How Does Everybody Build up so Fast?

I am in desperate need to understand how by the time I have my single bot factory up, everybody else has a fully functioning army. I don't get it. I'm a noob player, and I need some help.

We have some useful guides for this here: http://exodusesports.com/guides/

The cookie cutter builds one might be what you are looking for, but you will find useful tips in the other guides too.

Well for one thing- You can start bot factory first.

There are also quite a few good tutorial videos over at http://pamatches.com/ so I'd recommend a little watching.

As a starting point here is my recommended start and tips- follow this you'll find you have lots of stuff quite quickly

When your commander lands, he makes enough resources to run 2 factories, so I recommend starting with a bot factory and then air (which is very useful for quickly scouting where everyone is) or make another bot factory as your second.

Once your first bot factory is up, set it to continuous build (bottom icon on the RH menu with factory selected) so it will keep producing units forever and put in the following queue: 1 x fabber, 5 x dox. Feel free to experiment with this queue, this is just a good simple one to ensure you have an army quickly in case anyone attacks but you also get a reasonable number of fabbers (getting too many too quickly will stall your economy). If you went air second, I set this to make bombers (on continuous) and then add in as a one off 5 scouts (to add 1 off units to a factory on continuous build, hold down the cntrl key whilst selecting the units you want and it will add them in but only once, really handy as it means you don't have to turn off the continuous build all the time).

Once you have the 5 air scouts, select them, click the 'patrol' icon (RH menu), zoom out a bit so you can see the edge of the planet then drag a circle *off the edge of the planet*. This will set the scouts to explore the whole planet for you automatically.

Whilst this is going on, use your fabbers to go get metal extractors whilst using your commander to build energy and more factories. An easy build for this is make 3 energy plants per factory. Doesn't matter which type of factory you make really, just set them on continuous build, and keep expanding all the time to keep your metal income balanced.

After you've got about 6 t1 factories up and running you probably need to think about going T2, or orbital (depending on the type of map).

Hope that helps

The commander provides enough power and metal income by itself that the very first thing that you can (and should) build is a factory and then a few fabber units to begin putting up generators and metal extractors.

It depends on the map size and game type, but I feel like that build will be a little heavy on the eco for a 1v1 on a random planet. I don't usually make more than a few fabbers now with this new commander starting metal income.

Well this is a general purpose build- it isn't really a 1 v 1 winner- however I don't think the guy in the OP is really competing on the ladder (yet)

This is very helpful.



At least as a basic idea. Obviously this has changed a bit now due to the sudden buff to Dox but the factory build order and early expansion with the fabbers is still the way to go.

With this game you need to understand that the meta is real. Don't read strategy guides, read patch notes.

At the beginning of the game, in order and with your comm, build 2x bot factories, 1x metal, 1x energy, 1x bot factory.

Then use your comm to build 1x energy and 1x bot factory consecutively, ad infinitum, until you win.

For your first bot factory, build a few fabbers. They should grab metal and if you wish, set two to build lines of energy and then you can use your comm to just build factories.

Other than that, all factories should spam, sorry build, dox.

This will work until Uber's next patch, where the above will apply to skitters.

This is why I play balance mods...

Instead of giving advice on a patch that will become useless withing 2 weeks possibly I'll tell you this. It's vague and sounds useless, but it's the best advice there is.

It's a 5 step program that guarantees you to become the best player in PA
1. Play a game
2. Lose (if you win, return to step 1)
3. Review the game and see how and why you lost
4. Adjust your tactics to avoid losing like that again
5. Check PA stats ladder and see your name in 1st place (if not, return to step 1)

This is a regular question on the forum, and by regular I mean REGULAR, why one of these (of just the link hasn't been pinned yet eludes me (the Quick Tips pin easily deserves a replacement or would be completed by including Exodus and @brianpurkiss's links)

OP, don't get discouraged... it's a numbers game

run many multi-p games against only AI in a sandbox until you memorize an effective build strategy

as this is is a faithful repro of an amazing game from the nineties, many of the better players have many years of experience


including me... but sadly, many years of experience has not been all that helpful to me yet

I sometimes hear users say "APM". What does this mean?

"Actions per minunte" i.e. how fast you can provide orders to your units. In terms of actual commands, a good rate is about 30 (i.e. 1 command every 2 seconds on average). The top players will probably be as fast as 60 (1 command a second). Basically if your playing the top players 1 v 1, you need to be very fast! To be honest though you can play well with a much lower APM thanks to uber making the interface easy to deal with using things like area commands and so on.

i could certainly give one command per second, but i'll probably never notice what my command accomplished, so i'll never be a top player

fortunately, there's no shame in not being a top player

top players need scrubs much more than we need them

i suppose that it's impossible for everyone to be a top player, because then the lower-scoring 'top' would become the new scrub

In the current patch you will see a lot of the top players not building many fabbers at all and using their commander to build lines of bot factories. The precise timings on what you build depend on what factories you are building but having just 3 or 4 fabbers is quite strong at the moment in 1v1s

Elodea has posted a fairly standard dox only opening build which is representative of what a number of players are doing at the moment.

EDIT: Elodea is rather fast so rewatch it if you can't follow what he is doing ^^

There was a thread around here called "Build orders", it helped me A LOT. While build orders changes since that thread, main rule still applies:
Don't expand faster than you produce things.
I was in the same boat, by the time I get 10 tanks, enemy walks into my base with 100. My main problem was that I was producing too many fabbers, and putting them all on expansion, while commander produces power non-stop. Yes, I had tons of extractors and power, but only things using those were fabbers and comm. I mean, it was expansion for sake of even faster expansion. Once I realized that you need only 2-3 fabbers at start, and comm can build tons of factories instead of power, things changed a lot for me.

I usually build like 5-10 fabbers so I guess that's my problem haha.

First factory is set to infinite build fabbers.

Build an energy storage, then a bot factory, then bot factory. First factory to infinite build fabs, second to... Idk probably infinite build dox.

Edit: You can NEVER have enough fabbers, I don't care what guides say, sometimes you need that large group of fabs... Now then, try to use as many of them as possible, at all times. You can never stop expanding, and you can never stop building more and more economy, factories, etc...