[libc]

A lot of comments here are focusing on the pricing and ignoring the 'sandbox' part of the game's description. There is a leaderboard you can try to climb but it is reset monthly and isn't really shoved in your face. Beyond that you're free to set whatever goals you want and go about them however you wish, with the principles of other strategy games (harvest resources, build things, attack enemies, etc.) to give you ideas. It's really a game about you and your code and how it grows and evolves as your goals and strategies become more complex.

Screeps is definitely worth trying, if for no other reason than to learn javascript at a deeper level if you don't use it extensively. I do have a couple of issues though:

The first is that it is quite resource intensive considering its simple 2D visuals, both in the browser and the standalone client. I'm not sure if it is just poor optimization or the javascript runtime but it shouldn't make my machine hot. It'd be nice if this were addressed.

The second issue I have is the workflow, which doesn't lend itself well to source control. The ingame editor works well enough, but its idea of a "branch" is just a named copy of the code directory. I think there is a way to integrate with github but I don't want to upload everything to the cloud just to be able to track changes. It would be nice if this area were looked at and made more flexible so we could use our tools of choice.

[tedivm]

Honestly I don't use the game client at all for coding. In my experience you're better off using a simple grunt task to push code to the server, and otherwise developing locally and keeping everything in git. The in game editor sucks, and you can do some fun post processing things with grunt.

The game client is pretty awful performance wise, but they're doing a rewrite that looks like it will be awesome.

[NhanH]

They have well supported API to push your code into it (alongs with gulp/ grunt package to do so, I think).

So you can work in your favourite environment and just "deploy" the code as normal, or am I missing anything?

[libc]

I admittedly haven't explored it in great detail, but when I've asked on their Slack channel a lot of people seem to just use the ingame tools which are "good enough".

[tedivm]

I think there may be a misunderstanding there. The community has built a ton of third party tools ( https://github.com/screepers ) and even has it's own alliance tracking site ( http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/ ). I can't imagine anyone just using the ingame tools.

[kotarou]

Can confirm, the community tools are awesome. If someone is only playing using ingame, without any of the external stuff, I feel they are missing a large portion of the game.

[ggrochow]

that is correct, also a GH integration, so you can have it reload your code as you push updates a github repo.