Hi Maroder

The area I play in is very large (mega base large - not my base, just the map area) and it is surrounded by water with only one opening. This is an ideal bottleneck to prevent the biters from coming in to my area (only need to defend one place). I'm currently busy clearing all the bases in my area to make use of that bottleneck.
My question is, does the enemies expand in the same way as vanilla? Meaning, does the enemy spawn at a current base, walk to a new location and then create a new base?

Second question. What is the purpose of the Ship Hull? I can not repair it, it does not seem to have a purpose other than being a physically big requester chest.

No, to create a base the enemy needs only free space. If you clear enough area, an enemy base may appear inside the player’s base. The spawn of bases and the collection of units of attack on a player occurs using a mod script - this significantly reduces the load on the CPU.
The ship is repaired when a specific item is loaded into a container. The list of items with which you can repair the ship and the bonus to repair is presented in the form of a request for the number of items. After repairing the ship, the research speed of the original laboratory is increased 10 times.

Thank you. So how do we defend our base if the enemy can just pop up anywhere? I've been playing about 12 hours now and I'm only at military science. I cant progress much further, since I'm defending most of the time.

An enemy base cannot appear if there is a player’s structure within a radius of 220 cells.
Right in the game you can change the settings and weaken the enemies.

Thank you. Does this mean I can "claim" areas of the map by simply placing a belt every here and there?

Something like that. Any building that has the "player" force will do.

That is good to hear. Thank you