Converting from StarCraft

Howdy! When I saw the original trailer for PA, I said out loud that I needed this game (I hope they release the soundtrack for it too), but at the time, 90 Lead Ingots was a bit too heavy for my aluminum wallet, ifyouknowwhatI'msayin. But after the recent sale, I was finally able to afford it. Now that that's out of the way, here comes my dilemma that I hope the community would help me alleviate.

I've been semi-playing StarCraft 2 on and off since its beta, that being said, I represent Bronze League all day, yo. But I watch professional games almost every day. So, I've become a bit pre-disposed to a certain way an RTS is supposed to behave. Like some of the shortcuts for PA I can't get used to, even if I change them in the options, they aren't used in the same context as in StarCraft. Like pressing A would mean attack move with a unit, while selecting a barracks, it would build me a marine. Of course, THAT I can get over eventually, it's not a big a deal in PA for micro as it is for macro... It's just a little weird using my mouse again to build on a tile to queue up units. But hopefully I'd be able to master macro enough to pull of some sweet micro moves on the battlefield.

But there is my biggest issue, the macro, mainly, the economy. The economy in PA is the hardest thing to wrap my head around. It's rate based, not instant payment like it is in StarCraft, this makes a few things VERY difficult for me. With a insta-pay system, it's easier to calculate timings of buildings and units, it's also simpler to not over-build units and buildings, because if you don't have enough, you don't have enough, and if you have enough, you know how much you can build with what you have, as well, there's no cap on the amount of resources you have (since there is a limited amount of resources on the map in the first place).

The rate based economy seems to be very difficult to balance, it's like balancing an ever growing wine glass tower in each hand while walking up the stairs. Because logically speaking, the most effective player balances out his output of resources with the output of buildings and units, never making too little and letting your economy get fat, never making too much that it stagnates your resources, and if you're not on top of it, it's VERY easy to get out of hand. And worst of all, it's SUPER easy to stall your eco in PA. It's just... super super hard... T^T I just find it difficult to do the calculations during gameplay in my head due to the ever changing rates of resource income. Also, this is an issue because I am not yet familiar with how much each unit and building is worth, lol. That would probably help a lot! XD It's unfortunate that I sound like I'm whining about sucking at the game, lol. Of course, these are just my opinions and personal experiences. And just to be clear, I don't want them to change the way the eco works, the game does well with it. I just need help adjusting to it.

I took a look at this thread which helped me a lot, but it's still very difficult to grasp, maybe there other ways I can wrap my head around an effective use of this concept, which is why I'm turning to you guys, the community.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-economy-factsheet-for-new-improving-players.52514/

I've been watching some games on youtube, but it's harder to wrap your head around the concept with someone else playing. Questions for my ineptitude? Comments about my whining?

Just FYI, streamlined economy like in PA is definitely harder to manage than how the economy worked in for example starcraft. Even the currently best players in this game have an almost impossible time figuring out how to use it to 100% efficiency throughout an entire game.

And that's a good thing, because playing this game perfectly requires an amount of skill that is almost inhuman. Which means that even the best players will never stop having room to improve, which is one way of keeping things interesting for competitive players.

One way to get better at utilizing the economy is to get to know basic buildorders that help you through the early game. But after that it's up to you to constantly watch your ressource in- and output and adapt.

Basically, you can read as much theory as you want, it will only get you so far. The thing that really helps you to grasp the game mechanics and improve is practice, practice and more practice.

You'll automatically get better the more you play. So go on and enjoy the game.

Greetings

Would you say.... KOREAN LEVELS OF SKILL? See what I did there? Because they're really good at RTS' lolol. Right well, that's what I intend to do, study up on the units, gonna make a nice spreadsheet of units and their stats (I'll put it up here if it's not around) and study that, practice, and hope that my ticky-tacks on the keyboard will one day get me to silver league.

I do hope that in the future there's a way to either tell or automatically be paired up with people of similar skill as you. StarCraft has amazing matchmaking. I'd hate to be blindsided by some 400apm player posing as a nub just to grab another victory with a 4 pool dox rush.

You might find some benefit from a few tutorials.

Other than that, just practice.

Besides the info on the wiki, I haven't found much use in the tutorials. I pretty much got most of what was went over during my first game against the AI.

I intend on playing the game of course. But like switching from Pepsi to Coke, I might need a helping hand during the crossover, know what I mean?

I find myself struggling with the rate based economy as well. Yesterday I discovered two mods that I find greatly helps me keep track of it: Economic Efficiency, which gives you a few percentages at the top that shows you you metal efficiency, build efficiency and power efficiency; and Build Power, which add a small pop-up that shows how much mass and energy the selected fabricator will use. Both are installable via the PA Mod Manager.

koreans (or asians) seem to dominate games like StarCraft and Warcraft, but there never were any great players from asia in SupCom. maybe because they didnt know about it, or maybe because their skills dont fit to PA/SupCom/TA as much.

I feel you. I'm glad you found my thread helpful, but it was aimed at people who were familiar with the concepts behind the PA/TA/Supcom lineage of games. My explanations there sort of rested on ideas that weren't fully explained, especially for people who are making the transition from the C&C/RA/SC school of RTS play. But I've played a fair amount of SC2, largely as a sparring partner for a friend in platinum, doing things like analysing his replays and helping him improve. So I'm hoping I can help bridge the gap with a few useful points.

1. The game concept is fundamentally very different in PA from SC2. The scale is just bigger: Starcraft asks you to preserve individual units and make tightly focused tactical plays, and while that's important in PA, usually it's the larger strategic mechanics of the game that take precedence. A lot of this difference is rooted in how the maps work. Starcraft maps are all about a tightly-bordered map with high-value, concentrated resource locations and key chokepoints requiring tight zone control. PA by contrast features wide-open maps with a more even distribution of resource value to unit area. This means that Starcraft maps mostly play out along an axis that directly connects two opposing players, while PA is more a struggle for encirclement and blocking your opponents' access to strategic areas of the map.

2. This sets up PA's economic game. Unlike SC2, where the upfront costs of units and the high value of all resource locations you to play the game step-by-step, PA's streaming economy asks you to control the flow of resources as a parallel to your flow of units across the map. In particular, the two-resource system in PA works quite differently to SC2: in SC2, you have a 'base' resource (minerals), a 'special' resource (vespene), and a 'control' resource (supply). By contrast, PA has only the 'base' resource (metal) and the 'control' resource (energy). Energy is very much like supply in SC2, because although you don't need it to power your actual units, the rate at which you produce power determines the rate at which you can convert your metal production into metal expenditure, i.e the rate at which your units can flow out across the map.

3. Patience. It will take you a little while to get a feel for the game, particularly how to go through its early stages without stalling your economy. But if you remember that: you must build 5 T1 power plants for every 3 bot engineers you plan to use; that having at least one bot factory continually producing new bot engineers is very helpful throughout the game; and that you should constantly be expanding your economy (not in base-taking bursts like SC2, but constantly), especially through producing new engineers and power plants to run them - you'll be in better shape than many other players out there.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Welcome to the game: I wish you the very best of luck annihilating your opponents and their planets.

Eco?
*Stall= run out of resources(-)
*Waste= stay w/ the storage Full and still produce(+)

there some FA tutorials that can help you, but the basic is:
Energy, Try to waste, not soo much(make much PGens, and you lose metal), because you need to use it every time(make units, buildings, run Radar, UberCannon)
Metal, don't waste, use what you have, but don't stall hard(stall something like -1)... when the game release, use all your metal, and reclaim every thing...
The FA tutorial, probably the best

I suppose I should get started. Thank you.

I'll also take a look at them mods, they sound helpful.

I thought Erie was really good. I wouldn't make such rotund generalizations.

whell, Lu_Xun_17 is not Chinese, because if he was, he would not be in the 3rd place on FAF Ladder, and there not a 500 players community of FA on china:
http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=5742

I hope people realize that I'm kidding.

I wouldn't say economy is everything. But if it was to collect one's total metal all game limitlessly, it would be encouraging bad playing, since to spend all that in excessive bulk you would need excessive fabricators and once the funds do run low you will have twice as many fabricators than you need.

Really, as far as that goes, and simplistic application of that ingame, just make sure to build things that constantly consume metal. A single fabricator constantly consumes metal assuming you keep him queued with 5 minutes of build orders or assisting, and a factory constantly consumes metal as long as you have it queued up. So, if you aren't spending enough metal, simply either build a fabricator or a factory, and you can even hold "ctrl" and click a fabricator unit to build and it will build it next in line even if the factory already is in the middle of building 100 units.

So, to start off, you build a power, then metal, then power. At that point, you EARN more than you SPEND, so build a FACTORY. That will use the spare income. Then build 10 fabricators while your commander goes off to build power (fabricators use more power than metal). They would over-spend your economy, but don't worry, your plans are early game to use them to immediately go and build extractors, making up for their use instantly with more metal. Tactically, try to build farther out first and maybe stick down a turret (not too farther out obviously though). Well, after they collect 6 metal points each, you are earning more than you are spending again, so build something to spend it. CHOICES: build a factory or two for each one and constantly produce units to turn economy into ever growing army-blob, or build turrets as far out as you can still defend and keep a standing fabber behind it for repair, or consider artillery as far out as possible to probe your enemy with, or blow a huge lump sum into a t2 factory which leaves you firepower highly weak but if you somehow do get t2 you can thrust ahead on economy and units again as long as you still make 4 t1 factories afterwards and start catching up on unit production.

The only complicated mechanic of the economy, is if you are short on energy your fabricators will not "spend metal" as strong as they can but you will actually lose metal because extractors won't even collect as strong with a power shortage, and alternatively, with low metal your fabricators will spend the metal you do produce but still consume full energy so if you add 10 more fabricators to a project you will NOT BUILD FASTER but STILL CONSUME 10 engineers worth of power for nothing. So just remember to try to avoid doing that. If you go negative in power, try to pull fabricators off so you can get power and metal back up, and if you are negative in metal, try to pull fabricators off because they aren't contributing but definitely do not add more!

Hey, even if it is hard at first, the AI does give a very fun challenge so it is entertaining just to start to learn by playing against the AI. You can even adjust it's difficulty, by adjusting it's income, by adjusting the "economy scale" number at the bottom of a pregame lobby. It starts at 1, which means 100%. You can turn it to .5, which means 50%, and the AI enemy will only have half the resources to spend, build half as many units, expand half as fast, ect. If you can get basics down you can flood over an AI like this, so turn it to .8. You might be able to keep up with an AI enemy like this. If you need another handicap, use a planet with a little interwieving of water, the AI currently doesn't use naval but you can to grind enemy units from shoreline. At 1, the AI produces very aggressively fast, within minutes it has a threatening army size, and by endgame it has the units necessary to cover 200km of land or 3/5th the surface of a "200" planet. Generally, the only way to beat the AI at 1 is to actively "raid", or start to use strategy in "stifling" his economy. You have to early on and all throughout the game start to attack him mexes to limit his resource, because this will manually do what economy scale does, just by killing his extractors instead of limiting their income.

Being able to build as much of 100% your income as possible is how you get strength, and tactical decisions like early raiding enemy extractors and intelligent choice of attack depending on what your enemy is using and where they are weak at is how you cripple your enemy's strength. As far as StarCraft, that is closer to C&C games than this one. Watching pamatches.com or something might help, as you would do for StarCraft. Generally, the games are just played two different ways. One you have a few units from a framework base and effective application of them decides game usually via clicking fastest, the other you have no base persay but as many extractors as you can collect while loosely defending the empty area between and the outcome is usually decided by how much resource you collected/spent and what you spent it in and how it was used. As far as that goes, getting as much extractors as possible is step 1, and building as much as possible of something that does as much damage as possible is step 2. As long as you collected and spent more than the enemy, you will have more, and as long as you didn't spend on something that died without doing anything or didn't even make it to combat, then you will outdamage your enemy.

So yeah. Text wall aside, watching pamatches.com might help considering you do watch StarCraft. One of the fun things about PA is that you play on a randomly generated sphere and you usually build tons of units and spend them like toilet paper.

The PA economy is quite unique (even compared to other rate based systems like TA).

The key to getting it right is having enough energy in relation to constructors (which should always be building by the way- if their idle assign them to assist something). Construction units consume 1000 e when operating, flat rate, no matter what their doing. Power generator (t1) produce 600 e, so as a rough rule of thumb you need 2 power generators per fabricator (the bit left over goes to powering radar, factories and so on).

If you work to that principal you shouldn't stall energy. Once you've got that, simply expand your metal and keep that balanced with the number of fabricators you have working- as the rates are much lower its much much easier to control.

in the reality, no, is the TA eco, but w/out the Energy cost for units, if you think FA eco is more "unique" (at now), than the PA eco, but still the same thing

wait, what you mean?

thetrophysystem and cdrkf, those posts helped a bunch, i can definitely work with what you guys said.

Some good points made on here.

You're exactly right. Managing your economy is very difficult and often the player who wins is the player who best manages their economy. I think it's a great thing that the best players cannot perfectly master the game. As was mentioned, this keeps gameplay interesting and allows all players to always have room to improve.

You should check out the PA Matches wiki: http://pamatches.com/wiki/
It has a breakdown of all the various units and buildings so you can better gauge what to build and when to build and whatnot.

Welcome to the PA community!

I would say this as an original TA player. The mindset that you should take into PA over most other rts games out there is that "the map is yours, take it". The more map control you have, the more resources that you should have. Map expansion is so much more important in PA than in StarCraft, do your best to gain exactly that.