Structure building - Automated or By Hand/Monitored
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Just getting started with screeps and am curious if most people have completely autonomous structure/defense planning and building or if wall/ramparts are done more by hand.
Also, is it typical to start in the live world without a fully functional AI to test out gathering/building before fully having defenses working.
Basically would anyone like to describe what they did when they were "getting started"?
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Most players do building placement manually, that includes defense and rampart.
And it's pretty common to start without defense code working. As long as you mind your room's location, people will leave you alone -- the newbie zone actually seems to have more action going on than the rest of the world.
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It's fine to start without defense plans. The first pressure is to get some energy into your controllers within about 24 hours, which is fairly simple.
When you can, build a tower, give it energy, and write code to have it attack things. Towers are extremely strong defense.
In terms of starting locations, the farther away from other players the better. If you change the map to show you "energy mined in last hour", pick a spot where nobody is mining, and ideally where nobody is mining even adjacent to that. It'll give you some good buffer.
Alternatively, look for rooms with a highlighted border - those are newbie spawns, and being next to them is reasonably safe in comparison to someone with high level murder bots.
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I basically did the simulation with waves of attackers until I was able to make it to level 6 or so, I didn't really pump the controller at all in simulation but it would have been nice if I had a little of that working. That said, it wouldn't have been a problem if I started in the world a little earlier because you have some time before the walls come down around your room. Just expect if you start in the world that you'll want code to build up walls and pump up the controller. If you start in a room with some buffer most likely you won't be disturbed till you have a tower. Just make sure you're working toward that (i.e. controller level 3).