Speeding Up the Early Game

This made me laugh so much

The first few minuts can be pretty boring if ur watching the game on youtube, twick etc. But if you play the game it's good too have a "slow" start so you can plan ur strategy, specifickly if ur playing a f4A with loads of ppl, it's good to have some time to think.

I don't mind the slow start - gives me a moment to warm up my grey matter. That said, it wouldn't kill me to start with building a factory first instead of 3 extractors and one generator.

I forgot to mention in the last post that the negative value only takes effect when surrounded by enemy metal and power buildings.

The idea was for the player that com rushes to take a major hit to there resource generation, so say that each player had 5 coms each and was getting 10 metal and 1000 power per second, one player com rushes loses all but the one commander that stayed at there base but the player that didn't com rush survived, the player that com rushed's resource per second would be reduced to 2 metal and 250 power per second while the defending player that survived would still be getting the full 10 metal and 1000 power per second.

Yeah, I generally enjoy the slow start. If you were to build a factory first, then that means you pretty much have to know what you are going to do before starting. Seeing how the maps are randomly generated it gives you an extra little bit of time to check out the map. You could realise that actually an air factory would be really useful due to the terrain blocking you off in some way, or that actually a naval start would be a pretty good idea.

I personally haven't found it to be a problem anyway, but I'm generally pretty slow at RTS games, so I appreciate the extra breathing/warmup time.

I can see the place for different starting conditions.

However

It takes 2 minutes for you to get first factory up, actually be able to afford it, and get your first units out. At that stage of the game you can either rush/raid or boom.

If you start with more structures and more units, it means that raiding isn't valid. The other player doesn't have to expand for mex, he can just build MDT at mex spots and fill them in as need.

And you know - comm-rushing isn't valid anymore.

Plus you'd have less T1 time.

Seems to be affecting the strategies for victory a little too much, in my opinion.

Hm.

One substitute for instant economy buildings (via an egg) would be increasing the commander's passive resource generation. Say, the commander innately fabricates enough metal and energy to have +0/+0 resources when using his/her nanolathe.

How about when a commander dies, it stops contributing to the economy. I am fairly sure that's how it is at the moment.

what i'm saying is have a permanent negative value affect your whole economy on top of losing the resources generated by your commander, so that in multiple commander games every commander counts and isn't disposable

OK, then lets look at an example. Two teams fight it out on a planet. One team does some planet smashing. Both teams get away with a single commander. What happens then?

are both destroyed commanders in there respective base's or in an enemy's base???

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/any-chance-on-a-commander-storage-increase.54941/

If we were to follow your logic, they need to implement some sort of system to allow players to know the potential start locations of the opponents so that scouting is not so erratic. Many things would require changing for some thought processes to make any real ground for the game.

I ask for the storage increase merely so we dont have to go mex mex pgen mex fac every game. It gets us into the action far faster, and stops us from needing a hacky method such as the egg or metal wreckage next to the start location.

Besides, you need to build the factory at some point regardless of what your opponent is doing, and more than likely it will be a bot factory 90% of the time even if they balanced the fabbers properly.

That just feels like horribly flawed thinking. There's no reason to design Bots and Bot factories to be the ' No Brainer ' opening because it leads to a very stagnant metagame. I'd argue that, in your scenario, Vehicle factories, Fabbers and vehicles in general in the early game are critically under performing; you've made Bots too attractive.

The overall viability and attractiveness of any factory as an early game investment must be made as equal as possible, save for scenarios that necessitate a single choice due to the terrain (Naval factory on predominantly water planets for example)

Also, if you follow my logic properly... rather than just jumping around without rhyme nor reason, the only thing that needs to be made easier is scouting. Whether that's through making an ' auto scout ' AI command or through a simple Area Command that sets a patrol that covers the area specified (which would be my prefered way of doing things).

If erratic scouting is a problem then you FIX the erraticness of it, not just remove the idea of it altogether and just tell the player where to go.

The reason that bots are a no-brainer opening is because of their inherent differences to tanks. Dox are far quicker and far more suitable to raiding. Why would you not build a bot factory? The other alternative is an air factory first, but then build a land factory soon after for fabricators. Currently T1 bombers are kinda bad, so its kinda pointless atm, but just like back in alpha, the potential is there.

Giving players potential locations for scouting is not removing scouting at all, and it most certainly is not 'here is player X, go see what hes doing'. It exists in all RTS. It is a fix for the erraticness.

Sure, area commands for patrol scouting could work, but automated scouting will just ruin the game plain and simple. Scouting is an integral part of the game, and whether you realise it or not, there is a lot of thought that goes into scouting rather than just mindless move commands.

In Starcraft 2 they decided to speed up the game by adding so-called "macro mechanics" that boosted income and production. People generally don't like these mechanics though, because not only does it speed up the early game, it also speeds up the more entertaining middle part of the game.

For this game, could it be possible to add a higher default income for your commander? This would have the advantage of initial metal extraction points not being quite as significant for your early game.

The danger of something like this would be that you can get very high income without having to take any risks by being more out on the map, so you have to be careful. And it might feel artificial to be able to support many factories while having zero metal extractors, not to mention there might be some uncomfortable rush strategies.

*sigh* That's the problem with solving everything too quickly and easily on a forum. If it's too correct there are no replies, no attention, and thus the solution dies. Then the topic goes full circle and nothing changes.

Well, I got my fair share of the same reminders. I guess that at our first posts and threads, we all passed through it

Nevertheless, your response was quite nice. Good style.

IMO PA does not speeding up.
Some times on the larger planets it can be a little slow, but that is because of the distance between players.
You can pump out 3 mex, factory then start on power and have a raiding force in 3 minutes or less.