How do I do this this stresses me out! I always have too much or not enough! Am I looking for a specific ratio of energy to metal?
Are the arrows supposed to help? Everything is so temporal they feel like they don’t help!
Is there a rule of thumb for how many constructors I should be making?
Metal is your primary resource because it is the hardest to get. All metal spending requires an equal amount of energy spending. A fabricator that cost 100 metal will also cost 100 energy. This means that you always want at least as much energy as you have metal. Also, some units and buildings will consume excess energy to maintain cloak and restore a bubble shield.
After that it gets a little trickier. You can never have too much energy. That’s because excess energy is used to “Overdrive” your Metal Extractors (Mex). When energy accumulates past your storage limit, it is automatically applied to Overdriving your Mex which starts to give percentage gains on each Mex connected via your energy grid. That’s why you’ll see people building “power lines” between their metal spots. Excess energy becomes more metal, which lets you build more energy, which gives you more metal. There is a tooltip that will pop up when building an energy production building that will tell you the estimated time it will take to pay for itself in extra metal gained from overdrive.
That’s all a lot to take in and you can safely ignore it until you get your bearings.
Just follow some simple guidelines instead:
(in order of importance. if nothing else just follow rule #1)
It’s always cheaper to make more Mex than it is to overdrive fewer mex by making more energy. This is how to game balances map control with economic development. If 2 players have equal map control, the player who has a stronger overdrive economy has advantage. The risk/reward is that you have to spend more upfront on your economy instead of your army to get an advantage later. Also, your power grid becomes a point vulnerable to attack if your unable to maintain map control.
Note: Reading this back just now, and boy it must look overwhelming
Nah, it’s very helpful! That all makes sense to me.
A few more things I overlooked because they are so fundamental I forget to even mention them.
Always be expanding. Always take as much mex and territory as is possible. If you don’t take at least half of the map in a 1v1, then you’re already losing. More metal = better army = victory.
Spend all of your metal. Excess metal is lost and wasted. Metal is the most important resource so don’t waste it by having excess metal.
Don’t build a storage container unless your commander has died or will probably die soon. And then, only make one. Follow this rule until you’ve really figured out how things work.
A pretty good tutorial on how the economy works.
I haven’t played this game much yet, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot! There’s a lot of interesting stuff to chew on, and I like to have a good high level view before I dive in too deep.
As a beginner I wish this game was more legible in general. Too many of the units look very similar, I find the symbols aren’t distinct enough, and a lot of maps have samey ground textures that make elevation hard to see at a glance. A few graphical / design tweaks would go a long way in improving the overall readability of the game.
SC maps tend to be more constrained, too, so these more open maps sort of add to the chaos. I find it difficult to track all the units moving around the map, even as a spectator.
While I’m at it, here’s some more tutorials that I used to figure out the game when I was starting. These are by GoogleFrog, the lead developer on Zero-K.
This one is about combat and maneuvering.
(EDIT: this Video is slightly out of date. What he calls Fight (F) is now called Attack (A). What he calls Attack (A) is now called Fire (F). This was a change for the better a few years ago. Just swap A and F when he mentions it in the video)
This one is about terraforming. You can safely ignore terraforming until you feel like you already understand the basics of everything else. I still have to return to this video sometimes when I’m trying to remember how to do something tricky.
I agree that the readability hurts the game. It’s something that’s still being worked on. It does get easier as you familiarize yourself with it. The icons start to make more sense as you encounter them more and more. It does work after you’ve let the visuals soak into your brain for a while. I can now tell everything that’s going on in a battle fully zoomed out purely from the icons.
Unfortunately because the game has no budget and is worked on by volunteers only, someone skilled would need to volunteer their work to overhaul the visuals and sound design of the game. The current level of polish is what the current volunteers are capable of producing.
I’ve already submitted a ticket to the github to have all units icons superimposed onto the unit portraits to link them better. That would be a good first step. I’ve considered volunteering to do this myself but would need to teach myself how and haven’t had the time.
I think FrequentPilgrim is underselling the “hook of hooks” of this game, which is clearly the traction/repulsion juggling gundam motherfucker whose name i instantly forgot
john, talk about that thing, that’s what finally, completely sold me on the game
Honestly, I think “hey here are all these options and strategies but we’ve streamlined and put so much power in the interface that they’re not a nightmare of micro and apm” is a pretty good hook.
i was half-joking but i think that’s still just “come for the hardcore strategy, stay for the hardcore strategy” - you can only get a sense of that after having lots of the game explained to you
on the other hand, there’s a juggling gundam that can pull enemies in or launch them away
One of my favorite parts of this game is the spectator mode. You can watch any match that’s occurring in real time while chatting with other spectators and drawing on the map to point out interesting developments. All replays are recorded onto the website and can be loaded into the game to rewatch. I spectate as often as I actually play.
Here’s a 2v2 Matchmaker game I just watched in real time that I thought was particularly good. You can view it by having the game running and clicking the button on the web page that says “Watch Replay Now”. http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/689022 It will automatically download and run the replay.
I’m always shocked by just how good the average match is. How much fun it is to analyze what each player was thinking and how they adapted to new information. It’s addictive.
okay i could not have imagined a better name in one hundred million years
you can use repulsion and traction on your own units.
i saw someone terraform a ramp and try to use the jugglenaut to launch their own kamikaze units directly into the middle of someone’s base
it failed spectacularly
this game is the best
and the footer even chased down that page to taunt it
The level of control this game provides is so fucking incredible. It hurts my brain.
I like it because it almost seems like a fictional representation of a videogame in which people can come up with new, never-before-seen strategies on the fly, which is generally not possible in actual videogames because their ruleset is not flexible or esoteric enough
“THE CIRCLE CATAPULT GAMBIT” what
it’s the promise of archon finally realized
So I dunno how useful this will be to the larger discussion ITT but I am getting strong Total Annihilation vibes from what I’m seeing/reading.
Let me start by saying that prior to TA I’d only ever played Age of Empires, and I’ve never played Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer or any of the big names. I probably spent more time reading the manual for Myth: The Fallen Lords then actually playing it.
Anyway, I do not know if TA truly did anything all that different from its contemporaries but I got into it deeply, and I loved that it did things like environmental hazards. Some maps had bodies of “water” that were actually acid! You could have an entire navy, constantly degrading for the entire length of a match. Some maps were entirely metal, and you could build metal harvesters anywhere. Geothermal vents, if found early on, were a huge boon compared to the solar collectors that were typical in the early to mid game.
Your commander unit was extremely powerful, and if its destruction wasn’t set to be a win-condition, it was sometimes a viable tactic to just roll your commander in during the early game to wreck your opponent’s shit if you thought you had enough of an economy lead. On the flipside the game also made turtling pretty easy and this was usually my strategy, I damn near played the game like tower defense until I could build enough long-range artillery or nukes to try to destroy the enemy from afar (but this was generally much more viable on smaller maps).
The game was also the first encounter I ever had with DLC, as units were made available post-release. I still have those files sitting on a floppy disk that’s stuffed into a CD case that has a bunch of my old PC game CD-ROMs on it. Speaking of, great soundtrack on those discs
Since TA the only RTS I’ve ever gotten into at all is Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. Not sure what that says about my tastes. I was interested in that RTS Sega published years ago but never jumped on it because I realized I’d never play it against anyone on Xbox360 and my computer of the time wouldn’t have been able to run it. For a long time I wanted to play that Grey Goo game but again, probably just missed the boat. Right now the only thing I can think of that’s on my radar is Drone Swarm but I have no idea when that damn thing’s going to come out.