Commander Reclaim Ruins PA

Over time every RTS develops a meta; units come into favour and fall out of it, people develop new tactics which defeat the old. An RTS doesn’t become stale until a strategy emerges that is so dominant is becomes required above all others.



In the article Commander Reclaim: How To Ruin PA, elodea makes the argument that Commander reclaim meets these criteria. A strategy which comes off the back of changes designed to make the Commander harder to repair or reclaim to death, earlier this year Qzipco discovered that it could be used as a means to jump start your economy.

Elodea walks you through what he sees as the problem and proposes some fixes for it. Check out the full article and let us know your thoughts.

Just as a matter of interest, how is this different than any of the 100's of build orders before this. If you don't know the best build or the current meta you will fall behind.

I just see it like this. Just a step of a build order. Just one step, like building a mex first or starting factory etc. The rest of the game is still the same.

That's the problem though . We should try not to have a 'best build order'. Having to use combat fab narrows possibilities more than say building a factory first. Combat fab determines what factory you need to build (bot mla, vehicle legion) and the pacing of the game. e.g. on amplus it pushes the game into t2 naval and kaiju rushing.

The other thing is there isn't another build order step/optimisation that gives you anywhere as much advantage. 50-100% more metal to spend over your opponent in early game.

Edit: No point arguing this I guess. PA isn't for me anymore *shrug*

It's indeed "just a step of a build order" so saying it ruins the game is a bit extreme.

But I'd still just disable it due to being very unintuitive for new players, and rather meaningless extra steps for everyone else.

Internal consistency speaks for the feature though (special case rules are not very elegant), so it's bit of a tough call.

I don't like the idea of reducing the metal cost. Even if the tactic is more risky, early T2 can be so powerful that this kind of thing can decide the match in minutes. It can become more rare, so less players will learn about it, and then it just becomes a nasty bit of cheese. Also Commander being expensive to repair is definitely a good thing.

The article has been updated with a video example of Com Reclaim Fix in action.

I think we need a poll!

In Zero-K if you reclaim only 1% of your commander (or more), he will turn into a blueprint again that needs finishing. Its 100% useless in anything since its an unfinishd blueprint that needs work, except it can be shot at or reclaimed/build up. I see this as the only solution to this ''problem'' that won't spawn new problems. If the commander stops being able to walk, shoot, build or regenerate resources, this buildorder will die off very soon.

My first reaction when I saw commander reclaim


I don't like the comm reclaim because it alters the gameplay drastically which makes the game less fun for me then it was before. Then again maybe its counterable with with some boombots. Not trying it because its just no fun for me.

Try Flubbs mod, he gave the commander some additional speed and lowered the metal cost to around 10k. We actually did some testing with this and the commander was used more at the front of the battle, he was also making proxy bases all over the map. When I tried this mod, pa was a lot more fun to play for me.

Everything is fun for a while but can get boring, not saying the type you mentioned is boring but also knee jerk.

My argument isn't that com reclaim is good for the game, but I like the early t2 which speeds the game up some: I'm a total annihilation love child so I like a quicker fast paced game.

PA punishes the aggressive player because the map size to t1 power ratio is so far off:

On larger maps by the time your advantage in t1 units reach the opponent he can have T2. That's why air spam is the go to on large maps for the first 10 minutes or so.

For me the commander reclaim just speeds up this process on the larger maps and makes it a decision on the smaller maps like forge. So I think it's better for the 1v1 scene.

that step however is way to strong especialy for the begining of this game and how it boosts the parabolic escaltion

the simple question is: how likely is someone to win not choosing to commreclaim against someone that does ..
and i dare say that almost every cast i saw recently from higher level players
everyone used commreclaim in his/her strategy ...
the person who commreclaims not only gets factories out quicker but potentionaly expands faster getting greater economy in a shorter ammount of time because the player gains the resources to do that ..

doesn´t make much sense because the comm has constantly to function to keep control of its units ..
i don´t find this a good solution either ... i would just disable fabricators to reclaim any friendly commander as they are highest priorityunits and not buildable as such they shouldn´t be reclaimable at least by your own units ...

can anyone tell me weither you gained resources on reclaiming a fullhealth comm in supcom?

i sure prefer aggressive commcheese over commecocheese because the first has a bit more ways to receact to than the other i think ...

that being said i could see a bit of problem in reducing the comms metalcost as it would allow combatfabricators to repair it much quicker ...
so not only would you have an early ecoboost but you could have a stronger pushoption in the midgame ... now it seems many players commit to t2 for the much stronger anticommunits ...
and i honestly feel a bit reminded to the early alphadays were t2 rush was not only prefered but mandatory (because lack of ballance among other things) were i think we should keep a ballance in which t1 and t2 are fairly equaly used .. i´m not´neccesarily saying that that isn´t the case though ..

I agree , if players com reclaim they have a higher choice of winning, and if equal skill levels play the player that comm reclaims have a higher chance of winning. I don't argue with this at all.

But you can say this for any build we have seen; if a player builds x instead of y they have a higher chance of losing. Now we have had a pretty long build where true metas appear. It's the same as every game if the balance remains the same: we fine tune metas, if uber change this like some of the above solutions, the same players that lose because they don't know the meta will still lose because they don't know the meta after a new meta is introduced.

That's gaming, and that's why you are rewarded for studying ( can't think of the correct word) the game. I could be the best lol player in the world but I am only good with lower tier champions so I'm not in the top 1% of players: is that my fault? Or the games fault?

Uber can't patch the game forever, so that every meta is buffed or countered, so we need to deal with the bad cards we are given and learn how to play the game we have.

This is the major difference of games becoming stale or mixing it up a bit. This is why games that are parched 20 times a year are more enjoyable than games that are not.

Nice article. While I always knew commander reclaim was out there and saw its advantages, this article with all its fancy graphs showed just how much of an impact it has within the game. I think the best part was the table showing the previous matches and what percentage of people used the strategy.

As much as I love PA, this game, and the RTS genre, is difficult for new a player. Having commander reclaim as the only strategy is extremely disappointing for casual gameplay because it is immediately perceived as OP.

PA should support every possible strategy. Commander reclaim is a brilliant idea and shouldn't be avoided entirely. Its these type of strategies alone that make me come back to this game and the genre.

I will have to try out both mods and see which one I like more. I'm leaning towards flub because of its emphasis on commander expansion. I feel like a faster commander would allow for more variety.

buildorders exist for efficient gameplay no question and you have that in every game following a certain curve of optimal progression ... the problem i have with this however is that commreclaim isn´t something that you can´t fail and get a chance of still winning in the longrun ... before that i would argue that theoretically you could start with any factory or pgen or mexx before factory and still have equal chances of winning vs other buildorders ...
with commreclaim however it feels VERY binary ... do it and keep on surviving or don´t and be more sure to lose ..
it feels in a similar fassion to supcom adjancencybonuses were if you decide to not build pgens next to your factory you make sure to be in a economic disadvantage without any gain whatsoever ...

before commreclaim you kinda had the choice of early eco or early production and the type of production with the associated disadvantages ... now it´s almost always early eco ..

After some more thinking... Here's a third solution, which I would choose if it was up to me:

Rather than saying that Commander can't be reclaimed as a rule (boring), or tweaking the metal value (risky, unwanted consequences) reclaiming it could just be made slower. For rationale one could say that commanders are made from special material that is more difficult to reclaim. So just reduce reclaim rate for any unit working on it.

How much? Depends on how useful you want to keep it. I might make it 25% of normal rate, which would cut the cost-effectiveness in early game a lot, but you might still use it later if you have energy and fabs to spare but lack metal.

Great article and thank you for the thoughtful write-up, elodea. I think we can all agree that the more viable paths to victory in PA, the better. It keeps gameplay less predictable, and adds to replayability and excitement. For that reason I'd say we don't need to get rid of com reclaim entirely, because it adds another layer of strategy. But it is rather a huge perversion of normal game expectations and for that reason, should not be so powerful that you are required to use it if you want to win. Like rushing T2 or using orbital on a single planet, it should not be something you see every game, but under the right circumstances, it might pay off.

I think the usage statics presented in the article make it clear that for now, it offers too good of an advantage to be optional in competitive play.

kinda intrested in that "true eco" mod

Edit: No point arguing this I guess. PA isn't for me anymore *shrug*