Planetary Annihilation Strategies / Tips and Tricks

I've had the Alpha since it came out, but despite this, I'm not a good player and tend to get crushed with an enemy who has 50X more factories than i have. This is for everyone, not just me, to look at/share their strategies to winning a match. I'm not asking for a Super-Secret locked-in-a-safe battle plan, but just a general strategy for a solid match. Also if you know some lesser known hotkey commands you can share them here.

Something that has worked for me is to watch and learn from the good players.

http://pamatches.com/

The key is to have an ever expanding economy and production value. Never stop building! The goal is to have enough power, metal, and factories that you can survive losing some. And then expand some more!

The best way to win is to out produce your enemy.

WELLLLL lately the winning tactic has been make one fac, make like 5 fabs, snowball ecnonomy, make 5 more facs, make 50 more fabs, snowball eco some more, each set of fabs makes 5 more facs and then you make all facs make tanks and send them at your enemy and you win. That or nukes.

PM me on faf I am willing to train any of you : tatsu

There is no super secret plan to win

Common mistakes which lead to lose :
- not expanding
- not attacking
- not using resources
- be afraid (and build useless defenses because you are afraid)

Good thing to do :
- expand (it means build metal extractors always and everywhere)
- prevent the enemy of expanding by attacking (always and everywhere)
- if you build a fabricator, use it, build stuff. if you build a factory use it, build stuff. If you build an army use it, kill stuff (units have a purpose, if you don t use your units you waste resource)
- you should have an energy excess. If not build generators.
- you should have a slight metal deficit. If not use your metal don t waste it.
- Last but not least, attack doesn't mean suicide. You spend effort to build units, so use them wisely. Attacking a tower defense is the more stupid idea you can have, you want to kill undefended fabricators, meal extractor, power generator, factories, commander... You attack the opponent army / defenses when you don't have alternative.

Having never played TA or Supcom before I thought I would be getting facerolled in this game. However if there is one thing starcraft 2 has taught me it's to expand expand expand.

Now in PA you really don't need to worry about the timing of expansions as much as you do in Starcraft.

My strategy is to eco up, drop an air fac and produce 1 AA unit to scout the map with. I will then continue to eco up while producing fabbers and units. I will use the fabbers to make more facs/eco then transition into tech ii as soon as I have enough resources to support 3 fabbers. Rush the tech ii, make 5 tech ii fabbers and then rush tech ii eco. At this point I will have been carrying harrasment out on any nearby enemies and building around 10 tech i fabs. By this time my eco will be strong enough to continously pump 10 tech i units out which are used in small groups to take out enemy eco expansions while I macro up a large army. I like to push my lines by building tech i bot facs close to enemy lines and just keep pushing units into their eco. I will produce around 5 tech ii facs in my main base hub as well as anti nukes and nukes.

Then it just comes down to if you are macroing as efficiently as your opponents.

If SC had timing to it's expantion it's because you needed to do it fast and because whatever the map you could invariably do the exact same thing so there were optimal builds that had been worked out really fast and quickly became known to all. In FA and PA there are optimal builds too but they arn't as dead-obvious, there are much more aproaches to them, the fact remains that if you're neither stalling nor wasting but surfing on that eco then you're doing something right that's bound to show it's fruit later in the game and that's where lies the real difference between Pa and SC, it's the flowing economy, wich you need to get to know personally .

Expanding is, I'd venture to say, even more a priority in Pa than in SC and FA.

tatsu i pmed you on faf

I have been playing since beta
and I have come across some nice strategy's, here are some of them!
((1))!!!the mystery moon lander (made the name up)
this strategy involves putting orders down like this.
2:metal extractors
2 power gens
1:bot factory
::: then make the bot factory make only engineer bots/fabricator bots then start making an orbital,
then once you have finished your orbital launcher make it fabricate 1 Astrulus then fly your commander to the nearest planet, then with your remaining bots make a few mass and energy gens then
DESTROY your orbital launcher, this makes you look like a new player who doesn't know what there doing when really you have rushed and hopefully succeeded. NOTE: only works with 2+ planets, duh
((2))!! my personal favorite the idk
this is just how I start the game.
3:metal then
3 power then
1: bot factory
then make the commander make 1 energy Storage and one mass storage
and while you are doing that but the bot factory onto repeat and set the build rally point to build on the same factory, then do what you want depending on the situation,

there's 2 of my best strategy's hope I helped
emporer88 out~

Thought I would do a basic tutorial that assumes you aren't retarded and can learn the basic mechanics of the unit types and how to manage a basic economy. That info is available everywhere and I would be wasting my time repeating it here. Hope this helps you with your PA mojo dude.

I find a solid strategy usually starts with a factory to allow access to early fab/scout units. This allows the player to expand more aggressively in the early game (first two minutes).

Some prefer an air factory directly, or a land factory. Either way ensure you don't ever stop building things with them.

Bots have a great capacity for early raiding. Elminating your opponents expansion is key, but bots are easily killed by patroling bombers. You will need to send them with escorts before long. Keep to the outside of your oponents bases, avoid the defences and force them to draw troops from their front lines to deal with you.

Vehicles tend to be a more defensive strategy as the tanks can easily weather early bot raids, be careful of their slow rate of fire and movement. They can be overwhelmed by large bot contingents easily. Make sure your tanks don't get to close to any units with a high dps and protect them from bombers as well.

Air is the best for early expansion. Beware their extra energy expenses. They can help you quickly amalgamate large swaths of mexes (metal extractors hereafter referred to as mexes) in to your economy. They are extremly vunerable to anti-air, give them fighter support or risk being sniped by your enemies' fighters.

For the first 5 to 10 minutes depending on how experienced your opponent is you should mostly focus on growing your mex count and controlling land with tier 1 military. At some point in this timeframe you should also endeavor into the orbital layer as an early expansion can provide you with a harassment free planet to grow your economy.

Dont just use teleporters for interplanetary affairs, use them to funnel troops into an enemies' flank. Nothing says surprise like 150 bolos rolling into your enemies well crafted energy network.

At the 10 minute mark you should at least have tier 2 in progress. Even one fabber working in the background can give you the edge if your enemy is only spamming tier 1 and neglecting his tech.

ALWAYS EXPAND TO THE GAS PLANETS!!! Virtually limitless supplies of both metal and energy await those who secure these floating tresures. Defend your Jigs well however, they have a structure specific proximity damage trigger when killed and they can take your whole operation down with one misplaced fighter. They will damage fighters, but not fatally since a recent patch.

In late game, after 25-30 mins you should most definitely have anti nukes. Sooner if you are fighting an experineced player or an absurd AI.

Never hammer units against a defensive line from the side it was designed to protect. Always take it from the direction that results in as few of the guns in range of you as possible.

Always have as much of your guns in range of the enemy while keeping the fewest of theirs in yours.

Don't be a bitch and exploit glitches, nobody likes to play with those people.

Get PA Mod Manager and install the hotkey mod. It allows you to setup custom hotkeys. Definitely a must if you're looking to up your APM.

Im not a pro or so...but one obvious thing that i see over and over again is, that players try to "rush" toward T2. (not just here...i see it in any game with a similar mechanic)
They build a small factory, use just some extractors near their spawn and try to build a T2 factory with a single builder and without ressources.
Do NOT do that. its depressing to destroy the enemies commander with 50 units because he has no defense, factories, ressources or anything else.

i start my games btw with air factory first, then 3 metal, 5 energy (because i like 5).
in the factory i build 5 scouts and 5 builders. the scouts start exploring my planet (early intel is pretty usefull), and with the 5 air engineers i start to take over the metal spots, while my commander builds some bot factories (or water, orbital or whatever else...based on the map)

i mostly go factory + 3 fabricators - 2 mex - 2 energy - factory ...
what factories when depends on map ..

You want to get better at PA?

1) work on one thing at a time. Identify a weakness in your game. Practice it!
2) Watch videos and replays (particularly replays) of good players. Watch what they do. Isolate one thing in particular. that they are doing that you believe you should do. Practice it!

Common mistakes:
Mismanaging economy
Rushing T2/orbital
Not expanding
Not scouting
Not reacting to key information.
Building the wrong units due to lack of knowledge

Example: you scout, and see their base. They have more air factories than you. You need to build more air factories! If you don't react to this information, they will establish air superiority and that could be your downfall.

@exodusesports wrote a fantastic guide that will be helpful: http://exodusesports.com/guides/the-planetary-annihilation-pyramid/ note that economy is at the bottom. If you screw your economy up early on (e.g. not building enough power generators, or not expanding and claiming metal and stalling on metal), you might well not recover. It is all about efficiency. Don't over spend but don't float either.

Once you've got those basics down you can get down to tactics and intelligent decisions, and overall grand strategy. Once you've nailed a few opening builds and all of the above you can get creative and see what else works for you.

Here is a solid strategy that you can use.

Make custom game and put your eco to 5x. Sometimes they will notice, but when they don't it is a good strategy for winning.

*But really, play the game as if all you see is your eco bar. Get lots of metal, spend lots of metal. Don't be blue, don't be red (although if you had to choose, you would want to be red), and know what to build when it goes to either colour

so had a game today were i felt that it clearly lasted longer than it should have ... i had both the eco and production lead as well as territorial control but i just wasn't able to crack the opponent until i went full on t2 long range and anchors ... what did he do? he build towers and groups of tanks and aa ... all thightly packed toghether at his base...
bombers didn't work likely due to being clumped up ( i do suck at micro ... and my god did i waste them ...) launching tank waves coupled with infernos didn't help much either due to his thight groups of single and double barreled beamtowers ... and he didn't even have walls ...


i would like to show the replay but it seems it was bugged as i couldn't load it

map was forge

If you can get this replay to load then you will learn the fastest way to expand with land units. Obviously there is usually not 3000 metal spots but I think it carries over to other things.

This is not the way to play in 1v1 games.

Replay is broken to me, might be fixed, idk.
http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=312313
15581431267987750307 (paste into replay search bar)

Might be weird showing off my own game but hey, just trying to help ))))