Best path to maximise mass income at all times?

QuietJoy

Trying to nail down the lowest cost way to get mass at all times as the game progresses, in terms of how quick to get and make it pay for itself.

I've watched Heavens eco vid at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-GzOhDQwA8&list=PLxH0oefiZR_VjudeMTq6cGaMOLnnNywKQ but I'm keen to make a simple guide for newish players and not go into opportunity cost or if mex likely to get reclaimed as he does. We'll set aside thoughts of power cost in general as we go.

To begin with, we reclaim. Essentially free mass (ignoring cost of engineer). Rocks get more mass than trees. Reclaim alone can often win games as the quicker you can upgrade your mexes using this free mass the quicker you can grow your eco. When reclaim from dead units becomes available you should always grab it as a priority. The importance of reclaiming dead units cannot be overstated.

Then we grab T1 mexes. These should be grabbed at every opportunity, even if you feel you can not hold them for long as they repay the cost of making them in around 18 seconds. They cost 36 mass and generate 2 mass per second.

Next, we upgrade a t1 mex to a t2 mex. This costs 900 mass and generates 6 mass per second. 150 seconds or 2.5 minutes to repay.

We must ring those t2 mexes before even thinking of upgrading them to t3, so 4 mass storage each, total cost of 800 mass. This adds 3 mass per second, so a ringed t2 goes from 6 to 9 mass income. Just over a minute to repay the cost of all 4 storages.

Once I finish ringing t2 mexes I'm always unsure.

The two usual options i think are:

RAS on my acu after building a t3 pgen. Taking the UEF as an example, cost of RAS is 5k and income is 14 mass so 6 minutes to repay.

OR -

Upgrading a ringed t2 mex to a t3 mex costs 4.6k and outputs 27 mass per second. Takes about 3 mins to repay cost.

I think RAS income has changed at some point during a patch and it used to be the recommended next step but now seems only worth doing if you want the extra power it will create?? So it seems clear to me it's best to keep upgrading those t2 mexes to t3's and only then once they are all done get RAS on the ACU. If your faction has multiple RAS upgrades I don't know of any reason not to get the second stage immediately after the first.

(Oh, if you want to get technical, BrinkOfInsanity did a video where he proved if you have mass and power in the bank combined with plenty of buildpower, you should ctrl+k the t2 mex and build a t3 from scratch on top of it RATHER than upgrading it. Seems illogical but he clearly proved it.)

So now we're in late game, all mexes are ringed T3 and ACU has RAS. Once more I'm unsure.

Essentially, we are back to the choice of two pathways:

Mass Fabs. Static and snipeable. But lower cost and faster to build than RAS Acus. I'd say build a dozen or two T2 MassFabs and then start making the T3 MassFabs.

OR -

RAS Sacus. Just go all in on these high HP, mobile units with buildpower. Building the Gateway costs, and then the first few Ras Sacus seem to take an age, but by the time you've got 500+ mass sec you'll be watching them pump out to hopefully an unbeatable mass income.

Interested in hearing everyone's thoughts. Ras on ACU before or after T3 mexes? What's your late game mass strategy and why?

Jip

If you go RAS after making a T3 pgen without the right amount of mass income then you are spilling a massive amount of power. On top of that, if you make a T3 pgen just for RAS, than RAS is not 5K mass but 8K mass for 14 / tick - as its sole purposes was to get you RAS. Going RAS first is never worth it as far as I am aware.

You mention reclaiming rocks is more useful than reclaiming trees because rocks give more mass. That isn't entirely true - if you reclaim a lot of tree groups (like on Seton's, or as air on Gap) you can push back your pgens, allowing you to upgrade your extractors earlier. In turn, they give you 'mass'.

Then there is the trade off - your topic is only about making economy with economy. But what about taking more economy from your opponent than you spent on taking that economy? As an example - a bomber may be only 80 mass. But if it manages to destroy up to 400 mass then the bomber has a 5x return investment over your enemy. That difference means one of two things:

You have more presence, make even more presence and can therefore take even more ground.
You have equal presence, stop making additional presence and spent it on your economy.

This only increases when you strike engineers in general, but specifically those that are performing a critical job at the time (such as making power, factories or extractors). This is also why early raids can be so effective - their risk is small, but their return value can be gigantic.

kdrafa91

After geting all T3mex, some mass fabs then portal + RAS SACUs, imo

You can get RAS ACU if you go air or nukes it makes the E worth, imo

Some games people have more than 100 SACUS its OP

QuietJoy

@jip Good points mate, thanks

Exselsior

Jip made some good points and I'll add my point of view on it. To directly answer the title of your post, there isn't a way to do that. Each game is different, and this is highly situational and map specific. Some examples of what I mean:

If you're in a situation where there is constant fighting especially with expensive t3 and t4 units, the best way to get efficient mass immediately is to have factories pumping out engineers to the front lines to reclaim everything as soon as it dies.
If you're making a lot of air, having a nice air grid is critical otherwise you're wasting mass because you'd need more power to run the factories without adjacency than with
If it costs a lot of resources to protect your economy in the late game, then ras bois become more efficient and much less risky than explosive mass fabs
Counter to that, if it's easy to protect then well made t3 fab grids are more efficient though risky.

Some other points

It's rarely a good idea to go ras before upgrading all mexes to t3, I think the only time this can make sense is on dedicated air slots with practiced builds, and I believe that has a lot to do with build power limits on these practiced builds
Never make fabs before full t3 mexes
Never make ras bois before full t3 mexes
Making too much power is one of the biggest mass wasting mistakes I see noobs make that's relatively easy to fix imo
Don't make pointless units, for example something I see lower rated people on Seton's do is make a patrol group of a bunch of t1 units and some t1 static AA in expansions such as island and the beach expansion mexes every single game regardless of the game state. Don't do this. It's a massive and useless waste of mass that could have gotten you full t3 mexes faster. Tons of other obvious examples of pointless units, but this is the first that came to mind.
You can ctrl k t2 mexes to build t3 on top of the wreckage, but you have to do it correctly. Meaning you need at least 15 t1 engies assisting the t3 (iirc), and to do it without stalling otherwise it's more efficient to just upgrade the mex. Also, and this is a really big point, you have to have the apm for this. It's highly apm intensive compared to just upgrading some mexes and pausing ones that aren't being assisted by engineers. To be blunt, if you're here asking this question you probably shouldn't be doing this unless you're completely afk in an eco spot on something like astro or gap and have nothing else to do.

tl;dr: This is an extremely situational question with no one answer anyone can possibly give, but there are a lot of general tips that can go into it.

Broken

Depends on map. If you're in a big team and eco slot, you pretty much always ras instead of t3 pgen, because especially if the mex are closely packed. Dual Gap is a clear example of this.

If its a smaller team map with no eco spot then just copy top builds in Setons.

If its a 1v1 then look at 1v1 play.