allow the players with not very mature code bases to play during the season as well. Currently if you've spawned anywhere around Geir and haven't been competing in BA/SWC events you would be pretty much done for.

What I would like to see in next iterations of the season: Try to get the players competing for top 10 positions near each other and try to accommodate for areas for newer/less aggressive players as well.

As an example for the season 1 score gather/deposit goals you could have the score collectors in the center of the map reward 10x as much score for each turn in than the score collectors at the map edges (and then just a linear distribution related to distance from center). This would force players which want to be in top 10 to spawn near the center and leave the edges for the less competitive players.

As for the season 2 ideas: I would love to see some heavy fighting over "score"/trophy points. Every sector has a portal towards a fighting arena in which you would have a "domination" game mode. For each tick you have the controller reserved in this fighting arena you would be getting points (we would need to have multiple arenas, like 10 or so and not have every sector connected to every arena at all time).

If you're on windows I can strongly advise to run the dockerized version of screeps-launcher (https://github.com/screepers/screeps-launcher) in Docker with WSL2 support. This gives you much better performance than the private server option from the client (on med-end hardware I can run 100ms ticks).

Can you please review the "terminal structures cannot be constructed"? I think disabling the market is fine but not having a terminal will require a lot of code changes/deviation from regular code.

You should store the identifiers in memory and then use Game.getObjectById() to retrieve the live object.

@Tigga I agree that actually being able to defend the drop-off point would be cool, but wouldn't a simple cooldown mechanic which limits the drop off throughput be much easier to implement (already exists in game) and have the same results to what you're proposing?

Edit: Limiting the throughput might even result in the top players needing to get control of multiple drop-off points, which would be nice IMO.

Will those "mined resource items" be in your storage/terminal and counted at season ending or will it be more like the power processing? If you keep the resources in storage/terminal it'll be more exiting near the end of the round since they can get stolen by aggressive other players.

Yeah I have it sometimes as well, only encountered it in the steam client not the web version.

The problem is that you can't simply keep adding shards. There needs to be a mechanism to end/clean up existing shards as well.

Problem with wiping existing shards is that you probably loose some paying customers which is not ideal, unless you make it an actual game feature such as NPC invasions which keep becoming stronger the longer the shard lives and eventually wipe all players.

Reading through all the comments here shows the devs have pretty well thought about it, and thanks for the active respones from their side!

Something that's not very clear to met yet is how you deal with these "account resources" in combination with the "seasonal mode" that's being worked on. In my opinion it's very important that these seasonal modes are a "fair" fight which shouldn't be influenced by account resources either gathered from paying with RL money or originating from the persistent MMO mode.

The seasonal will become quite competitive I guess and being able to retrieve an advantage there would seriously ruin this mode. Would it be possible to completely block selling CPU "blocks" in this mode or at least restrict it until you reach like GCL5 or something?

You mention that you "completely wiped all screeps related data", but can you double check that deleting the "Steam\steamapps\common\Screeps\server\db.json" file doesn't resolve your problems?

Can we get any update on this devs? What's the conclusion based on the poll results and how are you going to proceed forward?

I think the question about how long a "season" should last is very much linked with the tickrate. You would want to at least be able get to GCL 5 or 6 within a round and get some RCL8 warfare involved.

Curious how many players would want to pay separately for this and if that would cover developing "unique content". It's not really different from unofficial community events which tend to only get around 20-30 players.

@o4kapuk

I've looked further into the issue and I think I've found it. I think it's caused by providing the energyStructures towards the spawnCreep call, and one of the extensions that you pass has no energy and therefore an empty store object.

In the "newEnergyHandling" method you have this code:

    let availableEnergy = _.sum(energyStructures, id => roomObjects[id].store.energy);
    if(availableEnergy < cost) {
        return false;
    }

and a bit further:

        let energyChange = Math.min(cost, energyStructure.store.energy);
        energyStructure.store.energy -= energyChange;
        bulk.update(energyStructure, {store:{energy: energyStructure.store.energy}});

The lodash _.sum seems to be very robust and handles null/undefined without a problem. A Math.min() with undefined in it will give NaN, so I think this is were the problem originates from.

When not providing energy structures to the spawnCreep call I can't reproduce the issue, so If it's not what I described above there's definitely something else wrong in there.