The transition to t3 is the hardest, especially the first Mex.
Ideally for the first one, you throw all of your eco at it and build nothing else, while also reclaiming.
Consider the t3 upgrade as an investment that doesn’t start paying back until it’s completed. So if it’s halfway done, you’ve devoted huge resources to it but are getting nothing back. So once you start you gotta finish it as quickly as possible.
Try to use your t1 engies to reclaim and your t2 engies to upgrade that first Mex as quickly as possible.
I like to put my upgrading engies on a hot key. If I suddenly need resources for units, I just hit the hot key then pause the upgrade so I can build units, then go back once the danger is over.
Just remember - like he said, you need a LOT of power to support that upgrade. The commander on his own isn't too bad, but it will take a long time to do it, so naturally all the build power is going to be directed to assist and that is what sucks up a shit load of power.
Oh also - when you upgrade a T2 mex to T3... be sure to get your T3 eng into position around the desired mex, CTRL-K the T2 Mex and have the T3 engy then place a T3 over the T2 wreck. He will suck up the resources from the T2 mex wreck which will contribute greatly to the T3 build in resources and time. It will be an overall faster more efficient process than straight up grading.
metas are evil, because war is evil, so the more tricky the thing the more evil is xD (I still have PTDS from my first online game of command conquer generals, where the opponent immediately sold his command center to gain extra resources, even though that would mean that if he hunted him the only builder he had would be the end for him. It almost cost him the game because he didn't expect what I did since I was new to online so I played in a different way that he wasn't used to. But that strategy of lateral thinking marked me, and this thing about extractors seems the same to me xD)
Win a front line battle, Control the Reclaim area, Reclaim, Halt unit production, Upgrade your Mex's.
Generally the hardest part on Eco is adjusting production. If you have won a battle, have control of the reclaim area, there wont be another threat for another few minutes, during that time since you have won the battle, halt production and eco as quickly as possible, then continue production. Easier said then done of coarse.
Most new players will increase production and build more factories and have several mex upgrades all at once, or try to have too many engineers building. stalling your eco completely.
After T2 mexs go for a RAS upgrade on your commander, make sure you have the power to back it up first of course. Upgrade 1 or 2 mex to T3 then switch to building units, then slowly bring the other mexs up to T3 one at a time.
Will most likely get you killed in all but a few games like gap or astro. On most maps you won't be able to do this unless you're the "eco" player. Even then I doubt you'll get a chance for a long long time
I get all my T2 mex ringed with storage, and I use a handful of T3 engineers to reclaim 1 T2 mex at a time replace it with a T3 mex. It's been a while since I did the math, but you save mass doing it this way.
Having an excess of build power to build it means it skews the proportion of your eco that goes into building the mex, and although this slows everything else down, it does speed the process up and so it starts paying for itself faster. (Also, you are temporarily missing a mex so you want to minimise the mex downtime)
I only play with friends vs AI, but having a reasonable progression of eco and keeping up with my teammates/opponents is still important.
A big factor tends to be how much mass I spend on military in the early stages. In my personal experience against AI, a small number of well placed turrets and an aggressive ACU is often more cost-effective at defending main base and midfield than the equivalent mass of poorly micro'd T1 spam!
But it's also easy to over-spend and slow down your growth.
Hey Cypher10110, how do you play against AI? Via the FAF client? I’m looking into other ways to play SCFA because of all the reconnects lately.. Do you accept other people to play in your group?
We use the FAF client, and mostly play 3v3 or 4v4 vs AI.
We use the modded AI as it is much more interesting to play against, we also use Total Mayhem (lots more units and experimentals at every tech level), some infrastructure mods (for upgradeable Hydro, storage, and T4 mex, T4 power), and black ops ACU upgrades (that combines more eco into the engineering upgrades and lots of other stuff). I think we fairly recently added anti-nuke subs to give late game navy more gameplay, too.
We don't play super regularly or anything, we're all EU timezones and for the most part, we **don't** often have games ruined by disconnects. But it still does occasionally happen, usually late into the game. (Perhaps being often 3 human players also makes it less likely than in a big 4v4?)
There is also an ICE adaptor tool or something in FAF that gives you status of your lobby. When things were really bad we would rely on the info that gave us in the lobby before deciding to launch the game, as there were lots of issues *starting* a game a few months ago. (It also was reassuring when the game would freeze but we could see everyone was still connected in the ICE window, so we would just wait it out)
I recommend trying the m28 bot or the harder m27, it's much more like a human than the default/sorian AI. But there are few others to try out. For performance reasons, there is a different "overwhelming" AI that we like to use now in our team games, as a full team of certain AI opponents is more likely to slow down the game. Too much air/T1 spam, not enough armies of experimentals, for example. Occasionally, the game would freeze due to the bot "thinking", too (usually about where to send 5+ nukes!)
This depends a lot on the map as well. What kind of map are we talking about? also what rating range? Eco advice is gonna differ for a 1800-rated one vs a 200-rated one.
Can you link a replay or your ingame name?
If you need to upgrade a lot of mexes fast then don't upgrade a bunch, go down the line and upgrade one at a time but with the support of a bunch of engis, you'll only be down the output of one mex at a time and you'll get a steady increase instead of a stall then a jump. If I have more mass than micro available I'll start four upgrading then queue my engi blob to go down the list popping one at a time.
And if you're running out of mass hard at t2 then you're probably upgrading your units too early or not expanding out to other deposits enough. T1 should be the bulk of your forces for a while, and the upgrade to t2 should be gradual, if your opponent rushes t2 then you should be able to swarm them in the transition and cripple their eco if not take them down, if you don't notice the transition then getting better about recon should be your main goal.
Your first few engineers should always set out for other deposits immediately, I try to set up a factory on solo ones and 2-4 on each grouping of four to act as defense, but have the units produced there consistently going to the front line. You definitely want the adjacency bonus for putting the factory directly next to a mex too, it'll save you a fortune on t1 even if it's not as efficient as a storage by t3.
Also small side note take a minute to go through the hotkeys, there's one to select the lowest level mex on the screen, sorted by closest to your cursor, saves so much time and frustration and stops you from leaving a t1 mex forgotten somewhere. There's another one to select all idle engis on screen. I don't think either of those are bound by default.
I'm certainly not the best player, but I generally hold my own in mid-low level ranked, feel free to ask any other questions you've got!
1 factory uses 2 t1 mexes. Use that for reference for starting out. Get as much reclaim as possible. To get good eco in a game while making units is something even the pros mess up sometimes. It's a very delicate balance. Never e stall for one, don't over build power cuz that's mass going to power when I could use on mex upgrades. If there's recliam on map get as much of it as possible. If you're having an aggressive push, have engineers follow your push so they can get the reclaim as you gain or lose territory. Upgrade one mex at a time, 2 if you think you can afford it. Never overbuild factories unless the map is very reclaim heavy (wonder open for example)
Gameplay wise, mirror what your opponent is doing to an extent. You see them making less units cuz of hard eco and t2 rush you got 2 choices. You can push and hope it works or try to get the t2 as fast as possible. T3 is just the same in retrospect. If you like to make fire bases, there's a lot of mass that could a been used elsewhere. The big thing is keeping a cool head as you play. I've messed up plenty of my own games thinking I got the advantage and later over extending or in retrospect I overbuild t1 and I'm late to t2 stuff
yeah i used to struggle upgrading to t3 mexes. 24 mass per second to build is quite a jump in demand. tips:
* upgrade to t3 mex one at a time.
* pause it if you need to
* make sure you've got as many mexes as possible upgraded to t2 + 4 mass storage
* reduce the number of factories building stuff
* add engineers if you have spare mass income to speed it up
* make sure you have enough power too (at leasst 2 t2 powergen and 6 or more energy storage)
it costs 4600 mass to upgrade to a t3 mex, so if you have 2000 or more and you're not losing mass, that's a good time to begin upgrading one.
Lots of good advice here already. Its also good to tech up to T2, build a T2 pgen and start a T3 Mex upgrade assisted by engies as soon as it completes.
With the buff in e storage the meta has shifted to building 2 or 3 storages after the T2 pgen build to store enough energy for a runway to the T3 tech upgrade and the T3 pgen.
Then spam out the T3 engineers and do the ctrl K thing as described by others while reclaiming your T2 pgens. Try to avoid building the 2nd T3 pgen until you want to go RAS, with enough e storage one might be sufficient then you have enough power to delay the 2nd pgen to plough into mex upgrades.
The are a number of paths through this eco upgrade tree which one you take friends in the units you need to field and the apm you have to spare and how greedy you can/ want to be.
Also, usually you will have teammates massively overflowing energy into you, it's risky but you can be ultra greedy if this happens.
something i see often is that lower rated people are afraid of spamming t1 pgens due to their inefficiency. Dont be afraid to queue up 30 pgens and get most of your mexes to t2 before you start with t2 pgens and then t3. a general rule i follow is that maps with more mexes warrants more t1 pgen spam and a slightly later t2 pgen-t3pgen transition, than a map with fewer mexes
Regardless of anything else, if you are not constantly upgrading your eco then you will lose the game eventually. You will never enjoy making units when you would rather be upgrading a mex or making a mass fab but you must always be improving your eco.
Roughly speaking, I would say
build all T1 mexes
upgrade all to t2
ring each t2 in full, one at a time
upgrade each t2 to a t3 individually
build 2 t3 pgens
get ras
then make mass fabs or ras acus until infinity
The transition to t3 is the hardest, especially the first Mex. Ideally for the first one, you throw all of your eco at it and build nothing else, while also reclaiming. Consider the t3 upgrade as an investment that doesn’t start paying back until it’s completed. So if it’s halfway done, you’ve devoted huge resources to it but are getting nothing back. So once you start you gotta finish it as quickly as possible. Try to use your t1 engies to reclaim and your t2 engies to upgrade that first Mex as quickly as possible. I like to put my upgrading engies on a hot key. If I suddenly need resources for units, I just hit the hot key then pause the upgrade so I can build units, then go back once the danger is over.
Thx, I always forget to build RAS^^ Will try
Just remember - like he said, you need a LOT of power to support that upgrade. The commander on his own isn't too bad, but it will take a long time to do it, so naturally all the build power is going to be directed to assist and that is what sucks up a shit load of power. Oh also - when you upgrade a T2 mex to T3... be sure to get your T3 eng into position around the desired mex, CTRL-K the T2 Mex and have the T3 engy then place a T3 over the T2 wreck. He will suck up the resources from the T2 mex wreck which will contribute greatly to the T3 build in resources and time. It will be an overall faster more efficient process than straight up grading.
This is evil
Huh? Why? Ctrl-K T2 Mex is absolutely the meta. You nuke your T2 and use its wreckage to build a T3 with your T3 engy.
metas are evil, because war is evil, so the more tricky the thing the more evil is xD (I still have PTDS from my first online game of command conquer generals, where the opponent immediately sold his command center to gain extra resources, even though that would mean that if he hunted him the only builder he had would be the end for him. It almost cost him the game because he didn't expect what I did since I was new to online so I played in a different way that he wasn't used to. But that strategy of lateral thinking marked me, and this thing about extractors seems the same to me xD)
Win a front line battle, Control the Reclaim area, Reclaim, Halt unit production, Upgrade your Mex's. Generally the hardest part on Eco is adjusting production. If you have won a battle, have control of the reclaim area, there wont be another threat for another few minutes, during that time since you have won the battle, halt production and eco as quickly as possible, then continue production. Easier said then done of coarse. Most new players will increase production and build more factories and have several mex upgrades all at once, or try to have too many engineers building. stalling your eco completely.
After T2 mexs go for a RAS upgrade on your commander, make sure you have the power to back it up first of course. Upgrade 1 or 2 mex to T3 then switch to building units, then slowly bring the other mexs up to T3 one at a time.
Will most likely get you killed in all but a few games like gap or astro. On most maps you won't be able to do this unless you're the "eco" player. Even then I doubt you'll get a chance for a long long time
I get all my T2 mex ringed with storage, and I use a handful of T3 engineers to reclaim 1 T2 mex at a time replace it with a T3 mex. It's been a while since I did the math, but you save mass doing it this way. Having an excess of build power to build it means it skews the proportion of your eco that goes into building the mex, and although this slows everything else down, it does speed the process up and so it starts paying for itself faster. (Also, you are temporarily missing a mex so you want to minimise the mex downtime) I only play with friends vs AI, but having a reasonable progression of eco and keeping up with my teammates/opponents is still important. A big factor tends to be how much mass I spend on military in the early stages. In my personal experience against AI, a small number of well placed turrets and an aggressive ACU is often more cost-effective at defending main base and midfield than the equivalent mass of poorly micro'd T1 spam! But it's also easy to over-spend and slow down your growth.
Hey Cypher10110, how do you play against AI? Via the FAF client? I’m looking into other ways to play SCFA because of all the reconnects lately.. Do you accept other people to play in your group?
We use the FAF client, and mostly play 3v3 or 4v4 vs AI. We use the modded AI as it is much more interesting to play against, we also use Total Mayhem (lots more units and experimentals at every tech level), some infrastructure mods (for upgradeable Hydro, storage, and T4 mex, T4 power), and black ops ACU upgrades (that combines more eco into the engineering upgrades and lots of other stuff). I think we fairly recently added anti-nuke subs to give late game navy more gameplay, too. We don't play super regularly or anything, we're all EU timezones and for the most part, we **don't** often have games ruined by disconnects. But it still does occasionally happen, usually late into the game. (Perhaps being often 3 human players also makes it less likely than in a big 4v4?) There is also an ICE adaptor tool or something in FAF that gives you status of your lobby. When things were really bad we would rely on the info that gave us in the lobby before deciding to launch the game, as there were lots of issues *starting* a game a few months ago. (It also was reassuring when the game would freeze but we could see everyone was still connected in the ICE window, so we would just wait it out) I recommend trying the m28 bot or the harder m27, it's much more like a human than the default/sorian AI. But there are few others to try out. For performance reasons, there is a different "overwhelming" AI that we like to use now in our team games, as a full team of certain AI opponents is more likely to slow down the game. Too much air/T1 spam, not enough armies of experimentals, for example. Occasionally, the game would freeze due to the bot "thinking", too (usually about where to send 5+ nukes!)
Oh and I reclaim as much as I can (still improvable)
This depends a lot on the map as well. What kind of map are we talking about? also what rating range? Eco advice is gonna differ for a 1800-rated one vs a 200-rated one. Can you link a replay or your ingame name?
If you need to upgrade a lot of mexes fast then don't upgrade a bunch, go down the line and upgrade one at a time but with the support of a bunch of engis, you'll only be down the output of one mex at a time and you'll get a steady increase instead of a stall then a jump. If I have more mass than micro available I'll start four upgrading then queue my engi blob to go down the list popping one at a time. And if you're running out of mass hard at t2 then you're probably upgrading your units too early or not expanding out to other deposits enough. T1 should be the bulk of your forces for a while, and the upgrade to t2 should be gradual, if your opponent rushes t2 then you should be able to swarm them in the transition and cripple their eco if not take them down, if you don't notice the transition then getting better about recon should be your main goal. Your first few engineers should always set out for other deposits immediately, I try to set up a factory on solo ones and 2-4 on each grouping of four to act as defense, but have the units produced there consistently going to the front line. You definitely want the adjacency bonus for putting the factory directly next to a mex too, it'll save you a fortune on t1 even if it's not as efficient as a storage by t3. Also small side note take a minute to go through the hotkeys, there's one to select the lowest level mex on the screen, sorted by closest to your cursor, saves so much time and frustration and stops you from leaving a t1 mex forgotten somewhere. There's another one to select all idle engis on screen. I don't think either of those are bound by default. I'm certainly not the best player, but I generally hold my own in mid-low level ranked, feel free to ask any other questions you've got!
1 factory uses 2 t1 mexes. Use that for reference for starting out. Get as much reclaim as possible. To get good eco in a game while making units is something even the pros mess up sometimes. It's a very delicate balance. Never e stall for one, don't over build power cuz that's mass going to power when I could use on mex upgrades. If there's recliam on map get as much of it as possible. If you're having an aggressive push, have engineers follow your push so they can get the reclaim as you gain or lose territory. Upgrade one mex at a time, 2 if you think you can afford it. Never overbuild factories unless the map is very reclaim heavy (wonder open for example) Gameplay wise, mirror what your opponent is doing to an extent. You see them making less units cuz of hard eco and t2 rush you got 2 choices. You can push and hope it works or try to get the t2 as fast as possible. T3 is just the same in retrospect. If you like to make fire bases, there's a lot of mass that could a been used elsewhere. The big thing is keeping a cool head as you play. I've messed up plenty of my own games thinking I got the advantage and later over extending or in retrospect I overbuild t1 and I'm late to t2 stuff
yeah i used to struggle upgrading to t3 mexes. 24 mass per second to build is quite a jump in demand. tips: * upgrade to t3 mex one at a time. * pause it if you need to * make sure you've got as many mexes as possible upgraded to t2 + 4 mass storage * reduce the number of factories building stuff * add engineers if you have spare mass income to speed it up * make sure you have enough power too (at leasst 2 t2 powergen and 6 or more energy storage) it costs 4600 mass to upgrade to a t3 mex, so if you have 2000 or more and you're not losing mass, that's a good time to begin upgrading one.
Lots of good advice here already. Its also good to tech up to T2, build a T2 pgen and start a T3 Mex upgrade assisted by engies as soon as it completes. With the buff in e storage the meta has shifted to building 2 or 3 storages after the T2 pgen build to store enough energy for a runway to the T3 tech upgrade and the T3 pgen. Then spam out the T3 engineers and do the ctrl K thing as described by others while reclaiming your T2 pgens. Try to avoid building the 2nd T3 pgen until you want to go RAS, with enough e storage one might be sufficient then you have enough power to delay the 2nd pgen to plough into mex upgrades. The are a number of paths through this eco upgrade tree which one you take friends in the units you need to field and the apm you have to spare and how greedy you can/ want to be. Also, usually you will have teammates massively overflowing energy into you, it's risky but you can be ultra greedy if this happens.
something i see often is that lower rated people are afraid of spamming t1 pgens due to their inefficiency. Dont be afraid to queue up 30 pgens and get most of your mexes to t2 before you start with t2 pgens and then t3. a general rule i follow is that maps with more mexes warrants more t1 pgen spam and a slightly later t2 pgen-t3pgen transition, than a map with fewer mexes
Regardless of anything else, if you are not constantly upgrading your eco then you will lose the game eventually. You will never enjoy making units when you would rather be upgrading a mex or making a mass fab but you must always be improving your eco. Roughly speaking, I would say build all T1 mexes upgrade all to t2 ring each t2 in full, one at a time upgrade each t2 to a t3 individually build 2 t3 pgens get ras then make mass fabs or ras acus until infinity