Team games: Spawning apart vs. Megabases + Cult Strategy

I think your problem is that you are taking battles against randoms as a benchmark for success. notice that they probably have never played together before, and are going in blind while you guys have a strategy worked out. against clans, the futility of your strategy is shown. your strategy can only work if you rush on a medium to small sized planet. in the vid. the orange team did not rush, so they lost. they could have won though. but they needed to rush.

You're right, we don't get what you were doing.

What you definitely weren't doing though, was attacking. Not once did any of your groups of dox push into VoW's territory. I actually think your spawning together strat might maybe have worked (or at least worked a lot better) if you'd A) expanded a hell of a lot more, you had plenty of metal available behind your base you never claimed and B) actually attacked! As Marshall and Zaphod were saying near the beginning, in the early game you had enough dox to overwhelm one of their isolated polar players which might have tipped the eco scales into balance and compensated for your clustered spawn. As it was, you just sat around waiting for VoW to out-eco you and then remove your early game advantage with tank armies, which are far better than dox in direct confrontation.

It was a very strange game to watch, for the first 3-4 minutes it looked like you guys had a plan and were going to go for hard rush and harass, but then it was almost like you all went AFK. You just never did anything with your units.

Spawning together and specialization are different things.
Spawning together might be useful for comboxing, or sth like that (or when 1 commander escapes asap to another planet).
I hate when someone does that in regular game because it puts the team at a disadvantage:
1) you're going to build the same number of buildings, but have less space (constructors have to travel further from the landing spot) - wasting time. Especially if there are trees.
2) assuming you want to build the same number of extractors - instead of 4 (4 players) circles of radius R you will need to cover 1 circle of radius 2R - much longer travel time for constructors
3) you're at the same place, it's easy to scout what you're doing. enemies need to focus just on one base
4) if there are multiple planets, enemies will be able to grow economy without being threatened


Now, specialization is completely different. Thanks to teleporters you don't need to build everything, someone else can give you T2 constructor or send an army.
Imagine system with 2 starting planets and 3v3 game. I always prefer to split 2-1 between planets because of possible outcomes:
1) all enemies went to the same planet -- hurray! It's free win. The planet without enemies safely builds economy and sends units to the other one. The other planet just turtles and uses recieved units. This way your team has 1 whole planet + small base on the other, while enemies have a part of the planet and their eonomy is constantly attacked.
2) they split - and it's equal (1v1+2v2 or 1v2+2v1).

I just cannot find any realistic situation where spawning together would help.

The reason you guys don't get what we are trying to do is because you've never tried it. You all play team games more or less the same way you play 1v1s, with each player being responsible for every aspect of his little base, and assisting each other now and then when needed. You are never playing the game as an army, even when you are "sharing armies" (i.e. when you are supposed to be a single army): you are always playing like a loose association of little armies. And if that was not bad enough, you play on these ludicrously huge systems with more planets than players, which means that all games, even on Clan Wars, end up being little more than a loose collection of 1v1s, or at best 2v2s. And THAT'S what I and my friends find boring. Watching a little commander build a little wall in front of himself to defend from 10 or 20 units, all zoomed in, as if you are playing StarCraft or something. But StarCraft is lame to me. That game was boring in 1998, and it sure as hell is boring two decades later, when the genre has moved on to strategic zoom, multiple layers and thousands of units. We want to see huge armies on huge terrain with pivot points and pincer movements on a gigantic scale. That's the kind of play that PA was created to make possible (just read some Jon Mavor interviews), and that's the kind of play that the Cult system is supposed to facilitate. And when we play against players at our level, IT DOES. The people in the MP lobby are generally at our level, and when we are facing them, matches go on for 1-2 hours, and they are so epic that they make the Clan Wars battles look like Dune II or C&C1 in comparison. And if you can bear with watching us get curbstomped for a few more matches, until our knowledge of the mechanics and our APM start catching up with you, maybe one day we'll have a war of that size caught in prime time on Clan Wars.

As for the reason we were not attacking in that match. It's simple. Normally, Masahiro takes our entire army and strikes the nearest base, and keeps going until he's flattened everyone. 50% of the time this works. The other 50% it doesn't, because that leaves our megabase defenseless, and then if an enemy player invades it from the opposite direction with a small force, we end up losing. If there are choke points we put up defenses, but some times there aren't (as in yesterday's game). Plus, we were all extremely stressed as it was our first esports game, so we were extremely cautious. There's really no mystery to why we played the way we did. Noobs + unconventional strategy + stress = what happened. And the fact that, despite all that, our strategy STILL created for us a real chance of winning, is a testament to the efficacy and the potential of that strategy.

I completely understand what you're doing and i believe it can work, but needs some tweaks in order to be effective. If you try my idea and it works, then there is definitely a way it can work while making everything interesting to watch.

Build some turrets with walls (they become exponentially better at defending) on the side you're going to leave undefended while you stomp one of the enemies mini base with a commander if you prefer. Make an air factory producing nothing but air fabs and send them to the other side of the planet where you can build a second base, free metal, and a proxy base for metal raiding.

okay so i have some thoughts on this.

Spawning apart grants major map control and is very good for planets that are big, but i do think spawning together could work in something like a size 700- for games that are 4v4+ because you have such a strong rush ability opened up. if you walk at the first opponents base you find after 1 minute with 3 coms or more and just push push push you can probably get the game in your advantage early.

If merely spawning away from each other makes you feel seperate and not like a team, you probably don't have a good team to begin with.

I'm about to go off topic, but this is something I really need to say.

I was extremely disappointed in the way people reacted to what they were watching on the stream. Yes, you are an eSports team and by playing in a tournament in front of a live audience you are inviting criticism of your strategies. I understand that and from what I'm reading, I think you do too.

Where people went way too far was when some of them moved from discussing the strategies to insulting your team itself. PA can't hope to cultivate a healthy competitive community if newer teams are attacked by viewers. Further, every one of us has tried out a strategy before that ended up not working. This isn't a real war, guys; it's a game. We can afford to take some risks here and experiment a little because there are no consequences. You guys lost but it looked like you had a lot of fun and learned some things at the same time. I call that a success!

So I want to congratulate you all on this because you did something that a lot of other people watching still haven't done; You got together as a team in front of a live audience and put on a show while fighting a team that has been around for over a decade. I really liked the creativity of your plan even though I was not alone in assuming that it wouldn't work. I hope to see even more creativity from your clan in your next game.

I'd say perhaps you should try two smaller 2 person bases, this gives you two bases to attack from, a tele retreat for commanders or unit reinforcement, more map control and intel aswell for multiplanet spawns two planets you can contest over. also this would also mean you can practice getting the hang of working in pairs and controlling 1 base between two players with in clan 2v2's which you would just scale up into 4v4's later on.

Go for it man. Play with the the game. Try and see if you can discover a new meta. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

From watching that replay, I honestly think the megabase strat has potential. It looks like you guys managed to get some crazy speed going in the early game. You really need to make sure you take advantage of that, because that's something this strat will have over your opponents.




As an honest critique, you guys should explore doing these:

- Scout like mad. Because you're all together, you cover less surface area, and therefore get less intel by default.

- When you've found your enemy, expand in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

- Unit diversity. While bots are good for harass and early rush, they get curb stomped if the opponent manages to build a tank blob. Either mix in some tanks from the start (you could even use the tanks as a defensive force), or develop a strat where you go bot heavy early, but begin to transition to tanks mid game.

- Moar air. It doesn't matter if you're not building bombers, just spam interceptors. Enemy bombers were eating your bot blobs for breakfast.

- Most importantly, don't be afraid to attack. Send everything at the most isolated player as early as you can. Don't worry about defending your base. In a pinch, your four commanders can just bunch up and ubercannon the crap out of anything harassing you. It's not always about destroying them either. Sometimes just putting them under pressure, or attacking their econ is enough to give you a lead that you can capitalise on.

Also, as a more experimental suggestion:
- Early t2 rush? Is it viable if you all concentrate on getting a single factory up? A few vanguards/ shellers early game would be a nasty surprise.





But anyway, keep it up. It's good to see people experimenting.

The main thing that went wrong in the clanwar video is not attacking, early harras would have pushed the enemy in the defensive and seeing their ally get overrun by a load of bots would probebly make em recall large parts of their offensive units.
No scouting or expanding didn't help. ofcourse.

But as far as teamplay goes, spawning appart does not make for a worse team play feeling.
You still must support eachother.
If your teammate is attacked you must help him out, either by sending him units or attacking the source of the enemy attack.
Take over where needed or build teleports for fast unit transfers.
When on a single planet 3 players often spawn in a triangle, so that triangle must become one huge base and having specialized players to do that still works it will just be later in the game.

With multiple planets, players will have to take over new colonized planets etc.

The best team would be the one where this happens on the fly where the players take the proper initiative.

Also with specialization, what if the eco was bad, are you going to blame the player assigned to it then?
The proper action would have been to help quickstart an eco boost.

Yep, as I said I think there was the potential for an interesting (and maybe even winning strat there), it just looks like it should really rely on early aggression which you didn't produce. If you want to try things out and test your strats more get in touch with promethean, I'd be quite interested in trying new things and tweaking strats with you, and you wouldn't be under the pressure of playing a pro team on live stream (we have plenty of players who aren't as good as our clan war teams eg. me).

It's not true that spawning apart makes you play as 4 separate 1v1s by necessity though. Although I haven't played competitively for a long time, I've played team games against reasonably skilled opponents where we spawn apart and specialise and have won with clever use of teleporters. In a recent game I went hard air and relied almost entirely on my allies for ground defence, while they relied on me for interceptor support. And I'm talking about single planet games here, I hate orbital wars too and never play on systems with more than 2/3 planets if I can help it.

Am i the only one that really liked the 2nd strat with the 4 player orbital rush? I think that was somuch better then the 4 player megabase.

I think the mega base idea had some potential on Elysium because the amount of metal meant that spawning together didn't really put you at an economic disadvantage in the short-term. The problem is you then played very passively, defeating the point of spawning together. You have an incredible defence in four commanders, meaning you're untouchable, so you should be moving your entire army quickly to overwhelm the more isolated enemies early on, putting their economy behind and compensating for your far more easy to contain setup. Hell, you could have tried a good old fashioned commander rush, four on one (though that likely puts you too far behind in factories right now).

What you can't do is spawn together and then play passively because you'll get surrounded and lose all economic opportunities, then you'll lose simply due to the overwhelming unit advantage of the enemy.

I would highlight over cautiousness as the key weakness in your game on Saturday. You saw it in the battle north of the lake. Voices of War moved in with a force, you had three bot armies surrounding it and all it needed was an order for all three to move in and you'd have completely crushed that force. But you didn't, you, danced around it and let the tanks use their range to whittle down your force.

I suspect that because you view yourselves as the underdogs you took on a more cautious approach in that game, and that's what screwed you in game one. On the other hand I completely understand the pressure of a live event can do that to you. EDIT: And indeed from what you're saying that appears to be the case.

I don't see the megabase as viable on Voices of War though, there simply isn't enough metal in any one spawn to make it work. Voices of War could take the economy of four starting locations and funnel it all to factories near you, while you had the economy of only one starting location. Your swift move to orbital was smart, but you need to lock down planets faster when you get there, and especially get orbital radar down to spot incoming fabbers.

If you want massive armies though then the mega base is not the way to go. In shared armies your production can be anywhere, the commanders are just your economic kickstarters. The more eco you have the bigger your army, and spread out spawns will win the eco wars every time. Something you guys might find comfortable is linking up your disparate bases with teleporters. It would be like having a mega base, but a more economically powerful one. Your army could be wherever it needs to be, but you have better expansion, are harder to contain, and your army would probably be bigger because your eco is larger.

I haven't watched the game so going by the discussion here only. Bear with me, text incoming...

I would argue that specialisation is essential to winning, and that's what the better teams are actually doing, its just a different type of specialisation than you (@icycalm) are describing here, a micro-specialisation if you will, or transient-specialisation, where as your definition is macro-specialisation.

You decide early on, perhaps straight away or even before the game starts who does what - big picture macro-specialisation.

Other teams, organised or even randoms sometimes, decide on specialisation on the fly, and often flit between tasks as the situation demands or influences.

On spawn each person specialises in making their base self-sufficient.
Once the enemy are scouted those close to the enemy switch to production (no need to communicate, but can)
Once the enemy are scouted those far away switch to eco / orbital / tech

any any point in the game someone declares - im leaving the planet, someone take over my base!
-cue volunteer to specialise in e.g. controlling the southern hemi-sphere of the main planet, rather than just their base.
someone scouts out a lone commander - cue taking everyones' bombers, setting all factories to build bombers and going for a snipe.

eco starts to suck - someone looks at all bases for areas of eco improvement.

my base in under control - i'll take a look at everyone elses and tidy up a bit as required

we've got no orbital, i'll sort it

its similar to settons clutch where everyone knows their role based upon starting position, except now its 'know your role dependent on the ever changing starting position and map composition'. Harder, more fluid, but its there.

its not 4 generals ignoring everything but their battlefield, its 4 sergeants getting whats needed done when its needed - focus, fluidity and adaptation is what wins. - 'no plan survives contact with the enemy'

Edit - what I didn't make clear, is that they are all doing different aspects at the same time, never all aspects, hence it is specialised

The multiple-bases linked with teleporters strategy is extremely different to the megabase, and since many people are recommending it to us I'll take a minute to explain the differences, and a few more things as well.

First off, I have absolutely no interest in the 1v1 aspect of this game. I've been playing like that since the days of Dune II, and I am glad that there's finally a game out that allows me to completely move past it. What we are going for in this game is an actual chain of command, with me being the real "Supreme Commander", creating the strategies before the game, and modifying them on the fly within the game, and with all the other players taking orders from me, and trying to implement them in real time as best as they can given the current situation they are facing. Of course we discuss the strategies in our Strategy subforum before the game, and I take suggestions from the other players, and we all weigh their pros and cons, but for the most part all the strategies are mine, and moreover when we are actually in the game and there is a disagreement, whatever I say goes because there is no time to properly discuss things. Which, again, is how things happen in real life for obvious reasons. It is simply not a productive thing to do to have disagreements or discussions when you are under fire, and there has got to be someone who calls the shots at all levels and at all times.

So, for example, it was a little frustrating for me watching the videos after the game and hearing the casters ask my friend recoil all these questions about strategy, when the poor guy was only responsible for the economy, and has not thought through the strategic aspect as deeply as I have. He was literally spamming energy generators and metal extractors the entire game. That's all he did. And I was spamming factories and trying to choke his economy -- or to ALMOST choke it, to be more precise -- to make sure that we are churning out as many units as possible at all times. Meanwhile, Qpo was trying to grab as much metal as possible outside the base and generally assisting Masahiro, who was our general, and who was taking the army we were producing and moving it around the map.

None of this can work if we spawn apart. You can't have one player make pgens and mexes in a spot that has no factories or units around it to defend it. You can't have the general spawning alone somewhere, because he'll have no army to command. It just won't work, and that's why we are not trying it. We have tried two 2v2s however. In that case, one of the players in each base is doing economy+production, and the other one is the general, in which case we have two generals. This can work, and we do plan to use it in Clan Wars at some point -- and we will be forced to use it in the multi-planet systems, eventually. But again, it's not as powerful for us as the megabase, because you have to understand that NONE of us plays 1v1s, like NEVER, so we are all extremely specialized. I don't even know what half the units do, for example, and it was funny watching the stream yesterday and seeing the casters wonder why we are not hiding our orbital fabbers after the lightning colonization of the system. But we didn't know what the deep space radar does exactly. I just thought it was a more powerful version of the normal radar lol. That's the kind of noobs you are facing lol. Which makes some of the mean comments in the Twitch stream a little more understandable. I mean, the dudes were right. They didn't have to be so mean about it, but what they were saying was correct: we DO suck, compared to the top players. In the MP lobby we win more games than we lose, but compared to the top players? Dudes please.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/icycalm (136 hours)
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Qpo (130 hours)
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Masahiro9891 (221 hours)
http://steamcommunity.com/id/recoil345 (65 hours)

That was the level of the players that VoW was facing on Saturday, and VoW, as has been pointed out, has been a clan since 2001. 13 years. Our clan was started in AUGUST. VoW was a clan in SupCom. NONE of us has played SupCom or even TA. I finished Halo Wars on Legendary in July with recoil before we jumped into PA. Halo Wars lol. Before that the last RTS I had played was Cossacks in 2003. We are not even entirely comfortable with the concept of a streaming economy yet, since none of us has encountered it before.

I could keep going, but this should be enough. The viewers and the commentators need to get some perspective on who we are, not because their comments hurt our feelings, but because they are the ones who are going to get frustrated when they expect miracles from us that will not be forthcoming.

Our game plan is to stick it out with Clan Wars Season 1 while playing catch-up with the other clans inbetween fixtures. We don't expect to win a single match. It would be awesome if we did, and it may happen in the last couple of fixtures in our home system if the season ends up stretching over 5 or 6 more months, but we don't expect it. But then when Season 2 rolls around, and a bunch of new clans enter the league, we hope to have amassed enough experience by then to be able to be competitive against the least experienced of them.

Ultimately, however, the 4v4 format is still too restrictive for the style of play that we like to pursue. We want to move to 10v10s and 20v20s and 15v15v15v15s, with multiple Mumble channels devoted to separate squads of commanders on separate planets, and with a single Supreme Commander (me lol) just sitting back and watching the titanic conflict unfold and formulating strategies and giving orders while barely touching his mouse. When these sorts of games become possible I believe that you will see the megabases and extreme specialization completely dominating the game, and I and my clan will be there to play against whoever can muster the manpower to compete with us.

fluffy posted while I was writing my post. And he's right. For the 4v4 format, extreme specialization like ours is a disadvantage. Medium specialization, like all the other clans are doing, is superior. But it is easier for us to learn a single task really well, than to try to become equally expert at all tasks in the same time frame. We just don't have the hours in-game to do this at a level that can approach the top players. By the time I've put in an additional 10 hours into the game, mot has put in 100 (I checked). It's just not going to happen anytime soon, and moreover it's not fun for us. I don't WANT to learn all aspects of the game up close. I just want to formulate strategies and bark orders. And this is the first RTS that is so strategically deep, that this may well be possible at some point (I mean in huge 40- and 100-player wars). Until this is possible I will do factory production, or sometimes economy, but I won't play 1v1s in the MP lobby to train in all aspects, because I don't like it. It's too stressful, and when all is said and done, compared to the top players, I suck at it.

I DON'T suck at formulating strategies, however. The casters and several people in this thread could see that. So I will try to see to what extent PA is a game in which a team can outthink another team, as opposed to outclick them. At 4v4 it is debatable, but as the player numbers increase tactics=micro will take a back seat compared to strategy=macro, and those are the games that my friends and I ultimately want to be playing. 4v4 Clan Wars is just a step on the way there for us (though I do hope Exodus will be expanding to larger games eventually).

With respect to the teleporters idea... I think there is a way for this to work for you.

As I mentioned before, I understand the logic of 'mega base' and think it has merrit. Where the gates come in then?

Well it strikes me that it's worth at least as an experiment, to start your commanders spread out, then at the very start of the game, use gates to consolidate them. Only after consolidating your commanders do you make the super base- however you now have gate access to 3 other locations on the map (or potentially other planets).

This would delay you start a little, but on the other hand may grant you enough additional map control to tip the scales? All it would require is shaking up your starting build a bit, after about 30 seconds you'd have all commanders in position as before, worth a try?

There's risk vs reward in both cases.

When spawning apart you gain huge map control, you already have nice areas to expand to, and nobody is running into each others expansions. The issue is if a player is trapped between two enemies, alone. What I suggest is to try to spawn in the next closest spawn each time so you're never too far off.

A megabase would roflstop any lone enemy if he happened to spawn near you, you could easily focus on him and defeat him. Expansion is much worse however as you have a much smaller area to expand. You'll need to walk much further to get the same expansion as you'd get if you spawned far apart.

Besides, if you're playing right... Far off bases will become one base. Expand towards your teammates, expand out as well but to a lesser extent as it holds more risk. Eventually your bases will connect into a true megabase, factories, turrets, metal, etc... All forming nice blobs of connection between all players.