Being a new rts player..then getting nuked at 25 min from normal AI.......closes game

I love this game but im new to rts in general and ill be honest i love to turtel, that fortress that i COULD build in this game but dont get a chance to because of the fact the the AI expands everywhere and has an apm of X100 mine (yes i know im obviously quite bad and i also realize i could just play easy but im quite sure they have a building limit or something as ive waited for hours only to come up on T1 mostly units). Would it be too much to ask to look into presets for AI as well as difficulties? AS in "Rusher", "Turtle", ect.... But please if you do take this into consideration (i would assume you already have.. i hope) make the difficulty scaled to the preset they pick so if i pick "Hard-Turtle" then when i build my "crowded, impenetrable and unforgiving FORTRESS OF DOOM"....they actually build theirs too! Instead of putting up 3 more advanced laser cannons for defense and calling that good.... if i wanted those kind of qualifications for "turtling" ide go play online... ;_; Suggestions and comments encouraged!!!!!

Yep, they are planning to add personality presets for things like rush, turtle, etc.

Until then I suggest you play on Sandbox.

Does this not Just dumb the Ai down?? Ie. Not attack\build

You can play on easy, turtle, and win. First off, play on smaller maps. Second off, you DO have to expand. I turtle, and I expand distantly very early game and then just fortify those points and build backwards to fill the space.

So basically, beginning of game, get your 2 pp and 2 mex and 1 factory, get your 10 fabbers or so, and send those fabbers to build right up against the side of the enemy spawn if you can find it or guess how far the enemy is and build as far out as possible. Then, fortify it with walls and turrets. Collect all the metal from there to your base.

Doing this, you still won't win. You will have to t2 and/or orbital it up sometime. Playing on a single planet helps a bit. Nonetheless, doing this will be a start. Do this where you competitively contain an enemy on a small planet, then you can focus on how you build afterwards. You need to do things like orbital, and artillery, and t2, and armies, which makes this game so macro, you have to focus on 2-3 sides of your production at once.

You can turtle though, and still diversify out quickly into t2 or orbital or whatever, and still beat the AI. It isn't about the strategy. It is about the utility. The plan has to have a logic. Building up against the enemy early restricts the directions and distances they can travel to obtain metal. If you didn't turtle, you could rush, and the same logic applies, you would raid early eco establishments, for the same reason, restricting early enemy economy. Turtle logic denys territory expansion, rusher logic sabotages attempts at territory expansion. Slowing down your enemy is the key to keeping up with them in economy and territory.

The game isn't finished. Personalities and further difficult modifiers are being added in the future.

This has been a confirmed feature sometime.

I'd recommend you do some searching around on the forums.

Also. Check out some tutorials and gameplay in the meantime.

Http://pamatches.com/tutorials/

You could always reverse turtle, and build your walls around the enemy base!

Done this online, and it is rather quite amusing.

In all seriousness though, its best if you expand outward to as many mexes as you can and drop the odd ' tower surrounded by walls' defence.

This will generate enough metal to turtle in your main base, and as long as you go tech 2 by the 8 minute mark, you probably tech enough to be competitive with the ai.

Even better, make a second or third proxy base. If you move offworld, you can flood the skies with fighters and bombers whilst making a very fortified base that the ai has a very hard time cracking open.

Just dont neglect anti nuke.. Pretty sure ai's have a nuclear missile fetish going on..

Most games I've played a few games recently on the "normal" difficulty have been fairly bad - and odd - with the AI.

And from what you're saying, I'm guessing I'm not the only one - AI seems to LOVE to spam the nukes - and I'm not at all sure how they are building them so fast. Oddly fast.

They'll start out at about 10 minutes or less for the first nuke or two, then the AI starts launching a nuke about every five minutes, then every minute, then every thirty seconds... (you see where i'm going with this...) I've had two games crash simply because the AI spammed too many nukes at once. Most of the time it wouldn't even hit any buildings - just where buildings used to be. And more often than not, if there weren't any buildings to hit, it would just drop nukes in open areas with no structures - wouldn't even cause damage to my buildings.

And it doesn't help that the anti nuke defenses seem to build at about half the rate of nukes. I could build as many of those as I liked, but still had nukes shoved down my throat. It got to the point to where I couldn't get halfway done building a structure before it was nuked - and I had the whole planet to myself!
So most games I've played a few games recently on the "normal" difficulty have been fairly... odd with the AI.

And I'm guessing I'm not the only one - AI seems to LOVE to spam the nukes - and I'm not at all sure how they are building them so fast. Oddly fast.

They'll start out at about 10 minutes or less for the first nuke or two, then the AI starts launching a nuke about every five minutes, then every minute, then every thirty seconds... (you see where i'm going with this...) I've had two games crash because the AI spammed nukes. Most of the time it wouldn't even hit any buildings - just where buildings used to be. And more often than not, if there weren't any buildings to hit, it would just drop nukes in open areas with no structures.

And it doesn't help that the anti nuke defenses seem to build at about half the rate of nukes. I could build as many of those as I liked, but got nukes shoved down my throat. I'm assuming this is a bug, and not the "actual" AI.

I'm totally gonna try that in a game.

What you have to remember is *HOW* the AI is scaled using the Easy, Normal and Hard settings. Also how it works.

On Easy the AI has 50% income from metal extractors and energy. On Normal it gets the same as you. On Hard it gets Double your income. The actual code for the AI works the same for all 3. The AI determines how to attack based on a threat assessment. If you turtle up and put allot of units in one space that paints a great big juicy 'Nuke Me' target on yourself. If you spread your base out more it's much less likely to nuke you because there isn't anything that justifies the cost of the nuke vs the damage it will do. I play against hard AI quite a bit and don't think its ever nuked me despite having masses of resources.

The other thing is- even if you want to turtle you should be sending out waves of tanks *from* your fortress of doom, to go and annoy the AI. Also if you *know* the AI is going to nuke you- build a few anti nukes and set some fabbers to assist them. Anti nukes cost less than nukes so you should be able to stop being nuked.

Yeah, the difficulty settings right now are pretty basic. Once neural nets are in I expect the difficulty settings will be used to interfere with the accuracy of its results, and when it has some strategic thinking certain tactics probably won't be available at lower difficulties (like responding to scouting nukes with anti-nukes).

Currently the AI doesn't produce anywhere near enough mobile units on ANY of the difficulties. It also doesn't expand far enough, which you might find surprising, but you can take over a planet pretty quickly in this game.

The AI tends to not spend nearly enough money on units, so it has tons of excess to spend on nukes and such. A few attacks early enough to take out some mexes and proper defense against their attacks (super turtling isn't necessary, only a few turrets and walls, combined with something fast to defend your outlying mexes) will render them pretty useless.

Rule 34. No exceptions.

If you were looking for a finished game you are sadly mistaken. Expect that kind of options to be in when the game is done.
Oh, and punctuation marks aren't pack animals for crying out loud.

As many others have pointed out here, turtling does not negate the fact that you have to build combat units in this game. Harrasing the AI will be forced to construct more and more defences. So make sure to attack the AI and force it to build defences beside every single goddamn mex it has. That really slows it down. Not to mention T1 tanks are extremely effective for defensive purposes early on due to their superiority over bots and lack of speed.

The (normal) AI in my games can't get a nuke up until its about 45 minutes in and every mex is either claimed or contested.

Depends in a 1v1 you don't really want an anti-nuke at this point, better to nuke them first or snipe the launcher. In a long running FFA, well that's a different matter.

Rather like this:

I usually put 2-3 adv fabbers on a nuke launcher, that makes the wait time tolerable. same goes for anti's.

i remember a game where one guy had the main planet, but i had all the moons. the fighting deteriorated to him nuking the moon he could hit, or at least trying, as i was scrambling anti's on that tiny moon. eventually i managed to utilize the economy from the other two moons to help scramble anti's, to the point where his assault was rendered ineffective. then i started to fling nukes back, only to have him power scramble anti's.

the nuke flinging went on for a while.

then, the unthinkable happened:

we both built up our batteries, and just so happened to empty our entire nuclear arsenal at each other - at the exact same time. all of his missiles were barely intercepted. two of mine got through, and smashed this main base. it was a nail biter.

then the coward used his air fabber spam to turtle his com with nothing but antinukes. so i did the other unthinkable thing.

i doubled my arsenal, and proceeded to launch 25 nukes simultaneously at him, overwhelming his antis and winning the game.

I dubbed it "The Grand Slam".

Why didn't you just smash the moon into his face?

Sadly, there was no smashable moon to smash......