Seeking Advice on Early Game Pitfalls

i watched http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/334021 vs faelthas

main problem seemed to be that you didnt really put any pressure on him, which allowed him in turn to do his thing undisturbed and put the pressure on you. beeing the side that is attacking or just threatening to attack is much preferable. avoid beeing forced into defensive mode.

also your energy production didnt keep up with your expansion. id suggest to spare 1 con to que a lot of power early on, so you can focus on building mexes and defenses with the rest.

playing fully zoomed out helps a lot, especially when coordinating multiple important tasks such as raiding and defending vs raids.

time management is very important, avoid having to micro your attacks when you should be queing build orders. making fairly long build queues helps, tho it often means you have to redo them.

making a lot of radars is good practice too.

I have nothing better to do so I'll see if I can notice anything wrong with your play

I watched your game vs Anarchid on comet, your queue was pretty much the exact same as mine would be, however you made one pretty huge mistake which was to not leave any BP on your lab whatsoever. It's fine to send your com and first con to expand, but usually I will bring my com back after a couple of mexes, at the very least you use your 2nd con to build nanos but when you send your 32nd con off to build mexes while excessing that made me facepalm. 'Metal surplus = Build more BP' is one of the constant fundamentals of ZK.

In your game vs Flipstip I noticed your territory was very flimsy, that is not good, every good player is guaranteed to punish weak defences. Well positioned LLTs, defenders and radar coverage is crucial but the thing about relying on radar coverage and mobile units is you need good micro, it's been a common theme for very long time that the very best players like Godde are able to rely on much fewer defences because of their quick reactions and good micro (don't try to emulate this). Seeing you pull your entire glaive army around chasing that 1 dart across your base is proof, you should just rely on good defence coverage for now (like I do). Speaking of the glaives, try to use on ctrl-z a bit less, like I said just a second ago "good players always punish weak defences", you need to be able to split your units to raid and defend at the same time. 'The best defence is a good offense' is certainly true in this game, if you can learn how to macro hard while keeping all the enemy units busy with fewer units then you will go far (exactly what Flipstip did to you actually), try to be aware when your opponent is playing you like this, Godde does it to everybody while naked expanding and it makes me sad seeing everybody fall for it. Also good harassment will some times make lesser enemies over-commit to defences.

On Deadlands, you went into the game with no tactic, whereas Anarchid came with a good one, it's important to put some real thought into what you're going to do and what works well on the map you're playing before a game starts.

Again on the Vittra game, not much significant harassing, just a large force of mostly idle glaives until Emblis seized the initiative by countering you with outlaw push. The only time I think it's ok to play defensive is when you're doing an overly greed macro start, but your start was actually quite slow on the mex capturing here. The decision to counter rush him when you couldn't deal with his outlaw was great, definitely the most logical choice but both the offense and defence at this point could have gone a lot smoother so there's definitely room for improvement with your general play. You won anyway mainly because of superior apm and macro but not taking that free com kill etc might have lost you game vs better player.

Tl:dr:
Honestly the issue as expected is mostly just a matter of experience and refining your basic play, more games played = less silly macro mistakes. However I did feel like there was maybe something missing, you could stand to be a little more aggressive and to take the initiative a bit more. Try to constantly probe your opponent for weaknesses, lone cons, cracks in defences etc. You played a lot of cloaky but I didn't see much scythe use and everybody knows air or gunship switching is a very important part of 1v1. These are probably the main things that make up the difference between your 1800 elo and people at 2k+ elo.

I com expand (Thus battle com) and send my first con back to base to assist, which is often my second unit after a scout (rather than making a full raiding party or anything before con). Shadowfury talks about it as the '20 metal hump', when your initial BP from your comm and factory isn't enough to spend your resources. This is why (Other than it just being a solid strat) a lot of players chose to stop their coms in the middle of the map and set up a nest: It's spending their buildpower, and potentially setting up a second fac there, which they can't do if they're walking.

Of course I'm kind of notoriously useless at the 20 metal hump and excess like a MOFO and end up morphing my comm to suck up the excess which is rarely good. If you find yourself doing this, nanolathes on your comm help (if you ever panic and have to morph your comm because you're excessing, you're morphing it into extra BP which will let you get your eco under control). And I mean, I'm an advocate of the '1 con 5 units repeat' thing, and I use fight orders from my factory so they all assist by default, and I still excess.

But yeah there is no one strategy. A lot of it is just being familiar enough with the way you play that you're always spending your metal and rarely losing your units and making fewer mistakes.

Watched the game vs flipstip, you really excessed a ton. You realize this, but your analysis is "I need to build caretakers". Nonono. Idle or walking (Which can be just as bad) commander, expanding mexes when you were floating metal, and IDLE FACTORY, and not fac assisting. You should have a couple of cons dedicated to your factory before you even start with caretakers.

As well as making a nest with (Or, ugh, morphing) your comm when you start excessing, use him to make energy. It will be a defended hard point, so it's a safe place to put energy and it's a good use of comm BP, esp because you're excessing M due to overexpanding and e-stalling.

If you are still, at your elo, excessing with an idle factory then you you NEED to use repeat. Turn on auto-repeat widget, get used to using it from the start of the game.

I say this as the king of excessing though. You lost that match because of his raiding. An important cloakbot trick to keep in mind is if you see a raider incoming, pull your con off it's build order (Or, use the wait command! Though I never do). It will cloak and you can just get back to making mexes once the raiders pass. This actually can let you naked expand like crazy and never lose any cons: Use radar instead of defenses. Learning to naked expand is a big part of the 1v1 education and cloakbot is one of the best factories for it. Though control z was your main enemy more often than not here.

Finally, clump your glavies a bit more vs vehicle. You cannot 1v1 scorchers, you need a pack. They have more range and are only 0.1 slower, so you need to catch and overrun them rather than chase after them.

quote: It would be cool if we could distill the tips offered here to some sort of expansion guide for newbies.

Indeed. I have a new economy guide in the works (have script, need to get over cold) which would basically be the same as the old guide, but concise. I'm shooting for a 3 minute guide.

Something similar for expanding and midgame tactics would be a great idea, we'll need a script for it (I've tried unscripted, see above about "concise") but it should be fairly easy to do.

Overall, my current goal is to make a new batch of concise tutorial videos both useful as tutorials, and useful for myself to know what my viewers know. I often repeat myself on basic concepts that might be general knowledge, and I'd rather be sure they are general knowledge so I can just refer to the concepts without re-explaining them.

I guess, but I figure that if there are quick 2-3 minute videos explaining those concepts, anyone who is confused if I happen to omit an explanation will have an easy place to find them.

This is kinda true for all commentary, not just mine.

Still, off topic, main point is usefulness to new players, and like I said, there are works in progress.