The Advanced Metal Extractor Specialisation ideas

I think you're oversimplifying and missing the point --

If you can always hold off the enemy, you should always tech up.
If you can never hold off the enemy, you should always counter-rush.
The best games reach a balance between these two options so that either can be risky if you do it wrong. Early defenses can't be too weak or too strong. Economic advancement can't be too worthless or too powerful.

I submit to you that due to present PA balance, you should pretty much always tech up. T1 units are very weak versus T1 defenses. T2 economics are vastly and immediately superior to T1 economics.

My argument is that it's not even an interesting choice right now. It raises the Zaphod Limit because your T1 decisions mostly don't matter unless that decision is "upgrade to T2". And due to the nature of TA/PA style economy, you then spend an inordinate amount of time working up more energy and more metal and your ability to do this will trump a lot of strategic decision making.

The new player may have the best idea in the world for an Ant Rush but he's probably going to lose to anyone who simply went T2 and had a few basic defenses.

We could significantly lower the Zaphod Limit in this game by simply removing T2 mexes. That would immediately make T1 strategy a lot more important. You'd still want to tech up pretty rapidly but early T2 wouldn't be such a tremendous economic advantage to the extent that it trumps all T1 strategy.

I see a potential problem with only t1 mexes. With only t1 mexes you have to constantly expand, expand, expand and raid raid raid. There are just tons of mass points just in one planet. Imagine when playing with multiple planets.

I'm worried the huge amount of mass points will create this “nobody's land” type of zones where you can't protect your engineers at all. Where all the mass points are no one's, because neither one of the players can really protect them. But you still have to try to take them. And at the same time, you have to keep hitting your opponents mexes he can't protect from every direction. This type of gameplay is not very interesting imo, just really wearing and frustrating. And there isn't strategy in it, it just requires high attention and apm all the time because the one who keeps expanding and expanding and expanding to the “nobody's land “will eventually win. At least t2 mexes would reduce this. I agree that expanding should be very important, but it can also become very ridiculous at some point.

Heh heh, yeh I kept thinking that when it was being typed...stupid acronyms

Hmm. You bring up some good points!

I personally find t1 bots are highly effective against T1 defences. And I find you can win the game using T1 units without giving them the chance to go T2, if you are really devoted to spamming T1 and you manage your attacks correctly.

But I agree that advancement is too binary in the game.

It kind of makes sense (robot war), but at the same time...