Choosing Your Strategy

The RPS-style strategy applies to play styles as well. Rushing beats teching, turtling beats rushing, and teching beats turtling.

Rushing: The goal of an effective rush is to build a massive army as fast as you possibly can. The army is mainly made of lower-level units like the core infantry and scout units created at the base.

Turtling: Build a few defensive units, upgrade your Turrets, and focus on resources, slowly expanding your bases and fortifying them as you go. Creep slowly across the map with your upgraded bases, frustrating your enemy with your superior map control before dominating them, with your advanced economy funding a large and quickly replaceable army.

Teching: Teching is most easily accomplished when you have teammates involved. This allows you to focus more of your resources into research and upgrades instead of defensive units.

Booming: Expand your economy as quickly as possible, then overpower your enemies with your superior economy. Take over minibases and plant extra resource structures on them. Once you’re fully upgraded on your resources, expand farther to another base and build up resources there. This tactic is fairly risky against most players and is recommended for use in a match with teammates. When playing with teammates, you can send your extra resources to them to help fund their armies!

Scouting Your Enemy and Countering Their Tactics

Scouting is essential in deciding how to move forward against your enemies. This section aims to teach you how to identify the early-game strategy of the units.

Rushing: To identify a rush, look for more than just the starting units in your enemy’s base the moment you arrive. Their base may contain only Supply Pads or Harvesters; this signifies they’re focusing on unit creation and not research early on. If their base is locked early and you notice this building pattern, it’s likely they’re keeping their army locked in. This helps hide the fact that they’re rushing and renders you incapable of getting an accurate unit count.

When you see this, you have a few options. Retreat to your base, upgrade your Turrets, and build some counter-units; or quickly tech up and create advanced infantry or air vehicles. Choosing air against a rush isn’t always the best idea, however, as infantry is strong against air and can effectively fight your units. Focus on getting counter-infantry units like the Hellbringers or Suicide Grunts, and mix them in with your core infantry unit and a couple scouts. If you have a damaging Leader Power, use it to quickly deal with the enemy’s weaker units, leaving you the opportunity to move onto their base, which lacks defense without much resistance.

Booming: Booming can look like a rush in the early stages, if the enemy decides to lock their base. A good way to detect a boomer is to check for Generators or Power Extractors. Look for a booming player to quickly make a move for a nearby minibase. If you see them building Turrets, they may be attempting to turtle. In that case, set to building units, and use your Leader Powers to take them down.

Attack a boomer early. Leave your scout harassing your enemy’s base, trying to damage their resource buildings while you build up a small army of Hellbringers or Jump Pack Brutes to come in and deal heavy damage to the defenseless buildings.

Teching: Teching looks a bit like booming. However, the enemy builds a few Generators or Power Extractors in the early stages instead of Supply Pads/Harvesters. A teching player may also attempt to capture one of the Resource Nodes on the map for even more Power per second, allowing them to tech up as quickly as possible.

If you catch a player teching, immediately begin a unit rush. Their lack of Supply creation prevents them from building much in the way of defense. Focus on destroying any Turrets first, then destroy their resource structures to leave them at a standstill, allowing you plenty of time to complete the task of disabling the base.

Turtling: Notice your enemy building Turrets very early on? This signals that they’re attempting to turtle and want to ensure you can’t defeat them with a rush.

Either boom or tech to defeat a turtle. Build some Generators/Power Extractors to quickly tech up to the next level, then create a few anti-building units—Jump Pack Brutes or Hellbringers. Build a couple of support units to heal your anti-structure army while they pierce through the Turrets.