Ulasan

• gamedeal user

  Jan 6, 2022

  I am a big fan of programming games, so there was no way I could let Screeps pass by. RTS automation? Yes, please. At first I was entranced, but the more I played, the more cracks started to show. Simply put, Screeps is a game that took a fantastic and unique idea and managed to do pretty much everything wrong in its implementation. - The game is ostensibly PvP-focused, but after playing for ~2 weeks across three respawns, I've had yet to experience anything close to a fair and interesting fight. My neighbours were all either newbies who don't even build walls, or behemoths with two-digit number of rooms who would wipe me by looking at me hard enough, or open-source bot users whose creeps have thousands of lines of code, none of which they wrote themselves. How am I supposed to find someone close to my level to fight? And even if I do get someone and beat them, I am back to square one. - And the difference between different levels is massive - at room level 6 you unlock boosts, which can _quadruple_ the power of your creeps. I dealt with said open-source bot from the previous point (I was level 6, he was level 5) by simply stacking boosts to make a literally invulnerable tank and plunking it outside his walls. It could even be argued that the game is somewhat P2W in this respect, since you can buy one day of CPU unlock (for a few cents), sell it in-game for millions of credits and be set with quadruple-powered creeps for quite a while. I've personally had no shortage of credits simply by selling energy, but it's an objective fact that if someone wanted, they could get an objective advantage by investing real money. - You must write both offensive and defensive code, but you have no way to test it - for base building there is a simulation mode, but nothing like this exists for combat code, which requires an opponent with functional code of their own. The best the game offers is summoning an invader, which is a creep that just sits at the edge of the room and takes potshots at workers passing by. And as you can imagine, relying on untested code to protect you from being wiped and losing weeks of progress is not exactly pleasant. - The stakes of everything PvP-related are extremely high. It is very easy to just get wiped and lose weeks of progress in under an hour, especially if you make a mistake in your safe mode activation code, which you cannot test, because see previous point. - Other than PvP, there is simply not that much to the game itself. If it were not for the automation aspect, it would qualify as simplistic shovelware. The main thing you do is extract energy from sources scattered across rooms, but those sources are so small that you're going to hit maximum possible extraction rates almost immediately. Not like that matters, anyway - all you can do with energy is upgrade your room level, spawn creeps and build buildings. The buildings have a hard cap and there's no reason to have more creeps than you need, so all you have left to do is upgrade your room level faster and sell the excess. You have several different buildings, but all of them (except walls) have a hard limit per room, so there is going to be no variation there between different players. All colonizeable rooms are the same (1-2 sources + a random mineral) and even the top-tier resources are extremely cheap, there is no higher goal to aim for, so it feels very aimless. (I say "top-tier", but the crafting table is quite small and simplistic) You can colonize more completely generic rooms to deploy the same base once again, but why? To get more energy? To do what? To expand to more rooms? Similarly, from a pragmatic standpoint, why would I attack anyone, other than when I have absolutely no space to expand, if nobody can ever have anything worth taking? - The client itself is, let's say, _extremely_ bad. Doing _anything_ is a pain. -- Every room switch is accompanied by a several-second delay. -- There are very frequent graphical glitches, ranging from parts of the rooms not rendering to seeing virtual stationary creeps that have actually left that spot many ticks ago. -- You cannot draw several road blueprints in a row, you have to click on each tile. -- You cannot delete several blueprints at once, you have to select each one and click "delete". -- You cannot move a flag simply by recreating it in another place, you have to find its current place and delete it first. -- Manually editing creep memory just randomly fails to work half the time. -- You can only interact with the code when inside a room, leading to the absurdity that if you are looking at the market and want to manually execute a trade, you have to _exit_ the market by entering a room (with its several seconds of delay) to actually do it. And if the trade fails, you now go back to the market to find another order and back to the room to execute it. -- The game apparently re-fetches the code whenever you exit to the world map, since I've lost code several times due to exiting to the map without committing my changes. -- The game eats up a healthy chunk of CPU and GPU for rendering a bunch of simple shapes. -- You cannot even close the game normally - you have to kill it from the task manager. Simply closing the window keeps several quite CPU-hungry processes running in the background. -- The built-in code editor is barely usable - it loses your position when you switch between files, it has no error highlighting, pressing "Tab" always inserts a \t, even in the middle of a line (instead of indenting the whole line, as any decent editor would do), etc, etc.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 11, 2022

  Unlike some of the other negative reviews, I've never had any issues with bugs or stability. I mostly played in the 20 CPU limit area on the main server. But I DO have some major gripes. The first, is.. hosting your own server, is VERY difficult, and nearly false advertising on the store page. If you click the server host option in-game, it's DRM protected so you can't launch the game again to join. Which means, using SteamCMD on a dedicated box, will run into this issue, requiring purchasing the game again on another account. If you hunt down the dedicated server on github and figure out how to get it running.. you can bypass needing to buy a 2nd account. But then you run into the issue of it not coming with a full map. It actually expects you to build one yourself, yet doesn't have a map building tool or very good examples. It's not intuitive at all and it's obvious they'd prefer you to play on the main server, to keep population up. Secondly, playing on the main server or a functioning private server.. the game gets pretty boring. It starts off fun, when you're learning the basics and things are happening faster. And to clarify, the game "does" get absurdly complex later on, with the trade system and buff system. But don't let my hours fool you. Much of my time spent, is just.. watching not much happen. This is because I chose to code my AI entirely from scratch, and doing so means several days of not much happening, every time you start a new base, because grinding and waiting is the MAIN gameplay loop. Then every time you find out you made a critical error in your code and want to start a new code base, or get killed by another player, and are forced to start over from scratch, back to days of waiting again. I even put a lot of time into efficiency and optimization, so that each time I started a new base, I teched up really fast. But "really fast" is like.. at least 3 days to get a level 5 spawner (it caps at level 8 or something, but you unlock a lot of new game mechanics around level 4 and 5 and can start expanding, and leveling past 5 take exponentially longer). I played with a programmer buddy, that coded his AI entirely from scratch too, so we could watch each other's progress and share tidbits here and there, with the plan of parking next to each other and eventually allying. This helped keep things entertaining for a while. But unfortunately, with the grind based main mechanic, it really started resembling watching paint dry. The game isn't all bad. I really love the idea of a game you can control with scripting. But the game being all about grinding, with the shallow end goal of being competitive and killing other players, just doesn't resonate with me. Every time I "fought" another player, it usually always ended up in seal clubbing (high level players only attacking low level players since they can't fight back) or borderline exploiting (like rapidly zoning creeps in and out of a sector making them hard to kill at a border) making the fights very uninteresting and drawn out. Eventually I just ran out of motivation to play, and didn't play long enough to reach the higher tier gameplay involving mining non-energy resources to make temporary extremely expensive buffs and.. ...stuff. If you really are set on playing a programming type game, then I can't fault you for trying this. As there really is a huge lack of games in this genre (the only other I know of is Adventureland, and it has it's own issues). But do keep in mind, the game has no sound and not much in the way of animations or special effects. You'll be watching dots walk around for days, with the end goal of trying to compete in arenas full of AI's that have had years for their devs to figure out every advantage they can use. And for what? So you can say your dots are better than someone else's dots? Heh.. Just not for me. I'm still hoping to find a game someday that lets you script to control it and has actual gameplay, but isn't a "lazy mmo" that thinks grinding is the way to go, just because a script is controlling it. Like seriously.
• FrOsTy

  Aug 8, 2023

  Doesn't work on MacOS.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 20, 2016

  First things first, I have many more "hours on record" than will show on the review, I've been playing in the browser for several weeks now. Actually I'll let my github activity chart speak for me: http://i.imgur.com/MaBBLLN.png On to the review. There is nothing else to compare this game to, it is a shiny gem sitting all alone in the genre it just made up. As the description talks about, your job is to program an AI to do your bidding in the world of Screeps. You are not alone. There are other AIs inhabiting this world, some programmed for evil, some for good, and some with tons of bugs (mine). If the idea of of a RTS MMO where you control your units, base, combat, and resource gathering 100% through code intrigues you, then you are exactly the type of player this game was made for. Pros: -Completely new game concept that appeals to programmers or people wanting to learn programming -Friendly community to pester with questions -Well-documented API -Balanced game mechanics that rewards more seasoned programmers without punishing newcomers -A chance to be a clever bastard with your coding skills -Best way imagineable to learn Javascript, if you've been meaning to Cons: -Pricing structure might be a bit confusing, subscription is likely needed for MMO play -Early access game, occasional bugs, mostly cosmetic -Pretty steep learning curve that won't be forgiving for casual players or those who aren't really into programming Just a word about the pricing. Basically you are paying to have your code run 24/7 on a remote server. In light of this, the 10 free CPU is fairly generous and would be enough to have a smaller-scale operation in the game world. Half of the fun is optimizing your code, so it would be possible to participate and enjoy the MMO from that angle. But if you want to be a kingpin in the MMO world, you are going to want a subscription, plain and simple. It isn't like Guild Wars where you buy once and have lifetime access AND be on the same footing as everyone else. I think the devs could be a bit more clear on that. If you don't know Javascript, you are probably wondering if you should even try. Learning Javascript was actually the main reason I was interested in this game. I can't think of a more engaging way to learn a new coding language. I wish the had a game like this for all the languages I wanted to learn/maintain. There are nicely padded novice areas where you can start and learn at your own pace. If your main interest is the RTS elements and you are hoping the coding thing won't get in the way, you'll probably want to avoid this game. You'll easily spend 1/3 of your time in a text editor/IDE, 1/3 observing the game world, and 1/3 in the IRC chat asking questions or looking things up in the API. If that actually sounds FUN to you, get this game right away. edit: as another reviewer mentioned, there is a risk-free way to find out if this game is right for you, you can do the tutorial at https://www.screeps.com/
• gamedeal user

  Jun 24, 2016

  [code]function screepsReview(person){ if(person.isProgrammer() && person.isGamer()) { return SCREEPS_LOVE; } else { return LEARNING_OPPORTUNITY; } }[/code]
• gamedeal user

  Jul 13, 2016

  Help me, I can't stop writing code for my digital ant farm. Sometimes I manage to stop writing code and then I can't stop watching my digital ant farm. I've set up an Elasticsearch/Kibana instance to monitor my digital ant farm so I don't always have to look at it directly. I've learned an entirely new programming language (TypeScript) because of my digital ant farm. I often see the sun come up now. And it's all thanks to these jerks and their amazingly ruinous game. And my digital ant farm. I'll go to bed eventually, but first, I need to implement better spawning mechanics...
• gamedeal user

  Jan 10, 2017

  buy game know nothing about programming do tutorial still know nothing about programming watch tutorial video understand a little write basic command in console watch little baby creep be born watch little baby creep not move what do I do now watch move videos understand a little more write basic code watch baby creep start to move fall in love with baby creep watch baby creep die of old age feel sad watch new baby creep be born fall in love again make baby creep mine energy feeling so proud of baby creep feeling like a dad feel like he needs a brother baby creep 2 is born love my little babies fast forward a day have full family now many generations of baby creeps have passed baby creeps repairing building harvesting and scouting love my baby creep family attacked all die feel devastated die a little inside myself respawn watch little baby creep be born fall in love again
• gamedeal user

  Apr 21, 2017

  Last year in October I suffered a stroke resulting in partial paralysis in my left side. Since then gaming has been an exercise in frustration. If you can't reliably hit WASD with good timing, most games are a waste. A coworker introduced me to this game though, and it's quickly become my obsession. I don't need lightning-fast reflexes or extreme precision to excel; I simply write code that lets the game run itself and refine as I go along.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 3, 2017

  What do you do for your job? .... Coding What do you do for hobby? ... Coding Truly a game for coder.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 20, 2017

  My god. This game is crack for programmers. I love this game with a passion, but there are some things to note. 1. As of this date, 6/19/2017, the main server is overloaded. As such, the game crawls at a snail's pace. ...This will hopefully be addressed relatively soon. In the meantime, I recommend getting a basic resource mining base running, and testing more robust live code on private servers or the simulation before deploying more complicated code to the slow as all hell main server. 2. This is a subscription based game in addition to the base game's cost. ... Unless you're intending to play solo forever (dumb), or join up with only a few friends on a private server for all eternity (also dumb, in my opinion) ... The monthly fee is fairly reasonable given how unique this game is. But it's not apparent right up front, that you need to buy CPU processing power monthly. 3. They really need to give us more CPU processing power. That all said, I love this game. So, so, so much.