Changes in controllers management

We are about to implement some adjustments in the way rooms are captured and held in the game. The three following major adjustments will take into effect starting September 4, 12:00 UTC.

Сontinuous controller downgrade. All controllers, including those in rooms with a spawn, will continuously run a downgrade timer in the case when the Controller has not been affected by the upgradeController action in the current tick. Each run of the upgradeController resets the counter to the default value of 50,000 ticks for RC level 2 and above, or 20,000 ticks for RC level 1. The presence of a spawn in a room no longer has any bearing. Therefore, after a certain period of inactivity, a player loses the control of his or her room. Make sure that you upgrade your controllers from time to time to keep their levels!

Respawning in the same room prohibited. Respawning in the same room where the first spawn was placed will be prohibited within 3 days since the initial spawn placement. This applies only to a player who placed the spawn; other players are allowed to place their spawns in this room. And the 3-day period starts not from the respawn moment, but from the initial spawn placement. The respawn time-out itself remains unchanged: 3 minutes.

Neutral controllers reservation. Creeps will have a new method reserveController() that will allow them to temporarily block a neutral controller from claiming by other players. This method will be accessible only to creeps with at least 24xWORK and 1xCARRY body parts. Each tick, this command spends 2 energy units and increases the counter of the period during which the controller is unavailable by 2 ticks. The maximum reservation period to maintain is 5,000 ticks. A reservation involves defending not only from hostile creeps claiming, but also from respawning in this room.

Changelog 2015-08-06

Gameplay changes

  • Decreased creeps life time from 1800 to 1500 ticks.
  • Increased Storage capacity from 500K to 1M energy units.
  • Increased Storage construction cost from 10K to 30K.
  • Increased Spawn construction cost from 5K to 15K.

API changes

  • Removed deprecated option withinRampartsOnly in Room.findPath method.
  • Removed deprecated property Creep.energy.
  • Removed deprecated property Creep.energyCapacity.

Screeps will launch publicly on August 12

So, the Early Preview stage is over! As planned from the beginning, we have regenerated the game world and wiped all the game data. GCL of all the players was also reset, since its upgrading speed had been artificially increased. In the new world map, some of the new conceptions are implemented that were deemed necessary seeing as the world evolved in the Early Preview.

Download the full map image

For example, you may now note that the world is divided into 10x10 room sectors with free "highways" to travel between them. Also, Source Keepers were moved from the rooms for settlement into special rooms in centers of sectors which may serve as an extra source of energy for your rooms. You will have to compete with other players in the same sector for controlling them.
 
The game will launch on August 12, 17:00 UTC. We recommend that you use our pre-order page prior to this moment to be able to occupy a perfect room instantly by the launch.
 
Certainly, not all the bugs and issues were solved in the Early Preview stage, and not all the improvements were implemented (for example, many of you guess what the Creep.carry is for, but the details will be revealed later). This is why we plan to set up a test server soon after the public launch where all of you can track the development process and be aware of all the updates coming to the main server.
 
Thanks for being with us!

Game situation review: August 3, 2015

As the Early Preview draws closer to an end, it's time to evaluate the game situation after two-month game world development (keeping in mind that the GCL upgrading speed was several times higher in the Early Preview). Hardcore "wipers" are on a vacation, but high level of competition still gives much room for battles. Let's see who has managed to grow to decent levels and recall the most interesting duels amidst the sweeping upgrade of all players.

Photo of the creep world from space:

Expansion Rank Top 10 for July:

Currently DarkTrooper holds the first place by the Expansion Rank with his 25 rooms in the South East, GCL 26, and good margins for expansion. His game is relatively calm at the moment, but he should keep on watch: Rumatah nearby (GCL 19) can make a new foray. In the middle of July there was a 2-day onslaught that left DarkTrooper7 without half of his colonies, but, as before, further onslaught didn't follow.

Rumatah has 4 rooms of level 8, as well as DarkTrooper7. Another strong player, AzuraStar, also has 4 8-level rooms. However, despite endless capabilities of extension building on level 8, nobody seems to feel enthusiastic about it so far.

Unlike other players with dense arrangement of rooms, AzuraStar (GCL 25) has settled the West very sparsely: some of his rooms are completely separated from the back support. He has defeated the following players on his expansion course: Genovese (GCL 9), nugarin (GCL 13), QzarSTB (GCL 14), vfcosta (GCL 13), reyss (GCL 13), Capitano_Trigger (GCL 5).

In the North West, ZorzZ (GCL 17) has entrenched near AzuraStar and even took a border room W7S1 from him. An "inner" room W7N4 changed owners several time. The adjacent W8N4 had been occupied by GrandonBroseph (GCL 14) before he went on his journey across the map. Farther to the North West there are some more well-developed players: Aurel (GCL 15) and lethallic (GCL 13), but they hasn't behaved aggressively.

A coalition of hesto2 (GCL 13) and ultramixerman (GCL 9) controls the center from the South and periodically cleanses their neighborhood from players emerging in it.

Avicenna (GCL 18) and reyss (GCL 13) have respawned in the North after their previous fails. Tullron (GCL 13) also respawned in the South in his previous home after reyss, but later followed his suit: loss of all spawns and slow extinction of controllers.

Avicenna has abandoned part of his rooms due to CPU economy or because he has not restored after the latest changes so far. We witness a similar abandonment in the realms of chris (GCL 15) and some other players too. Nevertheless, the main flatliners of the month that left all their rooms are: Icefalcon (GCL 12), and AmazingDreams (GCL 7). Perhaps, now with automatic spawn refill such things will happen less often.

Early Preview ends

Well, dear friends, the Early Preview stage is close to an end. Together we were able to test and optimize the hardware, spot and fix multitude of bugs, polish the balance. A lot of creeps were built and lost during the process, but it was worth it - we are now finally ready for a public launch!

Early Preview ends on Thursday, August 6. Script servers will be stopped, the world will be wiped and regenerated. Then we will announce the public launch date so that you can get prepared to start in the final version of the game world.

All those who participated in our Indiegogo campaign will receive a due number of CPU credits. All the rest will be able to place a pre-order to start playing right after the server opens.

Thanks to all of you for your participation in the Early Preview, and follow the news!

New feature: code branches

One of the most often related inconveniences with the game and the editor has been the lack of various debugging tools. We plan to release the Screeps game engine as a standalone npm package so that everyone could launch a game sim locally in a console and thus perform any debugging needed, from unit testing of separate modules to modelling parallel development of game worlds with different settings. However, these are just mid-term plans, while in the short-term we plan to launch two important updates which will greatly simplify development:

  1. Branching of your scripts in a way that you can edit your code in the Simulation without affecting the code from the World, and then commit it to the World after the debugging.
  2. Better Custom Mode: import/export to JSON, saving game situation from any individual room in a game, repeating one tick in a loop, API for creating game objects in Custom Mode.

The second option will be introduced later, but we are happy to announce the first one right now!

In the scripts editor you can see a current branch selection list. One default branch is available initially. The clone function allows you to create a new branch based on it. All code from all the modules belongs to the branch cooperatively, you cannot take individual modules into a separate branch and use them from another branch.

The branch being edited at the moment is the one active in the game. However, the World may have one active branch, the Simulation another one. For example, you may clone the default branch and call the newly-created one, say, develop, then select it as active in the sim mode, and freely edit your code in it without fear of breaking something in the World game process while developing. After you are fully satisfied with the develop branch changes, you can again clone it under default name, thus replacing the basic branch and taking your changes into effect in the actual game.

If you use grunt-screeps for commiting your scripts from a local machine, you will have to update the package to have the ability to specify a branch to commit.

We hope this update will simplify testing and debugging of your game scripts.

Changelog 2015-07-29

Gameplay changes

  • Introduced new structure: Storage. It is available at RCL 4 and allows to store up to 500K energy units.
  • Roads now decay for 100 hits per 1000 ticks at plain land and for 500 hits per 1000 ticks at swamp. Every creep step decreases the timer for 1 tick per each creep body part.

API changes

Changelog 2015-07-27

Gameplay changes

  • Roads now decay over time for 100 hits per 100 ticks at plain land and for 500 hits per 100 ticks at swamp in addition to per step decay.
  • Increased roads max hits to 5000 at plain land and 25000 at swamp.
  • Removed spawn reinforcement function. Instead, every spawn now automatically gains 1 energy unit per tick while Room.energyAvailable is less than 300.
  • Ramparts now can be built on top of any other structures.

API changes

Changelog 2015-07-22

Gameplay changes

  • Decreased ramparts construction cost from 2000 to 1.
  • Decreased walls construction cost from 500 to 1.
  • Ramparts and walls are now built with 1 hit point initially.
  • Increased walls max hits from 10M to 300M.
  • Changed ramparts max hits, see this article.
  • Increased ramparts decay from 1 hit/30 ticks to 300 hits/100 ticks.
  • Increased HEAL body part cost from 200 to 250.

API changes

Changelog 2015-07-09

Gameplay changes

  • Walls construction is now allowed at Room Controller Level 2.
  • Constructing new spawn now doesn't create ramparts around it.

API changes