"What's the point in having bots and tanks? What's the point in having naval? Why air?"

Hello all,

It's been a long time since I've done my last post here, but i'm still enjoying playing the game.

Today, i'd like to discuss some feelings I have about the game, and would like to know if I'm the only to have these feelings, or just playing it totally wrong. I'd like to precise that i'm merely only playing with or against known friends.

This is how I always play:

- start some metal extractors, energy plants, build a factory (either bot or vehicle)
- spam constructors, area build mines, area build energy plants
- spam factories (vehicle/air/bot), build each type of unit in mode continuous build
- rush orbital to lock-down space access to my enemy
- throw basic units at the enemy
- loop the whole with advanced units / nukes and so on.

The problem with this is that:

- I do not have the feeling that the terrain is important (renforced by the fact that artillery is using high-altitude ballistic trajectories)
- No variety: It seems that spamming all varieties of units is easy and allows to handle all situations
- I end up always at end game with too much metal that i do not need to spend (like +500 for a total of +1500). This problem never happens with energy i'm always a bit tight (which is good, imho) with them.
- At the end, I end up always privileging air units as the fabs can build everywhere, and the other units aren't annoyed by terrain.
- At the end, the game is just a nuke spam fest. 3 nukes aren't sufficient? easy, build 3 others, i have unspent metal.
- The same strategy seems to always yield the best results, no matter the planetary setup.
- Orbital lock-down allows me to not to fear a possible asteroid strike.
- I don't bother with naval anymore (but naval was my favorite type of unit in supcom)

Do you play the same way? Are there other strategies applicable to this game?

Is this possible that metal is to easy to fetch, and the spots should give less metal, forcing the player to choose a strategy instead of building everything? Or maybe the mexes should be easier to kill? Or maybe i'm just playing to well (even against an hard IA?) compared to my friends?

simple problem of having access to too many metal deposits ... answer ... gamma is gamma ... so wait for we are able to propperly set the ammount and density of metaldeposits ... this will impact the gameplay in a big way ...
i am still of the opinion that because of gammastate we are supposed to be able to test each unit out without bothering on metal so much ... strategic gameplay will change with less access to resources ...

Ok it's what's I was thinking. I know that gamma is gamma, I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't the only one with this feelings .

Yep once you control how much metal and metal clusters are in your system, it would make interesting battles over control points and not just a "I have more units so I win".

Play Chess. It has been balanced pretty much in the last thousand years.

The only problem,I have trouble finding game lobbies late at night which is when I usually play.
Plus the mod support sucks and queens are OP lol.

Thank heavens they put a unit cap on that thing. Back in the day, everyone was just spamming 'em.

can you actually imagine if some sort of international chess community released a nerf for the queen?
Patch notes:
-queen movement limited to 5
-pawn starting move distance changed to 3

Ehe, I was obviously kidding. But for the record, if you really like Chess, give a try to http://gameknot.com/

One of the beautiful things about this game is that, in low level play, you can deviate a lot with you build and you can actually hurt your opponent quite a bit and have them be in a big disadvantage if you perform an attack correctly. For example, I tend to build 2 or 3 bombers and sniper fabricators early game and not only does that reduce the enemy build power but they also tend to build a lot of AA in response, which further decreases their build power. In a lot of high level play, the standard now is to get T2 as quickly as possible and spam the longer range bots/tanks.

So what does that mean to you? Well here are a few things.

You can try different things here. Sent out a couple of dox bots to raid your enemy early game. Change your early game build and make sure that you're always at about 90% usage of both your metal and your energy. See how fast you can get T2 out. There's plenty of things you can do differently here. If you're playing with friends, try a no-defense allowed game, where you can't build defensive buildings except for radar. This forces you to be more aggressive and it tends to be a lot more difficult and fun.

Naval is fun but until they make it so that wreckage sinks and debug the unit pathing, it'll remain problematic. Instead of nuking your enemy to oblivion, try to land on their planet by nuking a certain area and making a teleporter. See if you can break their defenses. It tends to be a lot more satisfying knowing you broke someone's defenses instead of just nuke spamming until you find their com.

Yes, currently, there's a sure fire way of winning the orbital war. But why not just deny your enemy from leaving the planet and finishing him off before he leaves? Build some orbital fighters and deny him that. If he builds an umbrella, try to snipe it with some T2 bombers or set up orbital fighters in the other planet. I've had plenty of people making 5 planet systems and they don't even make it out of the first planet because they're already dead. It's strangely satisfying.

There is a lot of metal available. My suggestion is that if you have spare metal, build more factories. If you don't have enough power to build factories, have your fabricators build energy generators until you balance your power.

If you still have too much metal, make a T1 factory and spam fabricators and set the rally point to a T2 factory. For all of your nukes, do the same. Build a T1 factory to assist the nukes. You'll end up using a lot of your surplus and be pumping out both T2 units and nukes a lot faster, assuming you have the resources for it. Also, if you're building nukes, you should get storage. Lots of it.

tl,dr; build more stuff, nuke more people

Better yet, Real-time chess! no turns!

http://play.svenardo.com/chess/

I have yet lo last more than a few seconds. oh well...

I know you were , I was just adding to it

all the problem is coming from heaving Toooooooooo much resurces in my opinion....

cant wait to be able to modify it

Damn, that's pretty hectic.
Took me a couple tries but I beat it on the default speed.
Gonna try increasing it now.
EDIT: Oh god, why did I do that?

I think an interesting game mode would be to to modify the starting homeworld to have metal be scarce but make another planet have abundance metal recources but to get there the Orbital Launcher has to be made a t2 building again with the adv radar being as awesome as it used to be

I won first time!!

I spammed and went straight for the King. The AI didn't care that my Queen was right next to his King

Queen is OP.

lol I just played that real time chess game too, its actually really easy to me once I got used to it cause I played speed chess and bughouse so I beat it 12 times in a row ha ha. AI just sux I even got a legitimate checkmate in the early game where he actually does see the check but doesn't matter still walks to his death cause its checkmate ha ha (don't feel bad I used to play in high school tournaments)

Also I have sacrificed that OP queen to win a normal game, I know you all will hate me for that *runs*

Chess 2: The Sequel.

The economy balance pass has yet to happen, which is why some of this is the case. I'd vote that T1 power get a small buff (output and cost are pretty much fine, but build time...), and T2 mex get a solid nerf (like half or less the current output). Someone also mentioned the idea of being able to overdrive your mex to crank a little more out with extra energy, which I think is an interesting idea if it's not too efficient. Definitely agree that some units are a little too all purpose right now as well, and that end game nuke spam is often the only way people choose to end long games.