I played a lot of Starcraft when it first came out, which Wikipedia tells me was only about 13 years ago, but it seems farther back than that. Maybe I'm mixing it up with the original Command & Conquer. Or Dune. Point is, whatever game conventions have evolved on this format, I've only a vague awareness of them, and feel a little lost. I've got electrical generators, and uhh... storage? Batteries? They do something. And metal. Apparently I need metal for stuff. And numbers at the top of the screen indicate stuff, but apparently the numbers go into negatives too? Do I owe the space-bank something? And there's like a bazillion unit types and by the time I've finished browsing through them and figuring out what some of the buttons do, my AI opponent's got bombers dropping stuff. I put up a radar dish at some point, but was never sure what it did, or if it did anything, or if it got blown up and lost in visual clutter. I've no sense of the scale of the planet, how spread out my stuff should be, or what my units do, or how to group them, or... anything. It's a beta, so I'm sure a lot of that will be addressed, and someone somewhere is working on something that will help with all that. As a first-time player though, a giant spinny orb that somewhere contains a hostile element is super daunting when I'm still struggling to identify my own units.
As of right now, the best way to learn (besides playing) is to watch good players via gameplay videos. You're probably familiar with this if you watched any starcraft esports. Luckily the PA commentators are better. The best ones right now I would say are: ZaphodX: http://www.youtube.com/user/ZaphodX1 MegaMarshall: http://www.youtube.com/user/MEGAMarshallXP?feature=g-high-ctv I watched a month of these guys videos before I even bought the alpha access. I would watch them carefully and their non-tournament commentary is very informative, especially when dealing with how to start a match off and what tactics to use (ex. 3:1 metalvsgenerator, scouting, expansion, map control etc.) Hope you have fun and learn about the game!
Look up guides for SupCom1/FA or TA, they won't be quite accurate to the specifics of PA, but it will help build that 'foundation' of core knowledge and from there you should be able to extrapolate a lot of stuff on your own. Also look up some PA commentors like ZaphodX(as above) and while I don't think that they have anything that could be seen as a tutorial or guide, the commentary should point you in the right direction for a lot of things. Mike
Hm. Everything has crazy nicknames. On the plus side, apparently there are tiers of things? No idea how those are triggered though... I certainly didn't see an option for any of that in my earlier match. That's the sort of thing a tutorial would be handy for. That, and surely there's got to be a way to focus on units or buildings and just jump straight to those rather than slowly pan the entire planet looking for them.
This should be of assistance: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-keyboard-shortcuts.46906/ You can bind a view and snap to it at a keyboard press! Shift + number to assign, alt + number to snap to it.
At this stage, a certain amount of "you should know what you are doing" expectation is present when running your first game. This has certain drawbacks as with the beta a larger bunch of newcomers are to be expected. On the other hand, given its fluid state, creating tutorials at this point is Sisyphus task as these would have to be updated almost constantly. I think the easiest compromise would be a sandbox game mode without any opponents, allowing a newbie at least to try out the building/unit set and gather first experiences with the economy without outside influence/pressure.
Yes but its very inefficient due to long rollout times. You're far better off building more factories.
I'd really love to link you to a very simple guide I just wrote but apparently I am not allowed to put links in my post, as a newbie.
Tutorial for what part of the game tho? "Unit Stats" or "Basics on How to Defend against AI and setup Economy" or "A how to survive being PWND on Multiplayer"
The info i think people should need to know before game is :- Zoom out for the RADAR!! The planet is also the MINIMAP RADAR when you ZOOM OUT (took me a few min's to work out why there isnt a minimap radar *forehead slapped myself for that*). BUILD EVERYWHERE, this aint C&C, Spread your wings and expand. power reaches everywhere building go almost anywhere, the bigger and more spread-out your are the harder it is to find all of your base n destroy it! Hide your commander if sh!t gets bad. Just like CHESS if your king goes down (The commander) its GAME OVER!!
Here's a video from Zephod that explain the basics of SupCom, which has a very similar resource management system. Also I guess I'll just give some random tips from things I've noticed while learning the game today. Metal Extractors and Energy Plants give you a certain amount of resources every second. However, you can only store a limited amount, so if you are filled up on resources, you are effectively just wasting them. You can mitigate this by building storage which will increase the amount you can store. The basic tech tree is: Commander (Starting unit) > Factory > Fabrication unit > Advanced Factory > Advanced Fabrication Unit With the exception of orbital units, every combat unit is made in either a factory, or an advanced factory. From what I can tell, the Bot factory gives you faster moving, but weaker units compared to the Vehicle factory. The jump from a regular factory to the advanced version is a HUGE leap in economy, so just be aware of that. You can assign multiple fabrication units to building a structure in order to complete it faster, but each one you add means you drain your resources faster. Since the AI currently only builds air units, I recommend rushing a air factory first, pumping out a few Fabrication Air Units to help build up your economy, and then just queue up a bazillion fighters. The enemy AI doesn't ever all-in you as far as I've noticed, so building air and a few turrets is a good way to turtle while learning the game. Radar lets you see your enemy as small squares on the map when they come in range. It's handy for scouting the enemy coming at you. Also, some things have a much larger firing radius than what they can see. But if a radar spots an enemy, they can then fire at the targets. You can only build Metal Extractors on Metal Points which are shown as like, a few silver lumps on the ground. The extractor should snap to them if you try to build one near it. Energy plants can be built anywhere. Hope this was helpful in some way!
Also the fastest way i've found to spread out is with "AIR Fabbers", they build slower but in swarms they work just as well, and they travel 10 times faster than land units. If you build lots of "Air Fabbers" first then spread-out to find many many metal deposits you will grow much much faster. Just remember to defend yourself, too much expansion and not enough defenses will also hurt your strategy in both multiplayer and against AI.
That's probably something @ZaphodX could consider doing for the Beta - if he has some free time on his hand, besides commenting all the awesome tournaments!
On point with air fabricators - they consume a LOT more energy to operate than any other fabrication unit. So this actually slows your expansion as you have to build more power generators to support your fabricators.
Yes i noticed they drain a lot of energy too. I compensate by building tons of power. POWER EVERYWHERE MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA .. lol
That's good to know... since each type of factory produces a unit that can build structures, are the Advanced Factory structures only made by the related builder unit? Like, could a troop fabrication unit build an advanced air-unit factory, or could it only build an advanced troop factory?
Each line follows it's own type so Fab bots build Advanced Bot Factory + Defense and Eco. They can't build other Lines Adv factory.
