Bite more than you can swallow

[Lieutenant Lich]

Recently I had some battles where I died and my team lost because I overextended. I tend to overextend because, since I am not great at eco, I often lack resources and I expand to have more mexes. That leads to me not having factories, leading to me not having units, leading to me getting killed. What to do in this situation? How to eco better or manage the expansions better?

[biass]

pass me a replay of this said over extension and ill check it out when i get home tonight

[lextoc]

Watch someone else play on your spot in a replay? Can't be that hard to copy him/her.

[Lieutenant Lich]

Replay is 4784538, on Plateau Small. It is the most recent one, there are others but overextension is not as clear as it is here.

[biass]

Here is me dumping notes about the game onto a forum post:

at around 5 minutes, beast has 4 times the amount of land production then you, despite similar mass incomes , you have done an okay job of scouting his production but time will tell if you counter it

however, having "enough" buildpower to defend yourself is essential to survival (as i say this he now was 5 times as much)

i noticed that you have walked halfway across the map to make factories, the longer you walk, the longer time it takes to get units out, and the closer they get, the more you risk if your enemy has his up faster, try making your production closer to your base, or at least where you have plenty of buildpower

"how do you do this so quickly" is because he has not spent the whole time walking half map to start building, remember acu is one of the slowest units in game, the quicker you start, the quicker you finish, the quicker you have units, etc, time adds up

at min 7:30 lets count land factory numbers
beast: 7
u: 1

you're also overflowing mass and have idle engineers in your base, remember you only need 2 t1 engy's to have the same buildpower as your acu

try and think of your eco has having 3 points, not 2, if you dont have the buildpower to spend your mass = overflow, thats bad, if you have too much buildpower, you crash eco = also bad

and ur ded, gg

[Hawkei]

Recently I had some battles where I died and my team lost because I overextended. I tend to overextend because, since I am not great at eco, I often lack resources and I expand to have more mexes. That leads to me not having factories, leading to me not having units, leading to me getting killed. What to do in this situation? How to eco better or manage the expansions better?

Aim to have enough land factories to completely consume your mass income - and then enough power, with only a minor surplus to keep everything running. I think, as a general rule, you should have 1 Land factory for every two T1 mexes under your control. To operate this land factory you need 2 or 3 T1 pgens.

If you haven't scouted your enemies production capabilities always assume that you need full production in units. Then put some effort into finding out what their capabilities are. If he is going eco, you need to match. If he is teching, you need to match. If he is spamming, you need to match. If you intend being defensive, and have enough units to hold, then go for eco, and shut down production... As you can see, bringing enough units to the fight is critical for success. Perhaps if you had better intel you could make better decisions.

[nine2]

1 lfac = 1pgen

[codepants]

If you haven't scouted your enemies production capabilities always assume that you need full production in units. Then put some effort into finding out what their capabilities are. If he is going eco, you need to match. If he is teching, you need to match. If he is spamming, you need to match.

This seems reactive, not proactive.

I've noticed the winner is typically the one "in control" of the game AKA the one being proactive and forcing the other player to react.

I would love to see some advice along those lines...?

But to the point of the thread, which is Lichking's specific replay... yea, scout, build facs sooner, and if you can't defend your ACU don't send it up.

[keyser]

being reactive is the way to play teamgame, or you have a real team set up and you go for a team strategy (eg : T1 land spam + com attack on canis). Most of the time, if you play teamgame like several 1v1 (and some help from time to time between player, like most of the time) then scouting and reacting is best way to go.

in 1v1 it's different, you have to fight with T1 a lot to gain map control, it's hard to have some time to analyse what your opponent is doing.


But in general being re-active is better than pro-active. (depends if you talk about dropping unit for exemple, and consider that being pro-active then yes being pro-active can be really rewarding, but i don't consider dropping like an overall strategy, more a tactical feature)

[Morax]

Don't forget that for every expanding engineer it is -30 power per t1 mex being built, so you need a few extra t1 pgens at the start to prevent power stalling while fueling the factories. If you build air you need at least another 4...

Once you are done expanding, it's a whole different ballgame: do not build more t1 pgens unless you plan to get an ACU upgrade (altho this is a really commong path it isn't necessary), you want to rush tech 2 (-100e for the upgrading fact alone, without assist), or get t2 air where you will need TONs of t1 pgens or at least t2 power.