Alien Build Order Since Reinforced
Geekavenger
Join Date: 2012-08-31 Member: 157117Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-08-31 Member: 157117Members, Reinforced - Shadow
There have been a few posts about which hive upgrade first but one thing I have been struggling with since Reinforced is build order.
I think my issue is that until 255 I used to just upgrade the abilities I already had access too, Biomass was a precursor to me even thinking about abilities. Now that I am upgrading all abilities by life form at one time (except gorge tunnels for some reason?) I don't know when I should be investing in Biomass instead of spurs/Shells/Veils instead of buildings (whip/Crag/Shade/Shift)
So I was wondering what everyone out there thinks as far as a Plan A goes for Build Order for Aliens
Currently the path I try and follow as closely as possible is (and I am admitadly not having any luck with it):
Hive Upgrade>2 Harvesters>3 Upgrade Structures>Biomass>Expantion Tech Point Harvester>1st Life Form Upgrade (Structure>Biomass if needed>Upgrade)
This is where I stop my build order because
a) even now it is heavily situational. If we have 2 Lerks or one Good Lerk I will do those upgrades first and push Biomass to Umbra, If we are holding a lot of territory I will do Skulk upgrades and try and save for a hive... etc.
b)I am not doing so well so I feel like by now I am already screwing up somewhere.
I think my issue is that until 255 I used to just upgrade the abilities I already had access too, Biomass was a precursor to me even thinking about abilities. Now that I am upgrading all abilities by life form at one time (except gorge tunnels for some reason?) I don't know when I should be investing in Biomass instead of spurs/Shells/Veils instead of buildings (whip/Crag/Shade/Shift)
So I was wondering what everyone out there thinks as far as a Plan A goes for Build Order for Aliens
Currently the path I try and follow as closely as possible is (and I am admitadly not having any luck with it):
Hive Upgrade>2 Harvesters>3 Upgrade Structures>Biomass>Expantion Tech Point Harvester>1st Life Form Upgrade (Structure>Biomass if needed>Upgrade)
This is where I stop my build order because
a) even now it is heavily situational. If we have 2 Lerks or one Good Lerk I will do those upgrades first and push Biomass to Umbra, If we are holding a lot of territory I will do Skulk upgrades and try and save for a hive... etc.
b)I am not doing so well so I feel like by now I am already screwing up somewhere.
Comments
Hive choice
Harvesters
Whip (skulk upgrade)
Biomass
Shells/spurs/veils
Hive #2
Gorge Tunnels
Situational - talk to your k/d leaders and find out what they want. Could go lerk/fade/gorge or gorge/lerk/fade? No point doing any lifeform upgrade if no one is good at that lifeform.
I kinda like the new tech tree for aliens since it's dependent on biomass upgrades now. Used to forget to get stomp all the time.
1) They get Skulk upgrades way too early - Skulk upgrades are pretty much worthless until you have enough biomass for Leap. Team resources better spent elsewhere.
2) They don't upgrade Gorge until biomass 3. Since Babblers were locked behind upgrades the early game Gorge has become extremely weak. Get them Babblers asap and they have a much higher chance of surviving to secure territory.
Other than that I'd say get Gorge tunnels early on so your team can get them up and have quick travel around the map.
-Hive choice
-1st hive upgrade
-tunnels (if I have good gorges or any gorges at all)
-biomass 1
-2nd and 3rd hive upgrade
-2nd hive and/or biomass 2 (gorge upgrades optional)
-whip
-whatever the team has from there
- 2 chambers
- Harvesters
- Tunnels (if gorges)
- Biomass 1
- 3rd chamber
- Biomass 2
- Gorge upgrades
- Second hive
-Whip
- Skulk upgrades (try to finish by the time second hive is done building)
- Biomass 4 (for leap)
Rushing two chambers is a bit risky if your team isn't very good, as you'll need them to defend your early harvesters. Assuming you can hold those, I'll sprinkle in additional harvesters as map control allows in between that build order. Works best with a gorge to build your chambers and RTs right away to save cash on drifters.
Result: leap up almost with the 2nd hive and full cara, pretty much as fast as you can get.
After that just 2nd hive upgrades, etc.
Comments on other builds:
Don't agree with early tunnels or gorge upgrades. You want gorge upgrades for bile, babblers aren't that good, also tunnels end up being useless in most maps (early game you have only 1 hive distance to travel.)
2 harvesters
shell/spur/veil
Second hive
Skulk upgrade+biomass
Second hive upgrades
More lifeform research depending on what the team has. If we need to take down marine bases/arcs, gorge. otherwise lerk/fade.
More biomass whenever it can be afforded
After that just structure spam, play around with drifters, get more harvesters as appropriate. Maybe gorge tunnels if we have enough of the map
Late game - get biomass 9, build whip army, contaminate over and over.
Right on the money in my book. Economy is your number one concern and priorety.
While my personal strategy will always vary based on how well the team is doing at containing marines my SOP to teching is as such:
Shift hive
Shift near starting extractor
1 drifter
Expand - A thesis could be easily written to describe all the fine points of knowing that the more you fortify a room, (crag/shade/whip/shift) the longer you have to hold the room intact before you start to gain a profit. Losing a building and having to replace it before you have regained your losses is detrimental no matter what it was that you lost. Reusing the same structures, since you will need one of each to get all the upgrades anyway, and echoing them around depending on where they're needed is a cheaper alternative at the beginning/start of a game. The topic of expansion has a million variables of when to do thing and when not to.
At 4-5 RTs first biomass (can be switched with gorge upgrade, depends on players)
2 spurs (An alternative could also be to drop 1 spur, research gorge tunnels, then the second spur)
Drop a shade
Gorge upgrade (or first biomass)
Third spur
Final Biomass
Second hive (can be switched with fade upgrade)
Fade Upgrade (can be switched with second hive)
(Gorge Tunnels unless previously researched)
Drop whip
Research skulk
Drop crag
Research onos
Crag hive
Shell
Biomass
Shell
Lerk upgrade (As a note, I feel that the lerk upgrade is only useful once you have the biomass for spores and researching it earlier for umbra is a waste when the early onos upgrade for bone shield is a much better investment.)
Biomass
Shell
Third Hive
Shade Hive (At this point in the game, for pubs, you might be able to get away with dropping all three veils after finishing Shade Hive and still have res to start Biomass right away because of the down time of possibly saving res since starting the third hive. Things however, often change.)
Biomass
Biomass
Veil
Veil
Veil
That's about it. Rip it apart as you please but the idea is to have research for a lifeform done at the same time you approach the level of biomass required to use the ability. Since it's pretty much impossible to not have some disparity since the 4-6 levels of biomass hold abilities for all lifeforms its generally better to have the biomass done first since all other lifeforms will get the health and armor boost and benefit more than spending the res to research a lifeform who's abilities you won't be able to use yet with no immediate benefit.
1. Get whatever upgrade you want (shift or shade seem to be the most common)
2. Get gorge tunnels
3. Rush bilebomb (i.e. biomass 3 + gorge ups)
After that you need to play it by ear depending on what the marines did.
- 2 or 3 RTs + 2 Shells
- 1 or 2 more RTs + 3rd Shell
- Biomass + Whip (Leap) + Gorge Upg (Bile) or 2nd Hive + Shift + 3 Spurs
- Whatever lifeforms are being used.
- Whips (x9001). Echo them in next to power node (x1).
- Profit???
2 drifters
harvesters
gorge tunnels? (usually ask team who will use them)
shift hive
spurs
second hive
gorge research
whip
skulk research
hive complete>biomass 1
biomass 1 on main hive after gorge up
Some point in there I'll probably drop a crag near my main hive to heal my drifters and a shift for my constructing second hive. After my second hive and gorge/skulk ups I'll generally prioritize getting a third hive if possible, otherwise crag and shells and then lerk>onos>biomass>fade. I might delay the spurs a bit more depending on how the game is going. I never like to get less than all 3 of an upgrade type at once, if my team are going to spend the time and res to upgrade they had damn well better be getting the full benefit.
I'm prioritizing lifeform upgrades in order of usefulness. Bilebomb should be up almost immediately as the gorge upgrade comes up, which is the single most important ability. Leap is second which should be up when skulk comes up. Regardless of whether I have a bunch of fades or not, the fade upgrades don't really bring a lot to the table for a vast majority of players, some are actually crippled by the introduction of vortex since they tend to use it improperly and make themselves LESS combat effective.
It has considerable advantages - no need to expose expensive drifters (8 res) to enemy fire, no early-killed unbuilt harvesters, you can echo whips for defense to buy time when feasible.
Echo is a huge ability, but I don't see it in pubs at all.
It has considerable disadvantages too. High cost, little to no scouting at the res node, slower building, and less forward drifters for enzyme support.
Echo is great for a lot of things, but for harvesters? Not so much. Learn to micro your drifters better and you won't need to worry about them being exposed.
I'd like to note that pre-reinforced my opinion on the matter was justifiably different (I even started a thread on the topic). Harvesters only cost 1 res to echo then instead of 2, drifters were much slower and therefor more difficult to micro and save from enemy fire, enzyme was more expensive and therefor less useful, and most importantly of all, the kham could go gorge and build his own harvesters in base. The early shift was also valuable for fast gorge tunnels, costing only 5 additional res, which now cost 15 and no longer require a shift.
Disagree. Even with the tres egg, which takes 45 seconds to mature and costs 15 res, he still has 0 res to use to build hydras or tunnels. If a single marine attacks your upgrades you are much more likely to be able to take him out as a skulk than a gorge, and the odds are even more in your favor with the whip and hive to help. It's totally non-viable when you consider the egg (15) hive upgrade (10) shift (10) and cysts (about 8-20) all have to be done right at the start of the round and leave you with no res to build the actual harvesters, let alone echo them.
False, ready room and come back. BAM 20 res in a pub, hydras and gorge commander. Or let someone jump in to start the match and jump out, this is allowed in comp. Or jump in and jump out right before match starts. The res gained from having a dedicated gorge commander vastly usurps any other build. Properly have everything hot keyed and macros set up and your balling in res.
Two Harvesters
Spur/Veil
Grab as many Harvesters as possible
2 Spurs/Veils
Gorge Upgrade
Second Hive
Biomass
Shade/Shift Hive
3 Veils/Spurs as quick as possible
Fade Upgrade
Lerk Upgrade
Onos Upgrade
Skulk Upgrade
Varies from game to game, ofc. Especially the lifeform upgrades. Haven't find the perfect order there yet.
I don't claim this to be perfect, but it works for me.
I find it pretty annoying that gorge and biomass is upgraded in the same place, so you can't really start both unless you got more than one hive and even then you might want to choose hive tech and upgrade bio first, so you have to upgrade gorge on first hive, but you still might need more bio on first hive. And all these bundled upgrades are so expensive, you almost never can research 2 things at the same time.
So you click and wait res to click another thing. What you choose first doesn't matter much, because bio doesn't work without upgrades and vice versa.
Then there is a point when you accumulated basic 'useful' biomass and upgraded most important life forms, so all that is left is waiting for res and clicking on what's left.
Each and every tech path is viable, so you can't screw up there either.
This post might sound rude/offensive, but I don't mean that. It's just how I feel about current research tree.
Disregard everything I said, I'm going echo gorge every game until this gets fixed lol. Thx 4 teh tip. :P
So cheat, or cheat, or convince someone to sacrifice their own pres in a pub. Still doesn't get around having the additional res cost on the harvestors, fewer drifters and less ability to micro drifters in the early game.
shift hive (h1)
2 drifters (maybe one if i'm cysting far and can't afford to drop the harvestor once the infestation spreads)
spur
harvestor
harvestor
harvestor (keep dropping harvestors as far as team is able to keep rines out of)
all excess res on spurs during this (although drop a shift if the gorges have built a wall somewhere good)
hive
biomass (h1)
gorge upgrade (h1)
whip
skulk upgrade
biomass (h2)
lerk upgrade (if lots of lerks around, otherwise, last thing before 3rd hive)
shade hive (h2)
veil
veil
veil
shade
fade upgrade
biomass (h1)
crag
onos upgrade
biomass (h2)
hive
biomass (h3)
biomass (h3)
crag hive
shell
shell
shell
Throughout all of that I will almost always prioritize dropping harvestors over anything else, unless a crag or something is urgently needed. If 3rd hive is retrieved before upgrades are maxed out, i'll usually rush upgrades before biomass (thus would build shells ahead of biomass - only do so in this scenario as it's just one biomass away from stab, then one biomass away for stomp, which seems more useful - depending on the lifeforms on the field of course). Resflow also would change this, as this assumes a really good resflow (e.g. such that biomass finishes before the fade/onos upgrades do). Lots of things would change this.
I was going to go into detail about that in my original post but it started to get way to long and went on numerous tangents regarding team economy. It is very feasible if you have a bunch of jerks on your team who won't go gorge or if you only have 1 on your team as you can use echo to build harvesters on one side of the map and have the gorge build the other.
But also think of this, if you are good enough with managing your drifters and keeping them alive you will only need to build 2. One for building obviously, but the other for supporting your team. I've noticed for myself that I usually have around 3-4 drifters if it's a larger game. Two at main for general base building of upgrades/support structures/harvesters/whips for later echoing if I need more than 1 FOB for harrassing, 1 for expanding/hive building, and 1 for supporting the team for pushes with the movement/attack/armor heal abilities. If you can keep your drifters out of death's clutches the money you save from not echoing will greatly offset the cost of drifters in the long run.
The best way to do this is to hotkey all of your drifters so if one spots trouble and you're quick, you can get it out of a tight situation until a teamate can solve the issue.
Edit* And now I see the wall of text I created...
Some quick math, it costs 8 res for a drifter and 2 res to echo. If you only have to echo 4 harvesters the whole match and not lose 1 the cost is offset and the added safety of only needing to rebuild the one at base makes it worth echoing. The moment you echo a fifth harvester you are spending extra resources regardless if you're expanding or replacing and the added safety loses its value if you're replacing them.
The balance of what to do hinges mostly on if you can manage your drifters. If you can, it's cheaper than to echo. If you can't, it might be better to echo your structures.
There's also the cost of echoing other structures. Whips, at 2 res, we can ignore for now because contaminate, echo whip spam, is more for ending a match or breaking a seige and is the only time you should be echoing whips.
Crags, shifts, and shades I believe cost 1 res to echo. Shifts might cost 2 I can't remember. The point though, is if you're careful, you only need to build 2 of each building. One for safe keeping (If you lose all your crags you lose onos upgrades, same with shifts for lerks, shades for fades, etc.). The second set of support buildings you can just echo around the map to where your team needs them so you can keep a sort of moble forward operating base without spending res to leave permenant structures and use that res instead to get things like lifeform upgrades, lifeform eggs, faster spurs/shells/veils, biomass, or another hive.
Lots of things to consider and often times you need to think of the more long term than short term.
It's the best party trick of the three, but like all other activatable abilities (uberheal, ink), it's just a party trick.
I prefer to spend every single squeeze of res on making my lifeforms faster and harder to kill, or to synergize (lf-specific upgrades). When all that's done, perhaps it's time to waste time and res on stupid things like drifter and structure abilities.
I'd rather have leap or a third shell 20 seconds early than feel good about myself because I am obscure, cool, and different. Unless it's a stacked game, then I don't really care.
You might take a PG down or an RT with a fast attack, but marines will come back and retake them if you don't make your players "permanently" powerful.
I feel like meds are a waste as well, except with really good players btw. That's recently possibly changed as marines are able to actually dodge a little more when fighting a skulk, so medpacks might actually help. However, in a lot of previous patches, you'd often find yourself having wasted 10 seconds of your time and 5 res spamming medpacks at a marine who does barely any damage to a skulk, or dies as fast as the medpacks are dropped.
Then again, people have their preferences. I see drifter usage, especially early game, as an "all in" type of maneuver. It either works and you win the game right then, or you waste res and time that you often don't make up for in the long run.
Of course, I'm talking mostly from the point of view of pubs. The impact of meds and drifter abilities on matches where people actually work together en masse is probably more pronounced as well.
Clouds are actually significantly more powerful than meds and ammo, at least in themselves. They are more on par with nanoshield and speed packs and scans (note, the speed pack doubles reload speed), and cost WAY less res. The downside of course is having to have the drifter in the area, and having to focus on keeping the drifter moving so it doesn't die near instantly. Storm and Enzyme are good early game and all game, Mucus and Hallucination are better when used on bigger lifeforms (IE onos and sometimes fade).
Also, the 2-6 res on clouds on an engagement is far from an "all in". If you lose the fight and you are set back 5 to 10 seconds in res flow, plus whatever you would have lost in that fight anyway, big fucking deal.
Use shortcut keys and Move VERY FAST. you wanna have less than 20 res the whole game unless your getting big stuff. 80% of the time Shift, crag then shade.
-Cyst 2 rts
-hive choice
-only 1 drifter (get a gorge)
-Ask yourself Is my team good?
Yes= (always expand first) expand 2 hive locations and get rts (resources win the game) - tunnels - hive upgrades - biomass - gorge upgrades - skulk.... (1 of each structure until hive 3 focus on upgrades)
No= hive upgrades - tunnels - crag - whip -.... (try to secure the double rts your probably going to loose anyways)
If your team sucks play more actively with whips crags and shades (if your an experienced alien commander you know theirs a lot you can actively do in battle.) If your team is good support them with upgrades and biomass.
It doesn't make sense that I can upgrade an ability, however cannot use that ability without a second upgrade. See what im saying?
It's like, Upgrading shotguns, but then you need to research the bullets. Right?
1)Cyst 2 RT's - Maybe use mist on the cyst
2)Build 1 Drifter
3)BioMass Upgrade (does this still give hp increase?)
4)Craig Hive
5)2Shells asap
6)Gettting Leap ASAP/Secure 2nd Hive
7)Building forward bases with Craig
If we have gorges securing 2nd hive early game, I drop them Shift/Craig with them, instead of dropping those in main base.