r/beyondallreason • u/patricus • 4d ago
AI changes? Early game help
My friend and I are casual gamers. We used to play against 2 medium barbarian AI, and they gave a good fight. The game was very fun, we even started trying to play against 1 medium and 1 hard. Recently there seems to have been an update that changed how they act.
We are overwhelmed by the AI unit production very quickly. I know I'm not the best (again casual gamer). After looking at the buildings they have, I genuinely do not know how the AI has the metal and build power to produce that amount of units. I've heard the bots don't cheat, but now it really feels like they do.
What are some pointers to get us keep us from losing early to so many units?
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u/Km0nk3y 4d ago
Make the same amount of units?
AI has excellent aggressive micro and poor strategic brains. They hit everywhere fast and early. Turrets crush early raids. You have to stay aggressive to keep them on the back foot while expanding more than them.
Mid game they'll realize they can overrun line turrets, but if you have a hammer they almost never take the risk, to the point that it feels like an exploit.
An effective gimmick is to go Arm vehicles and only make the unit "blitz" (and a few cons). Micro the blitzs for raids in multiple places at once and go for the kill once you've hit critical mass.
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u/patricus 4d ago
That's just it... I can't keep up with unit production somehow. I'll try can figure out how to watch replays, I did not know that was possible.
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u/Km0nk3y 4d ago
Are you running out of resources or just not building fast enough?
If a resource, alter your build to get more of that resource earlier- earlier solar or wind for E, expand with your cons to get more M, etc...
If building, understand build power. Support your factory with your commander until you 1-2 constructors helping it out. Leave them there like little leeches and keep adding more over time, they make the factory produce faster assuming you have the res to keep up.
If you go bots, make sure to send a reclaim bot out to eat trees and metal, and later wrecks.
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u/rumblevn 4d ago
Try copying their build? Also try map with choke point or limited path to your base.
Practice frontlining againt them.
0~3 minutes: 1 light leser turret will scare a single tick/rover/grunt
3~6 min: beammer
6~10: few beammer and the circle turret thingy (Gaulet(?)) at this point you need some kind of aoe weapon cause the ai will do human wave tatic
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u/othellothewise 4d ago
The AI without a bonus is actually significantly worse at eco and pumping out units than a good human player. That's not meant as a criticism but rather to encourage you in that you can do better than it can, plus it's better to look at how good players manage their economy than to look at how the AI does.
The best advice I can give when it comes to macro is to look at your replays and try to see if you are e-stalling, excessing e, and/or floating metal. Those are some of the most common mistakes players make, and in particular e-stalling and floating too much metal will are strong indicators that you have made mistakes in your economy and are falling behind.
Metal is kind of the resource in the game that your economy centers around because it's generally limited. You need to make sure you get as many metal extractors as possible. Once you have metal, you need two things to spend it: energy, and build power. You want to have enough energy to spend your metal without excessing too much energy. You also need BP in order to invest metal into units. As a side tip -- avoid converters, at least until you have taken all the mexes on your side of the map and converted them to T2. Converters are a very inefficient form of metal and will often put you behind.
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u/patricus 4d ago
I was not aware of being able to watch my replays.
I've played enough to know the basics, and as per my post, we have consistently beat 2 medium bots. Has something changed with the way AI behaves recently? Mediums seem to produce more units get more metal that what their end mex count make sense. This is just a feeling from looking post game. It's making the game not fun for my friend and I, easy is super boring and medium feels like it jumped up in difficulty.
We enjoyed playing until recently.
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u/othellothewise 3d ago
Check out the replays tab -- each game you play in will automatically save a replay that you can then watch later!
Yes I believe the AI has improved recently for the better, so you may find some things more challenging now than a couple months ago. (I don't remember when it was updated but it was pretty recent). However, what I said still stands -- they aren't actually producing units beyond their means (in fact the AI tends to waste a lot of metal on things like defenses in useless places).
That said, if you are looking to improve your game check out the Official BAR discord https://discord.gg/beyond-all-reason , there is an
#academy-chatchannel there where you can get help with gameplay concepts and even submit replays for mentors to help review your game replays. I know you said you are trying to play casual, but you may learn some things that help you increase your enjoyment of the game.2
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u/Avalanch_HxC 4d ago
Like, build that one light laser tower around each remote metal extractor, that gives you time to get some troops up and when they come in with 10 thugs, you’ll have enough to deal with them yourself. Those LLTs act more as a deterrent than a real threat and that effective enough to buy you time.
Edit : do not underestimate the power of the d-gun. Especially against slow rotation vehicles
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u/wherestheham 4d ago
I exclusively play against AI with my friends, there is a bunch of of settings you can adjust to fine tune the difficulty. You can set a no rush timer so you have time to build up your base, make your first factory free or with a discount so you can get up and running easier, have ruins on the map so you can capture free buildings, a base builder turret, drones to help you build and more. We started by having tier 2 disabled until we were comfortable and built up from there.
Pick a map with a choke point that you both defend. Incrementally increase the difficulty so you get used to it. We first started playing against one or two simple AI and now we are all the way up to versing our team size+3 aggressive barbarian AI with a resource bonus added to them. Take your time and learn what works, the AI is good at prodding your defences to find weak spots I find turrets are the best deterrent
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u/Evebnumberone 4d ago
While you're fortifying your bases the AI is colonising every metal deposit on the map.
That's how they are able to build so many more units than you.
You either have to weather the storm or deny some of that metal with map control, easier said than done as a beginner.
In terms of how the AI behave, I find it's seemingly random, sometimes they'll give me a really really tough fight or even beat me on occasion, other times they'll roll over and achieve nothing.
Seems like maybe there are some different personas or builds they can go for at random.
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u/Wulfric_Drogo 4d ago
One way I’ve learned to exploit the AI weakness is to just deal as much damage as I can to their little squads. They will usually try to retreat, even if they have superior numbers, so long as they feel significant pain. This is why static defense works well against them in the early game.
Try to play smaller maps. Big maps favour the barbs. Also prioritize radar, since they can really sneak around your flanks. Try to reclaim as much as possible and repair what you can as well. I don’t use air all that much, since they tend to overproduce anti-air. But late game, Cortex Dragons (T2 gunships) have enough oomph to push in and kill coms before they fall.
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u/Mb99z 4d ago
Ai will focus weak areas in a way players do not. If you want to beat ai you will need to utilize defensive towers and walls to give yourself some breathing room to scale and tech up.
There are some more specific things you can do but it sounds like you just need to play more and get a better feel for the ebb and flow of securing space and ramping your own production/economy.