The territory settlement has suffered great changes since 2016 began. Some players who control large parts of the five sectors have stopped their scripts and surrendered their territory to others:
| Region | Old owner | New owners |
| E5N5 | Ranger | DarkTrooper7 (4 rooms) Hendriksie (4 rooms) |
| W5S5 | Vertigan | AzuraStar (6 rooms) |
| W15S25 | msvsergey | TooAngel (4 rooms) Novice area (15 rooms) |
| W15N5 | Vision | retired (7 rooms) |
| W15N15 | reelthyme | Novice area (21 rooms) |
Here is how the map looks like at the moment:
Starting from now, we’ll use a new strategy to open Novice Areas. If large free zones inside existing game sectors appear, they will be zoned as Novice Areas rather than just adding new sectors to the map. It will allow for more flexible balancing in settling the game world and prevent the appearance of large empty spaces that would decrease competition for territory.
The main criteria for placing these zones will be the room reservation which became significantly easier after the recent update.
By the way, as the reservation process became easier and you now have to reserve rooms to increase your energy sources capacity, actual domain borders became visible on the map. This simplifies the task of choosing the starting point for novice players. Let’s see the room availability in the Claimable view:
While previously it wasn’t always obvious that placing a spawn in some room would infringe on some large player’s interests, now it is perfectly clear and visual.
The most densely-settled sector, the Screeps metropolis, so to say, is now the central Hernanduer’s[23] location – W5S15. There are only 5 neutral rooms now, and after the NPC Invaders update, it’s likely that only one isolated room will be left, W2S19.
Unlike Hernanduer, many players place their rooms quite far from each other, so to assess their domains, the settlement rank could be useful in addition to visual observation.
As was expected, the expansion leaders are all the same who lead the main tops. In January, NhanHo[25] landed his 4th gold in the Expansion Rank:
Danny’s[15] chart for the last day of the month shows that curve for Hernanduer where he recaptured the initiative to soar upwards in the new season (it is seen in the current chart [link]). His companion in the chart DarkTrooper7[21], on the contrary, fell into coma for a few days but later braced himself and regained control over his territory:
The Power Rank reveals the state of the preparation for the era of heroes. As in the first power season, Hernandeur again tops the rank by piling up literally over 9000K of power in total. We are seriously eager to see the power creeps he’ll be able to create when they appear!
The highest military activity of the season was focused in the new sector E15S15 which is completely immersed in fighting. We can hope that future Screeps leaders will emerge from here. And now, as we intended in the previous review, let’s switch our attention to some attacks with towers (which, by the way, prompted us to adjust their characteristics a little):