help dealing with powerstalls

[Eoinbastian]

Hi guys hiroprotagonist here. Lately in 1v1s Ive been powerstalling hard.

Now I know sevral obvious ways to deal with power stalls.

1. Pause air.
2. Pause factory building engies
3 dont use more then 3 engies for power spam except on certain maps
4. Pause power spam/reduce build power

What are some other ways to get out of powerstalls?
Maybe Ineed better tree reclaim..

How do pros anticipate how much power to build?

Thanks guys!

[lextoc]

First reaction should indeed be pausing air. Pausing a factory building engineers isn't that useful if you ask me. Instead you could perhaps decide to pause all your land factories. I do this when getting an early gun upgrade on my ACU, but it's always a little bit risky. And it isn't the same as power stalling, I choose to have no power. I think the best thing to do is put as many engineers as possible on power, but on one pgen at the time (logic). Meaning you shouldn't build multiple pgens simultaneously.

[ZLO_RD]

most desperate and last used method is to pause mass production in mass extractors, but you should not forget that ths method exist...
some people tell that they force mass stalls to prevent power stall (start t3 mex and heavy assist it) but i would not recommend that way

also if you have unfinished structires you can reclaim then and get mass and power back
also you can
1) selfdestruct building
2) start rerbuilding it on same place so it will be started from 50%
3) instead of continuing building start reclaiming it and you will get 50% power and 50% mass back

you can reclaim enemy unfinished structures to get power too

and ofc best way is to predict power stall and make it never happen by taking in account how many engineers you are useing for building and assisting stuff so if you want to begin spamming factories with 6 engies you will 1rst need about 9 pgens just to begin and then add 2 more for each factory own consumption

that helps creating better build orders
better build order usually means - get more factories earlyer
so if you make second land with just acu you build 5 or even 4 pgens before starting second fac, but if you assist acu with engy to boost your build order you will need to add at least 1 more pgen before second factory...

also if you are on the edge of power stall you can put away assist from air factories, but still keep factories producing, cause they will benefit from adjustency bonuses (ofc if you have power gens around factories)

also some times if you have firebase you can build t1 pgens around t2 shields and radars there if you suddenly about to go power stall

also need to keep in mind that some units are made with enabled cloak/jammer/shield abilities
and if for some reason you have many of them they may suddenly affect your power
i am taking about cybran t3 air scout and t3 gunship and monkeylord
and UEF t1 frigate
units with personal shield are kinda obvius

Edit: OHH how could i forget!!! you can reclaim forest if you need power, as well as small bushes, but they are kinda not worth reclaiming...

[Vee]

There are two different kind of powerstalls. One powerstall is when your power is going down fast, and your mass is also going down fast. Usually since you have less power storage than mass storage, you will stall power before you stall mass. This powerstall is caused purely by too much build capacity. So just pause some build capacity. This power stall happens when you have mass in storage and suddenly you increase build capacity to spend that mass. So just spend that mass a little bit slower, give it time to go down.

The second kind of powerstall is when your power is going down, but when your mass is staying constant. This is a bad kind of powerstall because it means that you really don't have enough power to spend your mass. The only way to get out of this kind of powerstall is to build more power. To reduce the effects of the powerstall you may also pause/disable things that are using power, but that are less important. For example: radars, shields, sonar, stealth, air spam, acu upgrade. These are all things that use relatively a lot of power. Some things that do not use a lot of power are: mass extractor upgrades, land spam, navy spam. So if you have trouble spending your mass while not stalling power, you may for example pause air but upgrade a mass extractor. That way you can still spend your mass but you use less power, which lets you have that power for making more power.

The best way to deal with powerstall is to prevent it of course. What really helps here is a stable economy. What I see happens a lot to me & others is reacting too late to economy problems, then overreact. Because of overreaction the economy goes bad in the other direction, for example they spam TONS of power which causes hard powerstall and in the end they have too much power. Because of too much power they stop powerspam completely, and then a few minutes later when their mass income increased, they are again in powerstall because they forgot to restart the powerspam. Compare it with driving a bike or car: if you are going too far left on the road you should steer to the right. But if you overreact you go too far to the right and then you have to react again to go to the left again. You swing left to right left right and you never stabilize. So you should be careful not to overreact. Do a small adjustment, and then give your eco some time to fix itself. Also it helps to know how many engies on powerspam & how many engies on factory spam to have a stable economy. A good rule of thumb is if you have X engies on factory spam, you need X/2 engies on powerspam to keep a stable economy.

[Eoinbastian]

Wow thanks for all the advice. Hopefully I can actually apply it.

I know that everything is map dependent but how early should you start power spam. Or how much power is good to build with acu between early factories?