turle players are generating less economically

On an 80 km map with 3 human teams of 2 and one ai team of 2 is it better to grab lots of pumps over an area of say 20km, or just some pumps near your base. Most would say take the 20 km of land and try to dominate as much area as possible.
This theory is wrong. As most of my games on forged alliance are on 40 and 80 km maps with a similar setup to above, i've learned that it is pretty much impossible to control that much space without leaving major holes in your defence. Lets say you pick up an extra half a dozen pumps. This extra resource could be generated alternatively in almost the same time as a dozen secondary commanders with resource allocation upgrades. Also secondary commanders take no space and are therefore easy to defend. Not to mention they are essential at assisting base when defending from game ending artillary. I think there are several different ideas of what turtle style is.

Moving lots of units long distance is a huge concern for a game of PA's scale. For the most part, transit options didn't exist in previous titles. TA travel was a nightmare, and SC1 travel was crushed by the overpowered interceptor. Both games had air units move an order of magnitude faster than everything else. So it isn't a big surprise that large parts of terrain were difficult to control.

Supcom 2 started a good trend by giving new ways of moving units across large areas of terrain. Then it screwed things up by using stupidly small maps.

There are mods for the other games, which do various things to help shrink huge maps down to size. A few good options will be essential for PA. Keeping air power in check is also key, as fast units will always have many tactical advantages over slow units.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/11cfc7e5f7741b2453cc3861505463cf/tumblr_mh3kexjaYh1s49jb5o1_1280.jpg

They are adding a Unit Cannon from what I can see
That seems a good way to travel quickly

Why not just take all the mex you can get AND macro in your base? Just rebuild the mex if they are killed and attack your oppoent so much that he no time to kill your mex.
40 to 80km maps might be a bit extreme, though. Never really played serious games on 80km and only a few on 40. Dunno. I don't think a normal PA map will have more space than a 40km map.

I am not sure what this thread really is about.


Controlling a large area is impossible, yes. However, every second you control a mex you get an economic boost, and i am pretty certain it doesn't take a whole lot of time before the mex has earned it's cost in mass back (total cost: IE an engineer, pump, and some defences) after which you get a net profit.


Turtling however is not grabbing a ton of land, and thus i do not understand the combination of your stance and the thread title.

So just wondering,

Is there a point to this thread or is this just an interesting fact you decided to share...

just an interesting fact and like i say there seems to be many definitions of turtling. Mine is to be unstoppable as long as the scale of the map is 40 or 80 km.

That's not turtling.

Turtling is building a lot of defence and focusing on maintaining territory.


What you describe is either raiding or steamrolling. Steamrolling is ensuring you vastly outnumber and outpower the enemy. It's also inefficient. Raiding is keeping the pressure on the enemy so the enemy has to focus on your attacks and it disrupts his operations.

I disagree if you can afford to steamroll then it isn't inefficient. Outnumbering and Overpowering your enemy through hundreds of units is to me what TA & Supcom were all about.

Steamrolling by definition is been unstoppable over the long run... Your enemy constantly taking more losses than you in numbers that mean - if the trend carries on - his base will be flattened/steamrolled.

Unless the change the resources in PA so they aren't infinite constantly having more forces/stronger forces and throwing them into the breach can't be inefficient.

Don't get me wrong raiding has its place but raiding won't win you a battle in an efficient way (Unless you are going for deaths by 1000 cuts).

Steamrolling is being unstoppable, yes. However, if you can afford to steamroll someone ENTIRELY, you could've won the match a long time ago.


Sure, in some cases steamrolling is entirely justified. However, it's inefficient as you have a lot of overkill.

Raids can win you a battle. Raiding is something you can do to keep the enemy occupied and relatively small while your army rolls out for the definitive strike.

Don't get me wrong, i love steamrolling and it's how i usually play. I also know how inefficient it is.

Whilst I agree that trying to hold 1/4 of the make resources isn't ideal its still a viable strategy if you concentrate your resources and allow the extra mexes to be expendable you can't hope to defend them all so you shouldn't try to they are there to give you a resource boost when defending such a large front elastic defence is key. Having fall back points and reserve units are key and then you can just take the mexes back after you have pushed the enemy back.

Plus SCUs are expensive to build and upgrade and take time and resources you may not have

Yes and yes.

There's nothing wrong with TRYING to control the map. obviously if you control the entire map you can make the extra effort and control the enemy territory (AKA: WIN). However every second you have a MEX you generate resources. If it costs too much time and micro to keep building em, it's not worth it. However if you enemy does not pay much attention to them: his loss.

How are we Turtle players generating less economically if our objective it to get to the highest point as quickly as possible. And by this I mean not producing many low level units past what is needed for defense and going straight for the end game. Like for my my goal would be to get off the planet as quickly as possible and start setting up secondary bases on the moons and asteroids.

Because you aren't expanding as much as a non turtler.

Economy beats turtling.

Even in age of empires, a player with more economy can easily defeat a more cautious turtle, but the problem lies in that the rusher will kill the economy before they can set up, but a rush will be blunted by a turtle.

As the early game goes anyway.

This would depend on the Turtles strategy. Where me and my friend in FA work to have tech 3 in 15 min or less. My friends could mass produce Experimentals in 30 min. We build an extremely powerfull econ in order to do this. Turtles can do mass econ but it takes a different style. Strategy within the bigger strat is a very important element as well.

Of course, But that is generally how it goes between players of equal skill in the early game.

Tech, Econ and spamming are the general mid-game strats.

If the maps aren't gunu be that big, whats the point of it being planetary?
You wouldn't fit 10 people all v all on a 40km map, they would have no space.

Because instead of having a 81km map, you would have 2 40k maps and 7 5km maps in one system, at the same time.

They've already said they'd rather not set a hard limit as to how big planets can be. This means there could be 100km+ maps.