Undocumented Behavior

Behaviors

Hard Limits on Certain Intents

In addition to the soft limit imposed by the 0.2 CPU cost required to register an intent, some intents have a hard limit on the number that can be registered per tick:

• Game.market.deal: 10
• Game.market.cancelOrder: 50
• Game.market.changeOrderPrice: 50
• Game.market.extendOrder: 50
• PowerCreep.spawn: 50
• PowerCreep.suicide: 50
• PowerCreep.delete: 50
• PowerCreep.upgrade: 50
• PowerCreep.rename: 50
• PowerCreep.create: 50

Each limit is specific to that particular method. For example, if a player calls Game.market.cancelOrder successfully 50 times, they may still call Game.market.deal up to 10 times.

Any invocations that exceed the limit will fail silently (the return code will be OK). Using the previous example, the 11th+ call to Game.market.deal would be effectively ignored, whereas the first 10 would be processed as expected. Fortunately, the 0.2 CPU cost will not be incurred for any intents that exceed the limit (source).

All currently-known hard limits are applied to intents in the global namespace which appears to concern intershard / account-level actions.

Workarounds

• Manually track progress against the limit each tick via [[prototyping]] or an overlying abstraction
• If hitting these limits due to batch processing, run the affected job more frequently so fewer invocations occur on any given tick

Magic Numbers

See the Useful Constants page.

Intent Precondition Checks

An intent will be rejected due to precondition checks even if another intent has been registered on the same tick that will allow all necessary conditions to be met.

For example, if a creep carrying no energy successfully registers an intent to withdraw or pickup energy, it still won't be able to repair, build, or upgrade until the next tick.

PTR Settings

There are several differences between the Public Test Realm (PTR) and the official World server:

• All buildable structures have a build cost of 1
  • The only exceptions are swamp roads (cost: 5) and tunnels (cost: 150); the new cost is applied before the terrain cost multiplier for roads
  • Build cost changes are reflected in the client and on ConstructionSite instances, but not in the build cost constants defined by the API
  • Repair costs are unchanged; this is particularly impactful for tunnels
• The RCL upgrade cost for every level is 1,000
  • The downgrade timer must still be maxed out before RCL increases
  • This new cost also applies to RCL 1 -> 2 (normally only costs 200); beware this balance change when respawning
  • The upgrade cap of 15 still applies; this can potentially impact benchmarking setups
  • The client UI will not reflect this cost change
• Nukers only require 1 energy and 1 ghodium to fill
• Nuker firing cooldowns and Nuke land timers are both reduced to 100 ticks
• The market GUI is disabled, but the market itself is still functional
  • Only the most recent 1-2 days of price history are available for each resource; sometimes it is entirely absent
• The shard3 CPU limit is increased to 60
• The 12-hour cooldown on Game.cpu.setShardLimits does not apply

Most of these changes can be found by grepping for config.ptr in the engine repo

This behavior can be easily recreated on a private server via an environment variable change: PTR=true.