General Tips

Talk about strategies in here! (If you just want to post a civilization, use the Civilizations forum; if you only want to post a build order, use the Build Orders subforum)
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Omega
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General Tips

Post by Omega »

From another forum...

"1. If you have tons of leftover resources, you are doing something wrong. If you have extra food, make citizens and boom with it. If you have wood but not food, make farms and boom with it, or make buildings and produce more troops, or expand... If you have gold or iron you can't spend, make more production facilities. If you have extra stone, consider houses, hospitals, walls, or towers depending on the situation. Not spending resources is the way you can ensure you have a smaller army, smaller boom, and less defensible base than your opponent, which is a bad thing!

2. If it's a setting where your opponent(s) can do different strategies, you NEED to scout them. This usually means making a dog as the first thing from your capitol and sending it to your opponent. However, it can also be done with your very first units if your dog dies, or if it's an age like Middle SH where you're going to be hardcore sword rushing your opponent with your first units.

3. You usually can't get away with massing just one unit type. Mix and counter early and effectively. Just don't do it so early that you can't keep up production while you're switching (thus leading to you dying), or that it interferes with your boom more so than not switching would.

4. If you've been countered by your opponent, you have two options. You can play defensively and hope they don't kill you before you counter them, or you can play offensively and cripple them as much as possible before you switch. If you can pull off the second option, you should do that, because nothing makes your countering more effective than if you've hurt them so bad they can't make the counter to your counter.

5. Don't ever waste units. If your army has little chance of doing anything effective in the current moment, keep it alive until later. Dead units in the present do nothing for you, but living units in the future can win a game. (Note: This doesn't preclude using units as decoys or flooding with units, because both of those give you an advantage that you WANT to have, i.e. diverting their army or giving you line of sight)

6. NEVER underestimate the value of unorthodox strategies and tactics, even sub-par ones. Surprise has value, and if you execute things flawlessly you can have tremendous effect. One example of this would be prophets behind enemy lines along with firestorms and earthquakes (throw in a plague on their cits and you can REALLY shake things up). You can often literally wipe out all of someone's production buildings if you pick the right targets and execute it flawlessly, and doing so can completely shift the balance of power in the game much more towards your side.

7. If you have a choice between playing too aggressively or too defensively, pick playing too aggressively every time because you'll win more and become a better player in doing so since you'll begin to understand how to attack effectively, what's ineffective, and most importantly, how one can defend against good attacks all at the same time just by paying attention and thinking about what you and your opponent are doing or did! Playing defensively, you just learn how to defend, which isn't going to help you win if you're unable to kill your opponent.

8. Always try your hardest in games, and never give up. Trying your hardest each game will redefine what your hardest is over time, which means you're going to become a much better player. Never giving up is going to teach you that because you don't have all information in game, your standing compared to your opponent is usually a LOT more even than you think it is, and you're also going to learn how to take advantage of mistakes your opponents make when you're down and use that to help turn the game around. Never giving up does NOT entail playing 100% defensively unless you actually have a shot at winning by playing that way--stalling tactics without a way to achieve victory are just lame, and aren't going to teach you anything.

9. If you sense that things aren't going your way during a game, don't keep doing exactly what you're doing. Evaluate your options. Do something else that gives you a shot at winning. This doesn't mean to immediately drop what you're doing, because odds are that's the only thing that will keep you alive during your gradual (but quick) transition to something else.

10. If the odds of victory are extremely low after you've played for awhile, do something unorthodox as mentioned earlier. Surprise has value, and there are a lot of risky unorthodox tactics that can blow the game wide open if you execute them well.

11. If the odds of victory are extremely low before you even start a game (and you're more interested in a shot at WINNING as opposed to learning from your failures), play extremely aggressively. Do as much damage as possible, and if you're still alive after having done considerable damage start playing defensively and booming WHILE still attacking and causing havoc in your opponent's bases. The worst that can happen here is that you still loose, but you'll at least go down having actually posed a threat to your opponents. The ideal situation is that they're unprepared for the raw aggression and die, get crippled to the point where you're about even with them, or make a big enough mistake in responding that you've got a much better chance at winning.

12. Teamwork is vital. Communicate and plan with your allies during and BEFORE game. Use Ventrilo if at all possible, even if just to listen. There's really nothing more important in team games than good teamwork. This is especially true in mismatched games (i.e. 2v4) because the side with less players has almost zero chance at winning if the other side has good teamwork. In team games, teamwork is almost as important as skill, so make sure you hone it to perfection!

13. If you don't know what certain units or abilities do, are effective against, et cetera, you need to learn it now. Go to single player, put a medium computer, and start the game. Quit immediately. Go to the scenario editor. Now you can disable all the AI stuff that makes it do stupid things with its units, and give it and yourself units. Figure out what beats what, in what proportions, what everything does, and so on. If you know the value of every unit option in game, you're going to make a lot better decisions when it comes to mixing, and even whether or not to fight your opponent or retreat. In ages like Nano, you're going to have a massive advantage if you've understood everything about the cybers (in games TL that last long enough to get to cybers... or in any other resource amount really), because your opponent can mass Zeus's against you all day long and it's not going to matter if you know that a single resonator from a tempest is going to 1-hit-kill a Zeus and all adjacent Zeus units, and that you can keep your Tempest alive long enough to do this using the Diffraction shield power from Appolos along with their healing."
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