Looking for help by good players

[psycoakira]

My dearest Overlords of nuclear Annihilation,

I, the very humble and often exploding ACU, am seeking your help and ask you to pass me your profound knowledge as follows:

1. Reclaim
Now about Patrols, Attack Move and Rigt-Click factory build. Is there still more to know. How and what of the 3 before mentioned do you use and when ?

2. Coordinated Attacks
Does it happen by sheer luck or your profound experience that group of units arrive at the same location at the same time. The coordinated attack move is not working or is he ?

3. Build assist at T1 T2 and T3
With what and how many Gentlemen. Pls help me here.

4. HQ
Do you snipe them thusly denying your enemy new units for a while. Is it worth a strike or should I concentrate solely on the enemy ACU and dont try to exploit the missing HQ´s ?

Thats all for now.
Thank you very much in advance for your help on this matter.

See you on the Field of Valour.

Yours

Psycho

[Rogueleader89]

My dearest Overlords of nuclear Annihilation,

I, the very humble and often exploding ACU, am seeking your help and ask you to pass me your profound knowledge as follows:

1. Reclaim
Now about Patrols, Attack Move and Rigt-Click factory build. Is there still more to know. How and what of the 3 before mentioned do you use and when ?

2. Coordinated Attacks
Does it happen by sheer luck or your profound experience that group of units arrive at the same location at the same time. The coordinated attack move is not working or is he ?

3. Build assist at T1 T2 and T3
With what and how many Gentlemen. Pls help me here.

4. HQ
Do you snipe them thusly denying your enemy new units for a while. Is it worth a strike or should I concentrate solely on the enemy ACU and dont try to exploit the missing HQ´s ?

Thats all for now.
Thank you very much in advance for your help on this matter.

See you on the Field of Valour.

Yours

Psycho

1) I assume you are referring to engineers? Pretty much never use patrol on engineers personally (but its nice on other things and on ACU for reclaim, problem with it on engineers is that if you forget about them they'll probably end up using your resources repairing units or assisting random things you may or may not care about, attack move can cause the same thing but generally less often since they will fall idle when there is nothing to do), attack move is great to add to the end of order queues or give to idle engineers in general. Manual reclaim is of course preferable for important things/when you aren't doing anything else/if you have the apm for it.

2) As far as I'm aware coordinated attack works (admittedly haven't tried it lately), but it sounds like you are trying to use it with a single group (or groups very close to one another) when its meant to be used with multiple groups coming from different directions? I've only used it a couple of times, usually I don't want or need groups to coordinate that well, I'd rather the enemy respond to one group by moving their defense force away from where the other group will be coming in. If you are having trouble with a single group splitting off a bit, its because they try to keep formation, grab multiple groups of your one large group (or naval group with t3) and give them seperate move orders for the problem to largely disappear.

3) Whatever your economy can support while still allowing you to expand your economy, this will fluctuate. Though as you move later into the game (well and during t1 when you are doing large amounts of land spam since you can only build things so fast) it becomes more advisable to just get a greater number of factories so you can benefit more from adjacency bonuses (which engineers are not affected by) and not fill half of your pop cap with engineers. Tech level isn't hugely important but t1 build fast, are cheap, are easy to split off for reclaiming... also to steal Hawkei's suggestion i keep meaning to try, uef sparkies on naval factories have great buildpower and some limited self-defense capabilities against hover (and enough hp + shield to not die to suicidal t1 bombers).

4) If the opportunity allows sure, but you had better be really certain that you can pull that off and that they don't have another HQ sitting somewhere. This said, if you are going to snipe things pgens (especially t2 and t3) and mexes tend to be better (easier to kill) targets, causing a power or mass stall will delay units and tech and economy a good amount of time (especially if its a 1v1 with nobody to throw power or mass at them to rebuild). If you know you can kill the ACU then go kill that instead of course, winning the game is a pretty good thing :P but generally speaking you want to be very careful about ordering units to snipe things, its very easy to turn a won battle into a lost battle because you set your units to attack an HQ and they died to newly produced enemy units/the enemy ACU when they could have easily dispatched those units, bought themselves more time to wreck a greater amount of stuff, bought time for another wave of your troops to come in, or even just done some damage and retreated, you don't want to leave your opponent a bunch of mass wrecks in their base or they'll just be able to rebuild whatever you destroyed in no time.

In the end you really just have to judge how many resources you are putting towards a snipe vs the potential gain and the likelihood it will succeed.

[nine2]

Disclaimer: I'm not a great player.

Definately agree that sniping power / mexes is a great idea. You can do low cost attacks on t2 pgens that cripple your opponent.

I think the important things to learn are how to build like a boss (i mean making your first 5 factories), how to raid, how to scout, how to know when you can get away with going t2, how to know when you can get away with upgrading mass extractors. Recognizing when you are invincible and redirecting your economy to ecoing up instead of more troops. Etc. These are things that win games.

Whether or not you reclaim using patrol or attack move, or whether you have multiple t2 facs or assist one - these things make a difference - but they are kind of a distraction from the stuff I just mentioned. They are subjects that can be ignored for a while.

But on the subject of going t2 ... usually you are behind on troops because you just went t2 so you want your first few t2 units out quickly. That means you want to assist the initial factory heavily (6 engies?) to get a few units out. After that you can transition to more t2 factories. If you did them all at once then once again you would have few troops so this is a bad idea. Just upgrade one or two at a time. That way you transition from lots of t1 units to lots of t2 units. Trying to do it suddenly can lead to death. However you can also recognize the scenarios where you can get away with it, or where you Have to do it that way. Having said that you don't want to be building lots of t1 when there are lots of t2 tanks on the field. So making a hard transition makes sense at a certain time. The main time I would have lots and lots of support factories is because I can't spend my eco otherwise. Ideally you would have many support factories each assisted by 5-10 engies. That way each unit gets built quickly.

It's taken me an age to realize it, but fine tuning and being a perfectionist isn't really worth it. You are better off spending your attention moving your troops. One trick I do is when I can't spend my mass I look at how much overflow I have (say +40) divide by 10 (each rhino uses 10) and upgrade 4 more factories to tech2 ... grab ten engineers to assist one after another to speed it up ... then go back to the fight. It's not perfect but its quick!

(tech 1 land uses 4m)
(tech 2 land uses 10m)
(tech 3 land uses 20m)

On the subject of reclaim I just use attack move. However at the start of the game whilst setting up my first few factories, i use manual reclaim to get mass way faster and because I have the attention to do it at that time.