Planetary Annihilation

Cosmic War

Strategy

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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2015 19:48

Okay, let's try this for at least the first single-planet match. We add some grenadiers in the composition, and we keep them generally behind walls. Have to know which general direction an attack may come from, so we know which walls to keep them behind.

And I am not sure if boom bots don't beat infernos. And who knows how many infernos they'll send? We might be able to flatten them by sheer number of boom bots.

If Rory and chevvy find unguarded factories while they dance around enemy bases, then I guess they should attack them, but the main thing is to take out mexes and harass metal. If they move into a base, then they will DEFINITELY lose the units, because the clan players will respond immediately and destroy them soon. Rory and chevvy will not be able to attack a factory, take it down, then move the units out and save them while at the same time commanding half a dozen more raiding parties (with fighters over them) around half the planet.

We need to keep things simple.

As for our build order: 2 bot factories with fabbers, 1 bot factory on planet patrol for extra radar coverage, 1 air factory on Firefly patrol for our main radar coverage, and all the rest 70% bots 30% air until we are ready to go T2, at which point 100% T2 vehicles.

Nukes and orbital we'll decide on depending on what the opponents do.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 16 Jan 2015 20:45

If you guys have the air superiority you're talking about, then it will be easy to see these vehicle groups coming ahead of time. You could move commanders up to intercept them. Most early vehicle groups will have very few infernos, if any at all, so shouldn't be too much of a threat to commanders.

Also, if dox are going up against bolos, it's best to have the dox swarm all around the bolos and be running past the bolos. This leads to the bolos having to swivel their turrets to get shots off and reduces their rate of fire. Even better, If your dox don't have to cover open ground to get close to the bolos, like if they are hiding behind a wall while the bolos approach them and can then come out from behind the wall surround the bolos once the bolos reach the wall, the results will be even better.

This dox+fighter strategy is pretty much my go-to strategy these days in 1v1 and it's been working pretty well for me. Also, if it's early in the game and your opponent has lots of dox to fight yours, remember you can trade favorably against same-size dox groups by making yours wiggle as they fire (giving them rapid move orders side to side so the enemies' damage is displaced more evenly amongst your dox).
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 16 Jan 2015 20:55

Icy, I think you can optimize your scouting by moving groups of fighters manually into place around (well outside of any AA range) the enemy base, and on top of mex deposits outside their base. Have them patrol in tiny circles in these important areas and you should see everything you need to see. Be sure to have them on patrol and not just sitting though, otherwise they'll land and be slow to take new orders.

I'd also say two factories building only fabbers might be too many fabbers. That's a significant reduction to your numbers of dox. Maybe these two factories could build a few fabbers at first, then have a queue of 1 fabber 10 dox or something like that.

And I'm not sure if grenadiers are a good idea. I think they are slower than dox and will get cut down by dox pretty easily.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2015 21:27

Again, some unrealistic ideas in there from you jeff. There is no way in hell that Rory and chevvy will be able to independently micromanage fighters from dox groups. In fact I am certain that they will fail in managing more than one dox/fighter group at a time, let alone the half dozen that each of them must in order to execute the plan perfectly.

And lol at weaving around bolos etc. You have no idea what you are talking about, the kind of stress these people will be under, and the gigantic differences in reaction times between them and their opponents. If anyone is going to be micromanaging doxes around bolos it will be our opponents.

Finally, you are judging a 4v4 on an absurdly large planet with absurd quantities of metal by the standards of 1v1 games, and that's why you are saying that two fabber factories is too much. You have never tried running a megabase of this kind yourself, so you don't realize how quickly production ramps up. By the time we have +500 metal going to waste you need a shitload of fabbers in order to spend it at all, and we will NEED to spend it if we are to outproduce the clan. It will be recoil's and my challenge to make sure that the two fabber factories per base are being exploited to the full from the start of the game, with none of them sitting around at any point. Just the energy plants you need to make to support these kinds of operations means that you could well have all the fabbers from one factory building pgens the entire game.

It would take a lot of losses in game for you guys to realize how unrealistic your plans are, so I am trying to do my best to explain this to you here, because we don't have 20 more Clan Wars matches in which to try these strategies so you can watch them fail (all the more so since you wouldn't be playing in all these matches anyway).
Last edited by icycalm on 16 Jan 2015 23:41, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2015 21:31

Ideally I don't want Rory and chevvy to engage with the enemy beyond mex-raiding until we have a huge T2 army for them (which we will never have because the clans will not let us make it). If they can manage this much, it will be a triumph for us. But I am afraid they will not even manage this much. They will probably lose all their raiding doxes within 8 or 9 minutes, and then there will be nothing to stop the vehicle hordes that will swarm on our bases beyond the Great Wall of China and some grenadiers and cheap laser turrets.

I hope I am wrong and they do better, but I don't expect it. Complexifying our plan beyond this will only ensure that we'll fail at it even harder.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 16 Jan 2015 22:49

Alright. Well, the last thing I'll say is that the grenadiers+walls strategy seems like the kind of complexification that will easily fail. I think using the commanders will be very important for fighting off these vehicles.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2015 23:01

Yeah, your advice about bringing out the commanders if we have advance warning is good, but you must also factor in that the commanders represent a lot of build power, and if the attacks come early and they have to stop building for a while, it might mean the failure to outproduce the enemy.

The walls are utterly necessary to stop the early vehicle attacks that will come. Besides, Rory and chevvy will not have to deal with the walls. So their task is not being complexified. I know I can handle the walls, and recoil has done this repeatedly (even against my suggestions). So we are set on this score.

As for the grenadiers... worst case scenario we use them like normal bots. If we have some APM left over, we micro them. If not, they are just more bots for raiding mexes. If a vehicle group comes at us, and there are some grenadiers lying around, we just move them behind the wall if we can. But the wall will be designed to slow the enemy down on its own, and with its few cheap lasers (remember: the cheapest ones). And then the last line of defense will be turning all dox factories to boom bots.

It's certainly something that hasn't been seen before on Clan Wars, and it's simple enough that we can handle it. It'd be great if we had practiced it 10 times before, but there's nothing to be done about this now.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2015 23:10

The build being tested right now on PTE will completely change the game, by the way:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/buil ... -up.67298/

Energy-sniping, huge buffs to combat fabricators, pelicans and laser platforms (and smaller buff to grenadier and astraeus), no more orbital reclaim, 4x more expensive teleporters... And they are still discussing more changes. Our last Clan Wars match with The Realm will be on this new balance build, and a ton more strategies will be opened up with it. (Which we'll fail to capitalize on, lol.)
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Unread postby Some guy » 17 Jan 2015 00:08

Can't all of our units fire over our own walls? If so, we could just replace the grenadiers with doxes behind the Great Wall of China.
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Jan 2015 00:13

Grenadiers are just far more effective at this. I've seen a good player say this in a thread full of great players, and no one objected. Grenadiers behind walls is currently the only effective use of grenadiers. So I guess they must do considerable damage.
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Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 17 Jan 2015 00:19

I once claimed that our units can fire over our own walls, but it's not true I discovered. They can fire from beside walls and the wall will soak up some return fire because walls get targeted like any unit. Grenadiers can fire over walls though.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 17 Jan 2015 04:56

Unless you're confident in me and Rory's ability to take out every bomber, it might be a good idea to put some AA along the great wall as well. Bombers will make short work of those defences otherwise, and can completely ignore them to go straight for the Commanders.
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Jan 2015 10:07

Ok, we'll try to put up some AA along the walls too.

I just don't want to waste too much metal on static defenses covering half the giant planet, the vast majority of which will never be used.
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Unread postby icycalm » 20 Jan 2015 16:41

Our matches with The Realm will be the closing matches of Clan Wars, and they are more than a month out so we have plenty of time to prepare and give them the best match that we can give them. We didn't practice for any other match, so let's make an attempt to practice at least for the last one. We should try to do better than our last -- and best -- game, because if we do worse it will be anti-climactic.

So. Here's what I have for a strategy on our system. I haven't thought about The Realm's system, but we only need to put on a good performance on ONE of the matches. One is enough. You could see it in the last fixture, where we were lame in 3 matches but rocked in the 4th, and still got a ton of praise from people for that 1 match.

So, our strategy on Elysium. Basically, the problem with the 4-player megabase on Elysium, as we saw in our game with VoW, was that within 5 minutes they were outproducing us on metal, and that's why we went with 3 bases in our next matches: the strategy of sending back the commanders to the center base with teleporters, and then the players of those commanders proceeding to spam mini-bases all over the planet. But this didn't work for us because the clans are good at raiding, so we abandoned it in favor of 2 megabases, which again didn't work for us... not sure why. Bad scouting and coordination, probably, in part, and also bad decision to make lots of doxes, since we are not good at microing them properly to do sufficient raiding. Also, raiding is apparently not such an efficient strategy on a planet with so much metal as Elysium. So...

I have a new strategy.

What all the above experiments showed were that you can achieve almost parity at metal with 2 spawns, even if the opponent spawns at 3. 1 is too little, 3 is not fully necessary, so 2 spawns, for Elysium, is the sweetspot. So here's how we'll do it. We want to combine 2 spawns with as big a megabase as possible, and then use the megabase to knock out one of their small bases as quickly as possible, at which point the odds, in terms of metal, will be more or less equal.

So we do 3 players on one spawn point, and 1 player alone. No one has done this before, and this is how it will work.

I am assuming the team composition will be me, recoil, jeff, and Rory. This would be my preferred team due to the superior experience, but I will of course play with whoever shows up. Also, if more than 4 people show up we can have different teams for each match so that everyone will get to play.

1. So, me, recoil and Rory spawn together, and jeff spawns alone. The spawn points should be as close as possible.

2. I start the megabase, including power generation, and recoil starts gathering metal. Rory meanwhile starts scouting for the nearest single-commander enemy spawn.

3. And what about jeff? jeff builds 4 bot factories, one making infinite fabbers, the other 3 infinite doxes, and then puts his commander on pgen spam. VERY IMPORTANT is that the factories should be built in the direction of the megabase, and that using the shift key the commander will then draw a HUGE line of pgens ALL THE WAY TO THE MEGABASE. We are talking the Great Wall of Pgens here. jeff will give the commander this plan from the beginning, and then he will not touch him again for the rest of the game. The commander is mine after that. What he should do after he's given the commander this plan is send the first few fabbers to make mexes one by one on the entire planet, and then start gathering his doxes into groups and fanning them around BOTH HIS BASE AND OURS. Meanwhile, recoil takes over the fabbers for mex-building on jeff's base too.

4. So the only reason jeff spawned apart from us was to help us grab more mexes and get parity on the metal production with RLM. After that initial spawn, jeff is on PLANETWIDE DEFENSE FROM RAIDING duty with his doxes, and recoil is on PLANETWIDE MEX PRODUCTION duty.

5. It is very important that jeff does not try to harass the enemy with his doxes, because he will lose them, and simply protect our own mexes against enemy raids. Just make a bunch of dox groups and fan them out across the edges of our territories. This will also give us a lot of intel about where the enemy is coming from if they try a major attack, so that Rory and I will have plenty of time to do something to counter it.

6. Not sure if jeff's 3 dox factories will be enough for this gameplan. It could be that 4 will be better. 2 will definitely be too little. So we'll have to fine tune that number through practice.

7. If all the above is done exactly according to plan (which it SHOULD be since there wouldn't be any time for the enemy to harass us by this point, so the only reason for us to fuck up the plan is if we don't practice it sufficiently), everything will rest with how well Rory manages to scout the nearest enemy base and attack it. He will have overwhelming numbers on his side, as he and chevvy did on the BRN system, so he should be able to manage it.

8. After we've taken down one enemy base the game will open up and the possible moves will depend on a variety of factors that I cannot possibly foresee beforehand. We'll just have to improvise, so the more dialed in we have the opening phase, the more calm and collected we'll be to handle what happens after.

I am listening to suggestions and I encourage people to play on Elysium and try this gameplan out every time they have 4 players on Mumble -- even some of them are not playing in Clan Wars. With enough practice we should be able to knock out at least one RLM base, and close Clan Wars at a high point -- the highest in the entire season for us (since we still haven't managed to play a decent match on our home system, which is beyond lame).
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Unread postby icycalm » 20 Jan 2015 16:52

tl;dr: me, recoil and Rory spawn together, jeff spawns alone. I build the megabase in jeff's direction, jeff builds 4 bot factories and then a huge line of pgens in the megabase's direction. Rory goes for scouting and attack, recoil does all the metal everywhere, jeff protects our base from raiding. And then we steamroll their nearest small base, and go on to win the match and the Twitch chat goes nuts and we are crowned the coolest clan of Clan Wars, for having gone from utter noobs to Realm-beaters in one season.
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Unread postby icycalm » 20 Jan 2015 23:11

lol I actually have a strategy for RLM's system too now. Very risky, but spectacular if it works out, and it'd give us a real shot at winning the game. The only problem is that we must practice without anyone being able to see our replays, otherwise we're screwed, because the RLM system strategy especially is very easily counterable if you know it's coming.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/how- ... st-1058808

I wrote:I would like an option for my replays not to show up on Uber's servers. It is utterly ridiculous in a strategy game to be able to see everyone else's practice sessions so easily. How am I supposed to surprise my opponents this way?

I might make a thread about that. The only solution I can currently see is to play on a custom server, but custom servers are slow to fill up and don't support reconnections, so they are not easy to use on a daily basis (plus they cost money to run, but that's not a huge problem).


I wrote:The other solution is smurfing lol. I might end up trying that in the end.



I will tell you the RLM strategy on Mumble. It's insanely easy to execute, money in the bank basically. But we cannot practice it on Uber's servers.

If we practiced every other day between now and the matches, we'd have a good chance of winning both. I know we can't do that, I am just sayin'. But with a little bit of practice we could get pretty close to winning in both, and have a ton of fun and wow everyone.
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Unread postby recoil » 06 Aug 2017 07:28

War Report - Clan Wars #2

War Status:
Failure. eXodus managed to obtain victory with a Ragnarok planet destruction on Muspelheim and through superior orbital capabilities that cleaned up the final commanders.

War Summary:
My mission as granted by Supreme Commander, icycalm, was to capture the system Norse Realms which contained two planets, Muspelheim and Niflheim, and one moon, Nidavellir, orbiting Muspelheim. With the entire clan landing on Muspelheim, my first sub-objective was to assist in the capturing of Nidavellir while the the other sub-commanders established a foothold on Muspelheim. icycalm and I managed to make it on Nidavellir first, but our lack of mission intelligence caused us to miss the creation of a BRN teleporter. Our base on Nidavellir soon fell afterwards.

During the ensuing chaos, our alliance with pXs and BSE fell apart as pXs was pinned tightly between two BSE commanders and subsequently destroyed. It was now a fragile alliance between us and BSE. Along the way, RLM had been destroyed out of sight from us.

Having been kicked out of the moon, we began to focus on expanding on Muspelheim, but soon found our selves trapped between BSE and BRN. The end was nigh. BRN began pushing on us and managed to destroy a good chunk of our base, but did not finish the job, it seemed they were distracted with other things. Eventually, they pulled out. I supposed they didn't want to waste resources on us and foolishly allowed us to rebuild an army. We soon became a hornet's nest with an army of over 300 with a good mix of T1 and T2 units. The war between us came to a stand still. Would BSE or BRN tempt poking the nest? Eventually, icycalm gave the order to charge BRN giving control of the army to NighAligned, surprisingly, our army cut through their frontline and we managed to destroy quite a few factories.

On the other side of the planet, eXodus was plotting to destroy the whole planet with a Ragnarok. It seemed our attack was enough of a distraction for eXodus to swoop in and destroy everyone. At the last second, we managed to put our commander on a flight straight to Niflheim before the Ragnarok detonated, escaping death and surviving for a glorious minute after BSE before burning up in the Niflheim atmosphere as he was intercepted by eXodus forces.

The final blow was struck by eXodus as they cleaned up the remaining BSE forces on Nidavellir with orbital strikes.

Lessons Learned:
While capturing a new planet, a mobile ground force and orbital force is key to destroying invasion attempts by orbital fabricators. We need Avengers to strike fabricators and highly mobile units like Doxes to slow down and destroy teleporter construction. Firefly's should be used to scout teleporter locations.

Finish the job. BRN failed to end us quickly and missed a planet smashing opportunity. Hesitation will snowball and cause tougher fights in the future.
Last edited by recoil on 06 Aug 2017 08:55, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 Aug 2017 07:55

That's great. I need to write the site's mission statement, then a War Report of my own for CW1 (or should we call the articles "From the Frontlines"?), and then I can post your report. So we can launch the analysis section with three articles.

As for CW2, I will say that, on second thought, it shouldn't have been a surprise what happened on the moon. BRN didn't really have all that many units. Our mistake was that, while building the orbital fabber and teleporters, we left our commander sitting around doing nothing, instead of building a few factories in order to have some forces to pour through the teleporter. That's all that BRN did. If we had done it too, instead of waiting to FIRST get on the moon, THEN build factories, and only THEN amass some forces, we would have given them a decent fight up there. With a little bit of practice, we could have even won. They REALLY didn't have THAT many units; it was just a small moon, and the proximity and speed of the engagement scared us. The moment we saw them our moral tanked because we weren't expecting to see them so quickly, and imagined they were some kind of magicians.

Having said all that, the reason I insisted on not making any factories on the lava planet was because we don't have a good feel for eco, and I didn't want to crash our economy and have trouble with the teleporter operation, or with the factory-building on the moon. It was a bad decision, and crashing the eco would have been preferable, even if it had cost us a few seconds turning off the factories to get the teleporters back on. It wasn't a few seconds that lost us the moon, but the lack of units to pour through the teleporter. Lesson learned, I guess.
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Unread postby recoil » 06 Aug 2017 08:15

"From the Frontlines" is good. If it's from someone who was in the war. "War Report" for accounts from viewers.
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Unread postby recoil » 06 Aug 2017 18:23

Definitely, Robo took a great one of the commander floating above the destruction of Muspelheim.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... ACB886074/
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Aug 2017 21:55

Via PA Academy Discord:

Nik wrote:But here are the basics: when you are expecting imminent aggression (comments box, walking distance between spawns) go vehicle. Vehicle build fastest and can defend and push out. Same goes if you know you have a very large distance from your opponent and are certain that the first raids will arrive when you are already stable on 2 factories: go vehicle because the fabs build your Base metal the fastest for an early advantage. Once you have that you can transition into whatever you need.
Bots are the everyday choice, they work on small maps OK, they work damn well on big maps but medium is where they shine. On medium range maps you can usually get away with doing double bot since your opponent won't have the bomber force yet to suppress you. Since early game it's impossible to kill a Base, your best bet is killing fabs and shutting expansions to gain the mid game superiority, and bots have the speed and the numbers to do that job.

As a rule of thumb: don't go air first, air fabs are 1shot kills and a semi idiotic player will snipe then before you have expanded. Air is reserved for second factory to use it for scouting and bombing early armies and fabs. The real risk is not going air second, because than your opponent will have free bomb rain over all of your armies, and AA is slow (edited)

Finally Naval. Any map that has a decent pond can and will be won by the better naval player. If he can survive long enough to use it. With naval make sure your metal is well guarded, and so are your fabs. If you loose your early game expansion your economy will collapse and 40 subs will soon be knocking on your doors. If you have a mixed land/naval spawn count the metal nearby: if it's all in the pond near your Base go naval first. If it on the ground, even if it's spread out, go land


Nik wrote:There are three mindsets you can have about playing the game: playing to suppress your opponent in terms of expansion, playing to push in and destroy a Base and playing to snipe the commander. The thing is that you only the last one to win a game (edited)
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Aug 2017 08:50

Via PA Academy Discord:

Nik wrote:Lmao... World patrolling is expensive af metal wise, and it only pays off versus people who don't build static defences/ don't guard their mex. ..
Proxi factories and gangs of world reclaim stitches clear out dox like a miracle


Nik wrote:+ set patrol path to small groups of tanks with AA and get static defence es and radar with fabs as they go that's should. Clear most of your troubles with raids
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Sep 2017 12:43

Tactical skill level, by Nik, via PA Academy Discord: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

Very interesting stuff. Kind of shames you to improve, in a way, and in the process reveals the fantastic tactical depth that exists in PA in general, and the latest version of Titans in particular (with the tree and wreckage reclaim possibilities, etc., among many other things).
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