Base Building

[Insidiak]

Hey, are there any particular approach that you employ when it comes to base building?
Methods and Construction Templates that are neat and efficient in using up space, converge and economic adjacency beyond surrounding Mexs with storage or T1 Pd with wall sections.

[Plasma_Wolf]

As you already said yourself: templates help a lot.

I don't think of a particular design before or during a game. I simply improvise where to put buildings, depending on what buildings I need at the moment. Of course, I use some adjecency: the use of mass storage is trivial.

The most important template I use though, for late game (mostly Phantom and FFA), is the one with one T2 flak gun and one T3 SAM. That lets me put my AA defence in with relative ease and keeps the balance between the two very good. The second one for late game is the T3 eco farm.

[Blodir]

I only use 4 building templates:
1. t1 PD surrounded with walls
2. t1 mex surrounded by mass storage
3. t1 mex surrounded by mass storage and mass fabs
4. 1 energy storage (so i can use a hotkey for it)

A couple of points to consider:
- use as much adjacency as possible when not in a hurry (not much going on in the map), if you're in a hurry just draw lines of buildings fast
- factory placement is important, factories should be as close to where the units are needed as possible (however sometimes they are best in main base, if the map expands in both directions)
- you can use buildings to block enemy fire, which is sometimes extremely helpful, but also very hard to utilize
- walls can be incredibly helpful
- one good way to use walls is to build them near the edge of t2 pd range, this way engineers won't be able to reclaim them and units are slowed down significantly

[Insidiak]

As you already said yourself: templates help a lot.

I don't think of a particular design before or during a game. I simply improvise where to put buildings, depending on what buildings I need at the moment. Of course, I use some adjecency: the use of mass storage is trivial.

The most important template I use though, for late game (mostly Phantom and FFA), is the one with one T2 flak gun and one T3 SAM. That lets me put my AA defence in with relative ease and keeps the balance between the two very good. The second one for late game is the T3 eco farm.

This seems to be a common behavior I've seen in casts surrounding build orders and general planning, and while Im in no way criticizing you it just seems like this feature doesn't get alot of thought put into it.

I have played where I just plop down stuff here and there without much fore-thought and it becomes mildly annoying when I'm trying to manage space to build more stuff or when building more defenses to protect what I already have built. It becomes problematic when I don't have space for a staging area to organize mobile units; or when stuff is spread out and what defenses you setup don't provide adequate protection for what you have built.
I guess it just boils down to an emphasis on making good use out of what you build.
For example, most T2 shields can cover 4 factories and 4 T2 Pgens, great use of space in a shield. When there is empty space under one of my shields, that is power wasted.

[Zoram]

As you already said yourself: templates help a lot.

I don't think of a particular design before or during a game. I simply improvise where to put buildings, depending on what buildings I need at the moment. Of course, I use some adjecency: the use of mass storage is trivial.

The most important template I use though, for late game (mostly Phantom and FFA), is the one with one T2 flak gun and one T3 SAM. That lets me put my AA defence in with relative ease and keeps the balance between the two very good. The second one for late game is the T3 eco farm.

This seems to be a common behavior I've seen in casts surrounding build orders and general planning, and while Im in no way criticizing you it just seems like this feature doesn't get alot of thought put into it.

I have played where I just plop down stuff here and there without much fore-thought and it becomes mildly annoying when I'm trying to manage space to build more stuff or when building more defenses to protect what I already have built. It becomes problematic when I don't have space for a staging area to organize mobile units; or when stuff is spread out and what defenses you setup don't provide adequate protection for what you have built.
I guess it just boils down to an emphasis on making good use out of what you build.
For example, most T2 shields can cover 4 factories and 4 T2 Pgens, great use of space in a shield. When there is empty space under one of my shields, that is power wasted.

allow me to disagree

A neat and well organised base, with no wasted space might easier to manager, it's also much easier to scout, snipe, and destroy.

A "messy" and spreadout base, while it will mean wasted power on shields and defenses is actually quite harder to attack and gives you much more time to react when attacked. If everything is close together a small force can do a great deal of damage as soon as it has managed to set foot inside, not even talking about strat bombers, tactical snipes, and chain reactions around your power plants/ mass fabricators.

Going through a spreadout base requires much more units to efficiently attack, as the attacker will be under fire as he moves from target to target.

[Insidiak]

allow me to disagree

A neat and well organised base, with no wasted space might easier to manager, it's also much easier to scout, snipe, and destroy.

A "messy" and spreadout base, while it will mean wasted power on shields and defenses is actually quite harder to attack and gives you much more time to react when attacked. If everything is close together a small force can do a great deal of damage as soon as it has managed to set foot inside, not even talking about strat bombers, tactical snipes, and chain reactions around your power plants/ mass fabricators.

Going through a spreadout base requires much more units to efficiently attack, as the attacker will be under fire as he moves from target to target.

Of Course
I know what you mean, what you gain in efficient economy you also become more vulnerable to loss of such.
Neat and Organized is effective where the threats to it dont apply, as in where the fighting is not. Spread out and messy is necessary when your establishing your borders in the expansion, grabbing mexs, making fire-bases and outposts in the like where land is fought over and boundaries shift and change.

Also when I mean Neat and organized, I dont simply mean clumped together, just intelligent usage of space, defensive converge and economic adjacency.

[speed2]

One and the most important thing that you should remember is, Build a base so you what to find on which spot
The worst thing that can happen during a game is that you are trying to find your own units or factories in your base
Then using adjecency is always good and you can even plan factories to use adjecency later, but for thata you usually have to know what you want to do in 10 minutes
And as Blodir said, if you have just a little time, try to manage it the best you you can do, if not, just draw lines of buildings. But even if you draw lines, dont build more than you need! Thats very important.

And BTW. I think this topic belongs to Help Me Im New section of the forum...just saying for next time

[Kalvirox]

Just a few key points:

1. Adjacency from Mexes gives a greater mass cost reduction than the mass gained by surrounding them with Mass storage. Power adjacency on your factory you want to be your HQ because it will cost less power and you will be able to upgrade it sooner (unless you are limited by mass, you can put it next to a mex and that might be a better solution in about half of cases.. but I find power to be my main limiting factor so I use power adjacency) Of this is just for land factories, for air facs you only really want power adjacency since they cost mostly power although having your air HQ next to a mex is good because gunships ect. are quite mass intensive compared to fighters.

2. If you have a dense base, it will take ages to move through it.. if you have a sparse base you are not being space efficient (people would argue that this is not important but I find if your base is too sparse it can be a bitch to defend) so you want a balance. Not a clusterfuck, but not a mess either.

3. make it look cool, but this is not necessary.. Cool bases often have lots of adjacency with them so you might end up doing it by accident

4. forward bases makes life easier. Helps with securing far away expansions and reduces "the defenders advantage" but of course on some maps this isn't viable...

5. Don't put everything on templates.. that just makes the template list more clustered and it takes longer for you to cycle through them... only put necessary things such as mass storage rings/ Pd + walls... I think the only ones I have are PD, Mass rings, T2 power + shield (It just saves me time putting things together neatly to stick a shield in the middle). t2 arty with pgens and E storage surrounded by power.. I still have a "ceneraii is a cunt" wall art template aswell but we won't tell him about that

[Mycen]

One thing I've seen that seems to works well (on smaller, open maps, anyway) is to build PDs at or near the center of the base rather than the perimeter. Attackers can't bypass your defenses, and a few T2 PD in the middle of the base will shut down raiders pretty easily, as the PD can fire at raiders with relative impunity while the attackers chip away at factories and other buildings.

[Aurion]

One thing I've seen that seems to works well (on smaller, open maps, anyway) is to build PDs at or near the center of the base rather than the perimeter. Attackers can't bypass your defenses, and a few T2 PD in the middle of the base will shut down raiders pretty easily, as the PD can fire at raiders with relative impunity while the attackers chip away at factories and other buildings.

This is general bad advice, if they never get to the center of the base you just wasted mass on 'a couple of' T2 PDs. It might as well make them reach the center of the base by overwhelming you with more mobile units because you built those t2 PDs (and they will probably kill the t2 PDs from out of range with MMLs.