Official Grey Goo Starter Guide

This is the official starter guide for Grey Goo! Want to know which faction might be your preferred starter faction? Check out this guide! Present within are detailed reference cards for both the hotkeys and units for each faction.

Grey Goo Overview

Grey Goo features a 16-mission single-player campaign revolving around four factions - the industrial Beta, the technologically advanced Humans, the volatile Goo, and the stealthy Shroud.

This real-time strategy (RTS) game was developed by Petroglyph, a company with deep RTS gaming roots; veterans at the studio originally hail from Westwood Studios, the folks responsible for creating the iconic Command & Conquer series. The company designed Grey Goo using their proprietary GlyphX engine and the game includes full-CGI cutscenes between missions to give an even greater depth of story. The team worked with Weta Workshop on the art in the game.

Grey Goo is focused on a larger, more strategic scale of gameplay. The game supports up to 200 units on the field per player, and unit speeds are a bit slower relative to StarCraft, making scouting and planning ahead even more strategic. Grey Goo’s deep tech upgrade trees are designed to unlock diverse gameplay options for units and structures rather than simple stat increases. In addition to the single player campaign, the game features Skirmish and multiplayer modes with up to four players; you can challenge other players or take on a variety of different AI, with varying difficulty levels, in a variety of multiplayer maps.

Factions

Humans - Very good at turtling (focusing on base defenses), with solid core base design and fortifications, but they sacrifice some mobility and map control to do so. However, they can unlock the technology to reconfigure their base, moving structures around their grid as needed. Helpful note: the Humans’ Teleporter structure can also instantly relocate units anywhere on the battlefield where vision is available.

Betas – A more-traditional RTS faction – you can turtle up with them, but they are versatile enough to go very aggressive, too. The Betas can spread to every corner of the map using expansion hubs, giving them the power to reinforce their strikes from multiple angles against more stationary foes like the Humans.

Goo - A very aggressive and mobile faction that can move constantly on several fronts at the same time, thus lending themselves more toward a very aggressive play style, but they do have some units that can support a bit of turtling in a pinch. Their unique ability to traverse terrain that is inaccessible by other factions gives them the element of surprise and allows them to outmaneuver an opponent when chased. Ambushing can prove highly effective for this faction; the Goo, more than the other two factions, most embodies the goal of creating a faction that is easy to learn and difficult to master.

Shroud - The Shroud are a base-building resource race. They are an intermediary step between the Beta/Human heavy base factions and the Goo baseless, in that they have light base-building and do not depend on map resources to function (though they get benefit from it). The primary themes of the Shroud are: advanced stealth, devious tricks based on mental powers, scaling based on connection to the “NeuralNet” (aura and proximity-based bonuses).

Getting Started

You can play each of Grey Goo’s four factions however you like. They all have specific mechanics that lean toward advantages in certain areas over others (like the effective base defenses provided by the Humans’ sentinel turrets, or the Goo’s freedom to develop immediately beyond the starting area), but each race is dynamic enough to adapt effectively to your own individual play style while allowing for experimentation.

We have given each faction the ability to break through a defensive strategy that delays the match into the very-late game: THE EPIC UNIT. Each epic unit has the power to crack an enemy base given enough support from allied units. The Beta have a mobile military base, the Hand of Ruk; the Humans send their Alpha to battle, a powerful unit with a devastating beam cannon; the Goo can join their forces to form a Purger; and the Shroud have the multi-stage Dirge that can toss around black holes! These units take a significant amount of time and resources to create, but once they’re deployed, they can change the course of an entire battle.

RTS games often have a lot going on at any given moment, and for many players, it can be overwhelming to keep track of so many important units and tasks. Grey Goo is designed to alleviate this and be a more macro than micro RTS experience, and factory auto-production is at the heart of that, and is something that can set players of different skill levels on a slightly more even playing field, at least in terms of constant unit production. Players can send build orders to factories with the game’s interfaces, in lieu of micromanaging production of specific units.

You still have to choose the right unit types and allocate them properly between your factories, however! This is important if your opponent tries to counter what you have on the field. There are situations where you may not want to use auto-production, as it can get expensive. Auto-building slow units can also make it difficult to keep up in army size or economic expansions, so keep an eye open.

Also keep in mind that, because the Goo faction does not have a normal infrastructure like the Betas or Humans, they are not equipped with the same auto-production feature. This is to ensure that there is a relatively equal amount of demand for macro-management between all four factions.

The decision on how to advance your tech is an important one, as it can determine if you successfully counter your enemy. There will be decisions that need to be made along the way, so plan for some trial and error. The game is meant to challenge players with their tech advancement choices and reward them accordingly. Tech upgrades can be reversed and switched to other choices as player strategies evolve over the course of battle.

We recommend starting with the first three missions of the Campaign, as they provide a comfortable introduction to the game’s mechanics. Play around with matches on the easy and normal settings to get a feel for what works for you. You can choose how the game’s AI will behave within missions; the AI can get be very tough on harder difficulties – consider yourself warned.

Skirmish

Skirmish AI plays the game exactly how a player would: it scouts the map, resource harvests, assesses enemy unit compositions, and makes decisions from there, determining high-priority targets, choosing what tech upgrades to research, and setting up defensive perimeters appropriately. It also assesses where it stands versus other players' economies and army sizes, making course corrections as needed (like creating anti-air if it detects you have air units, or expanding economically if it feels it’s lagging behind). It runs a huge variety of simulations to calculate the proper tactics to counter your force on the battlefield.

You may notice that there are a few named options to select for the AI, like Lambert or Cassini. These are the various AI personalities and each differently from each other when presented with similar scenarios to provide a variety of gameplay situations to the player. These behaviors may be more or less inclined to rush, or build aircraft early, or play a strictly defensive game in response to your choices.

Victory Conditions

These can be altered in any Skirmish or Multiplayer Game, except ranked/leaderboard games. Single player campaign missions are also predefined.
There are three general game modes: Standard, Annihilation, and Destroy HQ.

- Standard: Destroy the HQ, all factories and refineries/all Mother Goos (Epic units do not count)
- Annihilation: Destroy all units and structures/Mother Goos
- Destroy HQ: Destroy the HQ/all Mother Goos (Epic units do not count)

Custom Creation

Grey Goo includes a map editor at launch, giving players a wide range of tools that the developers use to build all the maps for the game. We are excited to see what the community will come up with in this bold new universe.

Reference Cards

[Action Hank]

Not the best place to post this, but could you guys look into selection bugs with Goo unit creation? Or overhauling the unit creation protocol entirely? Right now I'm losing units when I turn a protean into units cause the selection doesn't always transfer over from protean to fresh units, causing them to sit idly at the mother goo they were created at until I notice. What I would love to see is for units created from proteans which have had no movement orders yet, to head to the rally point of their mother if that's possible.

[76561198179237514]

Shroud have been added!

[VolteVaris]

Just needs the shroud update.

[Singleton]

中国大陆这边网速慢啊 it gets frozen

[Opinions]

@Jeff You need to build an add-on 1st then the large factory will slot on to that followed by the 3 remaining add-ons. After that, you can start with our alphas

[Man_CRNA]

Is there a reliable way to build a human epic unit? There's only three spots for attachment on the large factory.

[Lord Haart]

This is a great RTS, Can feel the Westwood vibes in it

[Setna]

Thanks Berek....man I miss the days of boxed games I still have my Brood War unit reference cards =)

[Sveenaa*]

Great help!

[Shinebox]

gj