Aggression Guide
Basic Aggression
_Why you should be attacking._
This is more a philosophy of how you should be playing, but if you want to be better at the game, one of the key principles is just to be aggressive. Its a war game, so fight! Put simply, you cannot win by defending. The only way you'll ever win by defending is boring the enemy to death. You'll have to attack eventually, so why not attack now instead of later? Sure, later you'll have more units and economy, but so will he.
But, attacking is also a sound economic decision. Metal is the most important resource. The only way to get metal is to expand and take Metal Extractors, or to fight the enemy and reclaim their wrecks. Thus, metal is territorial- you must always be trying to gain territory from the enemy to get more metal. This means aggression.
If you build a lot of energy structures to overdrive your mexes it gives you no advantage- the enemy can do the same thing, and will do so faster if he is more aggressive about taking mexes.
Take the situation of a 4v4. On one team, 3 players fight, one builds economic structures. On the other, all 4 fight.
Given equal skill, the 4 fighting players will win- they will take more territory, more metal spots, and when they destroy their enemies they will get to reclaim all the wrecks (both from their own dead units, and the enemies). All it takes is 1 commander wreck and they have a huge economic lead- probably much more than the player who goes pure economy, while having wiped out all his allies.
What if all players from team 1 porc defences, and on team 2 they attack all out?
Even assuming team 1 manage to take at least half the map (which, given a less offensive approach, is unlikely) an intelligent team 2 will see the amount of defenses they have, and know that this means less offensive units. Having the advantage in offensive units mean they need not fear attack from the enemy- they have more mobiles and can thus always beat him even with only token static defense. Team 2 can spend the rest on economy consolidation, much more than the players who are devoting their resources to defenses.
Even though static defences are, on average, 2.5x as cost-effective as mobile units they must be spread thin over a larger area. This means an attacker can concentrate his forces on a single point in the defensive line (perhaps softening it with an artillery barrage), taking on only a fraction of the enemies turrets while the rest of the defensive structures sit idle and useless.
So attack. It's the only way to win.
Debug data:
[SQLBagOStuff] MainObjectStash using store ReplicatedBagOStuff[objectcache] MainWANObjectCache using store EmptyBagOStuffIP: 216.73.216.161Start request GET /mediawiki/index.php?oldid=476&title=Aggression_Guide
HTTP HEADERS:
CONTENT-TYPE:
CONTENT-LENGTH: 0
X-FORWARDED-FOR: 10.3.113.36
USER-AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
HOST: zero-k.info
COOKIE: wikidb229_mw__session=uooprm0akdch7aeiqpv508m734in93nt
ACCEPT-ENCODING: gzip, br, zstd, deflate
ACCEPT: */*
VIA: 1.1 squid-proxy-5b5d847c96-qtnh8 (squid/6.10)
CONNECTION: keep-alive
CACHE-CONTROL: max-age=0[localisation] LocalisationCache: using store LCStoreDB[session] SessionManager using store SqlBagOStuff[session] Session "uooprm0akdch7aeiqpv508m734in93nt" requested without UserID cookie[DBReplication] Cannot use ChronologyProtector with EmptyBagOStuff[DBReplication] Wikimedia\Rdbms\LBFactory::getChronologyProtector: request info {
"IPAddress": "216.73.216.161",
"UserAgent": "Mozilla\/5.0 AppleWebKit\/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot\/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)",
"ChronologyProtection": false,
"ChronologyPositionIndex": 0,
"ChronologyClientId": false
}[DBConnection] Wikimedia\Rdbms\LoadBalancer::lazyLoadReplicationPositions: executed chronology callback.[DBConnection] Wikimedia\Rdbms\LoadBalancer::getLocalConnection: connected to database 0 at 'localhost'.[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[DBConnection] Wikimedia\Rdbms\LoadBalancer::getLocalConnection: connected to database 0 at 'localhost'.Title::getRestrictionTypes: applicable restrictions to [[Aggression Guide]] are {edit,move}[ContentHandler] Created handler for wikitext: WikitextContentHandler[MessageCache] MessageCache using store SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] SqlBagOStuff::lock failed due to timeout for wikidb229-mw_:messages:en.[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[MessageCache] MessageCache::load: Loading en... local cache is empty, global cache is expired/volatile, loading from databaseParserFactory: using preprocessor: Preprocessor_HashUnstubbing $wgLang on call of $wgLang::_unstub from ParserOptions->__construct[caches] parser: SqlBagOStuffArticle::view using parser cache: noArticle::view: doing uncached parse[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuff[SQLBagOStuff] Connection mysql object #124 (handle id #118) will be used for SqlBagOStuffParser cache options found.[Preprocessor] Cached preprocessor output (key: wikidb229-mw_:preprocess-hash:54b7a41a700ef101571031481c3ff615:0)[Preprocessor] Cached preprocessor output (key: wikidb229-mw_:preprocess-hash:54b7a41a700ef101571031481c3ff615:0)MediaWiki::preOutputCommit: primary transaction round committedMediaWiki::preOutputCommit: pre-send deferred updates completedMediaWiki::preOutputCommit: session changes committedMediaWiki::preOutputCommit: LBFactory shutdown completedTitle::getRestrictionTypes: applicable restrictions to [[Aggression Guide]] are {edit,move}
