As the title suggests. I need some major help. I'm not doin' to hot in PA and would really enjoy havin' someone help me out. I have played other RTS games and enjoy them. Now that i'm lookin' back, i've noticed that I loved the Supreme Commander series barring the SC2 that is. The formula for the RTS is known but a little altered to me and it feels strange. I've had 2/2 of losses so far, that with the setting on easy and my arse is still gettin' kicked around. Any help would be appreciated. Just label me a newb and start from scratch. Thanks.
I feel ya! Definitely a steep learning curve. I'm crawling up that curve myself! I'd be happy to help ya out if we're on at the same time. look me up on UberDex (under "social" in game) and if I see ya we can play. 1. get a build order down that doesn't stall your economy. search the forums for "build order" and you'll get plenty of good reading. My commander goes mex -> energy -> mex -> factory -> infinite energy. energy is your friend, esp at first when you're trying to get your eco running. 2. units, units, units. keep making more and more factories on infinite build. never stop building more factories, and keep expanding all the time. once you scout out your opp's base, expand in that direction and... wait for it... build more factories and set them on infinite build. I remember the day that I finally got this through my head, my play instantly and drastically improved.
Thats Nice but how in the world do I put the factories on infinite build? That would be nice so I could build a factory for each construct and worry more about important stuff like where to send my troops and advancing.
If you haven't figured it out in the past 24h, infinite build is the arrow on the right side of your screen when you select any factory. Just click it to toggle on or off. I like to go mex x3 pgen, factory, pgen pgen, mex, factory, energy till T2 for my starts. Pretty standard, but pretty solid too.
I am absolutely HORRIBLE at doin' scouting or anything like that. The areas are so large I can't even protect my bases and I feel like i'm doin' okay, gettin' goin', then WHAM, enemy commander has found me and starts sending droves of crap at me. While i'm swattin' at flies he's building this crazy stuff. I have no idea when to expand. I have no idea when to build, how to build correctly, when to scout, when to build radar's, which so far have just told me that my impending doom has arrived. Now I don't mean to rant but i'd like to at least have my army do a little dmg before it gets wiped out, say I put up a good fight. But nope... radar says you're dead... I'm fairly sure at this point I have to have a tutor or something. If i'm an awful player, tell me. My apologies for the rant and no offense, but I have no idea what the nicknames or abbreviated names for the units and structures are. Thanks for anyone that is listening.
You should watch as may videos as you can from the gameplay videos forum. Just kee watching until your head explodes, and try to find videos from different people and different points of view. Some of the commentators and players are really good at explaining what they are doing or watching.
My first advice to you is Don't Panic! The game can be daunting at first. PA actually has a really easy scout system in place. Early in the game build an air lab, set it on repeat and tell it to make the firefly scout plane. Then, with the air factory selected click the patrol option and drag the circle all the way off the edge of the planet. That will set the planes built by that factory to roam the whole planet. Any buildings spotted by the planes will remain ghosted so you can just have a look every so often and find your opponents base. Now once you know where he is you can defend better. When defending you want to place turrets in the most direct path between you and the ai as that's generally the rout it will take to attack you. Whenever you make a turret, build walls in front of it as it makes the turrets last 10 x longer. Those 2 tricks should give you allot more breathing space to build up. Also if the enemy gets closer to your base, user your commander and his uber Canon (fired with the alt fire button or by pressing u with your command selected) as that can fend off allot of units, just remember to repair your commander after with a fabber as he doesn't self heal. Edit: Another point- once you know where your opponent is, send fabbers to expand in the opposite direction as they are less likely to get attacked doing that. Hope that helps, Rob.
That sounds like a decent plan. Now if i'm gettin' bothersome, someone tell me. But as soon as I read somethin', other questions pop up. Like I understand what Infinite build means but what does it actually do? I click on a factory, click on the little continuous build option on the right but when I go to build units i'm still clicking on a unit icon in the factory menu like a thousand times for units to be built. So I ask, what does Infinite/Continuous build actually do?
It builds for you. Say you set up 1 BotA and then infinite. The result is, that it builds BotA until the end of time (theoretically ). You don't have to queue up 1000 Bots. The best thing about Infinite Build is, you can set up proportions: 3 BotA, 5BotB, 1BotC set on infinite will make the factory produce: 3 A, 5 B, 1 C, 3 A, 5 B, 1 C and so on. It is nice to mix in some anti-air units into your army or whatever you can think of. There is one thing, which may irritate you: Setting up a factory and clicking on 1 Unit will make it produce this Unit right away. If you click "Infinite Build" then, nothing will happen because the queue is empty. So you have to ensure that there are units in queue to make it work (Does anybody know if this is intention or is it a bug?).
I think it's a bug. One thing that does mitigate it a bit- you can queue up a building to start making units before the building itself is finished. So if you click to make 1 bot and set continuous build on a bot factory *before* the factory has finished building it works. If you do this after its built you need to click twice on the bot. Another useful tip (apologies if you knew this one) if you have a long queue in a factory (repeat or not doesn't matter) and you decide you want a different unit immediately (e.g. you need a particular type of fabber for t2) clicking the unit you want whilst holding the cntrl key will add it at the front of the queue which can be handy.
There's a lot of good advice here, if you actually want some in game help I'd be happy to lend a hand. Just send me a PM sometime, I should be playing this weekend in the evenings (GMT), or just connect to my clan Teamspeak (which I'll link when not on mobile) anytime.
