Speeding Up the Early Game

The first few minutes of any RTS are always pretty boring. It's been a plight since the early days.

Possible Solution 1
A promised solution that we don't know much about is The Egg. A capsule that drops out some units and possibly some buildings at the beginning of the game. May even allow us to choose which buildings we get allowing for more strategic choices, which is cool. Who knows, maybe the game in its current state paired with the yet to be released Egg is enough to fix our early game boredom.

Possible Solution 2
Simply boost the Commander's economy to allow it to build a factory first. So the Commander generates enough metal and energy for the Commander to be building as well as a factory be building. This increases the number of possible actions sooner and makes the game more interesting, faster.

Any other ideas?

I see you're new to the forums, and welcome!

You should do a search before posting in accordance with forum rules. Someone makes a comment on this topic at least once a month.

lol @hahapants

This will be a great area of experimentation for server modding.

I also feel that even that early build, though it takes some time, there's room for some diversity at the start. Some may feel it is a mandatory mex, plant, mex, mex, bot factory, but maybe it depends on the distance of metal or whatever. Or if you're on water.

There's nothing in the search specifically on the topic on speeding up early game.

The Commander's economy affects its rushing power as well. Being able to freely place and use laser towers without building a single power generator or extractor? That's a pretty damn aggressive thing.

The most effective quick start solution is to boost the lathe. Commanders that build faster get the game started faster. Add some starting wreckage (Such as from a crashed orbital lander), perhaps a dedicated lightweight/fast reclamation scout to grab field wreckage, and the game start ends up fast. It's really that simple.

Cheaper extractors also help speed the early game because you don't need to wait a minute for them to pay off. A minute of doing nothing, when there's nothing to do, turns out to be a very long time.

Yes it depends on some circumstances, but there is still only a very limited set of things that can be done, so having some sort of speed up (factory first ) sounds good to me.


hahapants is right though, we had this topic a lot.

Except the Commander can currently only build the missile defense tower, and I'd be fine with that build option being removed.

Boosting the build speed would be pretty nifty. Would speed up the early game and give more validity to the Commander late game by making it an even more important build asset.

It's been quite a while since we've had this topic, and a search didn't bring up any such threads.

*Ahem*
https://forums.uberent.com/search/160790/?q=early game&t=post&o=date&c[title_only]=1

Admit it, you didn't search.

I did search. Can't remember what terms I used, but I did search.

Even then, it's been a month and a half since the previous thread on this topic, and it's the only other thread on the topic - based on your search.

So, month and a half since the last thread on this topic. Only one other thread on this topic. (the other threads on that search are for SMNC)

A topic that exactly mirrors your topic that's only a little over a month old isn't good enough for you then?

The Search terms I used were "Early" and "Game".
If you did search, you obviously didn't search for anything close to what you eventually named your thread.

Did some testing. I did use "early game." It was my exact search query.

Here were my results: https://forums.uberent.com/search/160782/?q=early game&o=date&c[node]=61
I went through all 10 pages.

Didn't tick " Thread Titles Only ", did'ya?
Or " Display results as threads " either, huh?


Seems like your search results only go back to December 12th. Not exactly an exhaustive search.

Obviously, I didn't. If I did, I would have encountered 1 thread – hardly enough to fall under the realm of "duplicate thread issues." Though I probably would have commented on that thread if I saw it.

Uber's search feature sucks.

Now thank you for completely derailing the thread and sucking any usefulness out of it. Hopefully people will get back on topic.

Oh I do apologise. It's just that seeing such a pillar of the community not using the search function to its fullest and then blaming the search function, going so far as to say it " sucks ", while also firstposting in many other people's threads and commenting that they should be using the search function is just a little too tempting a target for a little good natured humour.

Ok enough picking on Brian here. Let's get serious.

My honest opinion is that the game needs to stay slow in the early game because that way, your evolving strategy is what decides the game, not if you got enough stuff in 3 minutes to comm rush the nearest two guys easily.

If you think thats an exaggeration, I will point to our comm rush master, Zaphod, who (I think) has used his commander in an aggressive/passive aggressive manner in his last 5 games that he has posted.

I'd rather not give him that kind of encouragement, and I consider myself ok at DEFENDING from him.

Completely agreed. The early game is in no need of further acceleration and deciding on your strategy with ' Factory First ' style openings before you even see your enemy is not a good thing to encourage in my opinion.

Building a fast base has very little to do with a Comm rush. In fact it makes rushing more difficult, because a more capable base Commander is more important to keep at home.

There's a different between slow, and "there's nothing I can do."

In it's current state, economy buildings must be built before building the first factory. This means the player must sit there and do nothing. Even after the first factory, there's a lot of time sitting doing nothing waiting for my one or three builders to finish building.

It's simply trying to move up the point where there's multiple things to do.

I don't see how players sitting and doing nothing helps strategy evolve, or give less power to rushes, or anything.

It's time spent doing nothing waiting for buildings to finish. There's no strategy or choice increase by sitting waiting for the commander to build mex, power, mex, mex, factory.

If we remove the first three economy buildings from the needed equation, then the game starts off sooner. No strategy or choices change.

Yeah I would like to see early game speed up a bit but I agree we don't want to make com rushing to power full.

The issue in some ways is not that we speed the first few mins of every game doing the same thing but more to the point atm the its choices are just not as interesting as other RTS games. Looking at SC2 and CoH2

Boost the Comm's lathe to 40-60 metal/s. Keep the energy drain the same.
Add a thousand metal pile of wreckage from the lander.

That was hard.