RTS food for thought

posted on March 7th, 2010, 3:11 pm

Rushing isn't always so fair, check out Star Wars: Empire at War sometime. It has a population capacity (Arbitrary Headcount Limit) of 10 in Land, 25 in Space (anything u buy in land takes 1 pop, space goes up to 4 based on class.) This means that when someone rushes, you probably won't be able to land (built units stored in queue, landing zones in land or open space in space allow u to bring them in) the appropriate (EaW uses Rock-Paper-Scissors style units) unit(s) to deal with it until ur base is gone. Rushing is ok in my opinion when you can have as many units as u can afford at a time to defend with, not when the game says you can only have X.

posted on March 7th, 2010, 4:36 pm

Hooooly crud Funnystuff, if only there was a smilie to indicate that I fell on my face laughing 

posted on March 7th, 2010, 4:51 pm

Holy shit, Dude.

  If you weren't 15 I'd say you were drunk!    Way to blast out some stream of consciousness but WHERE in the blue hell did that come from? 

Actually, this comes from almost a year of online gaming. Ive actually heard most of these before. I might not have been drunk but my father was .

holy $#^%@* thats a damn good joke...  

OMG EVERYONE!!!! MORT SWORE! I MADE MORT SWEAR!!!!!! Whaaaaaaaaaaat have I done!!!!?

looks like he was taking the piss from this thread

Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - I Quit.

Actually, I didnt even know of this thread. I saw it but just never checked it out.

Hooooly crud Funnystuff, if only there was a smilie to indicate that I fell on my face laughing 

posted on March 7th, 2010, 6:37 pm

Ay caramba x.x

posted on March 7th, 2010, 6:51 pm

That was great!

posted on March 7th, 2010, 7:14 pm

You made Morty loose his cool? Awesome! Its been a while since that happened.

posted on March 7th, 2010, 7:21 pm

posted on March 7th, 2010, 8:42 pm

wow lol

posted on March 7th, 2010, 8:43 pm

someone sticky it 

posted on March 9th, 2010, 2:03 am

I won't say that spamming and rushing aren't fair because certainly they are tactics which have historically been shown to work, especially rushing (I refer you to Hitler). I personally prefer a defensive stance where I build up and tech up and hold the enemy off until I can strike en-mass. This is mostly because I've always played against the AI and when doing so, playing the AI that is, you have to keep a large force at your base because of the AI's tendency to spam and rush. Now, should such tactics be used against new players, maybe not. Well, perhaps I spoke too soon regarding spamming. While yes, it can be effective, it is mostly a waste of resources if you just send in ship after ship after ship only to have them destroyed. I personally prefer to hold on to as many ships as I can and get them to rank up, Warp Ins especially (and no I am not one who uses the tactic of sending Warp Ins to the slaughter).

What I want to know is how people manage to build up large fleets in short periods of time unless they have two or three moon pairs going full tilt and two or three ship yards. And having spent all those resources on building the mining, presumably while maintaining two or three ship yards, you shouldn't have the resources to build a large fleet.

And funnystuff, that is a lovely satirization of the implications of that article  .   

posted on March 9th, 2010, 3:40 am

Well, the how is sort of the real trick.   A lot of rts is your build order, and building efficiently.  You can see on videos how we build up that fleet.  First you're building destroyers and mining, then spend some of your resources on teching up and building better ships.  Don't tech up fast enough and your units will get destroyed too easily.  Tech up too quickly and you don't have enough ships to be useful.

Also, like the article says, you have to pull out your damaged ships so they can repair.  You'll notice players in yandonman's videos.  The good ones are retreating damaged ships, so that they don't lose that many.  So they keep building more and don't lose the ones they have, and presto!   You have a large fleet!

Some of us are constantly trying new things, and tweaking what we do to see if we can get a better fleet, or get a ship out just a little faster, etc.  Half the fun of Fleet Ops is figuring out their game, since they don't have time to tell you if certain things are efficient or not.  Right now I've been looking at Collective Connections upgrades and figuring out what the diminishing returns are.  I've found out just how many Collective connections you get per minute.  I'll post them when it's finished.

But that's what I'd like to see more people do, is try and understand the mechanics of the game, as it is that kind of investigation that will give you the information to base your strategies on and make better decisions on when to build and what to build.

posted on March 9th, 2010, 12:18 pm

@Atlantisbase:
this article is not against ppl who are new, its against noobs. the difference is new players are expected to do bad but if u had 100 games online and start swearing when sb sends 2 b'rels to ur expansion or try to build defenses everywhere and when ur opponent wins u say he/she uses lame tactics. this is what is noob and full retard, not being new to the game.
when i played FO i met a few ppl like that. one person (i remember u ) after seeing my 1st b'rel (u heard me right, a single b'rel) attacking his constructor at his expansion said something like:
'playing vs u is stupid. u should have let me build my ships so we can play but instead u r using stupid rush tactics for noobs ...' and so on. he quit and said he wont play with me again
DN and other ppl (kudos to them ) did a gr8 job showing how to play FO and practicing with new ppl. maybe thats why there are less noobs in FO then in other rts games.

posted on March 9th, 2010, 2:23 pm

I dont blame him. You're just heartless Tom. That was a very rude tactic! Id quit too!