For experts advice and opinions

[Mogwai]

Greetings..
I started playing couple of days ago, now I'm at level 11 preparing to get core 5, at first it was all straight forward, but as I am advancing I'm taking decisions that I believe might affect me on the long run, so I just want to share my thoughts and strategies and see what game experts think maybe I'll learn a thing or two.

Base design:
As I found (correct me if I'm wrong), if a hack to be considered successful, one has to download DB from the core or/and loot all resources, otherwise it fails, and I design my network accordingly; My priority is the core, I put it way in the back and make it secure as possible, and I put resources nods within different branches to make it harder to loot them all (yes I risk losing some of my resources but I still win, right? ).. what made me doubtful about this strategy, is the amount of players who put their cores up front or in the middle and focus security on resources.. at first I thought ok, we're all beginner and this could be a mistake, but then I've found advanced players on youtube with high levels doing the same thing, so I started wondering what am I missing here?

Resource management (offence vs farming):
I see many people spending a lot of resources,time and nod space on buying more server farms and b-coins mines and leveling them up.. while I prefer spending that on leveling up the Evolver, Program library, developing programs.. seems pretty straight forward to me, because I can get in one hack what I get in hours farming.. I understand that I'm not hacking constantly all day long and it's good to have good back up source.. so to be fair I follow this strategy: I use farming resources to level up b-coins mines and server farms, and hacking resources to develop my offence.. let me know what you think

Programs:
I'm still not sure which programs should I get and which should I level up.. so, I need advice on that, what programs should I focus on when leveling up?

That's all for now..

Let me know what you guys think.. I really appreciate any advice, thought or tip
P.S: if these topics have been discussed somewhere else please leave me the link to that thread below
Thanks

[HCX - DReaD]

Base Design:
Advanced players put their Core at the front or middle to avoid being plowed by Kraken so easily. Although, you can manipulate the pathway to your core to be as isolated and full of traps as possible against Kraken. They will lose some rank points but their whole network will be completely safe from Kraken rampaging continuously.

Resource:
Most people will maximize the storage for both bitcoin and $, but as you said, since you can just hack, you dont need the auto-generate resource nodes to be high level.

Programs:
Most will go for high level Beam (for nodes with 1~2 connections) and/or Shuriken (for nodes with 3+ connections) for main damage. You also need to focus to either Battering Ram, Wraith or Blaster to take care of Code Gates. Do not upgrade ICE Wall too high, try to keep it at around lv4. Get high lvl Protector instead. Worm is not worth it at high levels.

[Mchief]

Few suggestions
1 figure out what your currently going for and build for that, if you want resouces put your core up front and the majority of hacis against you will be stealth downloads of your core , if you want rep make it hard to get every node in your base

2 know the value of your core, at higher levels it acks like a psudo code gate and outranks any node defensive node in attack priority ( ie if the node does not attack the core outranks it)

3 full farming is a bad idea, my first network my main goal was to get max # of max level resource producers asap and with in a few months I had done so, and I made huge amount by literally doing nothing, that said I myself got to spend about 10% of it, as I reached a point where all my upgrades were 3-4 million and I produced 100,000.00 an hour but every time I got to 300-400k I would get hacked, has to reset my account to get out of it.