Transitioning beyond the first 5 minutes

[TrouserDemon]

The main trouble I'm having is maintaining map control and and influence past the first few minutes of mostly mechanical micromanagement. I can passably keep my mass between empty and full by juggling the plates of production and upgrading extractors and reclaiming, but before too long I find I've lost my external mass extractors, and I'm increasingly fending off attacks to my own base, and in the struggle to keep my hydro and power generators alive I'm wasting mass. Before too long I get overwhelmed by units and my commander dies to floods of T1 units or some gunships.

How does one best transition beyond first contact with the enemy and the aggressive raiding?

[Softly]

Avoid teching mexes in the first few minutes (assuming smallish maps) and focus on building more factories as a way to best spend your mass. That way you'll end up with more bots, at which time its time for you to do some raiding and/or attacking of their base!

My general rule of thumb would be keep building factories until them and building pgens has your mass very slightly negative (and no storage). Then use your com to kill units and reclaim that if you want to start teching to either t2 land or t2 mass.

[Myrdral]

A replay of one of your games wou helpful. It sounds as if you are taking a very defensive approach from your post. Your problem may be in not producing enough t1 units or not gathering enough intel to use them effectively. You may also be teching too slowly or spending too much on eco like Dilli said. What sort of economy and units do you have when you feel your control begin to slip away?

[Myxir]

basically, it works like this:


ECONOMY

simple start buildorder:
landfactory, 2 pgns (power generator), 3 mexes (mass extractor), another 3 pgns and then a second factory (land, for air you might wanna use 1~3 more pgns)
in the factory, from the first 5 units should be 2~3 engies and at least one scout and tanks/labs (5x5 or 10x10 maps). move the scout close to the enemy to see raiding attemps or first bomber
the first enginier you get should build more mexes (there is often a 4th mex at your start position, start with this and then line up alot more of them), the second should reclaim mass and/or build mexes too, and the third build a lot more pgns
when you get more engies, take 2 or 3 to build more facs. don't invest much mass/energy to upgrading on small maps, better build facs and units.

it's important to have enough energy, here some things to know:
every landfac needs 2 pgns to run
every airfac needs 4 pgns to run
a radar will need 1 pgn to run, and radar is something you want to have
for a t1 engie building something, you usually need 1~2 pgns, for the acu even more
--> when you have 3 engies building, 4 landfacs and your acu and one radar, you will need at least 14 pgns


UNITS

with this, you should be able to get some factories up without running out of energy. use your units to attack your enemy, as attacking is better than defending. the enemy can barely attack you when he got to defend. but don't throw your units away.
also attack extractors of your enemy, these are very important in early games especially when there is not much mass to reclaim

build alot factories. on 5x5 maps it's not unusual to have at least 5 factories building units, often more (depends on available mexes/reclaim)