The Opening Build

In my most recent weekly tutorial, I posted a video on "diving into the opening build."

So I figured I'd open up some discussion on the topic by offering some thoughts and pointers of mine.

The opening 5 minutes are some of the most important 5 minutes of the game. During those five minutes, the rate of exponential growth is very steep. Fall behind during the opening 5 minutes and you're way behind. It is often very difficult to recover from that – this has been very apparent thanks to PA's new spectator features.

1. Metal, metal, energy, metal, bot/vehicle factory still seems to be the best opening order
2. Have the Commander walk as little as possible
3. Building a non-fabrication unit first (such as a Skitter or Spinner/Stinger) can greatly help to not econ stall
4. Getting an energy storage up early on, usually around the time of the sixth energy plant, is very helpful to deal with the all too common energy fluctuations
5. It's very important to have multiple groups of fabricators claiming metal in all directions

What's your opening build like? Any tips for new players?

3x metal > 1 energy > 1 factory is the common and currently best start.
Then the commander keeps making power, while the first 3 fabbers out of the factory go claim metal in all directions.

Around the fourth or fifth fabber gets me an air factory which starts spamming scouts. to get that o-so important intel

Depending on that scouting intel: either the next 3 fabbers are going to make factories in the middle of important metal fields, or are making an advanced factory.
If the enemy is either very agressive or very vulnerable I go with the former. If he's mainly macroing and turtling, I go with the latter. In the case of heavy agression I usually put up some turrets with walls to cblock shots.

weird I am doing pgen 3 mex factory since the mex got their price cut in half and the energy is eaten by the ubercannon.

I build two extractors, two generators and then usually an air factory, an AA turret and then more generators. But considering how my games usually end you can take this as something to never ever do ever.

Right now I generally do:

1. MEX, energy, MEX, MEX, factory.
2. Once I've seen where the commander will stand have him queue up as many energy that don't involve him walking. Total of seven required followed by another factory, probably air.
3. From the first factory it'll be three fabbers, one AA, one anti-ground, one AA, one anti-ground, 100 fabbers
4. First fabber does MEX
5. Second fabber assists commander (but usually sneaks in a radar after the fourth energy plant before going back to assisting.)
6. Third fabber does MEX independent of the first fabber
7. First AA and anti-ground unit guard first fabber
8. Second AA and anti-ground unit guard second fabber
9. Fabbers four and five work on energy
10. Air factory produces two scouts, one fighter, two fabbers and then 100 fighters

I branch out from there. I'm thinking of ditching the anti-ground protection for fabbers and going for two AA bots since the fabber can often slap down a wall, a turret or reclaim its attacker. I might also ditch the early air fabbers since I think early fighters are more important. And finally I'm thinking of mixing some bombers into that air queue as my opening can be a little too passive.

Energy any later than two MEX in is too late and will lead to post-factory energy issues. I like to kick off with a MEX though because metal takes longer to fill back up.

I don't like to do storage early on because I feel it takes longer to build the storage than the time it buys me if I'm tanking my energy.

?
I do mex, energy, factory, mex, energy, mex, energy x many and mexes with fabricators.
thought there wouldn't be that much rooom to choose it.

That leads to metal stalling.

I thought that'd be a bad thing at first glance, but thinking about it more I would imagine it would give a slight time advantage in production. Think of metal like money, money under your mattress isn't doing anything while money in your Roth IRA is netting returns. So the earlier you get that huge chunk of 1000 metal out, as long as your energy is being built up, you have an earlier base of production.

Pure speculation, theorying. Must test.

I'd give you production... production you can't use because you're stalling.

I'm the one who prefer to build early energy storage. In my case commander is opening with 2 metal extractors >> energy storage >> 2 power generators >> bot factory and then string of 6-8 generators.

If I would not build energy storage early all this power from generators during first minutes would be wasted and in this case we get some energy so commander had a chance to keep up building more generators before all buffer power will be drained - multiple fabricators will start to drain a lot of power very quick and we don't want to stall them early.

First couple of fabricators are sent to expand metal spots quickly but even if metal production is on edge at the end of opening (and moving to tech/production) energy will build a bit in storage.
I'm mostly not building air factory early but building a radar (and shut it down after a glance to save early power) and even earlier I just take second fabricator and order him and then cancel building metal extractors in areas around me - you cannot order building extractor in already occupied spots and you can exploit it to detect other players starting positions.

I used to build an early energy storage before a factory, but found it was possible to build a factory before an energy storage without stalling. That means production faster.

every. single. time i try to get as much energy as possible in the first five minutes, for some reason i am ALWAYS the first one to get hit, and then i end up having to retreat. and then i end up way behind

What do you mean can't use? Pretty sure everything gets built still just not as quickly. Plus with how cheap extractors are it's easier to recoup mass.

Must test

That's why I don't like to play large FFAs. Boils down to a lot of luck. Gotta be lucky and not be the first one to get attacked or teamed up on.

You can't use the full power of the production because you don't have enough metal to power the factory. That means your factory gets built slow, and more importantly, all of your expanding fabricators build slowly. This means your overall growth is slowed drastically.

You want to have more income than expenditures for a reason. Operating in the negatives means you build slowly, so you expand slowly.

There's a reason why the top players don't use this build.

It's more like appearing weak instead of strong. The strong players are targeted first before they kill you.I always start out great in FFAs and thus get targeted first, leading to being double/triple teamed.

Whoa dude was just seeing a possible opening that might backfire. And it doesn't slow the building of the factory. I might not be the most pedantic about economic accuracy but I do know to keep my resource storages between full and empty at such an early stage. I have found that I at times must pause energy production to not stall on metal production. My factory and metal building going forward at full steam. However a non-neglible part of metal production is engineers travelling to metal spots. I also do a thing where I don't saturise nearby metal spots first so that I can keep the outmost engineers going away and leave fresh engineers fill in the caps.

If the top players have reasons not to use it then I suppose they could be stated?

brianpurkiss I have seen that you are prone to take tone seriously. I hope you don't mean to be dismissive on purpose.

I thought that you want to be at a slight negative so that all your mass gets used.

Mex, energy, Mex, factory, energy spam with commander, fabber spam, Mex spam with fabber.

Late game slight negative can be fine.

However, during the opening build, it's possible to have your metal bounce between slight negative and not full so none is wasted and you don't stall.

But during the opening build, all this does is slow down your production and expansion. It slows down your exponential growth.

What is perfectly ideal is not maximizing your storage, and not letting your storage run out. If you watch the video I linked to in my original post, you'll see that is exactly what I do once I get my first factory out. There is a little metal lost before I get out the first factory, but that's negligible. If I build the factory first, then I would run out of stored metal and production would slow down. So for the entire opening five minutes, except for before the first factory, I don't stall metal and I don't max out metal. That is ideal.

I could argue with sending first engineers to closest spots first, closest spots around starting position can be reached by commander if its completely necessary and most production is going into building power generators and fabricators, metal spots close to us very soon will not be enough to keep growth, so first fabricators should go for it and travel to next closest clusters of metal beyond starting position, so they will be finish earlier.
Also it delays first major spike of power consumption for around minute what aren't bad as generators still don't had energy to sustain them all... I'm assuming that first factory is producing fabricators in loop through first 5 minutes of the game.