I like the ruins concept. I already liked the strongholds, so this is all win.

Question: If I destroy a structure to create a ruin with a 500 tick timeout, can I use that to essentially bypass the "can't withdraw from a nuker" constraint? With proper placement, it should be possible to yoink the up to 400K energy from the Nuker's ruins to the storage in times of dire need.

But did you see the video of the new Screeps game at the top? That looks GREAT! It's super fast and appears to have a "time dilation" ability that lets you build an entire base fast! And that soundtrack! Awesome! I'm totally going to play that game when it comes out.

@tun9an0 Isn't being able to sell it a form of rebate?

No. A 'rebate' in this context destroys a resource in exchange for not using it. Selling it does exactly the opposite... it encourages 100% of the resource to be used (Thus increasing server load.)

I completely disagree.

Not only do I oppose resource buying with fungible resources (Ultimately, it becomes an RMT scheme.) but this goes completely counter to the direction the game needs to go. CPU is a precious commodity, one the servers need more of, despite being a gigantic farm of industrial grade servers that serve only 1800 people. What happens when there are twice that many players? 2 giant farms of industrial grade computers? Eventually, the entire planet's IT resources will be devoted to Screeps and Bitcoin.

A far better direction is to reward people for NOT using all their CPU, say, a rebate of some kind on unused CPU, so EFFICIENCY becomes a legit goal, not just a way to "have more rooms" once you already have 30 of them.

@wtfrank No, I wasn't even going there. But I could if you want, but for completely different reasons.

No, I was railing against the basic "All the cost up front, all the benefit at the back end" design philosophy. It's like an omlete recipe that allows you to make a 1, 2, or 3 egg omelet, but the difference is you use small, medium or large eggs... all the omelets use 30 eggs. (To be fair, it's hard to come up with a good metaphor for this.)

You could argue (And I'm sure you want to.) that the incremental list of minerals to make the tiers of boosts are the extra cost, but I would counter that that's a mechanic to exponentially increase the return / cost relationship for the higher tiers, not to establish the base cost of the boosts. The 'steps' between the benefit levels (typically a linear scale, like 100%, 200%, 300% 400% for non boosted, T1, T2, T3) is too steep at the beginning.

I love the concept of using boosts for economic purposes. But they're just too expensive. Prohibitively so. You can use them for things that pop occasionally, like mineral deposits themselves, with their 50K cooldown. But in common use, even a small operation will outstrip your ability to mine the base minerals, or convert other resources to them..

Combat is so rare, that you can stockpile boosts for that. But most people don't even bother with that. They never even get to the point of developing effective manufacturing and boost code since it's just easier to respawn or just quit. And there is no incentive to use boosts for the economy. (outside of mineral mining, and the niche of Power Banks with only one access point.)

My rant comes with a suggestion:

Reduce the cost of boosts for T1 and T2 by 66% and 33% respectively. Keep everything else the same, but require only 10 T1 boosts per body part, and 20 T2 boosts per body part. Why should a +100% carry boost cost the exact same amount of Keanium as a +300% carry boost? How does that provide an incentive to learn about boosts and write boost code?

There are 4 essential "costs" in game, and they overlap with each other in many ways (You can sell minerals/energy for credits and use the credits to buy minerals/energy.) The 4 are: Energy, Minerals, Lab reaction time, and Spawn time. The challenge is to balance these. By artificially inflating the cost of low level elements (T1,T2 boosts in this case, but it applies to PC powers as well.) you severely curtail their ability to be used in situations where they're less than economical in their full form, or that full form is simply not an option.

So much wrong with this, but I understand why you think it could work.

First, Screeps is not a system where your code is running all the time. It runs in slices, but unlike a Linux program with a select loop, your access to resources is not guaranteed in the time between slices.

As such, you cannot attempt to insert a realized class into an object you place in a creep's memory. You can "do it"? But it will be a data only version... as such, you most certainly cannot execute something like:

Game.creeps[creep].memory.myObj.run(); out of a creep's memory. Oh dear gosh no. Only pure data can go in memory in this context, certainly not functions.

On a private test server (But I assume the current behavior is the same on live.) I get these errors:

[4:17:24 PM]Using StructureSpawn.renewCreep on a boosted creep is deprecated and will throw an error soon. Please remove boosts using StructureLab.unboostCreep before renewing.

Ok, sure... I'm renewing a lot of creeps in that room. I started by trying to unboostCreep() them before renewing them, but that ran into a wall pretty quick as a level 7 room has only 6 labs, even cycling through ALL the labs to use them all to absorb the unboost prior to renewing (And subsequently re-boosting.) the creeps hits that bottleneck at somewhere around 3 20 WORK part upgraders.

Am I trying to "abuse the system" or is the cooldown for the unboostCreep() command unreasonably high? I'm not even using the max boost, just the T2 Upgrade (GH2O) one. I would think I should be able to do one of those (With 20 WORK.) for each lab I dedicate to the unboosting.

Looking IN the Array, you are, when looking OF the Array you should.

IN is for objects. OF is for arrays.

Goggles (04kapuk) is correct. I looked at the replay too, and what's happening is the creep is renewing every tick, and also trying the boost. The boosts actually apply... but never show up because you're renewing in the same tick. Both the boost and the renew are applied in the inter-tick time when intents are applied, and the renew removes the boosts, but the boosts still cost you.

Yeah. Don't do that. And there's a good reason for it to be this way, if you could just renew boosted creeps, that would cheapen boosts and you would use them forever. Imagine if you could just boost a remote miner's transport and renew it forever.

There IS something you can do to mitigate boost cost in certain circumstances, though... there is the lab.unboostCreep() command that removes the boosts and recovers 50% of the originally applied boosts... if you need to renew the creep, use that FIRST.