A lot of different thoughts in one post

Having just gotten in to Beta yesterday and already dumped 8 hours in to playing around with the game, I have noticed a few things that I have questions about.

First, what are the "Avatar" and "Avatar Factory" that have the hotkeys of alt+F1 and alt+F2 that can be seen in the keyboard settings in the options menu?

I was playing around with that in a game that I had managed to break (which I will get in to in a minute) and looking at the different keyboard functions. It all seems well and good, but since I was playing around I decided to attempt to use some of the hacks, to no avail. How do those work?

It is possible to build Metal Extractors and Advanced Metal Extractors on top of each other. Is this supposed to be the case? I ask specifically because in some instances I am able to build two buildings on top of one another. In the game I broke I managed to get two Adv Metal Extractors in the same location on two different nodes, and the only way you could tell was from the moving parts.

The next series of questions are based on game creation. Is it possible to change the starting economy or rate?

Context again: I decided to attempt a 1v5 (me vs 5 bots) game where I would have five times the start that they had, but had to take them all down. It looked like it worked fine, until I published and got in to the lobby, at which point it reverted back to the 1000/1000/1x set up.

Is it possible to set a team to not start in the same location? During this game I was expecting to have five enemies spawning in their own locations, managing their own bases. Instead, I got this after the 20 minute mark:
--er, it's attached since I can't just link it.


I apologize for my scatterbrained approach to asking these questions. There is a lot I would like to know and this game has me feeling like a little kid with a new toy.

For the Extractors it's intended that you can just build the advanced directly over the Basic Extractors as an easier alternative to upgrading or reclaiming the Basic then building an Advanced.

Mike

Do they both function at the same time, or only the advanced one?

....honestly I don't know off hand, I want to say it acts as a replacement but I can't confirm it, should be easy to test for in test game.

Mike

It becomes an advanced extractor.

The adv and normal extractor can coexist on the same metal spot. You can tell because it has 3 of those pump things moving up and down. Also I moused over it and saw it move between +7 and +28 metal sometimes.

Whether or not this is intentional, I don't know.

Edit: It was one or two days ago when I saw this, may have been fixed in a more recent patch if you don't see this.

In Uber's last live stream, it was stated they have a unit called the Avatar or.. "L33t Hax", specifically to give them immense resources to help them test things. Only the devs have this unit.

It's possible to build advanced extractors on top of basic ones and vice versa. It's simply an early build of the feature to build on top of so we don't have to self destruct the basic extractor and reclaim it. We also get the resources of both the basic and advanced at the same time. It's definitely not complete, though. I'll do a quick launch of PA right now and test it.

I also was able to build two adv extractors on the same spot, but don't know if it actually succeeded or the build was canceled. It's probably just a glitch with the implementation of building basic and advanced extractors.

The AI doesn't go to different spots, and that behavior can possibly slow down, if not completely stop it from even building a base at all.

Edit :
So just got out of a game. I confirmed not only is stacking still available, but also confirmed stacking of multiple Advanced Metal Extractors. Are these enough for you?