レビュー

• FrOsTy

  Aug 8, 2023

  Doesn't work on MacOS.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 26, 2017

  You want depth? You want strategy? You want unexpected token errors 73 lines down in your harvester code? Then this is the game for you. This game is both educational and engrossing if you're the type of person that enjoys combat programming and ultra-high skill cap RTS gameplay at a snail's pace. If you're not that type of person, then don't buy it. Running someone else's code is boring, and the game's glacial pace will put you to sleep if you're not using all that downtime to improve your code. The meat of the gameplay is literally just coding the logic that your creeps will follow, and the "game" on-screen where your colony grows and fights other colonies just serves to give you concrete objectives and goals to reach for as you code. Once you're done coding and you feel satisfied with what your colony can do, then the game runs on autopilot. The goal of this game is to automate everything your colony does so that you don't have to play it anymore. That might sound bizarre, but the process of building up your codebase is immensely satisfying for a certain type of person who enjoys building complex systems. If you are that kind of person, or even if you suspect that you could be that kind of person, then this game is amazing.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 6, 2017

  This is an awesome game, and one I really enjoy. Upsides include: - Deep gameplay (how much AI can you write in an RTS? Have you thought of everything?) - Surprisingly good initial tutorial (you don't need to know a lot of javascript to play this, any experience scripting will do) - A simulation mode that lets you test things out without risking your live empire - Multiple worlds (shards) you can play on - Co-op and competitive multiplayer (just make sure any allies start the same time you do), with alliances - Slack channels, wikis etc, and a very complete API reference mean you can usually get the answer to your question - Real sense of progess as you watch your empire develop - even more so if you've got the AI you wrote making its decisions and agree with them. - Beating another player because your AI is better than theirs is an amazing experience. So, too, to a lesser extent, is watching your AI systematically dismantle NPC invaders. - The community of players IN GENERAL is smart, knowledgable, and nice. Exception: the players near you are quite likely to try murdering you in your sleep using tactics you never thought possible. This isn't because they hate you, though. This is just because you're mining resources they want. - If you want practice writing JavaScript, this is an incredibly fun way to get that practice. - The ability to write JavaScript is an incredibly useful skill, so even if you aren't attracted to the game for the sake of practice, the practice will still probably be valuable to you at some point. That said, there are some downsides: - This is a subscription game, in an era where there's essentially no such thing anymore as a subscription game. There's a good argument for it (your scripts run 24/7 even when you're offline), ways to play without paying a subscription (buy it on steam once, get a small amount of CPU forever), even exchange game currency for subscription time. But, ultimately, you are either paying with money every month, or you're paying with time. For some people, the fact it is a subscription game alone rules it out. - Combat can be brutal as a new player. While I have been doing fine, the outright majority of players I've seen start in my sector have either been murdered or abandoned their game within the first few days. TIP: if you start playing this, DO NOT start near a well-established player, as doing this means you have little chance of fighting back if they decide they want your resources for themselves. - It is very easy to make almost game-ending mistakes. Not got any defense AI when invaders start showing up? Aggress a player you can't handle? Left a bug in your code that causes it to fail to run properly just when you need it? Empires can fall due to tiny mistakes like these. While the tension is sometimes great, some people will find it insufferably annoying that they can lose huge chunks of progress just because of a misplaced ';' in their code. These people should probably not play this game. You have to have some patience for debugging. - The tutorial approaches scripting your AI from the wrong angle. While it is somewhat inevitable, given that it is aimed at new players, that it would take the simplest approach, it leads players down the path of having each unit make its own decisions. This works when you have 1 unit. Or 5 units. Or 10 units. It does not work when you have 100 units. At a certain point, if you follow this approach, you will realize that what you need is a sort of 'director' AI that assigns tasks to your units/creeps. This is a whole new level of AI programming that you will have to be willing to engage in to make real progress in this game, and the tutorial never mentions it, which is a major omission. - The main server, shard0, has a tick rate of about 5 seconds. This means that units only move or otherwise act once per 5 seconds. There is a second server, shard1, which has a MUCH faster tick rate of about 2 seconds. As well as newer players in general. If you are starting out, you almost certainly want to start on shard1.... but shard0 is still the default, for some reason. This might seem like a nitpick, but it actually makes a huge difference to the game to play it at half speed. Whenever you're waiting for anything... you wait twice as long. - This is a 24/7 game. Your empire exists 24/7. Your code runs 24/7. You can be attacked 24/7. There are few things as annoying as getting game alerts telling you that your empire is being wiped out while you're at work, or otherwise busy. Or even worse, seeing them in the morning after you wake up. You can script your AI to deal with this somewhat, but you also have to be prepared that it might, at times (rarely) interrupt your life to push you to deal with some crisis - or you might come back to an empty wasteland next time you sign in. - You MUST be willing to read the documentation. You MUST be willing to read a lot in general. There are some things about the game, seemingly minor (like the fact that rooms beyond a certain level attract MUCH stronger NPC attacks) which aren't mentioned in-game, but are on the wiki/API documentation. If you've read the docs well, you will know them. If you haven't, you can get blindsided when the enemies you face are suddenly 4x stronger for no identifiable reason. That's just one example - there are many others. - The longer you play, the less your empire changes on a day-to-day basis. You still have work to do, but progress is clearest in the first few days, where you're expanding more quickly. After that, it becomes ever more incremental until, eventually, you will probably settle into a position of relative stability - unless you are willing to go to war with a neighbor to expand further. Who should/shouldn't buy this game: - If you want practice writing JavaScript, or enjoy scripting things in general, definitely DO buy this game. - If you don't like the idea of writing code, hate the idea of debugging, or aren't willing to read around, DO NOT buy this game. - If you're not sure if you enjoy writing code, but are an RTS fan, I still encourage you to pick up this game and try to learn to write code - its a valuable skill and it will give you HUGE strategic and tactical insight you can use in other games. Not to mention teaching you a valuable skill in a fun way. Plus, frankly, I find it more satisfying to write the code to handle attacking, defending, etc, than I do micromanagement. If you're big into micromanagement (a la StarCraft) maybe this is not for you. If you're big into big-picture thinking, automation, etc (a la Total Annihilation, Factorio, etc) then this may well be for you. - If you're not sure if you enjoy RTS games, and have no experience writing code.... play another few RTS games, and try writing some other code for something, before you try this.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 24, 2016

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

  Jan 24, 2020

  I'm not sure whether to recommend this game or not. But given all the negative points I can come up with, I decided not to. First, some positve nodes: -Very well documented API -Nice simple tutorials to get you started -Provides a neat motivation for writing some code as a hobby and maybe gain some coding skills And now to the negative: -Requires monthly fees for unlimited gameplay -Slow user interface -Bad integrated code editor -Very slow gameplay on the official servers -Very hard for new players to hold their ground -Due to the slow gameplay, there is very little to interact with in the game world. There is just not much going on, but trying to harvest energy as efficiently (cpu and costwise) as possible. -Now way for new players to survive once the 'Respawn area' security expires. There are always bigger fish around you with so much more spawning power and energy ressources available. Let me tell you some story of my Screeps experience: At first I really liked the game. Progress was slow but steady. There were some new things to explore and to tackle code wise, like efficient mining in neighboring rooms or even in npc controlled rooms. Generally writing code for automatic exploring, building and maintaining your colony and rooms. But the further you get, the less things there are to do. You are always limited by the amount of creeps or bodyparts you can spawn in your room in one creep lifecycle (1500 server ticks) or by the energy available to you in that room. So you can't just try out everything that seems interesting, like battling your neighbours in the respawn area or trying your hand on boosting creeps with stuff you would almost always have to buy via the terminal. Because if you do that, you can not use this energy to upgrade your room or build defenses. And the respawn area will expire eventually. For me, it was 14 days. In this time, I managed to get up to GCL 6, which means I could own 6 rooms. I did own 5 in various room levels. My main room was at level 7 and I had one other at level 6, when the respawn area was over. At the same day, a long time player with GCL ~40 and all the ressources and rooms this comes with, wiped out all my rooms. Of course I could delay them a bit by activating a safe mode. But this only delays the inevitable, if the player which attacks you has compared to you just unlimited ressources and can energy starve you. That's it for me. It was some fun while it lasted and I probably would have kept playing for some time since I hadn't explored everythinbg the game has to offer. But there is simply no way to hold your ground against the big fish in this sea, which is why I won't start over again. -
• 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.
• 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

  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

  Nov 4, 2017

  After leaving my job as a Javascript dev to explore new opportunities I ended up playing Screeps. Nothing really changed except that now I am unpaid.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 20, 2018

  Even though I have only been playing for a week, I have had a blast with this game. I would warn that the game is really a programming competition, and most of the 'gameplay' is algorithm development / improvement (and bugfixing). That being said, if you know any C-based programming language, you should be fine. I mostly use C++ and python, but the JS API is simple enough that you should be able to use it if you understand variables and functions. And also there is a cpu subscription that you have to buy if you want more than 10ms of run-time in the full MMO environment. This is understandable: devs need to eat, and server time is not free. The game really is quite an impressive feat imo, and it looks like the devs are actively trying to add some new features (power creeps) to make the game's world more rich. This game is time consuming, but I think it is much more fun and rewarding than other MMO/RTS games which try to lock you out of automation and make you do everything manually. With this game, you know you are in a real competition. You know that your performance is based on your ability to envision and build a better, more robust system rather than your ability to memorize macros or click a trigger button really fast. My experience so far: After completing the tutorial, the first few hours of playing the game are pretty slow because you are just trying to understand the API, how to control units, etc. You eventually adapt the tutorial AI to a new system which you envision, do some cleaning / optimization stuff, and build your own self-sustaining colony. Once the basics are out of the way, you need to focus on defense. The game automatically sends enemies to attack you after you have done enough stuff in the room. At that point, your colony is destroyed and you need to write code to automatically rebuild and maintain some warriors or a tower for defense. After you have the basics of defense and colony building, you need to figure out how to expand, gather more resources, and improve fortifications. That's where I am about a week in. I might update this when I am further along in my journey.