100 to ten How is this possible?

OK, How is this possible? I only get three mines, three energy plants, one bot plant and ten bots made and get attacked by masses of planes and bots by the hundreds. I did not have enough time to amass this size army, how is my opponent?

You know you can review the replay at the end of the game to watch what they did right? Either way, we'll need more information than this to explain it. However, it isn't hard to put down 10 bot factories by minute 5 and start spamming units out as a large force, especially if you early expand and pump only fabricator units from your initial factory.

The opening builds are all pretty critical.

I've got some tutorials for you to watch over on PA Matches. Hopefully those can help.

http://pamatches.com/tutorials/

Remember that right now, just a few laser turrets will take care of 100 bots.

OK, I will check those out.

How did you only have 3 mines? I think I typically have 8+ mines by the time I get my 10th bot out.

Your best bet is to watch the replay but I can tell you that, oh, 19 times out of 20, when I spot my opponent doing something wrong, the main thing he is doing wrong is that he's not expanding. He builds like 4-6 metal, 8-10 energy, 1-2 factories and that's pretty much it. Other metal spots sitting literally within sight of his base go unclaimed.

So you should never have 3 mines and 3 energy plants and one bot plant and ten bots. Never, ever, ever. By the time you have 10 bots out you should have numerous metal mines and all the energy plants you had time to make.

Claim every metal spot you can. Don't be afraid to send out fabricators just to attempt to build more metal even if you aren't sure it's safe.

In a nutshell:
NEVER STOP BUILDING METAL EXTRACTORS. MOAR METAL.
If metal income is positive, BUILD MORE THINGS. Moar factories! Moar turrets! Moar everything!
You will need a constant stream of new energy plants to keep up with all this metal.

This is not a game of building 10 units and then microing them.
This is a game of explosive economic expansion.

Also, if you've had time for your factory to produce ten bots, you should have been able to build more than 3 energy plants & 3 mexes, so I suspect your initial build order is ... not optimal.

I just wrote a post about this sort of thing on reddit it might help you out a bit. It seems I can't post a link here as a newish user though, so I've had to copy-and-paste the article here:

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For me, the advantages to the different factories at start are:

• Air: you can get a scout or 2 out first, and find your opponents quickly, which is vital. However, air fabbers are the least efficient (they draw more energy to build the same thing as any other fabber). On the other hand, they're quicker to move than other fabbers and able to reach awkward places easily.
  
  
• Bot/Vehicle: t1 bot & vehcile fabbers are the most energy efficient. But with a bot factory you can also create Dox's which move faster than tanks, so are better for early raiding/harrassment. Tanks from a vehicle factory are more suited in the early game for defense.
  
  
• Naval: if you're starting on water, this is the starting factory for you! Air is a good alternative for water starts.

Personally I like to go either bot or air at the start, and whichever I choose, the other is usually my 2nd factory. See also my build cost analysis below.

About starting build order; Metal extractors are so quick & cheap to build that you want to start out with 2 (or 3 if you don't have to walk very far) of them before doing anything else.

Here are some stats (taken from PA-DB):

[ Abbreviations used; e/s = energy/second, m/s = metal/second ]

• Commander generates 1000 e/s, uses 1500 e/s
• Energy plant generates 600 e/s
• Metal extractor (mex for short) generates 7 m/s
• Bot factory (un-assisted) uses 675 e/s, 12 m/s
• Vehicle factory (un-assisted) uses 675 e/s, 15 m/s
• Air factory (un-assisted) uses 825 e/s, 9 m/s
• Air fabber: costs 270 metal to build
• Vehicle/bot fabber: costs 200 metal to build.

The first thing to note is the build rates:

• Air factory building air fabber: 270 metal @ 9/ms = 30 seconds to build air fabber
• Vehicle factory building vehicle fabber: 200 metal @ 15 m/s = 13.3 seconds to build vehicle fabber
• Bot factory building bot fabber: 200 metal @ 12 m/s = 16.6 seconds to build bot fabber

So if you start with a vehicle factory, you can get going with extra construction 3 seconds earlier than with bots, and 17 seconds earlier than aircraft.

You can see immediately from the commander's stats, that he uses more energy than he consumes, so you're going to need an energy plant pretty quickly if you don't want to run out. You should build one (and only one) before your first factory.

Once you have that (let's say bot) factory and get it churning out something (I suggest a few more fabbers to start with), you're using 675 (factory) plus 1500 (commander) = 2175e/s but only generating 1000 (commander) + 600 (energy plant) = 1600e/s so it's clear that the next thing to build is an energy plant if you want to keep up with energy demand. This gives us 2200e/s, so we're in the black! But, we've just built a fabber bot, which now needs to build something, and a fabber bot will use 1000e/s when constructing, so we need at least 2 more energy plants to keep up with demand.

Energy storage isn't really needed early in the game - if you're constantly balancing energy in vs energy out, you have no need for them and also, at a cost of 450 metal they're not something you can really afford at this stage (3 metal extractors @ 7m/s = 21m/s, so 450 metal will take 450/21 = 21 seconds of your entire metal income).

So my build order is generally: metal x 3, energy, factory, energy x 3, factory, and then play it by ear. Always have something building energy, because you can never have too much, especially if you're churning out fabbers (because each fabber will use 1000e/s when building (1100e/s for air fabbers) so for every 3 fabbers you create (draining 3000e/s), you need at least 5 energy plants (generating 3000e/s) to balance them. You also need at least one energy plant per t1 factory you build, and at least 4 energy plants per t2 factory.

Similarly 1 energy plant can support 4 t1 radars but, at 4500e/s, a t2 radar needs 8 t1 energy plants or 1 advanced energy plant to support it.

And if you can spare fabbers send them out in different directions away from your base, grabbing up as much metal as possible, which is particularly important early on.

One useful tip: some people don't realise that a t2 metal extractor and a t1 metal extractor can both occupy the same metal spot; when you build a t2 mex over the top of a t1 mex it doesn't get replaced, they both live in harmony. So even if you've built a t2 mex, you can still build a t1 mex on the same spot for 7m/s extra income. i.e. each metal spot is capable of giving you 7m/s from t1 mex and 28m/s from a t2 mex, for a total of 35m/s.

EDIT: removed an irrelevant paragraph.

Thanks for all the replies. I was referring to a game that was very short. I only had a few minutes before floods started to attack my base location. I just cannot believe that in the time it took me to build three metal mines, three energy generators one bot factory and get about 10 bots out of it, I was being attacked by a massive horde.

When the game was over only after a few moments, I saw the entire planet covered in my opponents stuff. Every metal spot was covered 20 - 30 factories pumping out fighters and the list goes on. I still believe there is no way somebody could have that much stuff built up without a hack in place going in. This not the first time this has happened and in every situation I am waiting for them to land on the planet after I have selected my landing site (may be nothing, just an observation).

I was an original TA Player and never encountered such massive hits only after a few moments.

Just sayin.

The pace of PA is much faster than TA. Most games at the high level are over in about 20 minutes, with both players quickly expanding to take most of the planet and teching up to get the advanced economy going. It is not even uncommon to nuke a player 15 minutes into the game.

This may not be relevant, but do you remember the name of the player that did this? I suspect they may be one of the better players in the game. Without a ladder, it is pretty common to get uneven match-ups like that.

Answered!!

OK I will chock it up to aliens. LOL Yeah, I see that TA was slower but it is not like I have no clue at all. Anyway, I will keep at it. I always loved TA and was looking for a similar replacement to my old friend.

I do not recall the name of the player I was up against. I'm sure I will become familiar before long.

That's not what my last game showed. AT ALL.

No but a T2 rush and building 2-3 T2 units + laser turrets will decimate those 100 bots

If you forget to build walls, the laser turret will die. Thats obviously what your supposed to do though.


Also: "

One useful tip: some people don't realise that a t2 metal extractor and a t1 metal extractor can both occupy the same metal spot; when you build a t2 mex over the top of a t1 mex it doesn't get replaced, they both live in harmony. So even if you've built a t2 mex, you can still build a t1 mex on the same spot for 7m/s extra income. i.e. each metal spot is capable of giving you 7m/s from t1 mex and 28m/s from a t2 mex, for a total of 35m/s."

What the ****!? This is a thing!? how do you tell if something has two extractors on it? Is this a bug?

To start:
- mex
- power
-power
-factory
- set commander to build more mex and have the factory start pumping out fabbers.
- Set the first 3 fabbers to build a few rows of power.
- Set the next 3 fabbers to start building mex all over the place.
- Keep building factory and fabbers
Profit.

Hey everybody!

Thanks for all the posts!!!! OK, the sandbox commander (AL) has real issues. LOL He locks up on something and just can't complete it.

Playing in easy mode was a bit better with some actual action from AL. Still, got my but kick though. At least I was able to get some things built before I got hammered. I'll keep at.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I will give them a try!

That's what sandbox is. A sandbox for you to mess around in without worry of attack.

technically the answer is aliens, all these robots are.

seriously, you remember all those command and conquer games where people who built armies that fast were frowned upon as not fun? Well, this games makes it fun and simple.

build a factory for every 5 metal points, put it on infinite build. Only pause it when going t2, which you don't need to rush. Within two minutes you should already have expanded to a large empty area building mexes and defended most distant first and building torwatdd each other later.

if you don't want to build armies, you still need to build distant, but establish early structure via turrets and pelters. The closer you can build safely to an enemy, the easier to pelter creep. Walls and turrets are fairly op, so is flak while missile turrets are strongish. I held off 40 gunships with some flak, and they specifically targetted the flak. Tbh, I nearly lost my ***, the commander and the last flak and last t2 fabber were only remaining, would have lost if last one went down. Rebuilt double flak afterwards.

games pretty cool. Watch a replay if you need. Give it a try. Anyone can automate widespread bulk hundred unit army production, replentishably. Throw that army away, don't shed a tear, replace them all in moments, they are like copy paper at an office.

You do need to rush T2, honestly. It wipes the floor with T1 very quickly.

Indeed. Both DutchMikey and myself learned that in the Clopsy tourney (He was the victim).