My gut feeling is that CPU tokens will underperform subscriptions in terms of revenue (and I have a fair amount of experience in this area).

It seems like the devs are replacing a simple elegant system with a fiddly complex one.

Is the goal to ultimately charge more per clock cycle? I.e. will running with CPU tokens 100% of the time cost more than a subscription? I wonder if the real fix is just to charge more for subscriptions if that is the case. We're all programmers. Our hourly billing rate is 30-50x the monthly subscription cost right now. We don't care what it costs, probably. I don't even know what it is.

I'm happy paying for my subscription right now even though I hardly play at all any more because I like supporting this weird indie game. However, I hardly ever participate in any game economy that involves microtransactions, and the mere presence of them in a "skill based" game for anything other than purely cosmetic stuff makes me not want to play the game any more. Maybe I am old and out of touch.

High level question: if Screeps were twice as good at converting free players to subscriptions would the devs be considering this change? If not, is the real problem actually somewhere else?

I would write code to harvest these, but it is impossible to test in a reasonable time frame, so I never will.

Having a 70% return for energy and 100% return for boosts seems really inelegant to me and is another weird edge case/bit of artifice I need to internalize into my code. Yuck.

Issacar's critique is on the money. You are patching the problem in the wrong place. The real problem is that CARRY is so inefficient.

It would be better to just remove recycling entirely than to introduce magic thresholds for when certain things happen, which is a design crutch. Recycling is already an edge case strategy that, if you are not transporting energy via HEAL parts, really has no use and is it even worth the CPU it costs to invoke.

Capping per part is an even grosser solution. What problem are you even trying to solve? This is only a problem because of the other design kludge introduced when you made RCL 8 rooms cap out on GCL production so the game now has this weird mechanic of temple rooms.

I think we should leave this alone and focus on shipping power creeps instead.

If it really needs to be addressed, the stupid answer is to make HEAL parts cheaper so that CARRY parts are better for transporting energy. The cost of HEAL has no impact on the game at all and could literally be anything.

My 2c

Haven't seen any updates in 3 months.

All the special rules around when Safemode can and can't be used should really be looked at.

It's too complicated and probably not the most elegant possible solution.

Why!

What is it doing?

I love screeps, but this is really painful.

@artch Yes, I didn't know about the room event log when I posted. I think adding the owner/creator as a property on each effect in the log would be helpful, otherwise figuring out when I'm being messed with could be challenging.

@helam @artch

If power creeps work in rooms without controllers, please consider adding a isPowerEnabled property on the room instead of on the controller.

Also please consider making a better way for me to tell if one of my rooms is being attacked with a power apart from periodically cycling through every single roomObject in every single room I own to check if there is an entry in .effects that I don't expect to be there. For hostile effects, it would be amazing if you told me which player owns the effect.

For instance, maybe there could be a Room.activeEffects property that is an array of all the effects active in a room. Even better would be if it were a hashmap to a list of effects indexed by owner. So Room.activeEffects['shedletsky'] will give me an array of all my active effects.

With only one tab open.

I'm using screepspl.us for grafana, but I don't think that is very chatty.

@gankdalf

I think the optimal case is that I have a pair of rooms with at least 3 sources total that are adjacent with every source within 100 ticks walking distance to each other (so a level 5 EXTEND_SOURCE PC can make a loop around boosting the sources every 100 ticks when EXTEND_SOURCE is on cooldown)

Instead of mining 1500 * 3 (4500) energy every 300 ticks, I now get 6500 * 3 (19500) energy every 300 ticks from these mines. Let's assume miners/carriers/links/whatever are free and this is pure profit.

That does sound pretty good. This power seems to be worth 50 energy/tick, or (at current rates), .45 credits/tick. If you are displacing remote miners for the same energy, it's definitely more CPU efficient since there is less hauling.

Basically I'm getting ~5 rooms of energy for free.

Now that I have thought some more about it, that seems pretty good. I suspect that most of the other powers do not rise to the .45 credits/tick value threshold.