I just started playing my copy of PA yesterday - and the AI kicks the crap out of me every time. Any suggestions on how to build my experience with PA? I feel if I play online I will get killed quick by other, more hardened players and and AI just kills me fast anyway Thanks!
You need to expand your economy more. Focus on getting out more fabbers (eight by six minutes as a rule of thumb) and more factories (four minimum by six minutes). This will depend on planet size, but the AI beating you means you're playing too small scale. Expand your economy, expand your production, then roll over it. The AI is learning these lessons too though, so it's going to get harder. Difficulty options are incoming at some point though.
You could watch some videos to get a hang of how to play efficiently, or play team games where your teammates can carry you a bit.
Play on a slightly larger map, normally you get a size 2, chose to start on a size 3. Beware the AI at most times starts not far from where you started. If the Planet has Oceans with Islands you may find the AI have poor planning, when it comes to playing on such a Planet. I won my game on a size 3 Ocean map.
The easiest mistake to make is probably failing to understand the economy, which is fundamentally different than most other RTS games. * Always be expanding your economy * Always be expanding your production to meet your economy * Attack your enemy's economy And * Your commander is a great unit for building stuff and assisting builds. Use him! I once had a teammate (I use the term loosely) who refused to use his commander and left him sitting in a corner the entire match surrounded by missile turrets. Things did not go well for us. You don't want him wandering the wastelands building metal extractors but he should always be helping with something.
Probably the other non-intuitive thing is never building alone. Fabbers should work in pairs, minimum. The really big projects need swarms of fabbers. Assist the building of nukes, and if you can't afford to then you built your economy wrong.
I suggest perfecting your 1st 5-6 minutes. As zaphodX suggested watch some video of high end players and watch what they do at the start. There can be several different openers but it's imperative to perfect your initial ecom expanding. I recommend you play 10 games against the AI but quit at the 10 min mark, aim at making your ecom better each time. One does not run before they walk. If your la lazy, try ctrl + n (shows all the metal spots) build 1 metal, 1 energy gen, 2 metal, bot factory, engineer(like 50), get your c-man to spam energy buildings, first fab(engineer) out assists your c-man, next 4 get them to build metal extractors EVERYWHERE(as Quitch said, groups of 2).. I mean everywhere, but be-careful spending to much time with them you don't want your new engies doing nothing. Next few dudes build an air factory, 3 more bot factories, adv bot factory, 5 land factories. Spam dox's with ur 3 bot factories, get 5 scouts then spam air to air, ants with the land factories adv fabs with ur avd plant. *2nd and 3rd eng out of bot plant build two radars before going metal hunting, radar is amazing. I'm sure there are better ways but this will be effective, I believe some ppl build 4 metal before a factory.
Personally I gained a lot of insight by watching the PA Matches and Zaphodx's videos. That and playing along while watching a match to sort of incorporate different ideas into my starting builds. Practicing the first 5-6 mins, like spazzdla said, gets you in the habit of starting your base off strong in economy and production. The planet maps also trip people up that are used to TA or SC type of RTS', in that, you HAVE to expand your base; there is no map corner to hole up in and fortify, you are out in the open and vulnerable and the only way to keep your opponent from overrunning you is to overrun them first. Its not really harped on, as much as it should be, that I have seen...maybe just not enough to get through my thick head...but the opening really is the key to the rest of the battle(at this point in the beta), if you meander in any way in getting the early economy up and first bot production rolling you will be behind the AI and it will let you know by overrunning and killing you. Perfecting your opening build(s) is like acing an audition to the rest of the game, if you make it past the 10 minute mark with your base not in a smoldering heap then welcome to the long game. And the long game is where you can get goofy with your strategy and tailor it to you instead of relying on cookie cutter builds. Also practice on big planets at first and move to smaller ones as you beat the AI more consistently, the key is consistency against the AI, get an opening that consistently puts you ahead of it or on par with it. And scout it up, get planes flying around to find where the enemy is what its building. AI sucks at water maps ATM so if you want to get your confidence up fight on water planets, AI commander also gets stuck in craters and cracks so if you haven't been scouted or seen any aggression by the AI, its probably stuck in a hole. Just my 2 cents. I could be wrong and if I'm not then an update will invalidate my advice sooner or later.
The next build will have an economic scalar that people can apply to AIs. Both to handicap them, or even to boost them. Should provide at least a simple scalar so people can get a more appropriate challenge for what they're wanting.
is there going to be AI behaviour slider or option, so you can have 1 rush and 1 turtle AI if you wanted?
Right now? No. In the future, that would be part of the plans. At least some amount of control over individual AI behaviors would be ideal.
Playing with rate 100 is pretty awesome. Can you la implyment it for normal games too? I wanna try a crazy unit spam battle from touch down.
I prefer to practice on small planets. The AI always spawns close to you, so if you can get up bot factories fast enough, you can rush him with bots, gut his power, and do whatever you like after that point. The other thing is that the AI's initial foray of units is more likely to find your base, which means you become practiced at defending a rush as well as delivering it. OF course, larger planets means that the expansionist behaviour actually comes into play a lot more. Metal planets are another one - the terrain makes the battles a lot more strategic. It's easier to capture and control chokepoints, easier to cut down the avenues of attack to your main economic centers. Just be sure to expand, expand, expand.
This is quite true However, this is pretty universal for all RTS's actually =P @OP: Watching just a few games cast on youtube will give you a lot of hints on general best-practice game play. I learned a lot from just a few videos, and utilising this I managed to beat a friend of mine even though he is usually very good with RTS games. I'm not claiming to be a pro player, since I've played just a handful games, but I felt i got a good grasp of the playstyle. There is some micro needed to send out your groups of fabbers to capture as much metal as possible across the map, and then defend it, but if you manage that your economy will boom and you will pray you have enough factories to use it all =)
I don't think the bullets are related to the first comment - you tend to freak out when your economy is red because you know your build rate decreases, so you tend to pull fabbers off projects until it's green again. But if you have 2 fabbers working on a project at 80 % efficiency, you shouldn't pull one off, they're building faster than they would individually at 100%. The economy is not well described in game.
*sort* of... I mean in Starcraft style RTSs you often can't attack the enemy economy without first overpowering their main army, so the gameplay can tend to be "build up, fight, build up, fight". The player isn't looking for a chance to wipe out an SCV so much as a chance to wipe the enemy army and then wipe his whole expansion or as much of it as possible before reinforcements show up. In TA/PA, players should be looking for unprotected metal extractors to snipe. ...at least, that's the theory. Right now I think Advanced Mex are so strong that players aren't needing to expand like they probably should.
Sorry my computer indicated a restart was required - here's a thorough explanation of the economy for you. If it helps, great. Here are images from this ZaphodX game While there is metal and power in storage, build rate is 100%. So build rate is 100%, even though both metal and energy are negative. In the following image, the build rate is 60%. (Metal income 68, Metal spending 113) (45/113 = 0.6) The breakdown of spending, using numbers taken from padb.com: 2 commanders spending 30 metal per second each. 2 bot factories spending 12 metal per second each. 3 fab bots spending 10 metal per second each. Everything is building at 60% efficiency. The 2 bot factories are still building bots faster than 1 bot factory at 100% would. I'm not sure if the game UI is wrong, or the PA database is wrong. But the amount being spent sums to 114. The aside is worth reading. I've tried to make it expandable. If metal storage had been empty, build rate would be 100% - metal income is exactly equal to metal spending. (103/103) Ok. The only case we haven't examined is the power stall. This is when you do not have unlimited power. Income is 12800, spending is 15825. Energy efficiency is 80%, so you only have 80% of the energy that your fabricators are requesting to spend. Only that amount is allocated to each fabber, so their build rate is 80%. A fabricator normally spends 10 metal for 1000 energy. You only have 800 available, so they can only spray a maximum of 8 metal per second onto the project. What happens to metal in this situation? You could spend 10 per second, but you only spend 6. The other 4 is credited as metal income. In case that last example doesn't make it clear, your build rate is the lowest of the two efficiencies. With metal, if you only have 80% available, they still require full power to run. If metal efficiency is 60%, energy efficiency is 70%, your fabbers build rate will be 6 per second. Likewise if metal efficiency is 70%, energy efficiency is 60%, your fabbers build rate will be 6 per second, not 4.2.
Also, unless the wiki is wrong, fabrication bots are superior in pretty much every way. Advanced fabrication aircraft use twice as much energy-per-metal as bot and vehicle versions. Fabrication bots have better turning and acceleration/braking than the vehicle version and are cheaper(*). So this is why you see everyone using masses of fabrication bots rather than fabrication vehicles or aircraft. They're just plain better. Aircraft can be handy for doing a quick move-and-build (especially across an ocean) but you'll pay for it in energy consumption. (* - this annoys me. Why are fab bots better and cheaper than vehicle fab bots? Shenanigans!)
With the handicap options, is it possible to have -1 / -10 / -100 or is the lowest number possible is 0?
