So, I decided with the new expansion and all to give PA another shot, and this time I recorded it. I'm afraid it's not one of my best videos. I'm much more used to 3rd-person commentary, so 1st-person videos tend to not be as fluid, as I am actively trying to play.
Oh hey. Welcome to PA. For those unaware, this guy is the principle (But far from the only) caster of Zero-K, one of the most popular spring games and one that has put a lot of thought into its design and mechanics. If you haven't played it yet, you really should check it out.
Well, it's more a return. Interestingly, I primarily discovered Zero-K because of GoogleFrog mentioning its UI in the PA beta forums a few years back. I've been here since Monday Night Combat (which I probably should have mentioned in the video, but it never came up).
I'll go ahead and repost everything I said on the ZK forums. Let me help a bit. You're supposed to go bot factory first; dox are the only decent raiding unit. Bumblebee is a phoenix, not a raven. There is no raven in this game. Build order tends to be something like fac metal energy fac metal energy energy energy. Blue is the color of excess. Don't have a blue metal bar in the future or I yell at you. When you have a lot of infernos, don't retreat. Also not sure if you know how the build hotkeys work, but control, rather than alt, inserts units to the queue. Aside from the bumblebee, the only units that could be characterized as riots are Teslas (T1 bots) and Bumblebees (T1 air). Bolo and Drifer are assaults, with infernos being a more specialized assault. Only raiders in the game are the dox and the icarus (sort of for the latter). Oh, and the piranha, but naval's different (yet fun!) Boom/Roach is only for sniping stuff; it has marginal ability for taking out tank blobs. You can just A-Attack wreckage (I think... They changed how wreckage worked in the expansion vs how it worked when I enabled it in my mods). There's very little in the way of on the map reclaim. Only stuff is trees on more lush planets like Meso and Pacific. If an enemy air scout passes over you, that gives you an "Enemy Detected" alert which confused the heck out of you in game 2. Dox and Slammers are amphibious because... reasons. Slammers use torpedos underwater, dox can't use anything underwater. Commander cannot build radar, but T1 fabbers can and you should do it. Bots have no dedicated anti-air; only vehicles have dedicated aa. The gunships can tank AA like a boss. Your only defense against them is superior fighter force. Assist is inefficient vs more factories. Atrophy (Gradual decay of structures when left unbuilt) is a thing. There's a mod called hotbuild that offers a one click tabless hotkey system. I prefer it to the vanilla system, but you may prefer the tabbed system since you play ZK. Commander alt fire is a wide radius riot weapon; bound to D by default. Rally points! Use them! Inferno monospam doesn't work. At all.
Oh BTW @Shadowfury333 there's a tournament at 1800 UTC today that you might be able to watch here: http://www.twitch.tv/teamexodusesports
Thanks for the laundry list of tips. I should probably keep this page on the other monitor next time I play. Most notably, Dox = Glaive, in terms of generalized usefulness. A few questions, though: Is there a mod or setting to make factory production stay in hotkey state for more than one to three units? Is my best crowd control option the Bumblebee, or does each factory have a riot unit? (I know, I'm thinking in Zero-K's factories-as-factions terms, but maybe there is) Should I generally avoid assist? Is it just an emergency thing if another factory would take too long while an army is barreling towards you and those additional units would fill out your army enough to win the fight? Are battles manageable while they happen? When I was trying the game out before streaming it I noticed units didn't exactly die in one shot anymore, and I could micro them (did a bit on stream too), but they still died fairly rapidly. What sort of factory to metal/energy ratio should I have?
There's Hotbuild 2, as I mentioned above, which takes some getting used to since it is not a tabbed system. Bumblebee and tesla are pretty much your only riot units and I've not messed too much with the latter (read: at all) Avoid assist. Better to have more factories generally. Dox you just give them a move(+attack command in some cases) and then let them run in. Grenadiers aren't very useful nowadays, avoid using them unless you need to take advantage of some ledges. Tanks you can manage a bit, but attention is usually better spent on growing your army than on killing the enemy army. Use this handy site to view unit statistics. One factory uses 675 energy and 15 metal per second (Annoying not having standardized units, I know). One energy plant produces 600 energy. So roughly one energy plant per factory. One metal extractor produces 7 metal per second. So roughly two metal extractors per factory. Your commander produces enough metal to do a little more than run one factory.
I'll add to Stuart's comments... Factory assist is a good idea at t2 imo, as they units cost more as does the factory. Assisting costs you more in energy than factories, however late game energy efficacy is less critical. With regards the economy, pa uses a slightly different scheme to earlier games. Essentially you have a fixed running cost per factory or faber. This does not decrease when your stalling metal! The key to keeping it stable is balancing fabs vs energy production essentially. I like to set my first fab to get approx 2 mex, then go into full time pgen production. Later in the game I'll assist that faber to speed up production. Once you get to t2 switch to t2 generators as they're much more efficient.
Okay, so I still want to have more energy than metal, good. In Zero-K the ideal economy is no stored metal and fully stocked energy (all production uses the same metal as energy, but there are units and buildings that need energy, and repair only takes energy), so that's why I wasn't sure what to think for PA at first.
Yeah really a full energy bar is your best aim. Also worth keeping in mind, stalling metal kinda hurts your energy eco, as you still use the full amount (although if you're using a bit less energy than you product this isn't a problem really). I also find that a few energy storage help a little later into the game, as the otherwise the default storage just empties way to quick if your briefly using a bit more energy than your producing.
