No idea. I definitely am getting the programmer feel, though. I keep hitting a point I can't recover from and have to respawn, tweaking my code to handle the issues I faced previously. Evolving code base for sure.

How does one respawn? I couldn't find that anywhere in the docs, do you just have to run out of energy and it automatically picks it up?

Click your username menu, and respawn is at the top. You start fresh, no room, no controller levels, but your max level attained remains.

Can't believe I didn't see it, I clicked on that menu a few times but never spotted the respawn button. Thanks, might respawn in a more favourable place once my harvesting scripts are working properly.

The initial investment is rather steep if you ask me because you do need to churn out a basic AI that is capable of doing collecting resources, defending the room, constructing various structures, distributing energy across the spawns, extensions and workers. However, once you have the basic behaviors in it is a matter of fine tuning and giving orders.

It takes time to take control of new rooms, especially rooms taken by other players. But even if rooms were already empty, it takes time to construct buildings, upgrade the controller and ensure its defendable. So all in all, once you have the basic decision making in it should be pretty much capable of taking care of itself unattended. But that still requires quite a lot of time on short notice. I found that getting the hang of Javascript took me a while and all the code I wrote along the way needs some pretty major refactoring in order to get it into a better shape.

Just upgraded my controller to level 3, I'm thinking of using a network-like system for my harvesters, basically propagating energy throughout an ever-expanding network consisting of extension points and relay creeps (move x 1, carry x 3). The idea is that it should be fairly efficient and also fault-tolerant as long as not all creeps die simultaneously (it also doesn't need roads, hence needs no human maintenance). I hope I can destroy already placed extensions though.

Haven't worked on my defenses at all so far, will need to set up some rampart logic and a few guard creeps before my walls go down in approximately one and a half days since in my current state it would only take a single armed creep to wipe my entire room out...

I'm still in the simulator trying to get a handle on the whole menagerie of structure types and the nature of all the little options.

The part system is really unique here. I'm trying to think of ways to abuse it effectively.