New - trouble vs Normal AI!?

Holy moly, that's how I went as well!

Probably an age thing. I was playing TA in my early teens as a very casual player. I enjoyed playing and enjoyed winning so turtling to an artillerly win was the way to go against the AI. Came back to SupComm2 in my early 20s after a couple of year break from RTSs and put in the effort to learn to play properly.

I think all RTS players start off as turtles, just because that's the most efffective way to win against an AI, and it's also less risky against an AI. Only when I started playing Forged Alliance did I learn that making a nice base and being cautious is a lot less fun than taking every opportunity to expand that you can get.

I would recommend to anyone that they try 1v1. Any more players than that and it can get overwhelming as to what you should do next, but if you play 1v1 on a small planet you become aware of the entire game and the brain chemical rush you get from that is just fantastic. You will lose the first few times, and you will lose hard. But watch the replay, and copy the first few minutes of what your opponent did and you will improve incredibly fast, and you will start to realise that using rush as a perjorative is limiting your enjoyment of a fantastic game.

The goal of the new player is usually to see 'epic battles'. There is nothing more epic than a game that starts with the sort of rushing that defeats turtles, but both players counter it and so the game escalates and escalates until some truly epic things can happen, and they don't rely on people having gentleman's rules not to play to the best of their ability.

I agree with the second part but disagree with the first. The only epic part of a 1v1 is how badly a new player will likely get defeated. Getting shut down by early raiding and then completely destroyed within 10 minutes is dull and frustrating. FFAs (3-4 players on a large planet or multi-planet) can be a good way to see big things with little risk. Some of my favourite early games where games in which I got steamrollered in the first 5 minutes only to get forgotten when another player started harassing my aggressor. A few times I managed to stay out of sight in the middle of a large lake or escaped to another planet and build up an overwhelming army while the other 3 players fought to hold their starting locations.

Yes, a new player will get defeated. But if that player watches replays, identifies what the other player did better and copies it, the new player will improve very quickly. Playing FFAs and team games can be loads of fun, but there is no pressure to improve. I think we have a different idea of what epic means - watching planets explode is all well and good but if you're not fighting tooth and nail to get to that point you might as well just watch a video.

A 1v1 where both players are evenly matched is the most epic any of this lineage of games gets. I can't describe the feeling when your brain is forced to kick up a gear and you start countering things left and right without consciously thinking about it. I can only imagine how damned high the top players must feel when they're playing at their peak.

Building an overwhelming army is fun to a point, but when the entire game consists of making a load of factories, sitting there til you have 500 tanks, then right-clicking them into the enemy base, you're missing a vast amount of what makes this game so good, and you'll get bored and move on without ever scratching the surface.

I guess we do have different definitions. 1v1s require a very specific skill set and evenly matched games regularly end without either player bothering to roll out higher tier units. I'd say they're tense and often fascinating to watch at the top levels of play, but they're rarely epic (at least not in scale).

You can fight tooth and nail for your area of the map in a team game or against multiple enemies in an FFA and learn a different skillset for matches that are equally tense and actually epic in scale, using the full variety of units available to you. You might get carried for a few matches by better players, or lose your team the game, but you'll learn all the same. Eventually you'll be the one doing the carrying or hopefully find a team of equally skilled players and orchestrate epic multi-planet struggles using everything in your armory.

Building up factories and just running a mass army of tanks into an enemy base can happen with equal probability in FFAs and 1v1s, it just depends on the level of players involved. I'm by no means a top tier player, so I can't comment on their feelings when winning, but the high you get from pulling teammates out of the fire or coming back from almost nothing to win the game is still pretty amazing.

Thanks all for the advice. I was definitely going straight to the hardest matches too fast. I'll get there sooner or later...and hopefully get out of the turtle mentality eventually. I surround all my resource generators with turrets but I'm trying to set up patrols instead so I can gang up on the commander once I find him.

Also didn't realize you could area-patrol with scouts...heck of a lot easier than what I was doing before!