Screeps Power Analysis

In the programmable MMORTS Screeps, you can have more advanced units called Power Creeps. Most players don’t utilize them, but when used properly they can be devastatingly effective, for offense, defense, and just economically. You can get a full breakdown of Power Creeps and how they work in the official documentation.

The goal of this article is to discuss the individual powers and try to get a feel for how useful each of them are, and when you’d want to use them.

Powers

There are currently 19 powers available. To see the full list, and any details that I might skip over in my analysis, go look at the docs.

Most, but not all, powers require resources to use. The overwhelming majority cost a resource called Ops, which is itself generated via a power.

Powers by Ops Cost

Power	Ops Cost	Additional Costs
Generate Ops	0
Operate Spawn	100
Operate Tower	10
Operate Storage	100
Operate Lab	10
Operate Extension	2
Operate Observer	10
Operate Terminal	100
Disrupt Spawn	10
Disrupt Tower	10
Disrupt Source	100
Shield	0	100 energy
Regen Source	0
Regen Mineral	0
Disrupt Terminal	50/40/30/20/10
Operate Power	200
Fortify	5
Operate Controller	200
Operate Factory	100

As we can see here, you can break down the powers into various different groupings, but splitting them by ops cost lets us categorize them into 3 basic groups: no ops, cheap ops, expensive ops. Disrupt Terminal floats the line between cheap and expensive thanks to its level-dependent cost. We’ll lump it into expensive, since it qualifies as that until levels 4 & 5.

No Ops

Generate Ops
Shield
Regen Source
Regen Mineral

Generate Ops

Generate Ops is almost required to be taken as your first PC power. 15 of the 19 powers require Ops. Start stockpiling early, especially if you’re playing in a market-disabled or market-minimal environment (Seasonal, ThunderDrone, etc.).

Shield

Shield is a pretty good power, and sees solid use at higher tiers. 5k ramparts every 20 ticks is nothing to sniff at, especially since it can be used in unowned rooms. In terms of efficiency, it’s below what you’d get from spending that same energy to build an actual rampart at level 1 (50 hits/energy compared to 100 hits/energy), but it hits parity at level 2 and becomes more efficient at level 3+.

The ramparts only last 50 ticks, so it’s still got hefty drawbacks, but as a way to protect your PC in an actively-hostile room, it’s quite solid. Due to the 20 tick CD and the 50 tick duration, you can only keep 2 shields permanently up per PC, with a third concurrent shield available every other cycle.

Regen Source

Regen Source is an excellent economic power, once you can unlock it. Across its 300 tick duration, you’ll get 1000/2000/3000/4000/5000 extra energy from a Source. At level 2, that’s more than an unreserved remote harvest source, at level 3 it’s equivalent to a reserved remote harvest source, at level 4 it’s equivalent to a Source Keeper room source, and at level 5 it’s better than any single-source room. All you have to do is use the power every 300 ticks, and since the CD is 100, you can keep it active on both sources in your room, plus potentially a nearby remote source.

The main drawback to Regen Source is that you can’t get it until your PC is already level 10, which means it isn’t usable for turbocharging your economy in the early- or mid-game.

Regen Mineral

Regen Mineral is widely considered to be a D-tier power in the community. At level 5, it provides 1 mineral/tick, which isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t work while the Mineral is on cooldown. This means you only get to take advantage of it while the Mineral isn’t on cooldown, and it also delays the start of the regen cycle for that Mineral, since that doesn’t start until the Mineral is at 0 available resources.

The one serious use of this power was in Season 5, where the scoring material was one-time, non-regenerating Minerals. By using Regen Mineral on those, Tigga and others were able to eek out just a bit more score than they otherwise would have been able to. Otherwise, unless you’re trying to minmax to the extreme and get every last possible resource out of a Mineral each regen cycle (which really isn’t necessary), this truly is a waste of a power.

Cheap Ops

Operate Tower
Operate Lab
Operate Extension
Operate Observer
Disrupt Spawn
Disrupt Tower
Fortify

Operate Tower

Operate Tower is an excellent defensive tool. 10/20/30/40/50% effectiveness increase means at level 1 each tower gets an extra 15 damage, 10 heal, and 20 repair at max range, and 60/40/80 at minimum range. At level 5, that bumps up to 75/50/100 at max range and 300/200/400 at minimum range. With 6 towers at RCL 8, that’s an extra 1800 damage that can be dropped every tick on attackers, requiring significantly more boosted Tough parts on attackers.

While using towers for repair is generally inefficient compared to using a creep (20-80 hits/e vs 100 hits/e), level 2 brings the close-range repairs to parity, and at level 5 even max-range repairs are equivalent in efficiency. Towers won’t ever replace dedicated repair creeps when under active attack, especially since you want them to be available for damaging attackers, but in the aftermath while they’re still boosted by Operate Tower, your towers can supplement your repair teams efficiently.

Operate Lab

Operate Lab is a good power to have for pumping out boosts. At level 1, it increases your boost production by 40%, and keeps going from there. ~~Since it doesn’t increase your input costs, this is effectively free boosts,~~* and for events like ThunderDrone where your labs are constantly on cooldown, even level 1 will noticeably improve your war machine.

* Edit: This statement was incorrect. Looking at the engine code (which I thought I had done), this just increases the reaction amount. So you input costs will also increase. No free reaction outputs, unfortunately. However, the conclusions about times when your labs are on cooldown are still absolutely valid.

Operate Extension

Operate Extension is a CPU reduction power. By instantly refilling extensions across the room directly from your Storage, you can save all of the intent costs from moving a refiller creep to each extension and depositing energy into them. Theoretically, if you were trying to use all 3 spawns to pump out as many creeps as possible, this would also let you maximize spawn uptime, since it would be rather CPU intense to have enough filler creeps to ensure that all your extensions are refilled every 150 ticks. In practice, however, this is mostly a utility power that helps reduce your long-term CPU costs when doing regular base maintenance.

Operate Observer

Operate Observer is only good for scouting beyond adjacent sectors. How often you do this boils down to how aggressive your bot is and whether you can get a scout into the rooms you’re wanting intel on. A single scout without any sort of waypoint-room renewing can travel a maximum of 30 rooms distance from its spawn room.

If you happen to be sending Deposit or Power Bank harvesting teams beyond your immediately adjacent highways, then it can make sense to use Operate Observer to cut down on your time-to-detection for freshly-spawned resources, but otherwise it’s purely about cutting down your time-to-update for tactical data.

Disrupt Spawn

Disrupt Spawn is a pure attack power, and is effective during sieges. Interrupting defender spawning is a solid tactic, but you’ll need level 5 to perma-block a designated creep from spawning, and you’ll need 3 of those to fully lock down a room. However, even a 20% increase in spawn time for defenders can result in gaps in defensive coverage. The short duration means that you’ll be burning through ops to maintain that disruption, however. The range of 20 plus the short duration also means your PC will be under fire from towers the entire time. Plan accordingly.

As with all offensive powers, usage of Disrupt Spawn is dependent on power being enabled in the target room.

Disrupt Tower

Disrupt Tower is a solid offensive power for sieges. Towers are often a significant source of damage, comprising 3600 damage at close range every tick when all 6 are built. Even at max range, they produce 900 damage every tick. That adds up, and will no-sell any attack that doesn’t incorporate at least T1 boosts for Tough and Heal. Disrupt Tower will reduce their effectiveness, and with no cooldown you can keep 5 of the 6 towers operating at reduced efficiency.

As with all offensive powers, usage of Disrupt Tower is dependent on power being enabled in the target room.

Fortify

Fortify is an interesting power with niche uses. While invulnerability for a wall or rampart seems good on paper, the unfortunate fact is that the limited uptime makes it not very viable for defense. Most room attacks end up being sieges, and with proper defender placements, RMA is the primary damage dealer long-term. Since a single PC can only keep 1 rampart invulnerable at a time, even with level 5 meaning there’s no downtime in that invulnerability, you’re still going to be dealing with significant incoming damage on the rest of your adjacent ramparts.

Where this power makes more sense is when using a PC offensively, paired with the Shield power. Drop a temporary rampart and make it invulnerable, extending the effective amount of time a rampart under fire would remain protective. If you have a healer paired with your PC, you can drop the rampart, make it invulnerable, and move your healer into it. Then your PC can sit outside the rampart and be healed from the damage that towers would be dropping on them, while the healer is safely protected by an invulnerable rampart.

You could also use this, combined with Shield, to make SK farming easier, as well as for reducing the healers required for Power Bank farming.

Expensive Ops

Operate Spawn
Operate Storage
Operate Terminal
Disrupt Source
Disrupt Terminal
Operate Power
Operate Controller
Operate Factory

Operate Spawn

Operate Spawn is a solid power for economy, offense, and defense. You’ll be using creeps for everything, so increasing the speed at which you can spawn them is a solid win. Once you get past the initial just-spawned-in ramp up for your economy, your bot will generally be spawn-blocked as its limiting factor. From RCL 1-6, a single room can support 500 parts worth of creeps (1500 / 3). A single double-source room produces 30k energy within that timespan (3000 * 2 * 1500 / 300 = 6000 * 5), so you won’t generally be maxed out on your energy usage, especially if you’re running multiple remotes. The specifics of why you’d want to pump out creeps faster for offensive and defensive purposes are too obvious to spend time on here.

Operate Storage

Operate Storage is a niche power with limited uses. Being able to store more in your Storage is a benefit, yes, and the long duration means that your overall ops cost isn’t terrible. But generally, there aren’t many situations where having a super-large Storage is more than minorly useful. The most clear-cut example would be for during a long siege where the attacker is also using Disrupt Terminal to lock down your ability to import resources to sustain your defenses. Aside from that situation, having a larger Storage just means you have more buffer before you have to start offloading your resources somewhere.

Operate Terminal

Operate Terminal is another niche power with limited uses. Reducing energy cost for transfers makes it less expensive to move resources around your empire, as well as making trade deals on the market, and the cooldown reduction also speeds up that process. But unless you have a central distribution hub terminal, the cooldown reduction isn’t going to make a noticeable improvement in your throughput, and if you’re worried about energy costs, you’ve got bigger problems. Frankly, you’d be better served by using Regen Source to increase your energy budget.

The one case where it might make sense is if you’re trying to empty out a room that you know is going to fall to a siege (or get closed, as was the mechanic in Season 6). But generally, those are predictable situations that shouldn’t require last-minute resource dumps to other rooms. So even here, it’s not that great of a power.

I would love to hear additional feedback on where this might be useful, or some hard numbers on how often folks are hitting limits on their transfers/deals due to cooldowns or energy costs.

Edit: Nicola on the Screeps Discord pointed out that this could be helpful for someone operating a Temple Room. Since you’re already pumping large quantities of energy into the room via a Terminal, the 10% reduction in energy costs from level 1 would make the operation more efficient and less of a strain on your empire’s energy stockpiles (though if you’re operating an active temple room, it’s unlikely you’ve got any sort of energy concerns to speak of). This is definitely a micro-optimization, and there are much lower-hanging fruit to grab when considering GPL allocations, but if you need filler powers anyway to bump up your PC levels for the better powers you actually want, this isn’t the worst pick ever.

Disrupt Source

Disrupt Source is a power that looks good on paper, but in practice isn’t very useful. Pausing Source regeneration is an excellent way to damage someone’s economy. The problem is that it requires range 3 to the Source in question. You know what else can prevent a bot from harvesting a Source? Attack creeps. If you have range 3 to a Source, generally the Source is outside of the protected area of the room and thus vulnerable to attack creeps.

The only situations where this power would see use is if the defender has their mining spot inside the protected area, but the Source itself is range 3 of unprotected tiles, or if you were being pushed out of a room and wanted to give a final middle-finger to the defender to make their life more difficult for a little while after you’re gone. You might be able to take advantage of it for harassment, either of remotes or if their bot doesn’t detect Power Creeps and thus yours can slip into their room without drawing a response, but the former is going to be cheaper with regular creeps, and the latter is heavily bot-dependent.

Disrupt Terminal

Disrupt Terminal is a top-tier siege power. As long as you have the ops for it, you can perma-lock someone out of their Terminal even at level 1 of the power. With range 50, you can pop your PC into the room once every 10 ticks and snipe their Terminal, and as you level it up further, it gets cheaper and cheaper to keep going. Considering how many people keep essential resources in their Terminal for rapid transfers, this can be a brutal awakening if they don’t also have resources stockpiled in their Storage.

The main drawbacks to Disrupt Terminal are that it has a very short duration and that it requires your PC to be level 20 before you can purchase level 1 of the power. Both of these are obvious balancing decisions by the developers, and I don’t fault them for it in the slightest. It does, however, mean that using Disrupt Terminal is strictly a late-game strategy.

Additionally, Tigga has noted that locking someone out of their terminal is very much all-or-nothing. Even a single tick of downtime in your disruption means that they can get a giant pile of resources out of their terminal, either via sending or withdrawing. Keep this in mind when coding your attack strategies.

Operate Power

Operate Power is an okay utility power that doesn’t see much use in practice. The benefits are straightforward: increase your power processing speed for 1000 ticks. The problems are three-fold:

You’re bottlenecked by power. Especially in game formats where you don’t have a market, harvesting enough power to keep your Power Spawn processing non-stop is a bit of a difficult task, and that’s without considering all the other things your bot needs to spend time and resources doing.
You’re bottlenecked by energy. Assuming you have enough power to process, your next issue is that processing power is extremely power-hungry. You need the full output of 5 sources to keep a Power Spawn processing at full speed, and that’s not including the cost of the creeps involved in gathering that energy.
Operate Power increases the processing speed of a Power SPawn. It does not increase your per-unit output.
- A quick peek at the engine code shows that it just multiplies the amount of power processed per intent.
- This means that Operate Power also increases the energy usage by a proportional amount, which means you’re hitting both of the previously mentioned bottlenecks even faster.
- Additionally, this amount multiplication happens before the resource amount checks; that means that if you don’t have enough power or energy to process the multiplied amount, you’ll get an insufficient resources error. Once you’ve used Operate Power on a Power Spawn, you’re stuck processing in increments of that higher amount until it wears off, whether you like it or not.

Overall, the utility of Operate Power is heavily offset by its drawbacks. The only times you’d want to be using it is when you A) have more than 2000 power ready for processing, B) have more than 100k energy ready to fuel that processing, and C) want to get that GPL progression as fast as possible. How often this actually occurs is very much dependent on your bot and server.

Operate Controller

Operate Controller is a niche power, but within that niche it’s truly excellent. Operate Controller lets you upgrade an RCL 8 controller past the 15 energy/tick base limit, letting you pump 25/35/45/55/65 energy/tick into a controller. If you want to pump up your GCL, and don’t want to have a dedicated claim-upgrade-unclaim loop room, this is how you do it.

That said, if you don’t particularly care about the GCL leaderboards and don’t have a massive surplus of energy, this power isn’t doing much for you. Since it’s one of the powers that requires PC level 20 to choose, this is not something that can really help you grow your empire during your low GCL period.

Operate Factory

Operate Factory lets you start manufacturing Commodities in your Factories. As discussed in the official documentation, the only use these have is to be sold to NPCs on the market for credits. This makes it worthless on any server that isn’t MMO. On MMO, however, it can be a reasonable way to get credits, either from NPCs or from other players who want the lower-tier Commodities so they can make the higher-tier Commodities. At the point where you’ve got Commodity processing infrastructure running, however, you’ll be able to sell energy and minerals to supply your credit needs, so this doesn’t provide much new utility.

Analysis

Power Creeps really only provide significant value on MMO. On other servers, your amount of time spent harvesting and processing power is far too long to get significant benefit. ThunderDrone and BotArena simply move too quickly to let you ramp up to Power Creeps. Even for Seasonal servers, which run for 2-3 months, you’re unlikely to ramp up to significant levels. You’re likely only going to build up one PC, so make sure you have a very clear build order and know exactly what you’re planning to use it for.

When starting from scratch, you’ll almost certainly want your very first power to be Generate Ops. Since ops take a while to build up, and many powers use large quantities of them, starting a stockpile is necessary. I’d recommend maxing out this power each level it’s available.

In general, there are 3 paths you can go with a Power Creep build:

Economy
Offensive
Hybrid

Economy

When going with an economy build, you want to get powers that improve your resource accumulation, as well as reduce your CPU usage so your empire can sustain more rooms and creeps than it would otherwise.

Suggested Powers

Generate Ops
Regen Source
Operate Lab
Operate Extension
Operate Spawn
Operate Controller
Operate Tower

A sample build order:

Generate Ops 1/3/8/15/23
Regen Source 11/12/13/16/24
Operate Lab 2/4/9/17/25
Operate Extension 5/6/10/18
Operate Spawn 7/14/19/20
Operate Tower 21/22

Generate Ops takes priority here, since you need ops for most other powers. Have your PC using this on cooldown, to maximize the amount of ops you can generate. (If you need more ops income, you could potentially create additional PCs just to get more concurrent CDs of Generate Ops, but in return you’re losing out on faster access to higher tiers of other powers. Evaluate this trade-off carefully.)

Regen Source is locked behind PC level 10, but as an econ power it’s top-notch, and thus gets priority immediately after Generate Ops. Level 4 could be done before Level 4 of Generate Ops, depending on how much you value the additional Ops income vs Energy income.

Operate Lab is phenomenal for late game play, since it increases your production of boosts. It gets leveling priority third, after Generate Ops and Regen Source. This is also the last power that we can get to level 5.

Operate Extension, Operate Spawn, and Operate Tower are all interchangeable, depending on exactly how you want to do things. Operate Extension is listed first here, since it reduces your overall CPU usage and can potentially improve your spawn uptime by reducing the amount of time you spend waiting for available energy. Operate Spawn is next, since it directly increases the number of parts each spawn can support. Operate Tower is not strictly an economy power, but it’s defensive utility is valuable. Operate Extension and Operate Spawn both offer defensive utility as well, due to reducing defender spawn times.

Offensive

When using an offensive build, you can focus on base harassment, or combat supplements. There is a lot of overlap between these, so you can easily use a base harassment build for general combat supplement. The general difference will be whether you include Disrupt Terminal, and whether you focus points into Disrupt Tower and Disrupt Spawn. If you were using a PC to help supplement Source Keeper farming or Power Bank harvesting operations, you’d probably want to max out Generate Ops, Shield, and Fortify, which leaves you with Disrupt Terminal at level 2. Still capable of locking down a target terminal, but far more ops intensive to do so.

Recommended Powers

Disrupt Terminal
Generate Ops
Shield
Disrupt Tower
Disrupt Spawn
Fortify

Sample Build

Generate Ops 1/3/8/15
Shield 2/4/9/16
Disrupt Tower 5/6/10/17
Disrupt Spawn 7/11/12/18
Fortify 13/14/19/20
Disrupt Terminal 21/22/23/24/25

Disrupt Terminal is the classic ability to use for long sieges involving Power Creeps. It gets priority, but since it takes the last 5 levels of your PC, this doesn’t make much difference except that it blocks out level 5 on any other powers.

Generate Ops gets priority up to level 4, because your combat PCs are going to be operating outside your supply chain, and should be at least partially self-sufficient.

Shield gets next priority for levels, as it makes your PC able to protect itself in hostile rooms, as well as helping to mitigate incoming damage for your other creeps.

Disrupt Tower reduces the incoming damage for all your creeps, but does not completely mitigate it the way that Shield does, thus it has a lower priority.

Disrupt Spawn is good for delaying defender refreshes and overall interfering with defense activities, as those all require creeps to be spawned. However, this is an indirect effect, and thus gets less priority than direct damage mitigation powers.

Fortify is the final power in the set, and while it’s good, using it requires Shield and you’re not going to get full uptime on it without sacrificing level 5 Disrupt Terminal to get level 5 Fortify. Within a multi-PC attack scenario this could make sense, but for an initial offensive PC, this is going to be less effective for you than Disrupt Terminal.

Hybrid

A hybrid build is one that incorporates economic powers and offensive powers. This could make sense for if you wanted to get some economic benefit from your PC while not actively waging warfare, but also get combat utility from it when you are waging warfare.

I don’t have enough experience to make a build recommendation here, but it would probably involve Generate Ops (notice a theme here?), Regen Source, Shield, Disrupt Tower, and Operate Controller/Lab/Extensions, providing solid utility for your economy, while also providing offensive powers that are usable for SK Farming, Power Bank harvesting, field combat, sieges, and defending.

Epilogue

There’s a whole lot of information here. I’ve tried to break it down across a somewhat reasonable axis (per-use ops consumption), but you could easily reframe it by ops/uptime, which would definitely make some powers far less expensive compared to others. The goal here isn’t to give the be-all and end-all guide to powers, but instead to provide a primer so you can wrap your head around them.

Questions? Hit me up in the Screeps Discord (@chaosmark).