I am getting PA soon and am pretty new to the rts genre. Are there any tips for new players that you guys can give me ?
There are quite a few beginner guides now over on the eXodus site. http://exodusesports.com/guides-category/beginner/
Learn your build hotkeys and command hotkeys well. The less time spent using your cursor to select buildings or commands the better.
Personally I recommend getting to know the game well playing against ai (skirmish mode) first. Then try some galactic war once you know what eventing does (as galactic war limits tech that you collect so knowing the tech first is a good plan). Once you know your way around the game then look at trying out multiplayer. The key to remember with pa is keep building. Factories should always be producing, and fabbers should always be making new buildings. Also expansion is key, new players tend to try and build a small base and then protect it with walls and turrets. The problem with this is you will get overwhelmed pretty quickly as the ai will finish up with a substantially larger economy. The best option is go big and don't worry about losing stuff, put up some turrets around important structures (e.g. factories and power) and use your units to defend outer expansions whilst rebuilding stuff that got destroyed. As capt said exodus is a good source of helpful info, as is www.pamatches.com Finally welcome to PA
Here are some tips 1. Get the necessary mods for better PA functionality through PAMM https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-pa-mod-manager-cross-platform.59992/ The mods you want are Pa stats online, system sharing, and hotbuild2. Do not attempt to learn the default hotkeys, they are very unintuitive and time consuming. Set your hotkeys through hotbuild 2. 2. Learn a build order from someone and practice it. This is quickest way to understand how PA economy works. Don't over build fabricators. 3. Play against the AI untill you can beat hard/absurd AI. Always look for opportunities to attack the opponents metal extractors 4. After you lose a game, click chronocam and look for something you could have done better. What made you lose, and how can you avoid it in the future. 5. Send your data to pa stats - it will prompt you when you want to select a spawn location. After your games, go to the pa stats website at http://pastats.com/listgames. Select your game and click on metal spent. Select a time that you want to use as a benchmark to improve on. Maybe 6 or 7 minutes. Try to spend more metal each game at the same time. You might eventually reach a ceiling with your build order, so experiment with different things and see how to improve it.
Mine is just a tl;dr version of everyone else's. Learn to play from videos and practice on the AI. Actually, to be specific, when you are new, practice against an AI with eco modifier of 0.5. I don't care if it is absurd, it won't build a threatening force at eco modifier 0.5, it may never achieve tech 2 given all the time in the world at that rate. If it is full eco, and normal difficulty, it will still be all over the planet with a hundred units within 5 minutes, it may not be aggressive but it will suffocate you accidentally. When you build faster than the 0.5 eco AI, play against the 0.7 eco AI, he may actually t2 albeit later better than never. Faster than that? Try 2 0.8 eco AIs, or 3 or 4 at once. Eventually, try 1 at 1.0 eco. Try 2-3 at 1.0 eco. Try 1 at 3 or 4 eco. It takes a strong early game play to take down a 3+ eco AI, because with 1 mex they can build a whole army while you require 6, you will have to kill his factories because his economy won't go down no matter how many attacks, he will run t2 factories off no mex at all.
I wrtoe some stuff you might find usefull: Tip&Tricks for new players how to kill a normal AI as beginner
Elodea has some great tips. I would personally add, don't bother with Galactic War. It is too random right now, and skirmishes are more fun anyway. Maybe give it a try when you are more comfortable with the game, see if you like it. It is no way to learn the game. Watching videos/streams can be a useful learning tool, especially if after watching, you attempt to put into practice what you have learnt. ZaphodX does great videos, as does wpmarshall. Try and watch POV videos from good players, so you can watch what they do. There are replays available too. It's quite a friendly community, once you can beat the AI and play against people, see if they will review the game with you afterwards. This can be particularly helpful, particularly after a loss. Figure out what you did wrong, when it happened, what you could have done to prevent it.
Ignore this 400%. Terrible advice. Edit: Well actually command hotkeys are useful, and build hotkeys can be but personally i prefer to click but it's certainly not the advice you should be giving someone who doesn't play rts much. --- The first thing you'll want to do is get used to this games unique streaming economy. (Most RTS games use a finite economy, you makes money and spend it in chunks) You use your metal and energy storage on a per second basis, the larger the drain on your eco the more eco making facilities (metal extractors and power generators) you'll need to keep up your efficiency. (the speed of your build power can drop significantly if you can't feed your nanomachine using fabricators and factories.) Next you'll need to learn how different units can be used with or against others and this part is mostly practice, to become a champion of the game. Put your AI's on easy and lower their eco modifier before starting a match against them, to start you off.
I really don't get this obsession this forum has with the idea that the build hotkeys are unintuitive or desperately need modding to even be playable. Anyone care to explain? I saw the hotkeys the first time I fired up a game and was perfectly happy...
I personally like Ubers system. A hot key mod was one of the first things developed during Alpha / early Beta, and I think a group of these players expected Uber to adopt the key binds they created (with the 'hot build' mod I believe). Well Uber chose a different system... I guess it's what your used to, thanks to PAMM the other hot key setup is available, I personally don't have an issue with the official one but more choice is never a bad thing imo.
Speaking of hotkeys... does anyone have a good setup that they would like to share? I've gotten into a bad habit of click spamming, for the most part it's fine for me, but I've been trying to switch to hotkeys and it seems so awkward.
Not saying that there version of hot keys are bad, im saying hotkeys in general for this game are unnecessary, and command hotkeys are almost unnecessary (due to context clicking) but not quite.
So I can't quite believe PAmatches.com isn't being mentioned anymore. That and ZaphodX and Realm and other caster videos.
Messing around with the interface can be of great help, many things are not obvious. I suggest: Area commands (to the right with something selected), most commands have an area equivalent The current selection (bottom left with something selected), you can remove certain types of unit, select all of a certain unit, with clicks and the control key There are hotkeys to select idle fabbers, idle factories, all air units etc Camera anchors (Shift + number, Alt + Number) Control groups (Control + Number, Number, double tap Number) Continuous build (for factories, to the right) Picture-in-Picture (press Q, or the 2nd button from the left in the bottom right bar) Some things may or may not suit your play style, you have to try them to find out.
Just play the game the way you like, it's still the best way to learn, experiment and gain experience. Try to mix up your gameplay now and then to figure out a playstyle that suits you best. If you got time to spare watch some videos on youtube of 'good'/decent players, not the high ranking competitive players as their tactics often won't be useful for newer players. I'd say to just start with the basics and slowly build up, advanced starting builds, mods and other strategies may be hard to follow when you don't even master the basics properly. Finally, join a clan/community, make new friends and play games with them. Keep pushing/challenging yourself and you will keep growing as a gamer.
