New Player Questions

[enricofermi2]

I had some general questions about the game.

1. Is there a maximum amount of energy/resource, that a single power line can move.

2. How does ammo work. Units have ammo, does it get created by the unit, or what.

3. How do energy mines work. There was a building that seemed to work like a mine, but I can't tell if it gathers from an area like the pylons, or if it's just collects on self.

[75Karsten]

1. No

2. Ammo can be either energy or wares. It gets sent to the unit by either the Rift Lab (energy) or the Factory (wares).

3. They only collect on the area they cover and have a green/red indicator on placement to show how effective placement is.

[enricofermi2]

thanks, I had some extra questions after playing some more.

4. I also don't get blueite/anti creeper.

5. And I'm not 100% sure what the factory does outside of storing resource.

[The_Mell]

Blueite is a resource that the factory transforms into anti creeper so it can be used by sprayers, AC bombers and other structures found in missions.
Similar redon is transformed into arc and the green stuff into liftic by factory.

[Strategic Sage]

My biggest suggestion would be to play through the Farsite Expedition and read the descriptions as they come up.

One correction on the OP; Pylons don't collect energy from an area. They don't collect energy at all, they transmit it quickly over longer distances. Towers do collect energy from an area.

5. The Factory processes resources from raw into usable - i.e. bluite into anticreeper. It does also store them refined resources, but the processing part is the key element.

[enricofermi2]

Is this game meant to be speedrun? Since it seems like levels are trivial after you stabalize, so the main objective would just be to win the map faster.

[Strategic Sage]

It's meant to be done however you want to. Some people speedrun. Some people enjoy the process of turtling and chilling and gradually taking over the map. There are also all kinds of maps; some you can't stabilize until quite late, or have scripting that makes things more difficult etc.

[enricofermi2]

Is there any way to see others players time sorted? I can see the end of match details for other players, but it doesn't seem to sort making it kinda pointless.

[Strategic Sage]

No. The reason for this is there is no good way to prevent cheating, meaning you can't tell which times are valid anyway. Sorted times are only displayed on the Chronom missions which don't hang around long. For speedrunning, using the group field is recommended; most of the best speedrunners are on the discord in the #competition channel.

[75Karsten]

Is there any way to see others players time sorted?

When a group name is provided, then a sorted list of the players in the group is returned.

[Strategic Sage]

Yep, good point. What I said wasn't worded as well as it should have been.

[75Karsten]

What you said was not wrong, though. By default, Chronom missions return a sorted list of times

[enricofermi2]

Originally posted by 75Karsten:

What you said was not wrong, though. By default, Chronom missions return a sorted list of times

It's a shame though, even if some cheaters were there, a sorted list for times by default would be nice. When I'm doing a mission, it's hard to have any idea of what a good or bad time is, less motivation to improve.

[75Karsten]

It's a shame though, even if some cheaters were there, a sorted list for times by default would be nice. When I'm doing a mission, it's hard to have any idea of what a good or bad time is, less motivation to improve.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. In previous games there were a constant litany of players asking for something to be done about cheaters and/or to remove their scores.

[enricofermi2]

Ah, well that makes sense.

[CS Z]

1. There is no limit. However, energy and building materials move more slowly across Towers. Build a line of Pylons in addition to your mesh of towers for a high-speed network to the front lines. Otherwise, units farther away from your base will regularly run out of ammo and just sit there before sufficient energy arrives. If you have a ton of Arg that you don't need, a pair of Rifts can be useful for dealing with really long distances.

2. I think this was sufficiently answered by 75Karsten.

3. If you are referring to Miners, they generate more energy than a Tower. Pro-tip: Stick ERNs on a couple of Miners to massively boost energy early in a map. If you are referring to maps with storage tanks, only some maps have them. They provide a massive boost to available energy at the start and will be replenished by the Lab whenever the Lab has enough excess energy.

4. Anti-creeper is slightly more powerful than creeper per unit. The AC units are mostly useful when there are AC breeder spots (white) OR flip breeder spots (yellow) on a map. For that, you really only need one AC unit and just turn it on while it is sitting on one of those spots. Once the AC unit has fed enough AC into the AC/flip breeder spot, every few seconds the breeder will automatically generate a large wave of AC.

5. The factory converts Redon to Arg, Bluite to AC, and Greenar to Liftic. Then it stores the converted materials until they are needed. You need Arg for anti-air, shields, and some totems; AC for weapons; and Liftic for totems and various advanced units.

I almost never bother with certain units. An army of cannons and mortars with some air suppression (regular bombers) + Snipers for cover (or just one or two snipers with ERNs) + a few well-placed Missiles will almost always get the job done. I beat the last mission of the campaign without realizing there were two advanced units available.