Quick tips

I ended up writing this on a reddit help thread, and because there was so much typing, I thought I would cross post here. Other people had already pointed out strategic things like always expand, always harass, etc., so this was a more tactical focus. Feel free to add!

• You can use more than one fabricator to help build things faster.
• You can queue up building multiple things to build if you hold shift as you build them. This also works for a patrol path or attack path.
• You can give factories commands like units, and units that come out will follow those commands. So you can have a factory produce units and then attack somebody's base and they will rally there. You can shift click a series of orders and they will do that, for example patrolling a circle around you base.
• You can queue up a bunch of things to build using an area build command by clicking and dragging out an area. Sometimes it will be a line, sometimes an area of them. You can even use this area command to build across the whole planet by dragging anywhere on the planet to off the edge of the planet. *You can use these area commands in ways other than building. Tell your air factory building scouts to area patrol the planet, and they will scout for you (but not in the most efficient way). Tell your air factory building fighters to area patrol your base and they will provide air cover. Tell some fabricators to area patrol around 3 tightly packed factories and they will assist to help those factories build faster when they are building, and switch during the roll off time. Also good for assisting a set of nuke factories or anti-nukes, etc. *If you move your army by right clicking the ground, it will proceed ahead without stopping, but fire along the way. *If you attack move, it will stop at range to shoot things before proceeding. *Combat fabbers from bot factories are powerful healing units (at the cost of metal economy). Placing one behind a walled turret makes it difficult to assault that spot. Bringing one with your army can help sustain through a difficult assault by healing something tough, like an inferno or a vanguard.
• Harass your enemy's fabricators with bombers. Defend from such harassment with anti-air such as spinners (vehicle factory) or fighters.
• You can keep up on energy pretty easily by having your fabricators build two energy plants, then a factory, then two energy plants, etc. Every two factories have it build a fabricator first. That should cover the factory and the new fabricator for each four energy plants. (600 energy per plant *4 = 2400 energy produced. 2 factory (675 * 2 = 1350) + 1 fabber (1000 energy) = 2350 used.
• When you select factories, the bottom button on the right can be used to turn on "continuous build" (or press L to toggle it) that will automatically requeue anything it builds, building for every. You can then have it build whatever mix and ratio of units you want and it will forever crank them out with no further attention.
• You can "priority queue" up a unit by holding control and clicking it (someday with keyboard too). That will make it the next thing the factory builds, but will not automatically be requeued by continuous build. So if you're cranking out units and you need another fabricator soon, just control click on it and it will pop out.
• Force yourself to learn the keyboard shortcuts on the build bar and you will find yourself able to quickly build what you want without thinking about it that much. It takes practice but it isn't that bad, and you will get used to it for metal extractors and energy plants in like 3 tries and that alone makes it worth it.
• Fabricators can use the reclaim command on the right bar, or by right clicking on trees and wreckage (dead units/buildings) to convert those things to metal. If you need metal, you can area reclaim some trees or wreckage to boost your metal economy. You can even "borrow" from the metal of your live building's or commander to get a temporary metal boost. The commander is 25,000 metal, so a good place to borrow in a pinch. Just make sure you have enough stuff fabricating to consume the metal before you do it.
• As your economy and production grows, building energy storage and metal storage can help smooth out the production cycles when you have a lot of fabricators working together to suddenly drain resources and then stop and move to the next spot. Similarly with factory roll off times.

There's three main rules to PA

1. Never Stop Expanding
2. Never Stop Scouting
3. Never Stop Attacking

If you think you have a large enough economy. You don't. Build more. If you think you have enough units. You don't. Build More.

Get that down, and you'll understand PA.

Watching gameplay videos is also an excellent way to quickly grasp the flow of gameplay.

This looks familiar somehow...

I'll also add a few to this:

1. It's never too early to attack your enemy
2. Always remember your objective: Kill the King. In a 1v1, if you are in dire straits, you can still win easily if you have enough units to kill the enemy commander.
3. Never give up - always tactically retreat.

People keep on asking the same question over and over... I'll keep on giving the same answer over and over...

These will be added to loading screens?

haha, nice tip on borrowing metal from your commander. I will try that one to turbo charge the opening 5 minutes of the game

It might be useful if there isn't much metal on your planet, but reclaiming will cost energy whereas metal extractors give you metal for free. I can see it being useful in some cases though if you're not afraid of your commander getting killed while he's weak.

If there's a forest you want to reclaim with a combat fabber, then sucking on the commander might be something for it to do afterwards. It's about the only way I think a combat fab may be useful, unless you actually want to try and use it for combat. That is, if combat fabbers for some reason can't reclaim your own stuff.

Reclaim half the health of your t2 factories, who needs a factory to have 30k health anyway. Reclaim holkins, they are paper anyway so there's nothing to lose. Thinking about it, reclaim any T2 unit that has low health and high cost, they'll probably get one shotted anyway.

I've been meaning to create a mod that adds quick tips to loading screens...

yes I realise it will cost more in the long run but, especially in a new game, there is quite a large time value of money effect going on. Slurping on your commander for a few minutes (shaving off maybe 10-30% of his health) would give you 3 to 10k of metal. That is a lot of energy generators, which are expensive and the initial limiting factor in getting more fabbers to work to start with (each vehicle fabber uses 1k energy to use its nanothingy = 1.3 energy plants or 1k metal). Later on you will have plenty of excess energy, with metal normally the limiting factor, where you can repair him up.

I haven't seen this being used in a recorded game yet (not that I have watched many) so perhaps it is only me and my build order creating any kind of initial bottleneck.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-did-you-know.58384/

You're welcome to take over maintaining the mod, I've all but abandoned it. I can help you get it on loading screens instead of the main menu. Or do your own mod from scratch, there's little to it. You can use the pamatches server to store the tips so the mod doesn't need to be updated whenever a tip is.

Hmm. That's pretty similar to what I was planning on doing.

It certainly would be good to start with an existing code base than start from scratch. I'd be up for that.

That I didn't know. Will use a LOT more now that I do.

That's even more diabolical than I ever imagined. Here's a pinch tactic if you have tons of energy and the orbital layer locked down, but hurting on metal: use your orbital fabbers to reclaim enemy structures and commander. They're pretty effective!

I've been using this a lot lately, especially for initial factory.
I put the infinite queue ON and put my standard pattern (like 3 tanks / 2 infernos / 1 spinner), then prioritize 2 fabbers / 1 tank / 2 fabbers / ... for the 10 first units.

The issue I have is with the display of the queues.
Standard and prioritized queues are mixed and numbers stacked, yet they are independent. It is not really user friendly. If you made a mistake, you're screwed and have to start over.
1 picture being worth 10000 words :

They correspond to the same thing, yet one is more usable than the other.

Edit : This may possibly be a mod idea if not implemented by Uber

you will need energy.

however, its a great tip, if you've maxed your metal eco, overproduced power to be safe, and need to outproduce units over your enemy, strip forests, commander, large chunks from internal t2 factories and as stupid as it sounds even an orbital factory.

btw, I suspect enemy structures like t2 factories reclaim faster than they take damage from infernos.

his tips are user accessibility, yours are gameplay. I.e. You can always expand, and lose to someone who knows how to do everything quickly with ui tools.

I think it is also worth noting the streaming economy. Storage is very limited, so the standard PA currency is units. You don't collect metal, you go near red in metal to store your metal value in units, factories, turrets, artillery, radar, army bulk... If you store metal by building units, you can always use those units sooner or later.

that actually helps teach a gameplay action, not an overlying open ended philosophy like:

protip: to win the game, kill all enemy team commanders.

without explaining how one avoids big failures on accomplishing it, like leaving metal sitting unused, not attacking for first 10 minutes, not scouting so you know when and what will attack you, and not getting more surface area of mex while killing back your enemys mex coverage.

btw garat, you should post something like this to tutorial link inside game main page, instead of what is there. Or hold a community contest, noting grade by amount of tips, both gameplay and user interface, specificness, shortness, and fundamentals above overly technical, including this op as fundamental and ui type stuff.

so many words said in such a short post.

Yes! and even that is not taking it far enough! we NEED a queue bar, a visible, separate fully mixable and editable queue bar.

How do you turn on the infinite queue?

Default key is L, but you can also find it under the energy toggle option on the right after selecting the factory.

Thanks a lot.