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.

@artch Hmm. What are the benefits of focusing on power level instead of GCL?

GCL has a lot of passive benefits:

1. I control more rooms so I get more resources
2. I am bigger and harder to wipe out
3. I have a lot of control over my spawn density (I can go build closely together in contested areas and spread out more in uncontested areas)

Since a Power-focused empire is harder to manage (since it relies on actively using powers instead of just being large), it seems to me that there should be some kind of payoff if you actually manage to make it work. Also, some of the powers need to help you secure/farm/process power banks, possibly fighting with larger neighbors. It seems like the obvious missing power in this design is OPERATE_POWERSPAWN that makes processing power not require a huge amount of energy that you need high GCL to collect.

It's possible power empires will make more sense once the commander/executor comes out (the one that makes raiding profitable? I forget which it is).