PTE Allows Us to Go Factory First!

The details of it can be tweaked.

I highly recommend you give the Realm Community Balance Mod or Statera mod a try.

They allow factory first and it's not like you fear.

Finally!
I will maybe play this game eventually

And indeed, I don't see how it favorite rushing.

Sure, your enemy has a factory 1 min earlier. But you do too. It's the same in the end.

This is primarily because com eco generation to consumption ratios in the above mods are comparable to Vanilla with a large part of the factory first made possible by storage increases. Making the com's lathe self sufficient is a dangerous thing.

Most strategy games I can think of have you start up with the ability to immediately build economy OR military.

Starcraft.

The neat thing about Starcraft though is that workers are fast enough to scout and are also able to do weak harass.

Commander can run 3 factoryies by himself!! awesome.... just dandy... I can build 3 air factories off start and just be a **** all game with no eco buildings!

The thing is, not only your commander receives this buff, but enemy commander as well.

So the commander is still squishy imo. I can now get 30 bombers to snip him in around 4 minutes in game and I can shut down anything he tries to build with bombers since you can kill units being produced by factories.

As someone else said, this applies to vehicles and bots as well. And vehicles are pretty dangerous as well, not to mention they also threaten to higher sustainable scale.

However, that was what I said above too. Maybe bot should be the only factory sustainable with just commander eco. Maybe vehicle require at least a mex, maybe air require 2 pgens? Or vehicle require 2 mex and air require mex and pgen?

I think the idea is nice, but worked out wrong. I don't know why uber did it in this way and not, as Stuart suggested an even bigger storage. You absolutely got to start factory now. Ofcourse there are way more choices way earlier, but making mex or energy before your factory is going to hurt economicly wich is weird and kind of stupid, especially for a game like this.

The only reason I support larger storage instead of larger eco generation, is because more storage is more newbie friendly which this game could use to a degree.

The commander can keep a slightly improved eco increase though. Nobody needs to build that much eco structure early game though.

Getting fabbers out fast is always going to be important.

As I've said before when this topic's been raised - I personally prefer there being a bit of down time at the start of the game.

• As a player, I use this time to check out the planet and the rest of the system to formulate an initial strategy and hopefully one or two backup strategies in case things don't work out ideally.
• As a caster, I use this time to analyse the planet and system, introduce the players if I know them, and talk a bit about possible strategies.

I know there's time during spawn selection for both of these, but it helps me to get into the flow of the game a bit easier and warm myself up. I know some people like to spam click during this time to get their clicky fingers ready for some high-APM action too

Also worth noting that factory first works in the current vanilla balance with team games, where one player goes factory first while the rest build eco. This can be really good for surprise rushes.

But now a building commander isn't consuming right? Sounds to me like constand waste of resources earlygame.

You can go triple factory start. marshall is going to record me doing this and a video will be up in a day or so.

I don't agree with elodea, the problem that you described right there is problem with bombers, not with opening with factory or mex first. They are currently too strong now, but what stops you from making 3 veh factories and spamming aa vehs or going 1 veh into air and mass interceptors. The build orders will just have to adapt. The fact that we save ourselves 35 seconds of life everygame is awesome. Right now almost everyone goes 3 mex 1 pgen, there is tiny variation sometimes, but thats like 5% of builds. If we think in terms of variety of builds in first 2 minutes I think the it will actually seriously rise. Because instead of deciding whether i want to go 2 mex 1 pgen or 3 mex 1 pgen I will be making already huge choices about what units should I build from certain factories and in which order, so we just get faster to the juicy part of the game. With new build income of commander loss of 5% builds that I mentioned will be offset with possible assissting or with different usage of enginners because of different income. I need to test it, but for now it sounds like great idea.

http://www.twitch.tv/planetary_annihilation/c/4674849 watch that

Yeah it does all come down to bombers being too powerful... as shown in Gandalf's awesome video. I bet it can be done quicker though if you build just 1 energy storage (you could even skip this), 2 air factories, 3 mex and then just get the commander assisting one factory (that's around 15 bombers produced a minute). You'd get the buildings up by 1 minute 30 seconds and you'd be looking at about the same number of bombers as in that video in under 4 minutes.

It does mean air is the only viable start, because you need its mobility to A) Ensure you scout this is even happening before it does happen, and B) defend against it by sending hummingbirds in to snipe the bombers.

I do think it would be better to make the commander self sufficient, changing this from 3000 energy produced to 1500. You'd then be able to go factory first but you'd have to eco after that.

This is all kinda funny though, cause it's obvious something will change before it goes to stable.

Again, It's not fault of commander income change, but strength of bombers in current patch. If they were weaker, you could open with bots or vehicles much more freely and it has nothing to do with this pte.

Aren't supcom bombers still good without being broken?