Are you a unit donor?
Following yesterday’s post on advantageous ways to donate all of your units to your ally upon death, it struck me that I haven’t yet blogged about the importance of unit donations in general. These suggestions are most apt for 2v2 and 3v3 ladder games, where you live and die as a team, but they also will be helpful for serious custom games in which your teammates aren’t selfish idiots, but rather, good players who actually want to win.
My advice, in its simplest form, is: be a good donor, benefactor, and philanthropist to your teammates. Yes, it may hurt you a little to give stuff away, but as long as it is helping your teammates more, then it is worth it. That’s it. The advice is simple, but trying to figure out some example kinds of situations it applies to is not. I’ll start you off.
I recently played a 2v2 ladder match on Roanoke Abyss (a sea map with six mass-rich islands). On this map, it’s pretty important to gain control of the two unoccupied islands, so your team can benefit from the eight mass points on each. Grabbing another island doubles your economic base; obviously, this is an important advantage that you want to secure. So I eschewed my usual build order of two land factories and went straight for an air factory after my first land factory. This let me get an early transport to shuttle engineers over to one of the vacant islands to start claiming it.
But my ally did not go early air. Early air is pretty resource expensive; you need to get that air factory (for which the opportunity cost is a land factory, which is a better deal) and the transport itself is very energy expensive to build, meaning you need to build more power generators early on. So what did I do? I gave the transport to my teammate as soon as I finished ferrying engineers to my vacant island. He used the transport to claim the other vacant island for free. This freed up the resources for him to go early sea and get his submarines into the water faster than anyone else. He even gave me the transport back as soon as he had claimed the vacant island, so I didn’t even lose use of it for very long.
We won that match in a fairly predictable manner. We controlled four of the six islands on the map, giving us a rather sizable economic advantage. Our submarines quickly ruled the seas and then our destroyers finished off the enemy bases. And all it took was a little bit of help between teammates early in the game. You see, it doesn’t make sense for both players to go early air; only one has to, and then he can give a transport to the other player at a much cheaper cost than each player having to build one on their own.
This same dynamic applies to many other situations. Isn’t it rather inefficient for both partners to have air forces, and then try to coordinate air defense? Why not have both players building interceptors, but one player donates all of his to the other player? That way one player can be responsible for the swarm of interceptors, which is a lot more efficient than two players trying to coordinate. Also, on maps like Field of Isis, where partners are close, it makes more sense for only one player to go early T3, as getting to T3 early on is expensive.
The one player who does go early T3 should donate a T3 engineer to the other player, who doesn’t have to invest a lot of early resources into upgrading a factory. Keep in mind, you only need one T3 engineer to build as many T3 buildings as you want (as soon as you start construction with your T3 engineer, put lower-tech engineers on it and move the T3 engineer to the next construction site). So the player who didn’t go early T3 still gets all of the advantages of it (and gets to erect a T3 power generator and mass fabricator much more quickly), while still being able to pump out a strong army of T2 tanks with all of those resources he didn’t have to invest into an early T3 factory. This is a huge advantage.
In addition to donating units, you can also donate resources. The most common way to do this is to send your engineers to assist what your ally is building. It’s just common sense to assist your ally with the construction of a game winner (such as an experimental, nuke, T3 artillery, etc.). It makes no sense for two partners to be both be building Mavors; just send some SCUs to your partner and help him build it (or vice-versa). You can do all sorts of crazy things that your opponents will rarely be able to defend against by pooling your resources together, like attacking with a Soul Ripper within 14 minutes or a nuke within 25.
Oh, and for the love of God, take advantage of factional imbalances. If you and your ally are playing as different factions, give each other some engineers. For instance, there’s no reason in the world you should be building Cybran T2 artillery if your partner is UEF or Aeon. If your ally is UEF but you aren’t, you can still build Broadswords. If your ally is Aeon but you aren’t, you can still get the best strategic bombers in the game (they’re the only ones that reliably hit moving naval units, for instance). And if you’re UEF, you really want to be able to build tactical missile defenses from the other factions, because yours suck. Combine two partners playing different factions and you can maximize the factional advantages and minimize the factional disadvantages. It’s a no-brainer.
July 4th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Good article.
The few 2v2s I played we usually donated unnecessary power generators. It was usually me who needed them because I’ve always had a thing for spam while my partner liked teching up as quickly as possible. Pretty soon I’d be ready to float my energy or mass and he’d hand over some of his excess.
July 4th, 2007 at 4:20 am
Well written. Keep up the good work. :)
July 4th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Sorry, my unit is not for donation…
July 4th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
The only thing I ever tend to help my teamate with is when me and ktachuck get good players on isis and one of us is uef…. We mavor rush it pwns.
July 9th, 2007 at 4:03 am
I must be stupid but how do you donate something to a team mate?