Screeps World Review Q1 2017

Screeps has been in the process of total reorganization lately. We’ve just launched our revamped game documentation and the blog where you’re now (the new forum engine is coming). We are reorganizing our team, and 2 new members joined us: a designer and a developer (they will be introduced later). We’re rebuilding the client graphic code from scratch using the PixiJS engine to optimize performance and bring the game graphics to a completely new level of quality. And the main revamp, server-side, is expected to be announced soon. It will have to do with official game servers and will introduce a radically new approach to expansion of the game world which will help solve the issue of slow tick duration.

Unfortunately, all this reorganization work affected our Screeps World Reviews. Starting this month, they will be published quarterly. Writing them every month took the time that we now want to invest in the game development itself.

The anniversary three-digit perimeter W100N100-E100S100 was opened recently. So let’s make a snapshot of our mega-labyrinth containing over 90k creeps:

And here is the alliance-based map view from the excellent site leagueofautomatednations.com:

Dissi has been topping PR rankings for the whole quarter, with Hernanduer coming second. Since Power Creeps is on the horizon, more and more players are now joining the race for this competitive edge:

To see which players among the power mining newbies have been the most active in robbering banks, we’ll make a leaderboard with all those who boosted their power processing abilities in 1Q17 year over year:

The biggest loss of the season was the defeat of freedom-loving zuphrany to Rajecz (The Hive) and maka_RTH (The Culture):

Neomatrix returned and considerably shifted the balance of power towards SUN in the far east:

R33T4RD whom we mentioned in the previous review continues his existence in the light mode and sieged E16S42 with a double 300M barricade. And remember that this passage has already withstood 9 nukes at once, a beautiful and intimidating event:

In the fall you could witness a graffiti the size of a whole sector. Bovius made the sector W55N55 his home to create a growing “blackness” of even a larger scale:

The most populous alliance, OCS, has been also the fastest-growing, it now includes 60+ members. Back in the Early Preview times, it was just a little less than the total number of players on the map. Now let’s compare the current alliance geography with what we saw in January:

In just two months, a tiny 3-4-member alliance Ypsilon Pact has reached the top and now challenges the leading alliances with their 19 units:

Let’s see how the Expansion Ranking would look like if we broke it into groups:

The map can be viewed as infographics using the filters Energy harvested / spent, Creeps produced / lost and others. The Market remains out of business, whereas the Range is its crucial parameter, and geography is a very important Market’s components. The following video shows how trading looked in the first quarter (displayed are all trade deals with amount of 1000 credits and higher):