Ladies, Gentlemen, EroticBurritos, LavaSnakes, and WrongCats, I'm sure you've all been there. It's 25 minutes in, you and your opponent are reaching the point of nukes and orbital wars, and you want to figure out what economy he has, where his energy is being built, and generally try to evaluate the game's progress. Without spectator mode, you might as well just not even try. It would be incredibly time consuming to figure out where his T2 metal is, and how much of it he has, and then multiply that by 24, and add....and UGH. That's a minute of micro just doing all that. In addition, people can still just rush t2 eco, and roflstomp someone with half the planet. BORING. Give me massive tank battles. Massive bot wars. Crazy flanking movements for no apparent reason, except to get on his blind side. How you do this: Reduce T2 Eco to the same as a t1 mex. REAP THE BENEFITS! I'm throwing my hat in here on this particular party for another reason - it's obvious. If someone has more mex than you, it's obvious that he's winning the eco war. Right now, it's not that obvious. You have to basically count his mex. I was reviewing a game between myself and Matiz earlier, when I noticed that alot of my raids actually went quite well when attacking his mex. I just never realized that we had a similar mex count - at least, that's what it looked like near the end. Looking at the stats, though, he had twice the metal. D: Where did it come from?! The answer was that he had more t2 mex ofc, but I couldn't tell that just by looking from strategic zoom. Was I holding on? Yes, I was. Was it obvious that he had twice my metal? No, it wasn't - he wasn't using all of it. But he was using more than I was. What about ya'll? I know this has been discussed to death, but should more stuff be more obvious and more *What You See Is What You Get*?
So basically you didnt realize that a good player probably will use his mex spots and put t2 mex on them? If you actually scout him you can actually see t2 mex. Though to make it easier strategic icons sure should stay even in fog of war, so it is easier to read.
I'm not saying it's difficult to see T2 mex once I've scouted them. I'm saying it's difficult to take a 4-5 second glance around a planet that you have *presumably* fully scouted and be able to see how well you've expanded compared to them easily, and how this effects your eco. It should be readily apparent how each player's eco is compared to the other. I've gotten much better at determining my enemies metal SPENDING compared to my own.....but it's mighty difficult to get their actual income. I'd like for this to be made more intuitive. *EDIT* Please note I'm referring to cases where the game is close. In one-sided fights this is obvious anyway.
Well for once, as I said: Icons should stay in the fog of war, that would help a lot. Second: Just assume that all mex that you don't control and that are not clearly empty (because there are fights close that killed them) are under enemy control. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best
Again, I already do this. Not sure what else I can say lol. Outlined what I wanted to get across already.
I want advanced metal extractors to produce 14 metal. So a basic+advanced will produce 21 metal total.
I think he means that T2 will produce 7 metal, so a T1 + T2 = 14 metal per second. I totally agree with this, T2 extractors are crazy good right now and are one of the many reasons to rush T2.
I'm with ColaColin on this one. You should expect that an unscouted opponent has at least as much economy as you do. By experimenting and playing the game more and more, you come to intuitively project the enemy economy, when they can hit t2, when they could make a nuke and when it is important to scout the enemy to see what they are up to, etc. etc.. Arguably you can aggregate the income from all scouted immobile buildings and this could even be calculated automatically and shown ingame. It is a little unclear how it would handle destruction that is out of Line of Sight as a nuke would surely destroy all eco buildings even though you don't get visual confirmation on that for example and it wouldn't be that useful in Free For All as there will be a lot of unseen destruction. Another argument that people usually put forth when they argues that energy is a critical point of failure is that you can snipe the enemy energy to disable whatever energy draining abilities there are. However you can't really know how much energy the enemy have unless you scout them completely and if you only take out a portion of their energy, the enemy can prioritize their energy usage, focus on rebuilding their energy plants and the energy snipe damage gets reduced mostly to the cost of the energy plants that were destroyed rather than providing a point of critical failure.
This is very good info for starting players. But like I said earlier, I'm at the point where I can tell how much they are spending by what I've scouted. What I'm having trouble doing is correlating territory and mex control with mex income. It's difficult to do quickly, even with an adv radar sat over their base.
Mex control isn't strictly correlated to metal income as advanced metal extractors break that. I've grown used the ridiculously cheap and profitable advanced mexes and I will withhold my judgement thereof until I see what Uber will do to t1 units and Defense Towers which balance is also of importance in this context. This should make it easy to see the enemy income if it is calculated automatically in the situation that you have the enemy thoroughly scouted.
