What is everyone's opening build?

Dude.... Raiding is a weakness of mine. I am weak at raiding. I am not good at raiding. Pretty blatantly, because I was raiding his base the entire game and lost the game.

If they fly through the area... The anti nuke doesn't provide area of effect protection for that area, but area of effect protection against the flight path of the missile?

I've figured out that much. But I am still to see it actually work.

IMO you should play as playing alone to start team games. Two people= two economies, otherwise one of you essentially is killing you both

Pgen, 2-3 mex factory, then comm on power if I get nice close metal I usually try to slip in an early metal storage, found that to be very helpful

If we were playing alliance mode, I'd agree with you. But it can be much more fluid than that with army mode

Example: 4 players in an army - 3 starting locations.

2 of the starting locations have lots of mex, so good for eco

The third location is in a strong strategic position, with natural defences around it, but near enough no mex

I'd probably say we put two people on the strong strat location and one on each eco. The strat location guys would build some energy to start while the eco guys build mex.

Coupled with that - if all four players play a 'standard' build, you'll find you suddenly have 4 mex and no energy, with four drains. It makes more sense to spread it out a bit. It's all about communication and co-ordination.

not saying you shouldn't branch off but the first five should be spent playing alone, to provide a stable economy. If one person comes off the line going defense or rush, you'll stall the whole team placing your whole team behind. That's the problem I encounter in team games with the unknown. Which is why I wish alliance mode was available already....

Well I wasn't saying that the players wouldn't be building eco - just that it might work out that, as described above, one player builds mex while another builds energy, depending on the situation.

Indeed some planet spawns call for that but when you're separated and one person goes economy only, he just left all your economy defenseless for a simple two unit raiding party to destroy

It's still a work in progress. To be honest I don't have one exactly... I'm working on it and trying to ditch old habits that worked in earlier builds. taking your points on board as I know I'm not being as efficient anymore as I should be.

Making a good call on when to slip in an early metal storage helps. No point building one though if you aren't going to let it fill up.....

cwarner is assuming you're coordinating with your teammates. The Army game type requires LOTS of communication. Practically requires audio chat with your team mates.

If one person stalls the economy, it's not (necessarily) because there's a bad player on the team, it's because you aren't working together.

It's imperative that you work together.

I NEVER play army matches with randoms or with people I'm not on audio chat with.

t1 Bot Factor. t2 Bot factory. Then win the game. Serious.

In most situations I've noticed it comes down to levelers, nukes or orbital lasers. While Dox are pretty abundant in the early game, I don't see a reason to invest in advanced bots too much.

I love my Slammers. I use them for raiding expansions and hitting the backside of an enemy's base. If they don't have defenses on their backside, a group of Slammers can cut through a large portion of their main base before units can be built.

I started doing that after I was killed by a group of 10 or so slammers that went straight through the back of my base to my Commander, killing my Commander in seconds. I was kicking his ***, and suddenly I was dead because he had a proxy base with T2 bot factories.

True. Although a mixed force with slammers and other units works.

Advanced dox do have the meat to fight enemy tank swarms quite well, and can even adsorb pelter shots well enough.

I wouldn't count them out.

I start with the casual 1 energy 3-5 mex, after that i build a factory and spam only out fabber bots. The 2 first bots i send out to get more mex, the third one assists the commander. After building 4-6 energy plants(depending on my eco) i build an air factory with my commander or with my 2 next fabbers being produced. Since my energy in this build is very low at the start i often have to build the air in a mex gap(when my 2 first fabbers are walking from one mex to another). Because of this my start often works better with less, more spread out mex. This build gives me good mid game eco, but is very weak against very early raiding. Not really the best start, but i'm used to it so that is why i use it ^^. Maybe have to change it soon... Also, i never build energy storage at the start since i always have low energy, but maybe an early storage before i build my factory could be nice like spazzdla said.

Offtopic:
Isaac! Where is Miria???

Pretty much the same but instead of a bot factory I usually build an air factory. This due to three reasons:

1.) Anti-air; to defend my base from air raids
2) bombers; to harrass the opposite team by killing the spread-out mexes and engineers
3) engineers; to build fast by reducing the travel time for the (since beta) spread out metal spots
3.1) to avoid the not yet mastered problems with pathfinding!
(4. To build an advanced air to snipe nukes/planetary/unprotected commanders)

Of course this only works if the opponent doesn't adopt a decent anti-air strategy - which in my opinion happens very rarely!

TheGurken

One suggestion would be to avoid using air fabricators. To me they seem inefficient in the extreme. The rest are good reasons and good strategy... Although an early bot raid would be a big danger.

Doesn't seem like there is a Miria on this forum ; (