Stories of playing godawful

Last night may have been my worst night of PA ever, so as therapy I'm going to post about it. I thought you might want to share your stories of your most shockingly bad play too.

So I run into clopse's smurf (which I recognised the name of, but didn't recall who it was). After scouting me he tells me I should have gone air first due to the spacing between MEX. Meant as friendly advice, it ends up with me making a bad decision.

• He bombs my fabbers. I shoot him down with Stingers. I send new fabbers to replace the losses but then (being a very mechanical player) fail to build any energy with fabbers because the ones I'd normally do this with got sent to build MEXs. I stall on energy. Hard.
• Having gone bot first my second factory will normally be air and my first two units will be Fireflys. I'll then scout the planet and find my opponent. I don't do this. My game is already collapsing at this point (for some reason) and I don't scout until very late.
• Despite having seen no T2 air, and not really doing any kind of scouting, I get it in my head that my opponent has gone T2 air and a massive air force is lurking in the shadows. This is a combination of clopse's opening comment and my total failure against T2 air every time I meet it. This naturally means I don't transition as smoothly into a T2 economy.
• By the time clopse attacks me I've made such a total hash of my eco that I have no ground combat units. Not one. It's kind of amazing. I had to wall off to try and survive long enough for my T2 vehicle factory to complete.
• My client crashes as I try to dance Kestrels around him. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

I'd say this may be the single worst game of PA I ever played, but I did expand okay, even while I was under attack I was taking more map control and looking to proxy. Raids were also stopped dead, though I think I over-invested in turrets for the metal saved.

So, frustrated by that I decide to go into a public FFA to try and relax. Hah. I roll up opponent one, but then start floating. I totally fail to scout my opponent who goes T2 air and I'm completely unprepared (IRONY!) having failed to switch my bot factory from raiding Doxs to Stingers for the late game. He then Catapult creeps me, even though I had more than enough eco to still nuke rush, or build Catapults or Holkins of my own. I owned the planet, I owned the eco and I threw the game so hard.

Naturally another FFA is the answer. Big water planet this time and I'm feeling confident because my naval game in the Commander of March 1v1 tournament was probably the best I've ever played. Fool.

• Spend way too long fighting an opponent I never gain proper radar coverage of, leading to me wasting a lot of T2 naval. BUILD SOME T2 RADAR YOU FOOL!
• The last 30min of this 60min game are me fighting purple. He's flying around with a big air force which my Stingers are handling, but I never really react to this and get more T2 air myself so it's a constant annoyance.
• I wait far too long to move to T2 MEX and for quite a while I'm stalling as much as 50% because of metal.
• I seemingly have no concept of how to scale up my game. I end up floating massive amounts because I just won't build more fabbers so I can get more factories and nukes. I keep throwing waves of T2 ships at this guy and they're not getting through but I keep doing it. He builds Catapults to stop my T2 naval while I just keep sending more ships.
• I fail to discern the result of a sneak attack. I manage to get a Leviathan in around the edge of his base and destroy his anti-nuke, but I don't see that I've destroyed it and believe the attack failed.
• I end up launching two nukes at the anti-nuke I'd already destroyed. He launches four nukes at me. Had I scouted I'd have been able to nuke his commander and win, as it is I get him down to 25% and then suffer a firey death as my anti-nuke is overwhelmed because my opponent scaled his game up (two anti-nukes and four nukes to my one anti-nuke and two nukes as well as five T2 air to my one).

My late game is just awful.

There was also some tedious orbital play. I spammed Anchors, he spammed Anchors, they cancelled each other out. Boring and fiddly.

Sounds like every match I've ever played except for one. And even in that one I got booted of the main planet very quickly and when I tried smashing the moon the game died.

I did get planet smashed as well that evening, but I don't feel so bad about that. It was a FFA, I was fighting other people, by the time I could get off planet they owned the moon so I couldn't get a Teleporter down, and then I simply couldn't get units up fast enough to attack and stop the Halleys. My laser sat and escort was enroute though when he launched.

It was the awesome kind of planet smash where you don't realise how close they are to done (I'd only scouted two Halleys), so just as I'm sending my force to Commander snipe, the sirens go off and this thing roars into view. Awesome

Well my fail games end like this: I go air first and somehow I get out produced by the enemy, every single time. By minute 5 I have a factory and 6 fabbers with some power and decent expansion, my enemy is going t2 with 3-6 t1 factories produced. How am I so bad with air? Noone knows.

Myo ther fail games go like this: I start decently and by minute 5 I'm not doing so bad. Then by minute 10 I'm stalling on power so hard my efficiency is 50% or less. I don't know if this is because I use too much fabbers or if I'm supposed to build power with more than just my commander +5-10 fabbers or if I really need to go t2 earlier but suffice it ti say, I usually have as much if not more factories than my opponent but I produce much much less. So much less that it usually takes 5-10 T2 power gens to pull me through. And that while constantly producing t1 power without stopping.

I don't recall this, but my girlfriend tells me she could hear me exclaiming through the wall on multiple occasions "What you you doing there?!"

4 FFA, this guy in the lobby said he was going to post the game to YouTube. Map started us on a Terran planet ww3 moons. I go air first an build a radar and I find blue. Since he I the closest to me, I start scouting and harassing him. I start getting orbital up and amassing some Bumblebees and Hummingbirds. I get a Peter base outside of blue's base and start to attack him with air. The air force I send includes most of my fighters and all of my bombers. Just as they arrive at blue's base, black sends over a MASSIVE blob of planes and wipes me out. After me, he went for blue, then pink. I was a little embarrassed to die to such a counterable tactic.

Also, the video the guy made is here:

That was me I always prioritize orbital hard, so I can usually get control of 1-2 planets before other people start moving into space.

A lot of people fall to this tactic. I had a guy scouting me flatout throughout the beginning of the match yesterday, clearly able to see what I was doing and yet he rushed a Nuke and I took him out with the bombers whilst holding defence with pelters. All that intel and he did nothing about it. Had 30 factories up in 16 min.
Also realised today in a 2v2 i almost took out Clopse and Smurf on my 5th online match haha.

"Stories of playing godawful", well let me think of one....Ah, it all started the day I was born..lol j/k, anyway back on topic I played one match where me an my opponent did horribly. It was a 1v1, I started on the north pole beside a small pond with some decent metal i it, so I decided to go first air, just so I could expand faster. It was a huge mistake I did not build enough eco to support air fabbers and ended up having a total of 5 mex 9 minutes into the game D:. I had one factory and a few laser turrets and was trying to get my eco back up. Surprsingly my opponent had not even scouted or attacked me yet, so around 15 minutes into the game I finally got my first t1 vehicle factory. Made my first fighting units and ended up doing "early" raiding on him XD. I just started pumping out ants, from the the only land factory I had lol, and ofcourse I ended up getting destroyed by laser turrets once he noticed I was attacking. 25 minutes into the game I decided to go t2 D:, lol and had 1 basic fab work on my t2 vehicle factory. Now my opponent was making some t1 vehicle moves on me, and I simply walled up towers I already had made in the beginning. After a few centuries my t2 factory finally finished. Didnt bother with any t2 engineers and made shellers straight of. I decided to scout my opponent the second time this round, and he had boomed quite substanially. He literally had me in a circle on the north pole with with around ~50 t1 factories pumping ants. The shellers held of a surprising amount of ants along with turrets. I basically knew it was gg and was waiting for him to finish me. While I waited I fooled around with some units I had never used (second day with the game ) and decided to experiment with vanguards as I had never used them. Around 50 minutes into the game I had no t2 eco, 1 t1 air factory sitting idle, a 1 t1 vehicle factory and 1 t2 vehicle factory. I moved one of my vanguards to around 30 ants that were coming at me and was surprised to it kill all of them. I decided to start pumping out these vanguards and see what I could do. I had 1 t1 engineer assist the t2 factory to make vanguards, still no t2 fabs lol. Made around 10 vanguards and moved them forward to where most attacks were coming from. My opponent had literally used a line command for turrets and had like 50 of them spaced by around 10 pelters. A few vanguards died but I eneded up taking the whole defensive wall down, and walked in with a 3 more vanugards and took down literally around 30 t1 factories that my opponent had. I just kept moving the vanguards to where ever I knew my opponent was and eventhough he had 95% map control, I ended up winning that round. lol I only had to use around 15 vanguards to take all his buildings down, because eventhough the game had at this point stretched on for around two hours, my opponenet had not built a single t2 factory. I steam rolled him with a few vanguards as t1 defenses and units are not much good against vanguards, and felt like I had done really well that game and thougth it was one of my better ones lol, rewatched the whole thing after it finished XD.

TL;DR
You could probably beat by only using your feet on the controls and your monitor turned off .

nah, I wouldn't say that. You used a unit he was perfectly capable of using, he just didn't adapt. We all have our off games.

I almost lost against a sandbox AI.
Does that count?

Shift-queuing special attacks will stop the commander from shooting its base weapon. Without the energy output to fire continuously, I was doing less dps than what even an afk commander can put out.

If you play godawful and still win I'd say you're doing okay

I feel so much better about that one match now.

I once sent 500 kestrels to attack three lines of flak cannons, whereas, I could have easily sent them around those. In the midst of extreme lag, they all died, and I ended up losing.

If you were in the Imperial Navy Darth Vader would've choked you to death for that.

Worst game I had was with a 2 v 2 I played just after Gamma launch. Host insisted on using shared armies and I got put together with a very new player. In fairness he was trying, however I gather he came from Starcraft and was spamming keyboard shot cuts for everything (most notably group selecting all fabbers, and commanders). He also really didn't get the streaming economy so 5 minutes in he's cancelled every queue of power generators I'd set up (simply by group selecting fabbers) and was trying to make a teleporter. E stalling like mad we were getting harassed by our enemies (a couple of guys I recognise from on here, can't remember who now but both decent players).

In a desperate move I take one of the commanders and move aggressively towards there base and start building a fire base close to them behind some walls (I don't believe in being a total **** with the commander so I didn't walk into there base, just close bye). To this I get loads of complaints about me com bombing them :/ I moved the commander there to focus there efforts on me to try and give me more breathing room to attempt to sort the economy out.

The end result was that by 15 minutes in we still had 0 eco and got totally overwhelmed. I was hoping to play some 1 v 1 with the guys on the other team but was refused based on my play style. Just so frustrating- and I was trying not to be too critical of my ally as he was a friendly guy, just very new (we all have to start somewhere).

I just wish more people would host standard team games now their available- shared resources is fantastic *if* your playing with a known team mate but it seldom turns out well with random players. I don't mind being allied with a new player even if it means we loose, as with separate teams at least I can put up a decent fight. However in shared armies if your ally doesn't know what they're doing they don't just screw up their build, they can actively screw up what your doing as well.

I'm green and had SuperMegaBeasto pull this on me.



Yes, that is an advanced radar right there.

Lol, ouch! I feel sorry for that poor solitary 1 barrel laser turret you got there....

It was sad when I watched the replay and he built that thing with a single air fabber. Yeah.

It's not that embarrassing, I mean, if all you saw was a couple of dots, maybe you just assumed it was a scout or something...