Posts made by SteveTrov

The latest update has seriously broken my code and so I have cancelled my sub. I havent really played much for some time but I always intended to return at some point.

I dont understand the logic of the RoomPosition change, break a load of code to save a little memory.....

So feel free to loot any of my rooms of anything of value that u might find there.

My sub ends at the end of the month but I expect my defenses are already broken along with everything else so happy looting.

My proposal for a super structure is a portal generator. Only 1 per player, very expensive to build 1M+ energy + minerals?. Costs energy and G to open and maintain a portal. A portal takes 20000 ticks to open and is visible to all players whilst is opening. Once open the portal can be used by any player in either direction like the portals in SK rooms. Portals last 20K ticks. For a number of reasons players wouldnt be able to open portals between shards.

This would provide a way for players to wage war across much larger distances. Forcing a portal to remain open for a number of ticks prevents hit and run attacks with no option for retaliation.

We could also add functionality to allow the creating player to extend the life of the portal by adding more resources but this shouldnt allow the creating player the ability to close the portal without warning

Well you seem rather pissed of about something.

IIRC you ran a K-bot, that is normally the worse of the open source bots because it attack indiscriminately and can be a big problem, particularly for newer players. However, you were one of the "better" k-bots in that you actually seemed to have control over your bot and I didnt see it attacking indiscriminately.

However, I agree with @wtfrank & @Atavus that the game should be played by players writing code. I was involved in the discussions about whether or not open source bots should be banned and I agreed that this was one for the community to handle. as long as those conflicts say in the game and do NOT turn personal.

Its a sandbox game and can be played in any way you or I like.

as @wtfrank said, upgrade boosts are the highest priced on the market, they also have by far the highest volume so selling them is relatively easy (on shard2 at least). I will endeavour to always have T3 boosts for you to buy with the proceeds.

@artch What if we allow building roads on walls,

Why would we do this when we can build ramparts with roads on them for the same price as a wall & road with slightly higher maintenance.

Or are you suggesting sappers ie building tunnels in hostile bases.

Calling @o4kapuk sounds like one for you!

Once you have claimed the room, you are able to destroy() any structure in the room whether or not it is owned by you. So there is no point in removing the structures before claiming unless they are blocking the controller.

I have an attack type that I call blitz that would benefit from this feature.

The idea is that I spawn a number (normally 3) large T3 dismantle creeps and do as much damage as possible to the enemy ramparts before they can get defenders out hopefully breaching them.

Once the enemy spawns defenders these creeps are useless

But this feels rather niche, and as o4kapuk said for most usecases its only slightly better than using recycle.

I noticed today that the cooldown on the mineral extractor is not 5 ticks as advertised but is actually 6 ticks. The tick after I harvest the cooldown is 5, then it counts down to 0 before I am allowed to harvest again.

Initially I thought this was a bug in my code, but looking at other peoples bots and chatting to other players this seems to be the way it is.

There are some other cooldowns that are not as advertised as expected. structure decay happens 1 tick earlier than expected. E.g. roads decay every 999 ticks.

Lab cooldowns seem to be as advertised, although some of the documentation needs updating.

Is this a known issue? Its not exactly game breaking, but mineral harvesting being 20% slower than expected is non trivial.

@tigga said in Terminals and Credits seem overpowered:

31 nukes on the terminal.

I wonder if anyone has 31 RCL8 bases close enough to an enemy room to do this?

I think what you are seeing is distorted by the fact that the best defense that I am aware of in the game (o4kapuk) is also the most written about.

In fact his is the only defense I have looked at or poked that I could really see an effective way of attacking. Other people have good defense, but nearly all have some weakness a skilled and determined attacker can exploit.

Base defense in screeps is similar to network defense in IT. In theory you can make it impregnable but in practice there are many things that can go wrong that its likely to be vulnerable.

I havent read the power creep docs in detail, but my understanding is that DISRUPT TERMINAL will consume ops much faster than you can generate them, this seems to be the way things should be.

I could even just convert all of my resources to credits, and buy whatever I need whenever I want it.

This isnt really true, the difference in the sell and buy prices and the low volume for anything other than minerals means you can neither liquidate all your resources or buy them back when you need them.

e.g if I sold my stockpile of XUH2O on shard2 the best price I could get right now is 0.01 and if I wanted to buy it back it would cost me 2.249 ~ 250 times as much.

However, terminals do allow you to move almost arbitary amounts of energy, minerals and boosts around your empire. Meaning that rather than draining a single room of resources you need to drain the empire.

But the reality of it is that most players do not have defense code that is unbreakable without draining.

IMHO the terminal does simplify things too much, it makes it too easy to move the resources to where they are needed. I think a terminal blocking capability is exactly the type of ability a power creep should have. I.e. its a very powerful ability but not one that is going to win a battle without other creeps.

Love the idea, but I still think it will be dominated by experienced/vet players. The code is where the strength really is.

If that werent true then it would mean that there was no skill involved.

I think this would be great, but am concerned the additional cost will mean it never happens.

@artch said in AttackController too easy to recover from:

@deft-code Actually, it is 10% per level. See here

So its 10% of the cost of getting to the level you were downgraded from.
8 => 7 lose 1093500 points
7 => 6 lose 364500 points
6=>5 lose 121500 points
5=>4 lose 40500 points
4=>3 lose 13500 points
3=>2 lose 4500 points
2=>1 lose 20 points

So in reality the number of points reduces exponentially per level.

The changes to attackController are great in that we now have a viable way of removing a room once and for all.

In the current implementation even with maxed out creeps it takes a while to downgrade a room from RCL8 to 0 and this is how it should be. But if the attacker starts such attack the defender only needs to gain control for a few ticks (particularly if they time it well just after a downgrade) to get their controller back up to full level)

1. A defender can recover 100 downgrade points a tick, this means that you can recover fairly quickly from an attack that has been going on for 1000's of ticks particularly at low levels.
2. If the attacker successfully downgrades the controller one level, then once the defender has cleared the downgrade timer the controller levels up by a level per tick until the remaining control points are used.
3. A 10% control point penalty is applied when the attacker successfully downgrades the room by a single level, but this penalty is only applied once, so as an attacker then is nothing to be gained for me between downgrading 1 level and downgrading all the way to 0. (nb I am not sure I have this mechanic correct and cant find any reference to it in the docs. )

So my proposal is as follows:

1. Make the rate that you recover from downgrade timers related to the number of work parts on the creep doing the recovery. e.g one WORK part recovers 5 ticks of downgrade timer per tick at the cost of 1 energy.
2. When a player clears the downgrade time and upgrades their controller 1 level the downgrade timer is then set to the max value for the new level (or as near is practical without immediately downgrading the controller again)
3. Every time a controller is downgraded 1 level the rooms looses 10% of its total control points and not just the first level.

I am sure other people have other thoughts on this feature, and so I welcome the discussion.

It would tell you if your bot is in a novice / respawn area.

Could it be added to the controller?

I doubt I will get around to creating a PR any time soon as I know the private server code very well and have many other projects that are progressing slowly.

So if anyone else wants to put a PR in for this, feel free.

From engine_main.log

Cannot open "/home/screeps/world/mods.json": SyntaxError: /home/screeps/world/mods.json: Unexpected token , in JSON at position 583 Connecting to storage Game time set to 2

On the botarena server we had a problem where mods.json failed to parse and rather than exiting, screeps server carried on without any mods. As one of the mods was screepsmod-mongo this meant that it used the default storage effectively resetting the server.

As mods.json is so critical to the running of the server I really think the server shouldnt attempt to continue if it cant load mods.json.

I expect the issue is down to versions. npm was reporting beta-9 but I am not convinced that is what we are running. Will investigate on our end.

thanks for your time.