Screeps World Review, December 2016

Screeps gets hot! If you managed to get bored, you’re probably doing something wrong. Thousands of players, 8 layers of world map perimeter, portals for long-range transportation, countless minor scuffles and major battles across alliances, free market, instant messaging between players in personal and shared chats… Cheer up your allies, Screeps has much more in store!

Time in Screeps flows slower than your watch, but we hope you won’t notice it when playing. Let’s make a snapshot of our world today to better assess our future progress, look back, and smile:

It’s surprising to see how the borders of alliances have changed:

In our previous reviews, we mentioned artwork out of walls, creeps, and other objects. But tedivm has raised a bar in design by putting a whole screen of 11x20 ramparts in E34N38. Managing the property StructureRampart.isPublic allows creating nice cartoons or, say, a ticker:

Mototroller in W12N12 has presented a timely Christmas tree:

Stybbe keeps improving his results in the ER top, the main players' benchmark, month after month. In the last month, he started challenging the leaders, but this month he can win the gold:

 

Dissi has boosted his power mining and snatched the laurels from the long-time power tycoon Hernanduer who collected 10 of them.

Screeps World War I

The greatest battle by the number of players and effect on the game world broke out in the past month. It started from a few local scuffles but later embraced 6 alliances. The players involved named this prolonged series of conflicts the “Screeps World War I.”

The alliance concept itself implies the domino effect, but when one alliance helps the other, it can create an apocalyptic resonance. You either find diplomatic solution or lose all resources. This war was marked with a heavy usage of nukes, but their directional operation helped avoid civilian casualties.

The record holder by speed, bonzaiferroni, played a key role in the war, and how dramatic it was! You can read his viewpoint in his account "regarding the tone of the community over the last couple days". The whole thing was so epic that you can write memoirs titled “Passion, self-destruction, and resurrection.”

Zergling, despite having quite high walls, failed to stage good defense and ended up falling in coma and resetting. Who knows, maybe we’ll see upgraded Zergling 2.0 in the future, but he has made history anyway.

Atavus, a witness and participant in the attack against Zergling, among some other things, has detailed everything in his write-up “Screeps World War I”. We recommend reading it as a nice appendix to this post.

The video of the month features a number of warfare episodes worth looking at, notice how many players are involved: