Reclaiming your way to victory
Reclaiming is great, whether you’re reclaiming objects strewn around the landscape or husks of dead units. Reclaiming is also one of those techniques that you use the majority of great players using, but a lot fewer of the mediocre players. There’s a reason for that: reclaiming is hugely advantageous.
Reclaiming can provide effectively free resources at the small cost of T1 engineers. A T1 engineer can pay for its own mass cost after reclaiming just seven trees, for instance. But there’s never just seven trees: there’s always many more, and having a few engineers dedicated to reclaiming will easily pay themselves back and much much more. A reclaiming engineer can bring in a greater mass influx than a mass extractor. That’s something to pay attention to.
But even better than reclaiming natural objects around the landscape is reclaiming husks of dead units. Husks are worth 80% of the mass cost of the unit. If anyone ever sends an experimental against you that you defeat, rush to reclaim it. It’ll almost pay for a rebuttal experimental unit of your own. Also, large battles tend to leave battlefields strewn with dead husks. Get some engineers out there reclaiming them and you can finance the construction of an even larger army than the one you lost, for free, because you’re also reclaiming your enemy’s units’ husks.
Anytime you’re looking around the map and you see dead enemies or reclaimable terrain objects, you need to be thinking to yourself, “How can I get an engineer over there to reclaim that?” Reclaiming is so important that reclaiming the large ice crystal on Winters Duel (the one worth a good chunk of mass) is in top players’ standard build orders for the map. Keep that in mind.
Be on the look-out for maps where reclaiming is overpowered, and don’t miss the opportunity. “The Ditch” is one such map. The whole map is strewn with rubble fields that are worth hundreds of mass each and reclaim ultra-quickly. There’s lots of them around all of the starting bases. Needless to say, you can get an absolutely huge jump start on an economy just by reclaiming everything in sight. Check out the replay below, where I had four tech 3 mass extractors, three tech 2 mass extractors, a tech 3 land factory, and multiple tech 3 engineers, all within ten minutes, all financed by reclaiming. You can just see the lightbulb go off in my head when I get my third construction unit and I realize how ridiculously good the reclaiming on the map is, and then throw my economy into hyper gear.
Download the replay of this match (v3223).
April 24th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
It’s very true. I noticed in most of the high level games people were putting 3 engineers on reclaiming duty pretty much from the start. Once I started doing this my economy came on leaps and bounds. And once you have that kind of momentum going it’s so much easier to build mass fabricators and tech up your extractors.
The more I play this game the more I begin to think economy is the most important factor by a long shot. Good raiding and expansion can mean a win in the short term, but the players who invests heavily into their economy at the early stages (i.e. building lots of engineers to reclaim, build diagonal lines of energy and scattered mass fabs) tend to be able to weather most setbacks and have a much better chance of being able to produce tons of t3 siege bots and SCU’s than the opponent who was more offensive at earlier stages.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Don’t forget to mention Ian’s Cross and Seton’s Clutch! :D Gotta love Experimental hulks! w00t!!
April 24th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Jay: Absolutely. Controlling the center of the map on Seton’s Clutch and Ian’s Cross are absolutely essential to victory. You basically have to move your commander up as early as possible and build as many land factories as possible on the front lines to churn out enough units to take it, and then hold it with turrets.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Reclaiming is especially important just after you’ve beaten back an enemy assault from your base. Grabbing all that free mass can take you out of stall, and give you the boost you need to get back in the game, especially if your opponent’s eco was geared toward that one big early push, like Molloy notes.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I seriously need to keep this in mind. I’ve always known about reclaiming, but as a lower-middle class player, you’re right that I still rarely do it.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Just a slight correction to the original post. You had 4 t3 metal extractors and 1 t2 extractor in under 10 minutes. Those rocks give INSANE amounts of mass. Something like 50 apiece from what I can see.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Depending on the map, I like to have the first factory I build making engineers at least until I go to tier 2. One useful technique if you do this is to set an ‘attack’ rally point for your factory by holding down alt and right-clicking. The engineer will start reclaiming anything in range the second it’s done building. Also (and this may be a glitch) once the engineer reaches the end of his attack path, he gains an insanely large reclaim range. Check out any of my recent replays on a map like Open Palms for an example of this.
It’s especially important to keep reclaiming in mind when you’re in negative mass. Instead of letting you mass sit in the negative, prioritize what you’re building then switch some engineers or even your comm over to reclaiming until your mass stabilizes.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Molloy: No I’m pretty sure I had 3 T2 extractors. Did you zoom out and really look around?
April 24th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I’m utterly positive Cyde. You were getting the 4th t3 extractor up just at the 10 min mark.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I assume wrecks, such as those of experimentals near an enemy base, can be destroyed?
April 24th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Ivan: I just did some testing in sandbox mode, and all dead unit husks can be destroyed. The husks seem to have a number of hit points equal to the hit points that the living units have. I was testing with Oblivion cannons and one hit will destroy a land scout husk, for example, but it takes many, many hits to destroy a spiderbot or fatboy husk, and a ridiculous number of hits to destroy a Galactic Colossus (well, not so ridiculous if you have lots of PDs or strategic bombers). Here’s a tip for destroying a Galactic Colossus husk: shoot for the feet. That’s where it’s actually “located”. You can spend all day shooting at its torso or head and never hit a thing.
Of course, since experimental husks are so hard to destroy, it does ask the question, why would you want to do it? If you can put out tens or hundreds of thousands of hit point damage against a husk near the enemy base just to deny them resources, shouldn’t you put that attacking power against the base itself and do a lot more damage than merely denying them a reclaim target?
April 24th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
To spite anyone looking to reclaim the hulk, of course. Or create a diversion.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
But if it’s near their base, you’re not going to be able to take it out without suffering losses. I mean, presumably, the husk is where it is because it was killed there by enemy fire, right? You have much better things to be doing while taking fire from the enemy base than firing upon dead husks of your own unit in the ground. The first thing that comes to mind is attacking the base, of course.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:46 am
I believe huge units (capable of crushing smaller units), the Monkeylord and the GC, can instantly destroy any husk that the walk over. So if you had a bunch of units die on the enemies half of the map, you can have one ML that just strolls over them all to give the enemy no advantage, I know that crushing units can destroy other experimental wreckages (Fatboy with ML), but I don’t know if an ML can crush another ML.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Nuthead: It doesn’t appear to be infinite; it actually looks like a stomp deals only a certain amount of damage. A galactic colossus walking across a monkeylord husk destroyed it in one go, but it took many passes of a colossus and a monkeylord to destroy a colossus husk. Although that could also just be that it’s so hard to step exactly on the colossus husk; it’s set up weird (it’s actually only located around the feet area).
April 25th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Here’s another replay that demonstrates how reclaiming can keep an inferior economy going to victory
http://www.gamereplays.org/community/index.php?showtopic=229740