How do you deal with being Harassed early game?

Hey, sorry if this has been asked before; but how do you deal with being "Harassed"?

I'm not very good at the game however I can now comfortably take on the AI and win, so I figured play against real people and see how I fair...poorly was the answer. So I looked up some streams and most of the players actively attack early on preventing expansion, this kept happening to me.

I mean I try my best to expand rapidly (despite all my fiber telling me to turtle) but obviously if you're constantly getting raided you tend to panic place up lots of turrets and then everything does down hill rather quickly; at least for me. Any advice how to break out of this circling plug-hole of diminishing returns?

Build more tanks.

Fold :S

Your best bet is to be raiding and harassing the other guy as well. That way you are both taking losses hopefully and the game stay even.. also if u must place some turrets make sure to put a few walls around them.

I would make it a goal to be out there harassing the enemy in a 1v1 situation ASAP. That way, if they start harassing YOU, at least you are even.

The other option is to build a few bots to escort your engineers first thing.

Building few defenses then units to protect the fabbers ... at worst make use of the commander

make a few dox early, anticipate where people are gonna come from (pretty much anywhere, of course, but still). if you don't feel like you have a home turf advantage, you're doing something wrong - 'cause you have one in early game, static defences are really powerful, and while the raiders might take out a few mex's, you should be building mexes in all directions anyway, so loosing a couple but killing all the raiders in turn should not set you back that much.

or are you already doing these things? I'm not sure what "early" is. If it's after a few minutes, you should have some fireflies in the air, giving you better vision, and probably also a radar or two. that should make sneaking up on you a bit harder.

I live in Washington State, so usually I just smoke a bowl and relax about it.

Yeah at the moment I feel that I'm just not getting things up and running quick enough and not intelligently responding to these tactics. Gotta say I find the learning curve of this game to be rather steep.

So basically the answer is tit-for-tat; thanks for the advice, I'll give it another shot after finishing off the AI a couple more times to boost my ego.

Just a warning - the most dangerous "harass" I have experienced is engineers that are on a long queue.

They tend to walk up to each of your mexes, realise they can't build a mex, then sooner or later they build a defense turret of some sort.

And if that completes, it requires a completely disproportionate amount of resources for you to deal with.

First question would be what do you mean with "early" game. It can be 1 minute since the start, or 10 minutes after. And it would make quite a difference So I will assume that you're speaking about 1 vs 1 games and the first 3 minutes of play.

When I watch top players' matches I see how they scout very early, usually their second Factory sends a bunch of Firefly around. This way you quickly know where the enemy is, and what their early strategy is as well. So you can anticipate a little their moves.

Specially during the first few minutes of a match I see top players relying very little of turrets, but mostly in an agile, small group of bots. Those combined with your Commander can stop enemy troops quite easily.

Done that you have to get stronger quickly. So it is fundamental to understand how to keep your economy healthy. In fact the enemy harasses you in order to reduce your resources, he will go for your Power Gen in your base first, and he will try to slow down your expansion taking down your Metal Extractors. Or your fabbers. With no resources your production will hold and he will soon have enough advantage to take your Commander down.

So as soon as you have a bit of Intel about the enemy base (scout!), and/or about his expansion, better you figure it out where your enemy's weak spot are, fast, and send your troops as well. As you surely experience yourself, being harassed makes for difficult times.

Here the last upload of Zaphodx, where he played magistrally. I always learn a lot from his replies.

There's a variety of techniques.

My preferred is to harass them. If they're having to defend against my attacks, then they'll have a hard time attacking me.

Bots are great for harassing and defending against harassments due to their speed. They can out run tanks and can quickly get to the other side of your base to defend.

Defensive structures can be helpful in defending against harassments as well. Single laser defense towers only cost 300 metal now and do a great job of dealing with bots. Worth the investment at large clumps of metal if you have an aggressive opponent.

The main thing is to adapt. Every match is different. Roll with the punches.

I take it you're new to this genre of game?

I've played TA and more recently Spring (BA Mod) competitively on line, as have allot of players on here (and many more from the SupCom / FA scene) so you're being thrown in the deep end a bit! Obviously PA is different, however the single planet 1 v 1 is very much like TA / Spring / SupCom in alot of ways so players coming from those background have a bit of a head start.

Everything people have said here is correct, and is pretty standard fair for this type of RTS. The key to winning is to prevent your opponent expanding so you can get ahead. Things I would always highly recommend: Keep your fabbers busy (press f to select idle fabbers, do this a couple of times a minute so you're not wasting build power). Always build radar and / or build scouts on area patrol from an air factory on repeat. If you know what's coming you can deal with it. Rebuild- as soon as your opponent has destroyed some of your expansion, have fabbers queued up and on the way to rebuild, ideally along with some combat units as escorts.

Another thing I find helps- given the relatively cheap cost of factories on this game, I tend to like to build a factory and send combat units on a move order along the line of expansion. That way you have a stream of tanks / bots covering your fabbers and mexes as you expand.

Other people have pointed out the obvious, which is that attacking is the best way to take the pressure off yourself. I want to focus on defending, though. Enemies that can send groups of bots to hit your weak points will be able to hurt you a lot, but they sacrifice firepower for mobility. They need to split their army up into a lot of small groups to do this, making each group relatively weak. You can use this to your advantage.

Your commander is very good at defending, but he can't be everywhere. I tend to move him to my most vulnerable areas early on, but this quickly gets risky once the enemy gets more powerful.

If your base is small or you have some good chokepoints, you can use slower units like tanks to hold an area. Keep groups of tanks from getting into long thin lines when they move around, because they can easily get flanked. Flanking in PA is effective because the turrets on tanks take so long to move from one side to the other.

If you have chokepoints in the map or are getting hit repeatedly in one small area, it's ok to make a couple laser towers and guard them with walls. Don't forget to keep mobile units with them too though. Defenses can help thin out an army, but they won't win it for you.

Usually the map is flat and open. You will need the speed of doxes to get into position. Build your factories in small groups near the edges of your territory. You can always build more to cover new area that you expand to. Radar and good fighter swarms are very important, because you need to know where the enemy groups are as early as possible.

If the game goes on and you are still getting attacked by bigger and bigger groups, you start to get new options. Assuming you have good sized fighter swarms for visibility, you also have air superiority over the areas you will be fighting in. Just a couple T1 bombers can rip apart an army of bots very quickly. Take your bombers and a group of fighters and just set them to area patrol over the weak spot in your base. You don't really need to deal with the micro that much anymore. This probably won't be enough to stop a determined opponent, but it buys you time to get your defenses in place.

Defending can't win the game for you, but it can buy you the time you need to pull off your big surprise attack, set up an advanced economy, or build up a base on another planet. Pure turtlers do always lose, but I have had some success recently in fighting a defense in depth to buy time for a surprise teleport raid into the back of their base.

Most importantly, be creative! Try to do whatever they don't expect.