I'd really like to see some quests/achievements to help direct new players to try everything out. Even without any rewards I think this would be helpful.

I keep wanting to weigh in here and say that I really don't like the penalty, but then I see the reasoning behind it. However, we need to make sure the cost is reasonable and scales appropriately.

There has been some confusion about the cost, since higher power levels cost more. The main thing is that if I reach level 10, then reset, it should cost the same to get back to level 10 as it did the first time. Resetting just effectively moves you back in time.

Some of us were worried that it was instead calculated like powerLevel = getPowerLevel(powerProcessed) - numberOfResets, which would be really, really bad. That would mean every reset effectively increases the cost of all future levels - I think we can all agree that this would be madness. @artch seems to have confirmed that this will not be the case, although this perhaps needs stating a bit more clearly.

HOWEVER

So far I've been assuming that resetting deletes all power creeps. I'm very surprised to see it only affects one. That seems very wrong to me, especially since you can choose to have lots of low level power creeps or one big one. If I'm at level 10 and I choose to have 10 power creeps at level 1, it should not cost me all 10 levels to reset them all!

Similarly, If I'm at level 50 and I create a level 1 power creep and then decide to reset it, I should not be reduced all the way back to level 49.

As @deft-code suggested, surely the cost should be based on the level of the power creep being reset?

This is why the higher-level players feel that this is unfair - because it is! @artch is right that higher-level players are in an unnatural situation, which is true. But they're forced into this situation. Let them make the unnatural situation natural by allowing them to "hold back" on their levels and develop their power creeps gradually, as if they were starting from a low-level.

I would strongly suggest avoiding spawn names and Game.spawns altogether. Use IDs from the start, it will make life much easier for you later.

Spawn names are just confusing and pointless. I personally think they should be removed from the game completely. The tutorial would be more useful if it didn't use them.

I must say I am very concerned with the way the new UI is being developed. I love the art style. But please, please, make the UI clear, obvious, and useful FIRST, and then, AND ONLY THEN make it pretty.

Screeps is a game about optimising numbers and statistics. There is nothing more frustrating than a UI which hides the important information (I'm looking at you, market history!). Please prioritise showing this information over any kind of aesthetics.

I would suggest that the default assumption for almost any page in the system should be a boring table of data, which you can make pretty with icons. Think very carefully before deviating from this.

The upgrade UI looks pretty, but I found it very confusing. Because everything starts greyed out and highlights when clicked on, it's not at all obvious that you can click items multiple times to level up multiple levels. When I reached my max level limit I clicked on one to disable it and was surprised to find that this wasn't what happened. Even then, I thought nothing had happened before I eventually worked out that it had increased to level 2. Possibly this is because the tooltip covers over the level text (which is also pretty small).

The bars around the circles are not at all obvious. I didn't notice them at all. They need to be much thicker, and I don't know why you are dimming the icon of the one you are hovering over. The key time you need to see them - when they change - they're almost invisible.

The 10/20/30/40/50 UI is ok, but because the hover popup closes when you click to increase the level you never see it animate, so then it's useless and confusing instead.

Some suggestions/requests:

1. Make it more obvious that we're setting levels, not just enabling
2. Make it possible to decrease levels without using the undo
3. Make it clearly visible what level is required to unlock, without having to hover over each of them
4. Don't cover the other icons with the information. Hovering to see information is bad UI anyway

Why not split this into two panels, with all the icons in the left panel. You click on an icon and it selects it and shows the information and current level in the right panel, with buttons to increase/decrease the level.

Is there any chance we can disable the notification emails for errors on the interactive console? Surely the interactive console should just never send error emails ever, regardless of the "send when online" setting.

If I just typed it into the console then I'm looking at the console and the error should be there. No need for an email.

Thanks.

That's a good point!

I'm totally in favour of that. I think the event log should be an essential part of the game.

However, I get the impression that many players are avoiding using it due to the extra CPU cost - myself included. Is there something that can be done about this? When you read the documentation the first impression is that it might be quite expensive. I've now profiled it and under peaceful conditions it's about 0.09 per tick to deserialise the event log for 10 rooms, without doing any processing on it. I'm not sure what might happen if you've got a lot of remote rooms or if there's a battle going on.

It feels a little unfair. Why isn't this already deserialised like the other game objects?

It's also all-or-nothing. If you disable the built-in notification system you have to process the entire log for all events for every room on every tick no matter what. And that's every room with visibility, not just every owned room or even every room with a creep in it. There's no way to filter it by event type or target before deserialising it. If I have visibility to a battle between other players, I'm going to have to deal with all those events too.

According to the source, notifyWhenAttacked only creates an intent if the value is changed, so you won't be charged 0.2 CPU every time.

I profiled this and calling notifyWhenAttacked(false) for every creep cost me less than 0.1 total CPU each tick (I have about 65 creeps). It would still probably be more efficient (and more useful) if we could check the current value ourselves, but at least we don't get hit with the 0.2 CPU charge every time.

Why are power creeps spawned on top of the power spawn? This is inconsistent with the way normal spawns work. Is there a plan to make normal spawns work like this in the future? If so, then I'm probably in favour. If not, then shouldn't power spawns work the same way?

Can the power creep move back on top of a power spawn after moving off it?