Intended way to Play?

My brother keeps talking about how I play is not the "intended way to play", i.e. building up a large economy and building nukes and armies of spiders. He says that the devs intended it to be very aggressive and not "Minecraft with robots". Is this true?

Playing aggressively, raiding a lot and capturing many mexes is the key to victory.
That said, please don't confuse this with suiciding units into the enemy => even if you trade equally, they can reclaim the metal if combat happens in their territory.

or, as [GBC]1v0ry_k1ng put it

quote: You can maek d-fenz or you can play the game.

When it comes to any competitive games I like to say "be as greedy as possible, but don't get punished". Be greedy with economy, keep wanting more and more of the map, grow like a blob, but don't let enemies punish your greed. Be greedy with killing enemy stuff, aggressively kill everything you can get your hands on, but don't let enemies punish your greed.

If you can naked expand and enemies don't raid you, that's good and okay. If you can kill the whole enemy base with Glaives because your enemy doesn't do anything about it, that's good as well. Just get an advantage in every way you can, but know about and respect the enemy's ability to do something about it.


More copypaste walls of text from the internet:

quote: Keep advancing! If you aren't moving forward you're falling behind, if you can start another resource base you should be, if you have enough to build units, you should be, if you have an abundance of resources in the bank you aren't building enough, if you're watching/waiting, there's something you could be doing, either harassing the enemy (remember, just because you're not wiping out the enemy base doesn't mean it's a failed attack, if it costs him more money/time than it costed you to build the units and send them then it's a success) , reorganizing, fine tuning etc. This isn't the right answer for every game, but most games follow this pattern, there's a reason why most professional RTS gamers talk about APM (actions per minute) once you know the game well enough that you're constantly flipping around the map giving orders you're on the right track, then it's just a matter of the best strategy for the game you're playing

quote: Be as greedy as you can be without getting punished for it by your enemy. Be as aggressive as you can be without throwing away units. It's better to be too greedy and too aggressive than it is to be too passive. If you lose a game because you spent too much time and too many resources on expanding/growing your economy, then you'll still improve. You'll figure out what you could've done different, what was too much, etc. Meanwhile if you lose a game because you sat in a corner doing nothing, then you won't learn about the potentially massive impact you could have on the map and the game. Finally, don't be afraid of losing, because there's absolutely nothing to lose. There's only things to miss out on. Which is why you always wanna go full ham, but only until you know better. You need to be honest to yourself - don't deny that you can still improve. Always be open to the idea that you might've been too greedy or too aggressive or tunnel-visioned on something while losing the bigger picture. And after you learned a lot of things and really improved, then every now and then you still wanna question all of your experience and see if you can't do this or that thing different. Break boundaries, try something new.

quote: be as greedy as possible, but don't get punished

You forgot the part where you drop them like a hot rock once you get bored.

Throughout development, the design has been towards elevating expansion and aggression in terms of their viability as part of a strategy. It is my intention that games have mobile armies and players vying for expansion rather than players just making a lot of energy behind a mass of defenses. However, this intention is only for the strategies that are developed by the competitive players who are trying to win and improve their skill at the standard 1v1 or team vs. team game. In short, high-level play is intended to have a lot of expansion and aggression. Defenses exist to give the players choice and to put some structure on the map but I don't want players of the standard game to get away with mostly building defenses.

It is also my intention that there be many ways to play. We've kept in mind to not close off too many of the options which work better in other game modes or a more casual setting. In my experience, superweapons and high powered economy are more likely to show up in chicken or AI games. It can be fun to make defense fortresses and the turrets exist to support that. One of my aims has been to make an RTS that works well for free-for-all games and these options support that. A bonus is that these features can show up in team games from time to time and it is cool when games escalate to this point.

In short, if you want to learn ZK competitively in the multiplayer community you will probably need to learn and adopt a playstyle of expansion and aggression (although, in even in team games there is space for specialization). But you are not wrong for playing in any other way. Do what is fun. Also, if you're playing local multiplayer and beating your friends feel free to keep beating them with things which are not 'intended' until your friends figure out a counter. This is the essence of exploring a strategy game.

Terraform performs that function now!