PA's been won, we can all go home now

I'd easily bet everything on the fact that if PA would develop a real competitive scene, that the best player would have 300+ APM. As much as some people here seem to think that they would be brilliant RTS players if only they were faster, in reality faster = better. You can play quickly because you know what you're doing.

FWIW, those stats in OP seem to correlate pretty well:

• metal consumed 250320/78701= 3,18

• energy consumed 24456919/6746200=3,63

• average apm 240/71 = 3,38

In PA, APM helps you respond to multiple threats quicker than other players. My 120ish APM allows me to respond to three events simoultaneously - whether those be attacks or queuing engineers or whatever.

Someone with around 50 APM can only handle one at a time, in my experience. Two will cripple them. This is why I always attack from multiple angles, if possible - it keeps my opponent scrambling and forces him to stretch himself to the limit to try to defeat my incursion. If they arent as fast - they are screwed. If they are as fast - it keeps them on their toes.

You get the picture

I don't think you get carpal tunnel from playing. Is there any evidence for that? Wiki says carpal tunnel is mostly about genetic predisposition.

I think I disagree here. I feel that PA has a relatively low APM cap. For example, in Starcraft, scouting is not nearly the job that it is in PA, but in PA it's not so much about clicking fast as it is about clicking some and then looking at the map. My APM is close to 0 while I am scrolling the map to look for expansions, checking other planets, seeing if you have any nuke launchers, etc. A skilled player is not going to somehow click 300 times while performing this necessary function. There's just not much clicking to it. In fact, if his APM is 300, it implies to me that he's not doing this kind of job which is probably why he's going to lose: he never took the time to really look at what I was doing and he never noticed my 4 nuke launchers.

Or that I was on the asteroid that's about to smash him.

I don't think you can even maintain 300 APM while properly playing PA because with such open maps, so much of what we do is simply taking the time to look around, and look closely. Starcraft is a game of APM because the game is decided by how your armies clash. PA is a game of low APM because the game is decided by attacks from unusual directions, attacks by unexpected unit types and endless expansion and all of these things involve more scrolling and looking than clicking.

While this is true, it has never been proved. It IS, however, completely factual that carpal tunnel is more common among habitual gamers than your average Joe Shmoe.

People always say this about new games. It never holds. Obviously it depends on the interface capabilities, on how smart your units are without requiring manual control, and on how many ways you can outplay your opponent strategically. But standard strategies will form, and as long as you can outmaneuver your opponent through constant troop movement, I think that high APM will be a necessity at the top level.

And that, I think, is why PA bucks the trend.

Constant troop movement is simply not the key to winning PA. It is in Starcraft because due to finite resources, small maps and a combat system that hugely rewards micromanagement of units, it's extremely important to manage every battle.

In PA I don't see where micromanagement of battles is nearly as beneficial (there are no special effects and unit TTK is so low that focusing fire is not only unimportant, it's detrimental). You can benefit from a degree of micro but nowhere near like you can in Starcraft. I mean a micro'd army vs non in Starcraft is probably the difference in going 1:1 and going 1:10. In PA I suspect it's more like the difference in 1:1 and 1:2, if that.

e.g., my 50 Dox vs your 50 Dox. If we both really micro equally well we can get it down to where my last Dox kills your last Dox or vice versa. In Starcraft, if I don't micro and you do, I lose 50 and you lose 5 (if that). In PA if I don't micro and you do, I lose 50 and you lose, what do you suppose....I'd say you'd still lose 25 or more.

Consequently, what wins PA is not microing battles but surprising your opponent, avoiding being surprised, economic expansion and economic denial -- and most of these have a fairly low APM ceiling. I don't think economic expansion with 300 APM is any better or different than economic expansion with 50 APM (unless scrolling around a planet counts as a lot of APM somehow).

Wrong on many levels.
You need to constantly raid and expand. That includes lots of moving units all around potentially multiple planets.

As long as the economy grows expontially it quickly is purely apm limited how much a player can grow.

seriously how are you guys getting such massive performance? I got a slideshow over here and my settings are on low with shadows off and this big-*** rig.

+ most or the entirety of my lag is serverside

If you look at the game in OP, difference in average APM seems to translate almost directly into an equally stronger economy.

Since I now play at super min settings (50% res included) I have like 120 fps when I play single screen.

If by "many levels" you mean "one level, which is not what we were talking about in this thread" then I agree.

In terms of APM, "troop movement" means you are personally overseeing how troops move and fire and this requires a high APM. That is what we are talking about and that is what you should not be doing in PA, except perhaps for the opening moves on a very small map. You do not want to spend a bunch of time micromanaging your 50 Dox. It doesn't buy you as much as not micromanaging is buying me. I am spending less APM doing other things that will ultimately be more beneficial than managing the Dox fight.


In the sense that you need troops to be moving, I fully agree, but you're not talking about high APM stuff there. That's just setting some waypoints, maybe some area-attack orders and then going back to doing something else. "Troop movement", in the literal sense, is not a high APM action.

I know it was an example but you don't just crash dox into each other like that. The further forward dox are the more valuable. So you retreat split up regroup or any thing you can manage to make a nuisance out of those 50 dox. It's a lot harder to defend than attack. This all requires apm. The faster you can do it the quicker you can go back and start building your base or whatnot.

I have highly optimized my piece of crap laptop to play Planetside 2 at 30 FPS in a 50 player battle.

This game on low is nothing for my laptop after THAT debacle. lolz.

Im going to be buying a high end desktop soon to help improve my performance. I cannot play PA on anything above 1200x720 at 75% sub on low settings. Maybe a desktop will let me jump to full screen and shadows

For sure there's a difference between 1 APM and 100. The real question is whether the ceiling is high or low. My argument is that it's low. That is, I would not be surprised if a 100 APM player beat a 200 APM player because beyond around 100 APM, it's just not helping as much as a better strategy.

I think APM has diminishing returns and they diminish pretty quick in PA.

The bottom line question is who is going to benefit more:
You spending time doing the retreat-split-regroup micromanagment of the Dox fight
or
Me spending the same time ignoring the Dox fight and building some more economy, starting a new attack from a different direction, changing up my build orders, scouting out your base and sending a fabricator to another planet

The things I'm doing inherently require less APM but still take up the same 30 seconds that you are spending microing the dox fight. Who comes out ahead after that 30 seconds?

You are heavily missunderestimating how much actions can be put into expansion and economy. Even given a very good UI.

Yeah I think there is something to be said about high APM and high "mental" APM. There's nothing stopping me from 120APM (issuing two commands per second) but I usually average below 20 or so APM in PA because I am for sure limited by my mental ability to decide what the **** to do. Spending 20 seconds idling all my factories while I track my scouts. Generally vascillating.

Your 300APM player is simply going to queue up his build order faster so that he can be not wasting resources and doing the next steps. I certainly cannot say that the strategic choices don't matter, they absolutely do matter, but the point I think is that for two players who operate at the same strategic level mentally, the one who has 50% more APM will actually quite easily pull ahead (all else being equal, or on average) because of the few seconds of advantage that the extra APM would deliver.

How many times have you said to yourself "damn if i only could have been 2 seconds faster..."?

Another factor is that APM is a retarded way to measure effectiveness, because of all the starcraft style click spamming that we do more or less instinctively (dox blob micro notwithstanding). APM doesn't know which clicks are the useless ones. So if the idea here is that "APM reading doesnt mean jack" that should sort of be obvious.

To your point, Slamz, our caffeinated 300APM friend here will reach some sort of "cap" wherein he's letting his APM number slouch when he's gotten done with tasks and is waiting on factories. That is the cap.

What I do know is that I never ever get close to this cap (not till the game slows to a crawl due to overpopulation). For me, I am often literally not fast enough to be able to afford to micro an army without falling even further behind.

As for microing 50 dox vs taking the same "APM" from that task to work on expanding eco, well, either way, more "APM" will get you that task done faster (you'll split the dox army into the configuration you want, or you'll queue up your eco build order) provided you can actually think at a sufficient speed.

One of the things that really helped offset the need for APM in supcom was the fact that you could plan things far into the future... FAR into the future. You'll see most good players early game just queuing up lots and lots of stuff, and then they don't have to worry about it for quite a while. Any free moment they have they queue up stuff. That way when combat comes they don't have to do both things, and can focus on that.

Currently the queuing systems in PA aren't as robust, meaning you have to keep focusing on more things all the time instead of one at a time.

Camera system is fiddly, more micro to just get the information too.

erm. I was under the impression PA had nearly the same queuing system as supcom did. The only difference is that combat in PA comes much, much faster, and your starting build only matters for the first 2-3 factories. The rest is up to how well you can micro and macro against attacks and counterattacks.