After some more testing, 'immortal' creeps were observed not taking damage from turrets and other creeps when my healing code was turned off and even when none of my code was running at all.

Additionally, they aren't 100% immortal in that room. Tigga was able to kill a few here and there intermittently which leads me to believe that (due to a server spike etc) that the game ran out of cpu to process combat.

I have not yet enabled the VM on my account.

More info in case it helps. The attacking creeps in this replay originated from Shard1. They were boosted in shard1.

Turret split fire and ranged mass attacks can be seen during the attack so it can't simply be turret focus fire with a visual glitch making it look like split fire.

I'm not sure what you mean MrFaul/Tigga, an estimation of the average tick rate is already available in the shard selection menu. I'm suggesting stats like energy mined within the last 1k, 10k, and 100k ticks. This way when you get a feel for your normal rates, say 40k energy mined in a room within the last 1k ticks, you can update your code and clearly see the impact, even if there were shard speed fluctuations at the time.

The in game statistics gives you a lot of useful information about your mining rates, but you can only compare previous to current changes under stable shard speeds. Shard speed changes can mislead you unless you make an estimation to account for it. What I believe other players and myself end up doing is searching for another ai within the game to use as a reference (who hopefully also hasn't made changes).

But I wouldn't have to do that if the in game measurements were tick based instead of time based. If this is too much of a jump for newer players to grasp I would settle for it being an advanced check box in options.

This would also help compare room performances across shards.

Thank you

(edit added title)

@shedletsky Even if the active player count remains similar they will have grown in GCL, owned rooms, and cpu.

@tedivm I noticed that the original authors of the bots also show up on the clone map. For example bonzaiferroni shows up as a bonzai bot user. The author of a code base certainly wouldn't count as a script kiddie but perhaps they are benefiting form collaborative efforts amongst their users.

@mashee I'm sorry to hear that you quit because of bots. They can hurt the diversity of the codebases out there. Your struggle has inclined me even more so to target NCP's. Perhaps I'll make a post asking about how to identify NCP's in this thread.

Edit: Apparently this forum doesn't embed replies. Any advice on identifying NCP's outside of obvious controller signing, and hearing about them through the community?

This occurred on shard0. Several creeps were pathing into a room making their way onto the zone line and standing on it but the game wouldn't zone them through to the other side. I've never seen this before and suspect it has to do with how most of the zones are closed down around this room and/or possibly how it is on the edge of the shard world.

The pathing code that I had followed a room to room path (not calculating the full pos to pos path) and thus attempted to enter into this room from the middle of the zone.

I will try entering from other room entrances later.

Here is a replay link of the issue occurring: https://screeps.com/a/#!/history/shard0/E25S89?t=23481285

After reading the proposed abilities for power creeps, I found them to be extraordinary as well. Abilities like "Kill" and "DISABLE_TOWER" will have drastic effects on sieges giving up much of the defender's advantage in the existing game design. I'm finding it stressful to imagine making a power creep defense that is "safe" from other power creeps and newer players are pretty overwhelmed going up against boosted creeps as it is, power creeps + boosted creeps would be more or less unstoppable. With so many abilities, it'll be hard to account for and test each one when building an active creep defense.

Due to the range on the kill ability, The only way a non-power player can stay safe it is to build a base that is entirely ramparted which can lead to base layout conformity. I'd like to see more balance with power creeps and more ways of countering them without power by spending high amounts of energy, cpu, spawn time, etc.

There is now a NAP agreement in place between SUN and r33t4rd.