I just wanted to reflect on taking the first two nodes, and would love to hear everyones input.

Actually one of the most effective strategies is to use your engineer to fast build a second engineer and then build a factory to get a force up early.

While rapidly expanding to 3 regions with no defenses can be a good strategy, it leaves you very vulnerable to early harassment.

When I play MP and I see someone rapid expand to 3 regions I use my greater military to b-line to them because they will be, literally, 2 minutes behind me in production which is lethal early on.

There are many different ways to start the game, you can focus too heavily on economy or production. I prefer to remain balanced and not over reach.

The problem is, which you i feel you are missing, is that if 1 person misses 1 point, and it is easy to do, then that person has lost.

This is not good for new people as well.

It is forcing the same build command all the time.

And having to press Q really quick is silly.

You could cut the time and let people chose the radioactive or metal.

I just think you should put 4 metal extractors around each base regardless of the map then you will have the resources to continue to build.

If you have 2 metal extractors around your base, and you get the radioactive but miss the metal point. You might as well quit.

How is that different than any other game where the person plays greedy and fails?

Now, on Fringe (I think that's the one) where you only have 2 metal, what I do is capture ONE of the metal regions and then build an annihilator at the other region with my Constructor which takes care of the enemies at the second region.

Maps should be different. If every map was the same, then it would get very repetitive and boring.

Adapting to the available resources is half of the fun.

So the first thing you want to teach people is how to press Q as soon as the game starts.

You are forcing the same dynamics.

This is not a strategy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is linear.

Furthermore, there are people out their that get it right everytime and this is too frustrating for people.

I can not get it right every time or do others, so those people will always win.

You have to sit there and stare at the screen stupidly waiting for the nexus to press p. And, if you miss startup in MP in ranked and dont pay attention for 1 second you lose.

Like I said.. Or, rather actually I am going to keep my emotions inside this time.

Honestly, pull the cotton out of your ears

Decisions and timing at the start of the game are not as absolute as you are making out.

If you get the start "wrong"/"right" it does not lead to a guaranteed loss/win.

It is not a matter of right or wrong.

Either you get both points before the ND spawn or you lose.

If the other person got both points, and you only got one.. well they have an advantage.

This is particularly obvious in maps like knife fight.

Take away the chances of the advantage.

Either metal or radioactive.. make a choice.

You are forcing people to take both points, because you need them to win if the other player has 2 points.

Or even better, add 4 more seconds to get both of them.

no, its not a loss of you dont thate the early 2 pionts.

i play rankd alot and somtimes i do other sutff in the mean time and becuz of a sound i hear my game is loaded and the othe rplay already has a piont or 2 and i have to now make it up. and still win

watch after every game how much metal and rad you collacted and how much of those you wasted . that amout is far far far greater then what you gain from getting fast 2 pionts in the beginning.

you can have a good eco at start but if you dont use it properly later in the game that early start was just.. so so okeish

The getting nodes with engineers strat is detrimental to the game meta.

Those who talk about risk are missing a very important point: in a multiplayer match, risk can NOT be a one sided decision.

In most RTS you have to decide between greedy early risks versus a safe start, but whoever advocates on the engie rush strat is missing one of the best lessons on game design I ever had about game balance in PvP: It's not healthy for a game to create a playing pattern which has no interaction to your opponents.

When you have an early harass or even a full agressive strat on Starcraft or Command & Conquer, you are not testing a players ability to fastly click on a series of command or to memorize which maps allow for some army maneuvers in order to work with your cheese first move. What determines if a rush works on one of these games are the resulting interaction of both players behavior: sure, having high APM might help you get that harassment army 2 seconds or more earlier, but that's not the dealbreaker: did your opponent scouted in the early game? Scouting is less taxing in the economy but gets you in a planning advantage if you spot a plyer fulling commiting to a move and that leaves you on a planning advantage to have the game. If your opponent was actually fully invested on an "ecoboom" tactic he'll be slighly ahead as your scouting force means no trouble but got you a bit behind on your growth.

The key component is whatever outcome these early decisions might have, they depend on player interaction and not a lonesonme mastery of a game mechanic which is always the correct option. Right now 2 node start is a must and on some maps 3 node start takes about the same effort as doing the 2 node map and can also decide the outcome of a game in the very first minutes.

I am not against mechanics to be mastered that will give you advantage against anyone who hasn't mastered that technique yet, however they should not be detrimental to diversity and above all they should NOT be a binary decision with the clear correct option. The best way to keep a game engaging in a prolonged time is to incentive risk taking, not the opposite, as risk taking leads to more unpredictable results and values adaptation, dynamism rather than going to skirmish and keeping track of which start is optimal for each map.

Not to mention these are completely unnintuitive mechanics. Every new multiplayer person I've met online got really confused as to why did I start with more nodes so fast and seemed a bit upset when I explained it and felt like they had come to a game without critical information. And it's boring. There's no fun at all on the very beggining of this game (that might not change fixing this, though, because matches will keep being about fighting neautral unchallenging creeps with extremely slow units (have you guys considered making the fastest speed a default for multiplayer?)

Not adressing this concern will lead to a mere skill floor required to be the very least competitive and will create a whole bracket of players incapable of experimenting their army and expanding strats due to a single gimmick they haven't learned. I personally have slaughtered every single player who did not start with at least 2 nodes heavily.

As to whoever said that there is a risk involved in facing someone who went for an early factory build: you do realize the most common thing to do is build a factory at the side of the first nodes you are starting to capture and give you the best of both worlds, right? There's no downside to this techinique. Some RTS give you a respectable amount of initial resources, allowing to go for an early army instead of a full base development and exploit the opponent's choice of going defenseless, but not only this is not possible on Ashes due to engineer cheese giving you almost the same early game potention but actually gets you ahead of the opponent on army might very quick as you'll have more resource income to keep your bays pumping lil' baby frigates like there's no tomorrow. The units' speed and the neutral creeps along the way are also very disencouraging on early harass. I'd say the only real harass this game have is limited to the air game - precisely by being an exception to what I've just mentioned: they aren't as slow and can ignore neutrals along the way.

I really see no problem in having this strategy be viable, if anything they just need to make rushing a factory more viable than what we have currently. Maybe reducing its build time a bit i dunno.

I find this style of openers cool because it speeds up the early game, and on a game that was super slow to get going because of neutral creeps, we can now stand neutral creeps because of this style of openers.

You dont wanna get back to the posts complaining neutral creeps slowing the game too much, and that all we did was fight creeps in the early game.

I agree on the slowly paced early game, but that's solving an issue like killing a roach with a jet bombing run.

I forgot to add that the worst part of this "risk taking" strategy is that if it fails you might as well surrender immediatly. It does not make the game more interesting to the opponent realising he's severly behind by not commiting to it as well as there's nothing fun on deafeating your enemy who got staggered with low funds due to one of his needed nodes to get the greed start going failed. It happened to me a lot in single player when trying to learn it and it is devasting. It happened once against a really lower level player and it was game over at the very start.

Maybe a possible workaround would be as the nodes immediatly connected to your Nexus don't ever grow creeps? That way you might go for an early factory and reclaim those nodes quickly while also building your first army.

Yeah i could see that working, in fact it might even be worthwhile getting a factory faster to cap those nodes instead of constructor rushing.

Like in theory you would have 2 situations

1º- The nodes to be captured have tons of metal and radioactive spots, so you open constructor first, this is done to take the nodes and cap the resource spots.

2º- The nodes to be captured dont have many resource spots, so you just open factory and a couple light units to take them.

The only issue i see with this suggestion, is that it would kinda force the maps to have a maximum number of nodes attached to the seed. Because otherwise you could have 3 to 4 nodes instantly capped by PHC scout units, and that is a bit too much.

Another suggestion would be that the first factory you make is instantly built. I've seen a lot of free indie RTS titles do this, Zero-k comes to mind, it works quite well in fact.

Problem with my suggestion is that you kinda would open the same way in every game factory first get a couple scout units and then take the nodes.

I think i like your idea more if they design the maps around it, because it allows for two distinct styles of playing and opening a match.

Not adressing this concern will lead to a mere skill floor required to be the very least competitive and will create a whole bracket of players incapable of experimenting their army and expanding strats due to a single gimmick they haven't learned. I personally have slaughtered every single player who did not start with at least 2 nodes heavily.

100% buddy. It is forcing a linear build without experimentation

I guarantee you, if you got 1 point and i got two.. I would destroy you.

It is true you could powerbuild bombers, and then use those bombers (1) to attack them, and (2) bomb nodes so your units can easily take them.

Either way, their is a massive advantage.

I suggested having extra metal nodes around your base to build factory, assembly, and timer to only take 1 node, whether radioactive or metal.

The reason why you would need more metal points at your nexus is that you would possible get stunted if you went for radio first.

Or, Add 4 more seconds to the ND timer to make it easier to get both nodes- I prefer this.

That way new people can get them easier. Do not forget there is people with different abilities, and not everyone is a master of pressing Q

In some maps the nexus is connected to 4 nodes, so I am not sure how you could figure out which 2 nodes would have the ND turned off.

And yes, if you could only get 1 point, you more than likely would go radio, but saying this, this would not always be the case with different maps.

You would have to get radio, as you can not build anti air if you are phc. Yet again, forcing a linear build

This is an interesting discussion.

I've made an internal balance change to test some things.  Basically, it takes slightly longer to capture a point and a bit more time to build an engineer.  Going for that greedy region is super risky.

your right lilosmith, If you put 2 players against each other with the same knowledge and 1 of the players get faster regions then it will mean GG for the player with less region, that is very normal in AOTS, That's how the game is made and that fine with me.

Faster player will win the game.

So what are the options here? its really easy to fix, just move the Regions farther away from the Nexus, that one way to fix the 2/3 Region rush.

Or another way is what Frogboy said, and I do like it a lot! (take longer to capture a Region or/and to make the engineer take more time to build).

Keep the good work Dev's, I do feel that the game still need a lot of Balance (Air Units still have a lot of HP, Structures still have way to low HP). things like that.

Just turn the timer down, same as moving them away.