Shields do seem to be a cause. I'm not sure they're the only one.

@artch said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):

@tigga Not only terminals, but also market. If I have less than 5 rooms (or 10 for two chains, or 15 for three chains, etc), my only option to setup full production chain is to use market. If there was no locking, then it's possible to spend a bit more spare GPL (depending on how many rooms I'm missing) and implement the chain on my own. We want to encourage players to trade as much as possible here, with as fewer options to work alone as possible.

Again, it depends on design details. You could design a system so that to get full throughput you need 5 level 1 factories for each level 5 factory, for example. Your example assumes you can get full throughput with one factory of each type.

I believe that if you need to optimize for throughput then locking isn't neccessary. If you have too few rooms you'll need to use the market as you just don't have enough factories to match your income.

@artch said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):

You don't dedicate 5 PCs to a single room, you rotate 5 rooms with 5 PCs through all levels simultaneously, effectively making all rooms identical with no specialization. Too simple, no coding challenge, no fun.

I'd argue it's simpler to lock your power creeps to rooms. I guess it's terminal transfer complexity vs power creep rotation complexity. Terminals seem easier.

Whether rebuilding factories is reasonable or not depends entirely on the cost of factories. I had assumed the cost was likely to be the same as terminals/power spawns/nukers, if not more (given "and the construction cost will be quite high" in the OP).

If that is the case then I would argue that your operators are locked down for quite a lot of ticks if you don't want to waste a lot of energy.

Also, if there was no such restriction, it would be possible to have just 1 factory and operate it by 5 PCs, thus managing full production chains with only one room

I think we don't have enough information to discuss this properly. To me it seems there are two extremes:

1. You're mostly throughput limited and want 100% uptime on operate factory. In this case 5 factories process 5x faster so just using one room wouldn't work. With locked factories operators are pretty closely tied to rooms, without locked factories they're free to move.
2. You're mostly harvest limited and only need 1% uptime on operate factory. In this case locking works a lot better as you can move the operator to the right place, process in a bunch, then spend 99%+ of your time elsewhere.

Obviously there's every point between these two extremes. I don't know where on this spectrum the design is.

@mrfaul said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):

This wouldn't be a problem if we are able to pass a lvl on the operate factory intend. This also helps to prevent to set the lvl "accidentally" since you must pass a int.

The problem with this is that it goes against the interesting design of needing multiple power creeps with different levels.

I think instead:

the level of the factory is permanently set to the level of the power

Should be removed. Just set the factory level to the last level cast on it.

@wtfrank said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):

Is it an intended consequence that operators become more-or-less locked to a single room?

I dislike this. It seems to be forcing a restriction and constraints that didn't exist before. Those constraints aren't that interesting: I think moving power creeps around should be incentivised rather than keeping them still as that leads to more interesting problems to solve.

I don't think it's quite as bad as you say as it seems operators aren't needed for level 0 production. I still think it's an annoying restriction though.

Run this replay forward, following the position of Byakko: https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/shard2/E12N49?t=14725300 (click on him to see x/y and highlight circle).

You'll notice on tick 14725320 he moves to 22,46. On the next tick he moves back to 21,47. The graphics (at least in Chrome) don't seem to be updating correctly here.

It seems to be related to power creeps in opposing rooms and effects more than just the power creep graphics. All creep objects seem to sometimes miss updates in healing/attack/movement. This seems to be just a visualisation issue - not issue with the processing - just the graphics.

EDIT: Just to be clear this isn't a replay issue. You see the same on live. May be shield related.

Thanks

This is not fixed on the main server. POWER_INFO[PWR_DISRUPT_TOWER].range is 3. You get a -9 error when attempting to use it outside of range 3

@wtfrank me too. But count the total number of orders on the market and divide it by the number of players on the shard. Heck, if you like only count players with GCL > 15 or something. It's much less than 50!