Clopsey Tournament This Sunday ( gmt+1)

Would have been easier to make a new thread, took me a few minutes to realise that this wasn't just a necrobump.
I will probably not be participating as I have decided not to play PA until people can no longer win by only building Dox.

Organisation level: clopse

Thanks Clopse, great tourney!

I KNEW THAT DOX WERE OVERHYPED.

Also Uber pls buff 'hold position' command omg pls wtf so dox don't auto aggro into tanks @BradNicholson pls save us

Edit: also thank you based @elodea and @clopse

You should have seen the tournament because dox were not the be all and end all

So the game might actually be balanced?!

It is likely closer than people realise, but I don't think true balance will come until we see small balance tweaks and a development of a competitive scene.

They (dox) still are a centralizing factor in the meta, they're just not as overly powerful as everyone (figurative hyperbole) thought. They are less OMG SUPER IMBALANCED and more just plain imbalanced.

They are just very risky, works fine with close spawn locations for all ins like we seen there. Reason it works is because it's harder to get high spam numbers of dox until after a certain time frame.

Agreed. It has ALOT to do with how close the spawns were.

Elodea happened to spawn fairly close so his tanks were useful early on.

When you have spawns on opposite sides of the planet like in you (@clopse) and I's game, the tanks take forever, and by the time they get into an advantageous position you have already decided what you do to counter them.

I'd say it was unlucky for you with those really close spawns, his tanks were almost immediately in your base.

Ok, so the meta has evolved alot since the last time i posted on build orders and i wanted to explain game 3 against clopse because i saw on zaphods twitch chat alot of confused people. To do that I need to quickly explain all about build orders in this patch.

Build orders are characterized by the number of fabbers you build. If you build 1 fabber, you are doing this for the quick 4 factories + late 2nd fabber on pgens, which will help you snowball into the midgame. The 1 fabber build puts you up about 60% more material over a 3 fabber dox build (e.g. 80 dox to 50 dox) but starts evening out around 5 minutes or so - it is designed to give you barely enough metal to support your early factory spam. Keep this in mind as it will become relevant later on here.

If you build 3 fabbers, you are doing 2 on mex expand, 1 on pgens. This is your macro build, which means you are only doing 2 factories to start before sinking time into 3 pgens before your factory spam. This will outspend and eventually win against the 1 fabber build if you can defend early game. I already made a video on this build so if you're still not sure what exactly i mean, you should probably watch it first at here. This build should also easily beat out any possible vehicle build with good control and awareness.

If you build 2 fabbers, you are going for 3 factory start before pgens. This is not a good build because it is not good at anything in particular. The advantage of having a third fabber on pgen like in the macro 3 fabber build is not worth trading out for the unit advantage you get from 3 factories vs 2. It is worth trading out for the unit advantage you get from 4 factories vs 2 however.

To get into explaining game 3 of the clopsey final, should start by stating that 1 fabber vehicle build is stronger than 1 fabber dox build. Why? Because the advantage of dox is to contain in the early game and outmacro the vehicle player. You cannot transition into an outmacro build from a 1 fabber bot build however. Not without seriously compromising your unit count (you will be spending time on pgens to get up +fabbers), which will lead to you getting overrun by tanks. 1 fabber dox is arguably the best against other dox builds, but is not good against 1 fabber vehicle builds. This is why I was confident in going vehicles against clopse because he did exactly that.

However, I was unlucky to be expanding towards clopse, which meant his dox reached my fabber just barely before it would usually have enough tanks guarding it to prevent exactly this kind of snipe. The 1 fabber vehicle build is still generally solid. Just defend your fabber and be confident in knowing that your opponent has exactly the same ammount of eco as you - you're not behind. Wait for him to become impatient and make mistakes, then counter attack and win the game. For the vehicle doubters, just rewatch the game on zaphod's twitch vod page and you will see that clopse should have been relatively the same metal income as me throughout the game.

TL;DR 1 fabber vehicles is favoured against 1 fabber bots. 3 fabber bots is favoured against 1 fabber vehicles. 1 fabber bots is favoured against 3 fabber bots. 0 fabber of anything is just cheese.

*Dox still needs nerf though because of the vision range, underwater shooting, projectile speed against air, and probably speed.

**Why i personally don't favour dox/tank mix is because
a) You won't have enough dox to do any meaningful harass against pure dox
b) You won't have enough tanks to form critical masses
c) It's too painful to micro dox selection so they are not getting bogged down to tank speed.

Actually the game that confused me was game 1. How did you manage to troll yourself so successfully?

LOL ok. So, as the planets slowly kiss each other to death, they rotate around each other. I wasn't confident in sending commander to other planet because by the time he's travelled around the sun, what was once the safe side of the moon could now be the kissing side. I thought i could just idle commander away from the kissing zone and camp clopse's orbital with fighters, vastly underestimating the size of the kissing zone in the process .

So, clopse, pizzalover3000 was kind enough to whip up a logo for you:

Yeah this explains why making 6-8 fabbers by me wasn't the best idea

Omg lol Matiz