Best early game strats?

Hey there!

As a new player, I don't really know what to do during the early game, which usually just leads to me quickly falling off mid-late game.

What's your strategy? Is there a "best way" to go with production etc.?

the current state of the game seems to be make loads of ants, get to T2 and add in loads of levellers. Although the new pending patch is going to change that a lot, it would seem.

Basically you want to go mex, energy, mex, mex, bot factory, and then make construction bots and secure a bunch of metal spots and make some energy. As soon as you can start making vehicle factories and spam out a load of ants.

The reason for getting a bot factory first is that bots are currently the most efficient fabricators. Also, stationary artillery is generally pretty good, as are nukes if your opponent doesn't make enough anti nukes.

Thanks for the response! Very helpful!

It seems like next patch it will be useful to set a few bot factories to patrol the entire planet for easy harass.

Bots aren't more efficient they are more cost effective fyi all land fabs at T1 are equally efficient......j/s

Check out the tutorials on PA Matches: http://pamatches.com/tutorials/

sebovzeoueb hit on the most important parts.

Things are also likely to change a lot in the next patch.

And thou Lord saideth 'Noobeth shall always be Noobeth'

The next patch will be great, but from what i saw from the videos, area patrol only gives one set of patrol movements for every unit assigned to it. Does not change from unit to unit.

Strange the planes all seemed to have different paths to me. Perhaps they were just following the same path at different intervals

Bot factory is cheaper to run, commander and both factories factory can be supported by 5 mex. The 6th mex covers the first bot fabber completely, whereas vehicle fabber is still operating in a negative economy, and by that time you have probably stalled your metal.

That hopefully will change to "automatically tries to cover the largest area possible" at some point. That would actually be a really helpful command.

I want scouting to be an integral part of the game. It shouldnt just be automated away to nothing.

At what line would you draw between automatic and completely manual scouting?

I think you misunderstood what i just said. To me, there is no line to draw between, its either one or the other. I would rather no automation at all with scouting being integral, than full automation and scouting meaning nothing.

Scouting does mean something. Watch Zaphod's casts, keep an eye on how many times he fails to notice something happening at the corner of the screen

He never said scouting didn't mean anything. To the contrary, gunshin was saying that scouting was so important he's worried that having it totally automated will remove a large chunk of skill based gameplay.

EDIT: to clarify, I think what gunshin meant was that if scouting is automated then everyone will be equally good at it and so it will 'mean nothing' in terms of skill

Macro over micro gunshin. Having to give 2 dozen orders to a scout to make sure that it covers the planet is tedious and takes away from the experience instead of adding to it. I'd much rather have automated scouting but jamming fields that make it so that scouts can't see things (combat units will still be able to). That will be a far more macro oriented solution that will add to the game and strategy. Do I send a scout which is fast but can't see buildings near a stealth field or do I send a slow combat unit that can see it? You could even make it so that at close range the scout can see through the stealth, but the building disappears from your game map when the scout moves away from it, requiring attention for the scouting to be successful. There are many applications for this and I think that it is far more intuitive than the "give the scout 2 dozen orders which takes time away from your macro so that it covers everything".

Scouting isn't a skill. Referring back to what the scout is telling you is a skill. There's no skill in clicking everywhere all over the map, and there are many older games where scouts just had an auto-scout behaviour.

Scouting is still important, but automating scouts doesn't remove anything from gameplay.

Would you consider patrolling automated scouting? It isn't clear where you draw the line.

There is a simple automated scouting behavior for ground recon in the game RUSE.
It is basically the same as a kiting AI. The Recon will stay out of enemy range automatically.
This might be useful for land scouts in PA as well but I think that coding a useful automated scouting AI is anything but easy and I don't really think you can automate away something like that.
Suiciding 10 Fireflies into enemy territory to find a nuke is not something that is easily automated and if the player isn't paying attention he wont even see that information.

The skill I see in scouting is knowing how to analyse what situation you just saw, and how often to risk invested resources to updating this analysis.

Currently the area patrol from the videos we have seen is not quite automated scouting. From the look of it, if you set a factory to an area patrol, any and all units that come out of the factory will be assigned the exact same patrol route.

Colin is saying that each idividual unit should get a different patrol route, which IS automated scouting.