Posts made by SteeleR

why an additional structure. As Dissi said: I personally always saw the controller as a way to control the room. It should be considered the most important structure in the room in stead of the "oh yeah that thing" structure it is now.

so something like when attacking a controler you're granted temporal building rights in the room. Still, there can't be 7 towers, but if you destroy one of his - you can build your own as well as ramparts and such... The room battles will take a whole other perspective than the static one there currently is

is the shard1 map going to be the one from the PTR? How often would it expand as in the a case a lot of players decide to spawn/respawn there, it might get too crowded real fast?

well, then i'm out of quick solutions

well, "meaningful" should be handled by our scripts and if the option was to have or not have the data - yeah, i'd like to have it even when the creep dies one-shotted, but the choice is having most of this feature available soon or at an unknown period probably at the end of the year

also, why not store the info in the creep's memory - that way it'll persist even after its death

Personally, i'm ok with the info gone when your creep dies, or pointing to a non-existing ID (creep/structure died as well - we can handle storing all creeps/towers and matching that ID so it shouldn't be an issue), but what does leaving the room has to do with it?

You can store the info when different players' creeps interact which shouldn't be that often or a lot of extra data

You can't guess this by range.. there are towers, range attacker/healers and multiple close targets - even with your "fog of war" you should now know many "people" have hit you (and even if you've been hit) and for how much

1. It is going to be used by 0.1% of players.
2. It can be used only once per day, thus manual usage is not much harder than scripted usage.

doesn't matter - the game is about automation so it needs to be there - if not right away - eventually is ok - as long as the game keeps its consistency of allowing our scripts to be autonomous 

• is this a game about autonomous game scripting or a “player” will need to be manually operating it all the time

I don’t think this question is something that should be answered. It’s obvious enough that Screeps is about scripting.

GREAT! then why having this discussion and trying to disable a feature in the ingame API. We won't have the same heated comments from everyone again when the power creeps are introduced and u limit their usage to some manual intervention, right?

Also, great to hear that importing data from outside via the web endpoints is fraud upon

Artem, can you answer my questions so I can personally dial down my frustration with your game roadmap

- is this a game about autonomous game scripting or a "player" will need to be manually operating it all the time

- is the CPU limit a cup for the scripts and balancing for the players or the available server resources and thus distributing some of the processing time to an own server and just sending the data back via the API is the way the developers see the game in the future?

if the answer to the first question is that the game scripts should not be fully autonomous - the whole discussion here will go away as surely the people that are trying to create AIs that can play the game will just go do something else cause this won't be achievable here and thus pointless to waste their times

if the answer to the second question is that we should boost our ingame scripts with data imported from the web endpoints - then the discussion goes away as we'll have the answer to how to fully automate the scripts - it'll just require an external server running an off-site version of our scripts

never mind of how the technical part is actually done, i'm still concerned about my 2 questions not being answered:

- is this a game about autonomous game scripting or a "player" will need to be manually operating it all the time

- is the CPU limit a cup for the scripts and balancing for the players or the available server resources and thus distributing some of the processing time to an own server and just sending the data back via the API is the way the developers see the game in the future?

Shards resources (not just CPU, but also GCL, Power Levels, Pixels, etc) are entities of higher order than those that your scripts are operating with. Giving an ability to allocate shard resources using the game API is similar to providing an ability of, say, changing your badge or email via the API. It is related to your account and should be set up by user, not by user’s script through an in-game mechanic. The shard itself knows nothing about the multi-shard environment it exists in, similarly to how it knows nothing about other user metadata like emails.
That being said, you can always use our web endpoints (they will get official Web API keys soon) to act on your behalf if needed.

Is it only me or this answer doesn't make any sense at all - "higher order" or not, your CPU availability matters to how your script can play the game - changing the badge, email address and so on doesn't have any significance to the game itself and can be done manually or not at all. And the "shard" (if it matters at all) knows about the multi-shard environment - it has portals to the other shards - it's not like these are separate servers, but something that, at least i think we are, trying to make work altogether.

So in the end you want us to write a 3rd party script to send data between the shard. If not already, at the near future, that mechanic will be used to do any heavy processing or preprocessing outside of the game thus bypassing the CPU limit and making it uneven for anyone who doesn't do that.

Again, don't know if it's only me, but these 2 points seem really really wrong and totally not in the direction i want the game to be heading 

At the moment when a creep/structure is attacked you can only see if they've done any damage to it (if overhealed - your script can't even notice the attack) so a detailed list of all attacker sources for the previous tick would be really helpful.

I'd like to see a few more incentives to stimulate the warfare. For instance - standing next to a non-ramparted terminal would give you access to that terminal. Same can apply for nukes, observers and/or labs

(bored and tired of working so here's a suggestion..)

As the screeps world grows ( not with players, but more rooms for the existing ones ) and the server tick times are so dramatically slow ( currently about 5s from a bit over 2 seconds when i stopped playing half an year ago ), here is a suggestion of at least reducing the server load on the invaders and adding a bit of logic to them. 

At the moment the invaders spawn at about 80-120k harvested energy in each room, so my suggestions are as follows:

- spawn invaders based on a time period
- give notification of incoming invaders (let's say 500-1000 ticks before spawning) that if the room is observed (or check in some manner) you can see a "signal" of the incoming attack and then decide how to respond
- increase that time period based on their success/failure  - meaning that If those invaders don't manage to kill even one creep - next time spawn them later, but if they do some damage (break wall/kill a creep) - next time spawn sooner and sooner. 

This will allow the following:

- the players that can successfully deal with them - be less and less invaded thus freeing CPU 
- more natural feel of those invasion, having the option to get alert of their incoming attacks
- more logical invasions focused on the rooms that are not protected enough
- ability to reduce those invasion attacks globally on the server during outages 

and to quote Sergey - Be Happy!

user-spawned invaders disappear if another player's creep enters the room - they can't be used against other players at all

I actually really like both of Qzar suggestion of how this issue can be resolved, but strongly disagree with his thesis that a defender is at a good position no matter if online or offline - you attack a room when you see how it can be taken down - ranged units, mass units, consecutive attacks and such so in a case of a well-prepared attack a defender has no chance no matter if he only needs to boost ATTACK or not.

In the case of our war i was away for about 3 days with very limited net access - so the result - a well structured attack based on the weaknesses of my defence lead to a loss of many rooms without the option of me countering it, still - a week later i don't have time to do so.

Due to the fact that everything in this game is done at a really, really slow pace and you need to automate everything so it plays by itself there is rarely the case where u have prepared code for all possible scenarios or the time do it in a couple of days when being attacked and have to defend the rest of your rooms - my experience there shows that each next attack on you exploits something you failed to oversee, which is totally normal and the best way to find it and patch it

The proposed ideas are good, but not enough in favor of both parties, so i would suggest something in addition:
- if we're going with the domination counter - trigger an automatic safe mode for the duration of that domination to the nearest room of the defender so he can actually engage in that domination fight

If the claim/unclaim exploit is all that you find wrong here, - just add a week/month timer for manually unclaimed rooms and that’s it

Yes, this seems to solve the immediate issue, but the root mechanic not only makes the process more complicated, but also adds some new fun to it, the centralized aspect to your empire.

Yes, it really seems like a nice new mechanic, but not appropriate for the time being (mostly for the reason below)

players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized

Only if they don’t make use of the market and its credits empire-wide sharing ability.

The game is already alliance-based and probably all of them trade firstly between each other and then on the market. Meaning that any new player, small alliance or a separated room/group of rooms won't succeed having to utilize only that kind of a market to "connect" to it's empire "center"



You've said that the rcl 8 rooms upgrade cap is because those rooms are considered finished and thus should have limiting factor to the progress of your empire (which seems like a totally wrong assumption given the fact that only when the room reaches rcl 8 u can actually start playing with it, unless in the novice area of course, and each such room is the engine for your empire in that part of the sector/map and thus should not be limited in how we chose to utilize it)

Having the power creeps added will result in a huge energy sing, unless your intention is for them to bring more energy/resources to the empire than they require to develop so whether that upgrade cap is lifted or not won't matter at that point, right?

About the claim/unclaim functionality that this thread seems to be - by your explanation for the cap limit, as mentioned above, the intension is not to limit us in any way of how to spend the energy we get or how fast to progress, so why this mechanic seems wrong?

I agree with @Atavus - this new root mechanic has no actual benefits towards all players, but only negative ones. For instance:

- players that are spread around now will be heavily penalized

- will limit the growth and returning of the news players to the game

- the "root" movement is once more very penalizing for the low GCL players that should keep it constantly moving while the high GCL players that have their codebase ready will not need to worry about such issues but just pick the most appropriate room of theirs for root and they'll be all set

If the claim/unclaim exploit is all that you find wrong here, - just add a week/month timer for manually unclaimed rooms and that's it

Seems like an interesting discussion and i'm afraid that the devs could do something to remove that cap limit which will allow the high GCL players to expand even faster and leave all new players in a pointless state where they can't reach anybody that has been playing the game from before them..

So, here's my suggestion - adjust that cap dynamically - for instance - if the highest GCL of a player is 36 - make the cap half of that - e.g. 18 and adjust backwards for the lower level players - so, for a GCL 9 player the cap would be (36/9) * 18 = 72 energy/tick per RCL8 controller. 

The applications - you may say that this would hold the progress of the top players and boost all others - that's the point, because this is not an economy game, but a war game - if the top players want to stay at the top they shouldn't be able to do that just by being good in economy and the fact that they are playing for an year longer

hmm, yeah.. 10 parts is a bit better.. Then may I ask for the option of boosting the invaders that we can spawn with T3 so we can run some tests on the live server as well