Welcome to FAF. We are glad you are here.
I’m glad that you have decided to play 1v1 ladder games. That is the purest and most intimate way to play Forged Alliance. It is the best way to develop well-rounded skills for Forged Alliance.
But it is not easy, and at first it can be overwhelming, even if you have played many team games. Or, perhaps you have played many ladder games, and you just keep losing.
The purpose of this guide is to focus on a few very basic mistakes that very new players often make. The main mistakes people make are with economic balance and by being too passive (being a “turtle”). In this guide, I will focus on those, rather than advice about how to move specific units around, or how to counter specific defensive structures.
The fun stuff in FAF is marching your armies around, but you need an economy to build an army. You need an economy to build a T4 experimental doom weapon. You need to build up your economy, and not die, to get to the part of the match where you get to decide “should I go for T2 navy, and build up an awesome fleet, or should I go for T2 air first to raid him with gunships?” I want to help you to get there, so you can have fun.
I split this guide into 5 parts. Part 1 is for players who still don’t know how or why they should push out of their base. Part 2 gives a little more advice about how to get out of your base. These are intended for people having trouble getting past 250 rating points on the 1v1 ladder.
Part 3 deals with specific matchups that may frustrate low-rated players. Part 4 is advice aimed at more advanced ladder warriors. If your rating is somewhere in the 250-750 point range, you might like this.
Part 5 is a summary of Zock’s advice, that he gave in personalized 1-on-1 lessons, which he uploaded to YouTube. That is intended for advanced ladder warriors. Even players at and above 1000 rating points will probably find something of interest in what Zock teaches.
Part 1: a strong start (250 rating and less)
Spoiler: show
Mistake: not having a build order.
A “build order” is a plan for what you are going to build at the start of a match.
“You can think of generic build orders as a ticket to enter competitive gameplay. If you don’t know any build orders, it does not matter how good of a strategist you are. You will probably die within the first minutes, or at least handicap yourself so much from the very start that you will die a slow painful death, over the course of the game.”
That is from the introduction to Heaven’s build order tutorial, which you should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uE1-xS2uk
The standard build order for your ACU is:
You make them, with your ACU, in that order. The reason this build order is so good is that you get a factory up quickly, so you can start making engineers; then you get enough power that you won’t just run out of power, and you get some mass income as well. It gets the mexes as quickly as possible without running out of power.
But the build order is more than this: also you need to make more pgens and more factories. Your first factory should make mostly engineers so you have plenty of engineers to do all of the things. As long as more engineers keep coming out of your factory, hopefully when you see the engineers just standing there, that should help to remind you to give them orders.
This build order is far superior to making mexes and pgens before your first factory. For some reason, a lot of noobs like to do this. A factory can make engineers. Multiple engineers can build more mexes and pgens, much faster, than your ACU alone could hope to do. You want to grow quickly and you can’t do that without engineers.
Zock (one of the greatest Forged Alliance players of all time) teaches that in this game, the more economy you have, the faster you can grow. More economy means you can afford to build more pgens, which actually cost a lot of mass and power. More economy means you can afford to upgrade more mass extractors, more quickly. More economy means you can afford to make more tanks, to secure more area, so you can build more mass extractors. There is a snowball effect to being bigger than your opponent. That is why it is so important that you don’t fall behind in the first few minutes of the game. The best way to do this, as a new player, is to steal a working build order (either a generic one, or a build order specific to the map) and follow that for the first 2-3 minutes+.
Mistake: not having a plan
A build order is a kind of plan. And when you are following a plan, you are under less stress. In Forged Alliance, you always have many options. The more choices you have to consider, the more stress you are under. If you are following a plan, you are taking choice away from yourself, which is actually a good thing.
According to Zock, it is always better to have a plan than to have no plan.
A plan can be as simple as: “I’m going to follow a generic build order, make 5 land factories in my base, and stream units out to the left in order to grab the expansion in the top-left corner of the map. My ACU is going to go south, and I’m going to send some units with it. The ACU is going to try to grab 3 mexes in the south and make a point defense there. Then I will make an air factory, send air scouts around the map to see what the situation is, and start upgrading my mexes back home, one at a time, to T2.” If you have that basic idea in your head, you will be able to make decisions and give orders much more quickly, which will give you the time you need to more effectively manage things.
It is said that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Sometimes that is true, sometimes not. But even if your plan is not working perfectly, it is giving you a framework to evaluate your situation and to more quickly decide what to do next (including: whether to change your plan).
Here is Zock’s explanation for why you need to have a plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwwVVS5 ... 0&t=51m46s
Mistake: staying in your base
New players often stay in their base. I don’t just mean the ACU stays in the starting location (which is not necessarily a bad idea, especially for lower-rated players who aren’t very good at keeping their ACU out of danger). I mean that no units at all leave the base until the core mexes are T2 and there’s a T2 factory. That is a terrible way to play.
If you stay in your base, while your opponent expands (sends engineers out to build mexes outside of their base), you will immediately fall behind in economy, and it will be basically impossible to recover from this early deficit.
A T1 mex gives 2 mass per second. If you upgrade it to T2, that will give you 6 mass per second. So by upgrading one of your mexes from T1 to T2, you get an extra 4 mass per second.
But it costs 900 mass to upgrade a mex. For 900 mass, you could build a land factory, 4 engineers, and 10 T1 mexes.
If your opponent expands and builds 10 T1 mexes outside of their base, while you stay home and upgrade one mex to T2, your opponent is going to have a gigantic advantage over you (you get +4 mass per second, and he gets +20). And, remember: in FAF, an economic advantage can snowball, because it costs mass and energy to build more pgens, and it costs mass and energy to upgrade mexes.
Whatever strategy you want to carry out in FAF, you need mass and energy to make it happen. If you allow yourself to fall far behind in mass income, you are making it impossible to battle your opponent, because they will always outnumber you. It is not so much fun to make executive-style decisions (“do I get T2 land and make Pillars, or do I just make 50 T1 tanks?”) when your economy is half as big as your opponent’s. Because even if you make smart decisions at that point, you can still be crushed.
I think one reason lower-rated players don’t try to expand is that they are afraid their expanding engineers will die. If you watch 1v1 games from higher-rated players, they lose engineers all the time. Engineers are not that expensive, and you should have a lot of them. You can and should try to protect your engineers. But the biggest mistake is to not even try to grab mexes.
And: since you know how frustrating it is to lose engineers: don’t forget to harass your opponent by killing his engineers. Sending out units for harassment is a very important part of getting out of your base.
Mistake: not making (enough) units
Part of the sluggish, passive mindset (that you are going to stay in your little castle, behind point defense, while you build up to Tech 3 or Tech 4) is that you don’t need units.
When you get over the turtle mindset, it is obvious that you are going to need many, many units (called “spam” because you are making so many of them) to do all of the things that you want to do around the map.
The best advice I ever got, was in my 8th ladder match, when RLO told me, “wheres you spam” (meaning: why are you not making T1 spam?). I improved significantly after getting that piece of advice and taking it to heart.
Mistake: not making enough factories
Because turtle players don’t need many units, they only build 1-2 factories. If you watch games from high-level players, or even just players at the 400-500 rating points range, you will see a lot more factories.
How many factories to make? The short version is: one T1 factory for every 2 T1 mex you can hold.
If you start on a small map where you have 4 mexes in your base and 6 more nearby, then you’re going to need at least 5 land factories.
On a lot of maps, you might have 16 mexes or more that you can take and hold. So it is normal to build 8+ land factories, depending on the map. It takes time to get 8 factories up, but it also takes time to grab all of the mexes that you will need to run them.
Factories take a long time to build, so it is best to have more than 1 engineer at a time making a single factory. When you are just starting out, for small maps make all of the land factories in your base. Don’t try spreading them around a small map. Don’t just leave your ACU standing there. If your ACU is not going to leave your base, it should be building factories or pgens for you.
Mistake: idle factories
Another common mistake for new players is that they make factories they need, but then the factories are idle (not producing anything). If you make factories, but they don’t produce units, you are just wasting mass. There is an icon on the right side of the screen for idle factories. It can be smart to pay attention to that. But also, when you are zoomed out to take a look at the battlefield, one of the things to think about is “why are my factories doing, are they making the right things? Are they making anything?”
It is good to give your factory orders while they are still under construction. If you wait until they are fully built to give them orders, there will be some idle time.
Take advantage of the ability to make an “infinite build queue.” The “build queue” is the list of things that the factory is going to make. When it is not set to infinite, the factory will make those units, and then stop. When it is set to infinite, every time it makes a unit, it puts (at the back of the queue) an instruction to make the same unit. So it will make everything in the list, and then repeat, infinitely. If your factories are making an infinite number of units, you do not have to worry that they will ever be idle.
This does not mean that you always want all of your factories producing things. If you are stalling mass or power, you might have to make hard choices about what to make. But your goal in the early game should be to get up a number of T1 factories churning out “T1 spam” so that you have units that you can use to attack, defend, raid, scout, etc. You use these forces to spread out and grab more mexes so you can afford to build more pgens and more factories.
Mistake: overbuilding point defense and putting it in the wrong places
Point defense and anti-air turrets can be extremely effective in certain situations. The highest-rated 1v1 ladder players will make defenses in basically every game—but not at the very start, and only when and where they are needed.
A point defense can only help you to hold one small spot. If it is an important spot, and you know it will be attacked soon, then it can be worth making the point defense.
The real problem with making too much point defense is that it shows you have the turtle mentality: your plan is to stay back and hide behind turrets, instead of creating swarms of robot armies to march across the countryside and burn down your opponent’s stuff.
Mistake: getting T2 too early or redundant T2
Part of the turtle mentality is the belief that “T1 sucks” so you should get T2 as quickly as possible. If you go straight to T2, without using T1 units to expand, you will not get ahead of your opponent. Their economy will be so much stronger than yours, that when they transition to T2, they will be able to get far ahead of you.
Just having T2 tech gives you some advantages over an opponent who does not have T2 (especially: TML and TMD). But it does not make you invincible. To actually make cool T2 stuff, you need mass and power. The best way to get that economy is with aggressive expansion using T1 spam or T1 transports.
Another mistake I see is that the player will upgrade their ACU to T2 and also upgrade a factory to T2. Or they will upgrade a land factory and also an air factory to T2 at the same time. Doing it this way basically makes it twice as expensive to get to the next tech level.
I recommend that low-rated players never get the T2 upgrade on their ACU. You will just be tempted to build stuff around your ACU that you don’t really need.
A “build order” is a plan for what you are going to build at the start of a match.
“You can think of generic build orders as a ticket to enter competitive gameplay. If you don’t know any build orders, it does not matter how good of a strategist you are. You will probably die within the first minutes, or at least handicap yourself so much from the very start that you will die a slow painful death, over the course of the game.”
That is from the introduction to Heaven’s build order tutorial, which you should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uE1-xS2uk
The standard build order for your ACU is:
- * a land factory
* two pgens
* two mexes
* one more pgen
* two more mexes
You make them, with your ACU, in that order. The reason this build order is so good is that you get a factory up quickly, so you can start making engineers; then you get enough power that you won’t just run out of power, and you get some mass income as well. It gets the mexes as quickly as possible without running out of power.
But the build order is more than this: also you need to make more pgens and more factories. Your first factory should make mostly engineers so you have plenty of engineers to do all of the things. As long as more engineers keep coming out of your factory, hopefully when you see the engineers just standing there, that should help to remind you to give them orders.
This build order is far superior to making mexes and pgens before your first factory. For some reason, a lot of noobs like to do this. A factory can make engineers. Multiple engineers can build more mexes and pgens, much faster, than your ACU alone could hope to do. You want to grow quickly and you can’t do that without engineers.
Zock (one of the greatest Forged Alliance players of all time) teaches that in this game, the more economy you have, the faster you can grow. More economy means you can afford to build more pgens, which actually cost a lot of mass and power. More economy means you can afford to upgrade more mass extractors, more quickly. More economy means you can afford to make more tanks, to secure more area, so you can build more mass extractors. There is a snowball effect to being bigger than your opponent. That is why it is so important that you don’t fall behind in the first few minutes of the game. The best way to do this, as a new player, is to steal a working build order (either a generic one, or a build order specific to the map) and follow that for the first 2-3 minutes+.
Mistake: not having a plan
A build order is a kind of plan. And when you are following a plan, you are under less stress. In Forged Alliance, you always have many options. The more choices you have to consider, the more stress you are under. If you are following a plan, you are taking choice away from yourself, which is actually a good thing.
According to Zock, it is always better to have a plan than to have no plan.
A plan can be as simple as: “I’m going to follow a generic build order, make 5 land factories in my base, and stream units out to the left in order to grab the expansion in the top-left corner of the map. My ACU is going to go south, and I’m going to send some units with it. The ACU is going to try to grab 3 mexes in the south and make a point defense there. Then I will make an air factory, send air scouts around the map to see what the situation is, and start upgrading my mexes back home, one at a time, to T2.” If you have that basic idea in your head, you will be able to make decisions and give orders much more quickly, which will give you the time you need to more effectively manage things.
It is said that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Sometimes that is true, sometimes not. But even if your plan is not working perfectly, it is giving you a framework to evaluate your situation and to more quickly decide what to do next (including: whether to change your plan).
Here is Zock’s explanation for why you need to have a plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwwVVS5 ... 0&t=51m46s
Mistake: staying in your base
New players often stay in their base. I don’t just mean the ACU stays in the starting location (which is not necessarily a bad idea, especially for lower-rated players who aren’t very good at keeping their ACU out of danger). I mean that no units at all leave the base until the core mexes are T2 and there’s a T2 factory. That is a terrible way to play.
If you stay in your base, while your opponent expands (sends engineers out to build mexes outside of their base), you will immediately fall behind in economy, and it will be basically impossible to recover from this early deficit.
A T1 mex gives 2 mass per second. If you upgrade it to T2, that will give you 6 mass per second. So by upgrading one of your mexes from T1 to T2, you get an extra 4 mass per second.
But it costs 900 mass to upgrade a mex. For 900 mass, you could build a land factory, 4 engineers, and 10 T1 mexes.
If your opponent expands and builds 10 T1 mexes outside of their base, while you stay home and upgrade one mex to T2, your opponent is going to have a gigantic advantage over you (you get +4 mass per second, and he gets +20). And, remember: in FAF, an economic advantage can snowball, because it costs mass and energy to build more pgens, and it costs mass and energy to upgrade mexes.
Whatever strategy you want to carry out in FAF, you need mass and energy to make it happen. If you allow yourself to fall far behind in mass income, you are making it impossible to battle your opponent, because they will always outnumber you. It is not so much fun to make executive-style decisions (“do I get T2 land and make Pillars, or do I just make 50 T1 tanks?”) when your economy is half as big as your opponent’s. Because even if you make smart decisions at that point, you can still be crushed.
I think one reason lower-rated players don’t try to expand is that they are afraid their expanding engineers will die. If you watch 1v1 games from higher-rated players, they lose engineers all the time. Engineers are not that expensive, and you should have a lot of them. You can and should try to protect your engineers. But the biggest mistake is to not even try to grab mexes.
And: since you know how frustrating it is to lose engineers: don’t forget to harass your opponent by killing his engineers. Sending out units for harassment is a very important part of getting out of your base.
Mistake: not making (enough) units
Part of the sluggish, passive mindset (that you are going to stay in your little castle, behind point defense, while you build up to Tech 3 or Tech 4) is that you don’t need units.
When you get over the turtle mindset, it is obvious that you are going to need many, many units (called “spam” because you are making so many of them) to do all of the things that you want to do around the map.
The best advice I ever got, was in my 8th ladder match, when RLO told me, “wheres you spam” (meaning: why are you not making T1 spam?). I improved significantly after getting that piece of advice and taking it to heart.
Mistake: not making enough factories
Because turtle players don’t need many units, they only build 1-2 factories. If you watch games from high-level players, or even just players at the 400-500 rating points range, you will see a lot more factories.
How many factories to make? The short version is: one T1 factory for every 2 T1 mex you can hold.
If you start on a small map where you have 4 mexes in your base and 6 more nearby, then you’re going to need at least 5 land factories.
On a lot of maps, you might have 16 mexes or more that you can take and hold. So it is normal to build 8+ land factories, depending on the map. It takes time to get 8 factories up, but it also takes time to grab all of the mexes that you will need to run them.
Factories take a long time to build, so it is best to have more than 1 engineer at a time making a single factory. When you are just starting out, for small maps make all of the land factories in your base. Don’t try spreading them around a small map. Don’t just leave your ACU standing there. If your ACU is not going to leave your base, it should be building factories or pgens for you.
Mistake: idle factories
Another common mistake for new players is that they make factories they need, but then the factories are idle (not producing anything). If you make factories, but they don’t produce units, you are just wasting mass. There is an icon on the right side of the screen for idle factories. It can be smart to pay attention to that. But also, when you are zoomed out to take a look at the battlefield, one of the things to think about is “why are my factories doing, are they making the right things? Are they making anything?”
It is good to give your factory orders while they are still under construction. If you wait until they are fully built to give them orders, there will be some idle time.
Take advantage of the ability to make an “infinite build queue.” The “build queue” is the list of things that the factory is going to make. When it is not set to infinite, the factory will make those units, and then stop. When it is set to infinite, every time it makes a unit, it puts (at the back of the queue) an instruction to make the same unit. So it will make everything in the list, and then repeat, infinitely. If your factories are making an infinite number of units, you do not have to worry that they will ever be idle.
This does not mean that you always want all of your factories producing things. If you are stalling mass or power, you might have to make hard choices about what to make. But your goal in the early game should be to get up a number of T1 factories churning out “T1 spam” so that you have units that you can use to attack, defend, raid, scout, etc. You use these forces to spread out and grab more mexes so you can afford to build more pgens and more factories.
Mistake: overbuilding point defense and putting it in the wrong places
Point defense and anti-air turrets can be extremely effective in certain situations. The highest-rated 1v1 ladder players will make defenses in basically every game—but not at the very start, and only when and where they are needed.
A point defense can only help you to hold one small spot. If it is an important spot, and you know it will be attacked soon, then it can be worth making the point defense.
The real problem with making too much point defense is that it shows you have the turtle mentality: your plan is to stay back and hide behind turrets, instead of creating swarms of robot armies to march across the countryside and burn down your opponent’s stuff.
Mistake: getting T2 too early or redundant T2
Part of the turtle mentality is the belief that “T1 sucks” so you should get T2 as quickly as possible. If you go straight to T2, without using T1 units to expand, you will not get ahead of your opponent. Their economy will be so much stronger than yours, that when they transition to T2, they will be able to get far ahead of you.
Just having T2 tech gives you some advantages over an opponent who does not have T2 (especially: TML and TMD). But it does not make you invincible. To actually make cool T2 stuff, you need mass and power. The best way to get that economy is with aggressive expansion using T1 spam or T1 transports.
Another mistake I see is that the player will upgrade their ACU to T2 and also upgrade a factory to T2. Or they will upgrade a land factory and also an air factory to T2 at the same time. Doing it this way basically makes it twice as expensive to get to the next tech level.
I recommend that low-rated players never get the T2 upgrade on their ACU. You will just be tempted to build stuff around your ACU that you don’t really need.
Part 2: moving out (250 rating and less)
Spoiler: show
The point of the first part is to convince you to try not being a turtle. Once you have accepted that you must leave your base with T1 spam, there are new mistakes that players commonly make.
Mistake: not reclaiming mass
One of the best ways to boost your economy is to scoop (reclaim) mass, which can be from rocks or wreckages. In addition to maps-specific reclaim that is placed at the start of every match, after a battle, there will be mass from the dead units.
New players often overlook reclaim, and don’t even attempt to grab it. I think this is because they have a hard time understanding the relative value of reclaim compared to the value of having more mexes.
During the early part of the game, when you are trying to expand, reclaiming mass is awesome because it costs a lot of power to build T1 mexes (and it costs a lot of power to make the T1 pgens that you need to get the power that you need), but reclaiming mass does not cost any power at all.
Later in the game, reclaiming mass is still very important. Mass is usually the limiting factor in how much stuff you make (because, let’s face it, by minute 10, players at a low level almost always mass stall by trying to spend more mass than they have). Making stuff is usually the limiting factor in doing stuff. Doing stuff is the fun part of FAF. More mass means more fun. Reclaim is literally just lying on the ground, waiting for you to take it.
You can see where mass is by holding down ctrl-shift. You also just know that there will be reclaim any time there is a battle. A bigger battle, especially with T2 and T3 units, means more reclaim. Do not forget that planes and boats also leave reclaim when they die.
Taking it is as easy as sending one engineer to patrol near it.
Mistake: taking bad engagements
Engagements (that’s what we call it when units fight each other, so we sound smarter) are obviously extremely important.
You want engagements to go well. You want to avoid getting in to bad engagements.
What makes an engagement good, or bad? It depends.
If you’re just talking about two armies clashing in the middle of the map, probably you are looking at who is losing more and who is losing less. If you have 20 mantis, and your opponent has 40 mantis, and they overrun your position, you will lose all 20 and they will probably only lose about 10-15. That is a significant victory for your opponent, especially if they can get an engineer in scoop up the wreckage.
So one way of looking at engagements is: who lost more mass?
But if your opponent is trying to raid your mexes, an engagement might be “good” just because you keep them. If they are sending 5 mantis behind your base to kill 4 mexes, and you end up losing 7 mantis in the process of killing 5 in order to save your mexes, that is not really a “bad” engagement for you.
So you also have to look at things like: opportunities to kill mexes and pgens. Opportunities to secure an expansion or stop your opponent from having naval factories.
Knowing what is or is not a “good” engagement is the first step towards learning how to get good engagements.
The most basic rule is: don’t attack into a superior force. If you have 20 mantis and you charge into 40 mantis, you will be defeated, badly. If you see 40 mantis coming for your 20, your mantis should probably retreat, and kite (retreat meaning move away, and kite meaning that they are shooting at the oncoming mantis while they move away). If you start running away quickly enough, maybe only 8 of his mantis will be shooting at your units, and 8 of your mantis will be shooting back at him. And then the engagement does not go poorly for either side: while it is 8 shooting at 8, you will both lose basically the same number of units.
The flip side is: try to get a superior force, so you can attack into an opponent where they are inferior.
Engagements can also go well, or go poorly, based on unit composition. For example, light artillery does extremely well in some circumstances, and poorly in other circumstances. When you are playing, and when you are watching replays, try to judge whether each engagement was good or bad, and think about what you could do to have better engagements.
You can’t always avoid bad engagements. Your opponent is trying to force them on you. But you can usually avoid taking bad engagements.
Mistake: not scouting
If you build an air factory, you can make air scouts. If you send out air scouts, you can see what your opponent is up to. This will help you to not just suddenly die because your opponent surprised you.
Every strategy in FAF has a counter. But you cannot afford to effectively counter every possible strategy from your opponent. If you fly scout planes around the map, and every few minutes you fly a scout plane over his base, you can try to see what strategy he is working on. Then you can counter that specific strategy, so you are spending your resources wisely.
Part of the fun of FAF is getting to make executive decisions (like: “Do I go T2 navy, or T2 air?”). Deciding how to counter your opponent’s strategy is an executive decision. If you scout your opponent, see what they are doing, and you get the chance to come up with a response, that is fun. If you see that your opponent has T2 air and has 4 gunships hiding behind his base, then you know you should build flak, or build lots of T1 interceptors. Having the opportunity to make that decision, and put a plan into effect, is a lot of fun. Suddenly finding your ACU surrounded by 10 gunships is not so much fun. The purpose of this guide is to get you to the point where you can have fun in ladder games.
If you make one air factory, consider giving it an infinite build order: 1 scout, 2 interceptors. Then, as you are playing the game, whenever you notice a scout plane on the ground (or seven of them), take that as a reminder to send it on a scouting mission. And because you are making interceptors, over time you will build up an air force that just might save you from a T2 air snipe instant death attack.
Mistake: lacking radar
Scouting is one form of intel. The other main form of intel is radar. (Also, for all of the reasons that you want radar, in the water you want both radar and sonar.)
At long range (and when you fly scout planes into enemy territory) radar is important for not being surprised by where your opponent’s units are, and so you can make better plans about where to send your units. Longer-range radars are the T1, T2, and T3 radar buildings, as well as on destroyers and cruisers.
At short range, radar is important because, without radar coverage, your units can only shoot at units they can see. But with radar coverage, they can shoot farther. This can give a big advantage in fights, especially if one side is trying to keep distance between the two forces. The easiest way to have short-range radar for your force is to send a land scout with your units.
Mistake: leaving your ACU exposed
If you do move out with your ACU, that can be a very powerful move. The ACU has a lot of hit points, inflicts a lot of damage, it regenerates hit points pretty quickly, it can be upgraded to do those things even better, and you can use it to build mexes and factories around the map.
An un-upgraded ACU has equivalent firepower to about 20 T1 tanks.
But moving out can also be a death sentence for you, if your enemy is able to swarm your ACU with enough T1 tanks (or stronger units).
As you play, you will get better about not putting your ACU in the wrong place. Since this is an extremely basic guide, I just want to give basic advice:
Mistake: not reclaiming mass
One of the best ways to boost your economy is to scoop (reclaim) mass, which can be from rocks or wreckages. In addition to maps-specific reclaim that is placed at the start of every match, after a battle, there will be mass from the dead units.
New players often overlook reclaim, and don’t even attempt to grab it. I think this is because they have a hard time understanding the relative value of reclaim compared to the value of having more mexes.
During the early part of the game, when you are trying to expand, reclaiming mass is awesome because it costs a lot of power to build T1 mexes (and it costs a lot of power to make the T1 pgens that you need to get the power that you need), but reclaiming mass does not cost any power at all.
Later in the game, reclaiming mass is still very important. Mass is usually the limiting factor in how much stuff you make (because, let’s face it, by minute 10, players at a low level almost always mass stall by trying to spend more mass than they have). Making stuff is usually the limiting factor in doing stuff. Doing stuff is the fun part of FAF. More mass means more fun. Reclaim is literally just lying on the ground, waiting for you to take it.
You can see where mass is by holding down ctrl-shift. You also just know that there will be reclaim any time there is a battle. A bigger battle, especially with T2 and T3 units, means more reclaim. Do not forget that planes and boats also leave reclaim when they die.
Taking it is as easy as sending one engineer to patrol near it.
Mistake: taking bad engagements
Engagements (that’s what we call it when units fight each other, so we sound smarter) are obviously extremely important.
You want engagements to go well. You want to avoid getting in to bad engagements.
What makes an engagement good, or bad? It depends.
If you’re just talking about two armies clashing in the middle of the map, probably you are looking at who is losing more and who is losing less. If you have 20 mantis, and your opponent has 40 mantis, and they overrun your position, you will lose all 20 and they will probably only lose about 10-15. That is a significant victory for your opponent, especially if they can get an engineer in scoop up the wreckage.
So one way of looking at engagements is: who lost more mass?
But if your opponent is trying to raid your mexes, an engagement might be “good” just because you keep them. If they are sending 5 mantis behind your base to kill 4 mexes, and you end up losing 7 mantis in the process of killing 5 in order to save your mexes, that is not really a “bad” engagement for you.
So you also have to look at things like: opportunities to kill mexes and pgens. Opportunities to secure an expansion or stop your opponent from having naval factories.
Knowing what is or is not a “good” engagement is the first step towards learning how to get good engagements.
The most basic rule is: don’t attack into a superior force. If you have 20 mantis and you charge into 40 mantis, you will be defeated, badly. If you see 40 mantis coming for your 20, your mantis should probably retreat, and kite (retreat meaning move away, and kite meaning that they are shooting at the oncoming mantis while they move away). If you start running away quickly enough, maybe only 8 of his mantis will be shooting at your units, and 8 of your mantis will be shooting back at him. And then the engagement does not go poorly for either side: while it is 8 shooting at 8, you will both lose basically the same number of units.
The flip side is: try to get a superior force, so you can attack into an opponent where they are inferior.
Engagements can also go well, or go poorly, based on unit composition. For example, light artillery does extremely well in some circumstances, and poorly in other circumstances. When you are playing, and when you are watching replays, try to judge whether each engagement was good or bad, and think about what you could do to have better engagements.
You can’t always avoid bad engagements. Your opponent is trying to force them on you. But you can usually avoid taking bad engagements.
Mistake: not scouting
If you build an air factory, you can make air scouts. If you send out air scouts, you can see what your opponent is up to. This will help you to not just suddenly die because your opponent surprised you.
Every strategy in FAF has a counter. But you cannot afford to effectively counter every possible strategy from your opponent. If you fly scout planes around the map, and every few minutes you fly a scout plane over his base, you can try to see what strategy he is working on. Then you can counter that specific strategy, so you are spending your resources wisely.
Part of the fun of FAF is getting to make executive decisions (like: “Do I go T2 navy, or T2 air?”). Deciding how to counter your opponent’s strategy is an executive decision. If you scout your opponent, see what they are doing, and you get the chance to come up with a response, that is fun. If you see that your opponent has T2 air and has 4 gunships hiding behind his base, then you know you should build flak, or build lots of T1 interceptors. Having the opportunity to make that decision, and put a plan into effect, is a lot of fun. Suddenly finding your ACU surrounded by 10 gunships is not so much fun. The purpose of this guide is to get you to the point where you can have fun in ladder games.
If you make one air factory, consider giving it an infinite build order: 1 scout, 2 interceptors. Then, as you are playing the game, whenever you notice a scout plane on the ground (or seven of them), take that as a reminder to send it on a scouting mission. And because you are making interceptors, over time you will build up an air force that just might save you from a T2 air snipe instant death attack.
Mistake: lacking radar
Scouting is one form of intel. The other main form of intel is radar. (Also, for all of the reasons that you want radar, in the water you want both radar and sonar.)
At long range (and when you fly scout planes into enemy territory) radar is important for not being surprised by where your opponent’s units are, and so you can make better plans about where to send your units. Longer-range radars are the T1, T2, and T3 radar buildings, as well as on destroyers and cruisers.
At short range, radar is important because, without radar coverage, your units can only shoot at units they can see. But with radar coverage, they can shoot farther. This can give a big advantage in fights, especially if one side is trying to keep distance between the two forces. The easiest way to have short-range radar for your force is to send a land scout with your units.
Mistake: leaving your ACU exposed
If you do move out with your ACU, that can be a very powerful move. The ACU has a lot of hit points, inflicts a lot of damage, it regenerates hit points pretty quickly, it can be upgraded to do those things even better, and you can use it to build mexes and factories around the map.
An un-upgraded ACU has equivalent firepower to about 20 T1 tanks.
But moving out can also be a death sentence for you, if your enemy is able to swarm your ACU with enough T1 tanks (or stronger units).
As you play, you will get better about not putting your ACU in the wrong place. Since this is an extremely basic guide, I just want to give basic advice:
- * have a radar, or fly a scout plane, near where your ACU is, so you don’t get surprised by a sudden swarm of enemy units
* have units with your ACU, so if you are attacked, you can try to win the fight
* once the game gets past 10 minutes, or if you see that your opponent has T2 air, have flak with your ACU
* the gun upgrade is very strong. If your opponent has the gun upgrade and you don’t, his ACU is very dangerous to yours.
Part 3: big maps and master turtles (250-500 rating)
Spoiler: show
Your time and attention are limited
You probably noticed that there is so much going on at once, that you just can’t do everything you know you ought to be doing. That is true, at every level. Even Zock talked about not enjoying 20x20 maps because there were too many things he needed to pay attention to. Some people are better at multitasking than other people, but no one is fast enough to do everything perfectly.
As you play, you will get better at giving orders more efficiently. One of the things you want to practice is giving orders quickly, and moving on to the next thing.
Also, one of the most valuable things you can do is to zoom out, take a deep breath, and look at the big picture. You can also get this big picture point of view while you are watching replays of your games, but by then it is too late to make a difference. Try doing this during your games, at least every few minutes. And try in general playing more zoomed out. It helps to have radar coverage, and to scout your opponent, so that when you zoom out, you see more of what is happening.
Don’t stress about big maps.
Players at low rating levels often hate the big maps (20x20) because they fall behind their opponents so much more quickly than they fall behind on small maps. This is especially true if your mindset is “turtle” rather than “expand expand expand.”
Players at low rating levels are very bad at shooting down transports. I could tell you: “learn how to shoot down transports, learn how to make scouts, send them around the map, and then get interceptors locked on your enemy’s transports, learn how to send bombers to kill the enemy’s expanding engineers, learn how to win air battles and use air superiority so you can use bombers and transports to get a big advantage over your opponent.” You WILL eventually need to learn all that if you want to keep improving. But that is not the best advice I can give when you have a very low rating. No. The best advice I can give you is: make a lot of transports and use them to drop engineers all around the map to grab as much as you can, as fast as you can. It is okay if the first three units to come out of your air factory are all transports. A 1700-rated player would never do this. But if your opponent is half as bad as you are, he won’t catch most of the transports. Be super-greedy and expand super-quickly. Do not expand only to “your” side of the map.
Every time you give an order for your transport to drop units somewhere, queue up another order after that (by holding shift) for your transport to return home.
When you get better, and you face better opponents, this rapid-expansion-super-greedy strategy will stop working. You will still want to expand quickly with transports, but you have to be more careful about protecting them. When you get there, you can adapt and improve. But in the meantime, do what works against low-rated players and you will have a lot more fun.
One mistake from low-rated players make is idle units after a drop. The transport will drop units, and they will just sit there for 30 seconds or longer. Try not to forget about them.
Expanding with transports and engineers: it is more sneaky if you drop engineers away from mexes. But you are not trying to be sneaky, unless your opponent already has the expansions. You are trying to be greedy. So drop the engineers right into the middle of a cluster of open mexes. If you need mass badly, it might be smart to build mexes first, before you build a T1 factory. If you are under 250 rating points, probably your most limited resource is your attention, not your mass. If you start building a factory first, and then queue up the mexes to be built after the factory, this lets you immediately give orders to the factory (while it is still under construction) and then you can zoom out and give your attention to something else going on somewhere else on the map.
If you tell the factory: “make a tank, a mobile anti-air, and an engineer, make these units on infinite loop, and when they come out, they should patrol in a triangle shape around the factory” you can then give your attention to the rest of the map. While you are not paying any attention to this expansion, the engineers will build the factory, build the mexes for you, and a stream of units will come out, stomping around in a circle: tanks to stop you from being raided by land units; mobile anti air to shoot down bombers; and engineers that will scoop everything around the expansion.
Eventually you will have enough of them, so you can tell the factory to stop making those units. You will have a number of engineers there so you can quickly start building other things, like radar, point defense, more factories (if you want to launch an assault from this expansion), etc., depending on what you need based on what your opponent is up to. This is an extremely efficient way (in terms of attention and APM) for a low-rated player to grab as much of the map as possible, as quickly as possible.
After you finish expanding as much as you can, then you can look at upgrading your economy and your tech. This is where you are making executive decisions, like deciding how hard you want to eco, which tech you want, and where you want to build up armies so you can take things away from your opponent. This is where the game gets to be fun.
Beating a turtle
So I have told you over and over again not to be a turtle. But one of the common experiences that lower-rated players have playing FAF, is losing to a turtle. It is also one of the worst feelings, when you are trying to play the “right” way, and you lose to a turtle. And if you are at 250 rating points or less, you are going to run into turtles quite often, including people who have a lot more skill than you, and just really, really like to turtle (which is why their ratings are so low, even though they have better skills). So I should give you a few points of advice about how to beat another player who is following the turtle strategy.
I have good news: the way to beat a turtle is: AFTER you expand, turtle harder than them. Turtle, but without building the point defense. I know you like to turtle, because the fact is, we ALL like to turtle. (That is half the reason why people play team games.) The only reason better players don’t turtle more is because we also like to win games.
First, you do what I describe above in terms of out-expanding them, grabbing as many T1 mexes as you can. It will be even easier to grab them if your opponent is being a turtle.
Second, scout them to see what they’ve got. If they stayed at home to build up T2 point defense, don’t bother attacking them with a T1 army. Once you have enough T1 units, you can stop making T1 land.
Their plan might be to turtle up until they can build a nuke launcher. Or a Galactic Colossus. Or, as soon as their fourth T2 mex finishes, they might start building TML, which could actually do a lot of damage to you. Your opponent will eventually have enough resources to implement any strategy (making lots of bombers, making gunships, making T3 land, etc.), and when they start on a strategy, you need to start on the counter to it. This is why scouting is so important. In fact, their strategy might be to build up 50 T1 tanks use them to run you over early. If that is what they are doing, then the most important thing for you might be to make more T1 tanks.
Do not only scout your opponent’s base. You also need to scout the rest of the map to make sure that they are not doing anything sneaky. Put a few scout planes on patrol to give you vision and radar over all the places that you opponent is not supposed to be. Making radars is a good idea, too.
Third, it is not enough to have a bigger economy than them, you need to stay ahead of them, and you need to not fall behind in tech. Build enough pgens. Upgrade your mexes faster than your opponent can upgrade his. Get a T2 land headquarters so you can make T2 engineers. Never stop eco-ing. When your mexes get to T2, put mass storages around them. Start upgrading mexes to T3. When you scout your opponent, pay attention to his economy and make sure that you are growing faster than him. You are not just trying to keep up with your opponent. You are trying to snowball an unstoppable economic advantage, so you can grow so much faster than your opponent could ever hope to grow, and then you will use that to crush them.
Fourth, while you are doing this, don’t let your opponent out of their turtle box. If they make 10 T2 tanks, make 15-20. If they have 20 interceptors, have at least 40. Be ready to stop them from expanding. If they make naval units, make twice as much as them, and then go attack their naval yard (even if they have enough defenses in their base to stop a land attack, they probably can’t stop you from killing their naval yard).
You want to out-grow and out-tech your opponent. If they build up strong enough defenses, it might be impossible to break them with T1 units. So get up to T2 and make MMLs or TML. If they have enough defenses to stop that, then get up to T3 and make T3 mobile artillery. Or get to T3 air and build a strat bomber. As long as they don’t have a SAM, one strat bomber can do huge damage. If they have shielding, but no SAMs, maybe you need to build up 4 strat bombers and attack with them at the same time. If they can defend against that, build a nuke launcher, or a heavy artillery, or some T4, or 50 Percivals.
The worst thing you can do is to stop ecoing in order to implement some strategy. If you stop upgrading your mexes (or if you completely mass stall while you are trying to upgrade them) because you want to build 15 T2 artillery pieces, you are giving your opponent the chance to get back into the game. You can build a mess of T2 artillery, if that is the strategy you want to follow—as long as you also keep ecoing faster than your opponent is.
Figure out what strategy you think can defeat them with a single attack. Failed attacks can actually help your opponent because you will be leaving mass on their doorstep that they can reclaim. If you make a Monkeylord, and you think, “this just isn’t enough. He has 4 Ravagers and I’m not sure whether a Monkeylord can break that, because I don’t know this game very well” then keep ecoing, and make a Megalith too. He probably can’t build enough defenses to stop a Megalith, in the time it takes you to make a Megalith, if you have twice as many T3 mexes as he does. Hang back with your spider until it can go in with the crab at the same time.
This is not the time to think small. In this situation, you want to grow your economy on an epic scale, and build weapons on an epic scale, to destroy your opponent in an epic fashion.
You probably noticed that there is so much going on at once, that you just can’t do everything you know you ought to be doing. That is true, at every level. Even Zock talked about not enjoying 20x20 maps because there were too many things he needed to pay attention to. Some people are better at multitasking than other people, but no one is fast enough to do everything perfectly.
As you play, you will get better at giving orders more efficiently. One of the things you want to practice is giving orders quickly, and moving on to the next thing.
Also, one of the most valuable things you can do is to zoom out, take a deep breath, and look at the big picture. You can also get this big picture point of view while you are watching replays of your games, but by then it is too late to make a difference. Try doing this during your games, at least every few minutes. And try in general playing more zoomed out. It helps to have radar coverage, and to scout your opponent, so that when you zoom out, you see more of what is happening.
Don’t stress about big maps.
Players at low rating levels often hate the big maps (20x20) because they fall behind their opponents so much more quickly than they fall behind on small maps. This is especially true if your mindset is “turtle” rather than “expand expand expand.”
Players at low rating levels are very bad at shooting down transports. I could tell you: “learn how to shoot down transports, learn how to make scouts, send them around the map, and then get interceptors locked on your enemy’s transports, learn how to send bombers to kill the enemy’s expanding engineers, learn how to win air battles and use air superiority so you can use bombers and transports to get a big advantage over your opponent.” You WILL eventually need to learn all that if you want to keep improving. But that is not the best advice I can give when you have a very low rating. No. The best advice I can give you is: make a lot of transports and use them to drop engineers all around the map to grab as much as you can, as fast as you can. It is okay if the first three units to come out of your air factory are all transports. A 1700-rated player would never do this. But if your opponent is half as bad as you are, he won’t catch most of the transports. Be super-greedy and expand super-quickly. Do not expand only to “your” side of the map.
Every time you give an order for your transport to drop units somewhere, queue up another order after that (by holding shift) for your transport to return home.
When you get better, and you face better opponents, this rapid-expansion-super-greedy strategy will stop working. You will still want to expand quickly with transports, but you have to be more careful about protecting them. When you get there, you can adapt and improve. But in the meantime, do what works against low-rated players and you will have a lot more fun.
One mistake from low-rated players make is idle units after a drop. The transport will drop units, and they will just sit there for 30 seconds or longer. Try not to forget about them.
Expanding with transports and engineers: it is more sneaky if you drop engineers away from mexes. But you are not trying to be sneaky, unless your opponent already has the expansions. You are trying to be greedy. So drop the engineers right into the middle of a cluster of open mexes. If you need mass badly, it might be smart to build mexes first, before you build a T1 factory. If you are under 250 rating points, probably your most limited resource is your attention, not your mass. If you start building a factory first, and then queue up the mexes to be built after the factory, this lets you immediately give orders to the factory (while it is still under construction) and then you can zoom out and give your attention to something else going on somewhere else on the map.
If you tell the factory: “make a tank, a mobile anti-air, and an engineer, make these units on infinite loop, and when they come out, they should patrol in a triangle shape around the factory” you can then give your attention to the rest of the map. While you are not paying any attention to this expansion, the engineers will build the factory, build the mexes for you, and a stream of units will come out, stomping around in a circle: tanks to stop you from being raided by land units; mobile anti air to shoot down bombers; and engineers that will scoop everything around the expansion.
Eventually you will have enough of them, so you can tell the factory to stop making those units. You will have a number of engineers there so you can quickly start building other things, like radar, point defense, more factories (if you want to launch an assault from this expansion), etc., depending on what you need based on what your opponent is up to. This is an extremely efficient way (in terms of attention and APM) for a low-rated player to grab as much of the map as possible, as quickly as possible.
After you finish expanding as much as you can, then you can look at upgrading your economy and your tech. This is where you are making executive decisions, like deciding how hard you want to eco, which tech you want, and where you want to build up armies so you can take things away from your opponent. This is where the game gets to be fun.
Beating a turtle
So I have told you over and over again not to be a turtle. But one of the common experiences that lower-rated players have playing FAF, is losing to a turtle. It is also one of the worst feelings, when you are trying to play the “right” way, and you lose to a turtle. And if you are at 250 rating points or less, you are going to run into turtles quite often, including people who have a lot more skill than you, and just really, really like to turtle (which is why their ratings are so low, even though they have better skills). So I should give you a few points of advice about how to beat another player who is following the turtle strategy.
I have good news: the way to beat a turtle is: AFTER you expand, turtle harder than them. Turtle, but without building the point defense. I know you like to turtle, because the fact is, we ALL like to turtle. (That is half the reason why people play team games.) The only reason better players don’t turtle more is because we also like to win games.
First, you do what I describe above in terms of out-expanding them, grabbing as many T1 mexes as you can. It will be even easier to grab them if your opponent is being a turtle.
Second, scout them to see what they’ve got. If they stayed at home to build up T2 point defense, don’t bother attacking them with a T1 army. Once you have enough T1 units, you can stop making T1 land.
Their plan might be to turtle up until they can build a nuke launcher. Or a Galactic Colossus. Or, as soon as their fourth T2 mex finishes, they might start building TML, which could actually do a lot of damage to you. Your opponent will eventually have enough resources to implement any strategy (making lots of bombers, making gunships, making T3 land, etc.), and when they start on a strategy, you need to start on the counter to it. This is why scouting is so important. In fact, their strategy might be to build up 50 T1 tanks use them to run you over early. If that is what they are doing, then the most important thing for you might be to make more T1 tanks.
Do not only scout your opponent’s base. You also need to scout the rest of the map to make sure that they are not doing anything sneaky. Put a few scout planes on patrol to give you vision and radar over all the places that you opponent is not supposed to be. Making radars is a good idea, too.
Third, it is not enough to have a bigger economy than them, you need to stay ahead of them, and you need to not fall behind in tech. Build enough pgens. Upgrade your mexes faster than your opponent can upgrade his. Get a T2 land headquarters so you can make T2 engineers. Never stop eco-ing. When your mexes get to T2, put mass storages around them. Start upgrading mexes to T3. When you scout your opponent, pay attention to his economy and make sure that you are growing faster than him. You are not just trying to keep up with your opponent. You are trying to snowball an unstoppable economic advantage, so you can grow so much faster than your opponent could ever hope to grow, and then you will use that to crush them.
Fourth, while you are doing this, don’t let your opponent out of their turtle box. If they make 10 T2 tanks, make 15-20. If they have 20 interceptors, have at least 40. Be ready to stop them from expanding. If they make naval units, make twice as much as them, and then go attack their naval yard (even if they have enough defenses in their base to stop a land attack, they probably can’t stop you from killing their naval yard).
You want to out-grow and out-tech your opponent. If they build up strong enough defenses, it might be impossible to break them with T1 units. So get up to T2 and make MMLs or TML. If they have enough defenses to stop that, then get up to T3 and make T3 mobile artillery. Or get to T3 air and build a strat bomber. As long as they don’t have a SAM, one strat bomber can do huge damage. If they have shielding, but no SAMs, maybe you need to build up 4 strat bombers and attack with them at the same time. If they can defend against that, build a nuke launcher, or a heavy artillery, or some T4, or 50 Percivals.
The worst thing you can do is to stop ecoing in order to implement some strategy. If you stop upgrading your mexes (or if you completely mass stall while you are trying to upgrade them) because you want to build 15 T2 artillery pieces, you are giving your opponent the chance to get back into the game. You can build a mess of T2 artillery, if that is the strategy you want to follow—as long as you also keep ecoing faster than your opponent is.
Figure out what strategy you think can defeat them with a single attack. Failed attacks can actually help your opponent because you will be leaving mass on their doorstep that they can reclaim. If you make a Monkeylord, and you think, “this just isn’t enough. He has 4 Ravagers and I’m not sure whether a Monkeylord can break that, because I don’t know this game very well” then keep ecoing, and make a Megalith too. He probably can’t build enough defenses to stop a Megalith, in the time it takes you to make a Megalith, if you have twice as many T3 mexes as he does. Hang back with your spider until it can go in with the crab at the same time.
This is not the time to think small. In this situation, you want to grow your economy on an epic scale, and build weapons on an epic scale, to destroy your opponent in an epic fashion.
Part 4: Intermediate Ladder Concepts (250-750 rating)
Spoiler: show
(This was too large to include in a single forum post, so I am going to paste Part 4 into a separate comment below.)
Part 5: Lessons from Zock (250-1000+ rating)
Spoiler: show
Zock recorded 25 hours of 1-on-1 lessons with FAF players during 2014-2016. I am in the process of summarizing his advice, and sorting it by subject matter, to make it easier to find, along with links back to the original YouTube videos.
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viewtopic.php?f=62&t=17577
