Starting the Game: The Egg

Indeed, why make it one simple action when you can make it a 4-actions micro?
I'm pretty sure this would be better like that in a game like StarCraft, but here the goal should be to keep the APM low when possible. And adding this particular unnecessary micro wouldn't help.

Now, adding a big pile of wreckage at spawn can be a balance point, like the four mexes at spawn point in FA. Simply, it's not a good solution for the starting chore. For that, it's no different than the boost, simply asking for more micro.
So in addition to something like facplop, why not? But it won't solve this problem.

A full storage can go anywhere. A boost can go anywhere. A pile of wreckage can only be used at your starting location, because you only have one lathe and your starting resources are already full.
People should be able to choose their starting spawn, in a zone. Then, they should directly spawn at the place where they want to begin, i.e. the place where they want to put their (free) first factory.
Why would they have to move before building their base anyway? For a pure Com-rush, without any base building? We don't want those, I presume. For putting their base somewhere else? They would waste time, which would be both boring for the player and give them a time disadvantage. Which should be avoided.
So anyway, their ability to move is not important, they should build where they spawned. And after their first factory is built, they can move freely by having one engineer reclaiming and another building somewhere else.
So having a fixed wreckage as opposed to a moving Com-storage shouldn't change anything.

All which take time, for a pre-defined build-order. With free buildings, this "high-APM low-strategy" time is reduced to nearly zero. Even better if it could be planned before the clock starts ticking, to avoid a stressful and unnecessary APM-spike right at the beginning.

Having a plain wreck is boring, so it should have more functions to not be boring? This is the bad approach.
If the plain wreck doesn't work, it shouldn't be forced to work. A working solution should be used instead. Forcing new functions to this wreck simply to make it work will only add unnecessary complexity.
Having a few free building (as the "facplop" is a simple example) is a working, simple solution.

I didn't say a plain wreck was boring. The plain wreck is a good idea, adds to the game, and does work. It's just very one-dimensional, since you are always going to build as quickly as possible and reclaim it as quickly as possible to build more stuff.

And a fixed wreckage is a huge difference from having internal storage on the commander. For fairly obvious reasons. Just to start, in order to build efficiently, you should build near it. It allows for a smaller storage limit, since some of those resources are out on the map, and need to be reclaimed, just like a rock would.

And this is to say nothing of the possibile uses an egg might have other than being a reclaimable wreck. Obviously having an asset with a function other than the commander is substantially different from just giving the commander more functions.

A small egg that can nanolath for 500 metal and then decay would have quite all the pro of a reclaiming egg while having the possibility to speed up the construction of the first factory.
It doesn't add any step like reclaiming which is good because its goal is to streamline the beginning. It doesn't mess with storage and the economy too.
The only cons I can see is that you must found a way to tell the new player to use it.

Let me rephrase it: How are either "egg" or plain wreckage superior to a free factory (+ a few more free buildings if the balance asks for it)?

The free buildings makes the infamous game start near-instant.
It requires few actions, and those actions are not special to game start (build is simply made instant).
The storage needed to begin is low, particularly compared to the later stages of the game: the expensive building(s) is already there. You only need enough for the first few cheap units (scouts/engi/raiders) and cheap buildings (light defences, probably first mexes and generators).

Thus, the main problem is solved with minimal complexity and minimal departure from the "main" game.
(And with orders given before the clock starts, you also get rid of the obnoxious APM-rush.)

What does the egg has that offset the added complexity?
What does the plain wreckage has that offset the time (and APM) lost to it?

Thorneel makes some very good points. I always felt that the facplop in ZK made the early game a lot quicker and more interesting. In a smaller game, you get to the action a bit quicker, and in a larger game, like on PA's scale, less time is wasted on the opening minutes. One great side effect is that this mitigates the time wasted on the first opening minutes where every game is identical and helps reduce the game length a bit, without sacrificing any of the strategic elements.

Also of note is that changing the default starting resources that the commander has does wonders for balancing out how the early game goes. In vanilla TA, just adding a couple thousand starting metal/energy allows the early setup to go a lot more smoothly, with less stalling, and yet it doesn't balance the game overly much. The commander's resource generation remains the same, so you're still going to want to get your economy rolling, but the amount of energy/metal storage gained from this isn't substantial enough to prevent the need for extra storage facilities. (Unless you make the starting resources REALLY big.)

The only question left unanswered is when it comes to expanding to other planets, in which case, sure, an egg might be useful.

But otherwise, I'm thinking I'm more and more in favor of the classic TA method of initial resources, along with a ZK style facplop. All that it really needs is that the default initial resources be balanced for a quick early economy. It's just a more elegant solution.

The beauty of pure wreckage is that it can be pretty much any arbitrary number without affecting rush tactics at all. It determines the starting resources for your first base, and doesn't affect the Commander leaving home in any way. It also works fairly well with a no-comm mode.

Want a slow start? Pick something like... 500 metal. Want a fast start? Start with a 10K pile. The explicit value is not terribly important, because the ability to utilize the pile depends entirely on having lathe power nearby(like the Comm). An excessively large pile will encourage tactics that involve raiding the pile or stealing it outright (also serving as good intel), which is a much better outcome than turtling with a large reserve of untouchable resources.

Early game stress comes from an overabundance of starting options. Early game mechanics should be easily understood, hard to screw up, and preferably lead into more advanced game concepts.

For example facplop, while very effective at boosting the early game, does not tie into new game mechanics or reinforce existing ones. Even worse, it teaches completely wrong fundamentals for playing the game. Facplop gives something for free, works only once, doesn't apply to new world expeditions, and all to save a couple seconds of starting time. Certainly building a factory is an essential skill to win, and facplop ensures you can't screw it up, but that's something you learn in about... 2 games. Even then, picking things you don't like isn't an unfixable mistake.

On the other hand, managing metal and energy are both fundamental concepts that serve the entire game. There's nothing wrong with hammering that into your noggin first thing.

While I do mostly agree with your above post bobucles, you did say one thing which concerns me:

Overabundance of options isn't really the problem, as long as they aren't illusory options. An illusory option would be something that a player can do, but which is strictly a bad idea. Such as building factories and mexes, but not energy. Legal, but strictly bad.

Players new to the game will essentially be flying by wire, and trusting pure intuition, estimation, and guesswork about game properties, mechanics, and strategies. In this state, it is completely impossible to discern the difference between a real option and an illusory one. If there are a lot of really bad possibilities, and only a few quite good ones, then new players are probably going to randomly select a bad one and lose.

So, in a sense you are right that early game mechanics should be "hard to screw up." As many viable, legitimate, practical options as possible should be presented. And the number of strictly bad things a player can do should be minimized, and it should be obvious to the player that these moves are bad so they will not repeat them.

However the number of strategic options available to the player isn't the culprit here. If a player has 1000 different viable starts to choose from, that game has terrific depth, and a player can choose any one of them without it being a categorical mistake to do so. We want as much variation in the game as possible, and having branching game states begin as early as possible, with as much diversity as possible, creates vastly more possible games.

another idea for the egg would be an addon that can be moved to different buildings to improve their speed/efficiency. that way in the early game if you need to fight off a cheese you can use it to boost a pd's dps, or firing speed, or if you need more mass/ energy you can use it to boost your income by adding it to pgens, and mexes, or it could also be used to do a rushing build by boosting a factory. i think that it would be a cool unit to have that would open up alot of strategic options in the early game, while making the economy more forgiving in the early game

My Interpretation of Egg
The complex ideas for the egg unit in the OP and the rest of the thread surprised me. I had just watched the livestream and when hearing "can deploy into effective a minibase" I got the impression that the Egg would literally hatch a bunch of ordinary structures on impact. As in the player would configure their egg with 2x Solar, 1x Factory and those structures would effectively appear at their start location. There would be no special unit which hangs around after the start of the game.

This mostly speeds up the initial base building part of the game because apparently people just rote learn a build a do it for 2 minutes without any thought.

For anyone who has been around Spring for a while this is basically the tactical deployment mode which let you setup your base before the game starts. Or it is like boost which is limited to structures.

I like this interpretation because there are less special cases than if we had a starting unit with arbitrary stats and abilities. The abilities (energy generation, radar etc..) can arise from the structures which hatch out of the egg.


Facplop and Boost
I decided to explain the purpose and problems with these ways to speed up the start of the game because it is an issue I have grappled with for a while.

Boost is a certain amount of resources which are stored locally on the commander when it spawns. Nanolathing draws from this storage at increased speed until it is used up. Then the game carries on as normal. This was the first attempt idea and had the issue of boostrush. There were two main types:

• Get a bunch of players together in the same spot and rushing an army or large unit from a single factory.
• Walk or transport your commander to the enemy base and make turrets.

Boost is basically not a good system.

Facplop gives the commander a free factory token which is used up when it creates a factory, the factory is created instantly. At normal speed the commander would take 60 seconds to create a factory. This was a much better solution because it takes out 60 seconds and removes the rush issues. It is even better at reducing unfun rushes than the ordinary resourcing system.

The main issue with the normal start setup is that once teams grow beyond about 3 players it becomes suboptimal for every player to make a factory. A team can best spend it's resources by having excess players use all of their starting resources to assist an allies factory. This gives them an extra factory-costs worth of units to play with.

Player which are assisting their allies in this way do not control anything in the game. But the most benefit to their team is to sit there assisting. This creates a rift between what a player has to do to play well and what they have fun doing. This is a major reason for facplop. So my advice here is to make sure every player has something active to do which benefits their team.

The more general statement should be obvious to everyone: make sure the optimal play is not boring.

I'm thinking that the egg itself be a scout, a resource pile, or an air engineer.

It could be all 3 the lander in the kickstarter was reused as a transport and landed on the moon. It could be a transport flying Engineer that you could scout with.

For game start balance I don't know but for expansion I was thinking a unit that does 3 things.

1. It protects you on your way to the landing spot. with no shields I'm thinking an armored shell that protects from all AA and then makes an impact weapon that makes a crater full of solid metal wreckage like a giant cannon shell dropped from space. (or instead of wreckage maybe even punch a geo-thermal vent or make a extraction point depending on whatever)

2. It launches a reusable flying transport just before impact. That can land its heavy overload within X range of the impact crater like a powered parachute. Landing X mass of pre-built buildings units or commanders the bigger the lander the more you get.

3. The Lander is then a flying transport you can scout with or use to transport stuff. (As a lander transport it could have any load-out even guns and a nano-lath for defending and reclaiming the armored shell wreck or building/defending a base)

If something like the shell impact was used at start it would also get new players used to the idea of constant permanent destruction of the playing field being a basic game mechanic.

If I may suggest an idea for the visual aspect of 'The Egg' landing on a planet?

I picture it being a ballistic capsule of some sorts that simply drops from the sky at immense speeds, making landfall without the use of parachutes or rockets.
Since we are aiming for awesome, why not have The Egg deploy some large flaps while launching a large bomb aimed at the terrain below before The Egg itself smashes into the ground.
The bombs purpose would be twofold:
1. It clears the ground of trees and rubble (and smaller enemies), providing a flat area for construction.
2. The shockwave slows The Egg down somewhat to lessen the impact.

And if 'The Egg' is not the chosen name for the vessel; have some appropriate words to play around with:

Commander
Deployer / Deployment
Lander
Invasion
Module
Capsule
Ballistic
Interstellar
Vessel

Interstellar Commander Deployment Capsule "ICDC"?
Commander Lander? (lol)

This sounds like the best option so far to me. It's basically the facplop, but even more streamlined (one less click as it's plopped at spawn point).
To go even further, there should be a way to pre-plan the factory first buildlist, which is often part of the rote learning as well.

On a minor note, I'm not convinced by the "ballistic" egg entry. Having Commanders arriving in a system with a starship makes no sense for a variety of reasons, the first one being that they hit the ground and begin acting at the exact same time.
So I'd suggest a Supcom-like teleportation instead. It's as violent and spectacular and will clear the zone as well. An hybrid solution, though, is to have the teleportation at high altitudes and the egg violently smash the ground below.