Visual glitch that happens some times, restarting fixes it most of the time if I recall.

Pathfinding is expensive, in moveTo you can find a few opts reusePath, is the easiest one to help lessen the cost with some/most creeps. Default it is 5, so every 5 ticks if your creep has not reached its destination / changed rooms it will recalculate a path. Saves CPU, but creeps will react slower to things in their way.

Beyond that, you can use pathfinder to find paths and save them for creeps to use with moveByPath. As for already created solutions I hear Traveler is something folks use.

related to: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2922/unable-to-read-other-players-segments-using-the-rawmemory-component/11 ? thought that was fixed though

Experimenting w/ attack code on them would be best. One thing to note, is that a tower has a fall-off damage range: Attack effectiveness 600 hits at range ≤5 to 150 hits at range ≥20

You can calc the damage/healing needed for your room, however once you get close enough, could always employ tower-draining depending on how effective their tower refilling script is. A tower can't hurt you, if it doesn't have energy and depending on how it selects targets helps as well.

Pairs/Squads tend to help when 1 creep can not, as you can have larger heal creeps or a group working together.

if your not going for fully automatic attacks, watching their creeps' logic and looking for a weakness you can exploit is generally best.

There's a cooldown when respawning that your not allowed to respawn in the same room, I don't know off-hand how long that cooldown is but its meant to keep folks from spam-respawning in a room.

You'd still be selecting to start manually though, maybe some one who does botArena can talk about how that's set up since its to my understanding almost all hands off, not sure if there's a way they auto-set spawns.

S3 was for a time (as most shards were) allowed to only be spawned on for a while, walls were put up/portals disabled between the lower shards and it for a time (I want to say 1-3 months?) as folks got established. The balancing factory with S3 in general was/is the 20 CPU restriction which folks on other shards have never had to worry about before.

If it holds for like S1 and S2, if S3 is full enough, maybe there'd be an S4? But I have no idea if that is going to be the case, the forums do reveal however 'access keys' https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2930/dev-update-2020-03-08-new-account-resources Which has the promise of seasonal stuff/special events.

I don't know if a newbie only shard would help the root cause you mention with a handful of powerful players, all it would take is several newbies working in-conjunction or having access to more powerful code/codebase to establish themselves and dominate.

I do have hope though, that seasonal play / Screeps Arena would be something more akin to what your looking for, either with constantly resetting seasons or 1v1 2v2 play easier to keep balanced than MMO which by its nature will have older players.

Have noticed it loading slower as well, started making a bookmark folder for my rooms.

@o4kapuk If your in range to attack, you'd be in range to have fairly high priority on the spam wouldn't you? Unless your energy supplier from the buy order is much closer and/or you have an arrangement w/ a neighbor I guess.

@tigga Could just auto-deny transactions from the player w/ creeps in your room attacking you but then I guess some one else (alliance member, ect) could still spam and/or you could start depleting their bucket before you attacked, so there'd have to be some way to detect the incoming spam and stop/adjust it like shutting off the terminal, or rejecting incoming trades from xyz room or player.