How do people get experimentals by 15 minutes?

[Reuben]

I've been playing some online games against people and some people have been getting experimentals by the 15 minute mark and I'm barely on tier 3. How do people do it?

[Lieutenant Lich]

It is called "rushing". Usually people rush Monkeylords. They are the cheapest experimental, I think. On Rohans, what they do is the following (usually the "rushers" are middle players, those that went to the middle):
1) Their other middleman(men) hold(s) all defenses
2) The "rusher" gets a T3 engineering suit for his commander, simultaneously ecoes hard. Meaning - pull ALL mexes to T2, builds T2 pgens (look at FAF glossary if you don't know the meaning), etc.
3) Once T3 suit is in place, the commander with it starts a Monkeylord (or Fatboy, if they are UEF). At the same time, he calls up ALL his engies and asks allies for mass and energy, if needed. Or just puts all available build power on the exp (short for experimental). Within minutes, the exp is done and commander unleashes it upon unsuspecting enemy team. Some put all their commanders on the experimental to speed it up. Then the exp is ready even before 15 minute mark. A properly microed exp can kill multiple commanders and/or leave everyone's bases/resources drained/ravaged. I saw that happen many times. This is pretty common.

The possible solutions against this tactic is
1) Scout very often (!!!), it is important on turtle maps.
2) Fortify heavily in the middle and put up Ravagers, if you are UEF. If not - put PDs on the hills, if possible. Chances are, if the enemy has a Monkeylord, it will not go through the hills and will not damage the positions significantly, while you will have the advantage of shooting from the top.
3) Invest into air players for them to make strats to kill the bitchy experimental.
4) Rush an experimental yourself?

The method with hill positions I have not tried. The ironclad solution would be to ask your UEF partner (don't tell me you don't have one!) to build ravagers and scout often yourself. That will allow you to estimate how much time do you have and get commanders away from the front on time to live another day.
Morale: The advices above may or may not work well for you. This stuff will happen inevitably. You can base off these ideas or develop your own. If you are new to FA and/or FAF, don't worry if you lose battles often. If you are determined to get better, watch your replays. They do help. You can see the game from the perspective of the guy with the rush experimental and understand how to do this thing or how to counter it.

[lextoc]

Using logic sense, it's really easy: don't build other stuff. If you see a guy getting an experimental out at minute 15 you can almost be certain the other team "fucked up" because he didn't have any other real defenses (besides his/her poor teammates).

Now, if you feel like being this guy (I certainly did), it's a simple thing to do. Just spam engineers out of your first factory during the whole game. Focus on upgrading your mass extractors one by one to T2 followed by putting mass storages around them, make sure they are protected by TMD. Then upgrade them to T3.

Upgrading your mass extractors to T2 can be done simultaneously in case there's enough reclaim available to NOT stall mass.

Depending on how many mass extractors you've available to upgrade, and which are located safe enough to do so, you can get an experimental at two T3 mass extractors, although I prefer to upgrade four mass extractors to T3.

The most important thing to note is that this is one of those strategies that's not static. If you see your team getting absolutely raped it could be you have to stop upgrading your economy and get a couple of land factories up to support them with T2/T3 units. But if they are doing fine: don't build more than two factories in total. One for T1 engineers, and one for upgrading to T3 for the T3 engineer.

Especially early on your only real tribute to the team is your ACU, so make sure he is useful those first 5-10 minutes into the game. And make sure your whole team is not going for this strategy, that's a death sentence!

[speed2]

Well if you see someone doing that you can always watch a replay and see what how they did it right? Pay attention when they start teching up mexes, all the engies reclaiming everywhere to get extra mass, etc...