@@perafilozof ok why is that you think? My understanding of vehicles is they don’t require the same sort of investment in an effective ‘ball’ like Sheldon’s. The staying power means you can scrimp on units and apply more pressure for lesser cost I’ll explore that this week I just recorded a video on that. There’s ofc OP units like snipers that you can have a really good effect with, without building too many troops, yet that’s later t2 because of the power cost. I like vehicles myself because I just like what a tank does and suits me.
excellent basic guides, I feel like we are learning to play the game in tandem and having input of another noob is amazing. I have some great tips, shared without order, about improving at the game: Set Attack (Default hotkey S) makes your units prioritize an enemy if it is in range, but do not make the units do anything else. Great to snipe out commanders, just set the S on them and micro into range. If they can choose between targets, they will choose the Com. Also great to have your snipers avoid shooting at the spam hordes. Fight command (F) moves the unit forward only if there are no thing to kill in range. Great for slow, methodical pushes, with snipers or starlights. Cloaking the Com (K) automatically sets it as hold fire. You can wait the incoming push and, when in range, blast them with the D-Gun. This works even against experimentals, so even if you have no troops you can stop unexpected incursions by positioning your com properly. If you move cloaked you will spend a huge amount of energy. Also, because cloaked units only appear on the radar when moving, you will appear in the radar if in range! D gun can shoot real fast if you have the energy for it, but the Com is very frail. Patrol command (H) acts as a fight command, unless the unit is a constructor. If so, they will also reclaim and repair everything in range. I love putting my cons patrolling behind the fortifications of the frontline. For bombing runs you click attack command (A) and click and drag right mouse click. You can paint areas very easily. Check out the Metal/Energy proportion of the units/buildings. Everything that has buildpower costs a ton of Energy. Solar panels cost no Energy and T1 Energy converters cost no Metal, so if you are overflowing one and starving on the other you should use your BP accordingly. If you are overflowing energy, build E storage, E converters or Buildpower (con turrets). Laser defense is also quite E intensive. To mass reclaim, click E, hold ALT, click on the unit type to reclaim and drag an area. You can easily reclaim armies and wind turbines and solar panels like so. Reclaim is very useful and wastes NO metal. Unfinished buildings will slowly return you the metal inputted at no cost. More on reclaim, I see players losing a chunk of the base and becoming demoralized. If you have the build power you can recover very quickly, your own wrecks will pay for most. This does not apply if nuked. The avoid having rezbots all clumped together reclaiming, spread them out and THEN shift queue the reclaim area command. They will be assigned orders depending on the position. T2 mexes give you 4 times the metal and should be the first thing to level up once you have T2 cons. Alt+Num sets an automatic command group for the unit type, including all new units built. Is conserved across games. "º" as number deletes the assignation.
Thank you for making BAR videos, having a calm and perceptive approach to what can be done, where one can improve. Looking forward to see more and more people checking this game out, now that uThermal got into it, previously Winter played it about a year ago or so. The third faction is coming up nicely, adjustments are being made to units. Looking forward to see the Hovers worked on at some point, to have them as a fully fledged way of starting/playing alongside of the already established possible openers (bots, vehicles, ships and planes) It is surely a slow burn for the more adult audience, who are into bigger scale team oriented RTS. i don't think i'we ever seen anything close to BAR, where we can have even 25v25 or even more players atst on a map. p.s.: I'm secretly wishing for more Co-Op options, but lucky for me 3rd parties are working on custom Raptors and Scavengers gamemodes, develloping interesting mutators for them to keep the difficulty and the exitement high. There is this entire PvE community, paralell to the more streamlined PvP gamemode in BAR.
@@mrnoid9949 heya I try thank you! I’m very into BAR right now, just enjoy gaming with random people likewise. The competitive games can be a bit too serious/competitive sometimes but i don’t mind that’s life lol. I lost sea last night and someone said thanks for holding so long it’s so awesome plenty of BAR players are quite mature and understanding but sometimes not 😂. I’m sure this game will get so much better with this developer and design team, they know what they are doing
Great Video. Love the explanation of the thought progress. Especially because it is a more "normal" level of play. Replay casts of pros can be at times daunting and demoralizing. Still getting the hang of quickly teching and booming against ai in skirmish. Maybe you could comment on how exactly a t2 transition should look like/occur?
Try to keep the maces out of balling up - wolverines and tanks have aoe. Your main advantage with bots is maneuverability and numbers which help you get the flank bonus which is needed to overcome vehicles. Right Click Drag lets you draw a line your units will try to form up on as opposed to just right click. Also recommend trying out the controls for - Right Click to set Priority Target rather than Attack its a little tricky to get used to at first - but you might find it easier to focus on maneuvering your bots and right clicking an enemy to set their target without disrupting their movement.
Bots vs vehicles both have tradeoffs. The issue with vehicles is you don't get rez bots, even if medium tanks are an amazing offensive tool. With vehicles you can push through but not reclaim easily, with bots you can reclaim but not push through easily, is how I see it.
Hounds have a 2ndry fire mode 'Gauss' much more useful than the primary, would give it a try! LLts kinda useless after 5min, with anti swarm towers that's basically no defence, Heavy lazer, dragon claws and gauntlets all are good defence, some might say units > porc however a good defence means you can do stuff with your army rather than sitting on your lane which seem to do all battle. Speaking of army, plz try making 10 grunts to every thug you make, will find you have a lot more options and can raid etc
Thanks, good tips! I usually only use gauss against tick swarm as it’s more reliable hitting them but I must I’ve seen some better players in games use it constantly. LLTs yeh they suck just something cheap and convenient for commander to build, to deter aggression or guard against ticks it seems
@@roguel1ke They are very good, but in a specific comp. They are used to hit very fast units that could get past your conventional rocket or plasma units, but also, they provide front line fighting power, in direct mass combat. The thing is, maces already do this fine. You don't get that value. LLT's are great if you have say, wolverines, or rocket bots, to give your long range skirmishers somewhere to stop retreating and make a stand. you can expect to lose LLT's whenever they enter combat, but normally, your army stands in front of them, and they are the fallback position, NOT the front line. Heavy laser towers imho, have no real role against vehicles. They are relatively fragile, they have not great dps per cost, and they get outranged by vehicle artillery in T1. Their main utility is that they can hit rocket bots reliably, have enough range in excess of rocket bots that you can stand in front of them and the heavy laser can still fire if your front line is engaged, and as a result, greatly help a front line against rocket bots. But against vehicles, they don't really have the dps to do a lot to tanks, and they don't have the range to hit artillery. and they are quite vulnerable to artillery. Against vehicles, imho, you will be much happier with dragon's maws and agitators The dragon's maws are good against tanks and resistant to artillery, the agitator is good against artillery as long as it has a front line unit keeping the artillery far enough back, (at least 300 units behind a front line of dragon's maws). And mines are also great, but that requires you yourself to be vehicles. Tanks tend to move in a large ball, rather than dancing in a spread line like bots are good at. And it's more punishing for them to abort an attack after they discover land mines, as they are much less agile.
Maces DID get a recent buff. 11% more health. Thugs also got another 100 health, but got a nerf to build time so they don't repair faster, they just have more total health. As for how to defend against vehicles? I think you build the wrong kind of porc, lacked scouting, didn't invest enough into APM free repair, and frankly, had too many maces. Maces are at their best when retreating. they get much more accurate against advancing enemies, but the range advantage against tanks gets a lot larger. You can trade very profitably against stouts as long as you are walking backwards. You get limited value out of more maces, as AOE starts becoming a real problem for them like any other unit. You want a front line you can back away through and not feel like it dies immediately for no value. IE: not really light laser towers. Dragon's maws (I don't know claws, maybe they just have too bad single target dps) help fill the gap, because it's radar immune, and because it can zone artillery away from your build power while being highly artillery resistant. This is what you maneuver in front of and behind in T1. What you want though is plasma artillery. Because vehicles repair so well, they really want repair power, and they don't get lazarus, so they build con turrets. You can one shot these with plasma artillery in high arc mode. This drastically helps you defend against vehicle pressure, while also punishing wolverines. Just remember the rules. at least 300 units behind the front line, so it doesn't get spotted and you can't artillery it down without the front line brawling with you first. A plasma artillery can just one shot all the mexes, take out all the build power it can find, and then slowly work down anything else it can hit. Also, you should have built way way more early ticks. I saw a ton of engages where not having vision cost you. The laser turret duels? ticks. you are wasting energy firing by radar there. The pawn probe? ticks should have done that, you wouldn't have lost any units. The next two engages, where you maces stumble into range of a LLT in one, and a dragon's claw in another? ticks. The allied team mate rushing in with rockets? he needed vision there. You could have provided it with a single tick. You should always have a tick in your production queue. Really, dismantling porc, you need to know what's there, or you take terrible engages. Basically every major battle I saw you fight, you started by stumbling within range of enemy porc. This is costly for you. it's one big part of why your maces melt so quickly (it's also that you have a 3 deep line against artillery). They can see as far as they can shoot, but that's not enough. You need to see as far as the ENEMY can shoot, which is over 400 units. Thug/mace can't handle that.
@@timmietimmins3780 good to know! They arnt bad I was just shocked against a conservative armour player how bad the trades were. Especially once the wolverines have a critical mass they seemed outclassed. What’s porc?
@@timmietimmins3780 also you seem to have a good head for mechanics, I guess my point is with this frontline play is look you can take bad trades and really struggle with game knowledge even, but if you can conserve your forces somewhat and not suicide charge you can be a good enough punching bag for the game to turn. Frontline quite often gets greedy, doesn’t t2 at all or gets wiped from the pressure, and loses the game because of either one quite suddenly. And apparently it’s a lower chevron position lol
@@roguel1ke static defense. It's short for porcupine. It would have been useful in this circumstance as it would have allowed you to concentrate more firepower in T1 on a small frontline, without becoming more vulnerable to AOE. As you identified, that was really one of your major issues. You are right, once you get to a mass of 3 deep units with them almost touching, Artillery start to get very scary. To zone out artillery, you will find it much easier with a smaller number of units that can be in a relatively loose single line and can move forwards and backwards unpredictably to somewhat avoid shots, and until wolverines hit absolute critical mass (more than 15 wolverines, if I recall), you can use pop up T1 turrets to have somewhere to retreat behind if you get pushed, and offer you front line combat power while not making you quite as vulnerable to artillery. After that, you really need to tech up (and this doesn't have to be to units, you can just build scorpions, which are much cheaper than a T2 lab but outrange wolverines), or go to counterbattery of your own, which can be plasma artillery in T1. You can somewhat mitigate this by having a front line of a modest number of your thugs, which just retreat to the rest of your thugs when pressured, but this means you have to give up substantial territory before you can start to actually fight decisivel, and means the enemy can somewhat slow push you. But you will lose fewer of them to artillery, and have less strain on your clearly overloaded repair capabilities.
@@roguel1ke Yup, for sure, conserving forces is extremely important. I think a lot of low OS players notice they are losing units for nothing, and panic, and think "I have to do something, or this will just end in me dying". Not realizing that if your opponent is 20 OS higher than you, just dying more slowly IS victory. I notice you have very good force conservation in general, it's how you get like 40 maces, but almost every time you probe, you cause no damage and lose something for nothing. I don't blame you for doing this, it's hard to play against higher OS players. But I point it out because it's an extremely common theme in lower OS play. The feel you need to do something, and then just hastening the snowball against you. Your team mate never had the most remote chance of taking down that heavy laser tower, and he would have lost more slowly if he had not tried, but kept those units back to fight later.
Thx for making more BAR videos! But really, Glitters front with 10+ mex is a vehicle must.
@@perafilozof ok why is that you think? My understanding of vehicles is they don’t require the same sort of investment in an effective ‘ball’ like Sheldon’s. The staying power means you can scrimp on units and apply more pressure for lesser cost I’ll explore that this week I just recorded a video on that.
There’s ofc OP units like snipers that you can have a really good effect with, without building too many troops, yet that’s later t2 because of the power cost.
I like vehicles myself because I just like what a tank does and suits me.
Thanks for making these. I have no idea what I'm doing in this game and your guides are helpful.
@@A123-d8o Glad you found this useful! Thanks a lot for your support also
excellent basic guides, I feel like we are learning to play the game in tandem and having input of another noob is amazing.
I have some great tips, shared without order, about improving at the game:
Set Attack (Default hotkey S) makes your units prioritize an enemy if it is in range, but do not make the units do anything else. Great to snipe out commanders, just set the S on them and micro into range. If they can choose between targets, they will choose the Com. Also great to have your snipers avoid shooting at the spam hordes.
Fight command (F) moves the unit forward only if there are no thing to kill in range. Great for slow, methodical pushes, with snipers or starlights.
Cloaking the Com (K) automatically sets it as hold fire. You can wait the incoming push and, when in range, blast them with the D-Gun. This works even against experimentals, so even if you have no troops you can stop unexpected incursions by positioning your com properly. If you move cloaked you will spend a huge amount of energy. Also, because cloaked units only appear on the radar when moving, you will appear in the radar if in range! D gun can shoot real fast if you have the energy for it, but the Com is very frail.
Patrol command (H) acts as a fight command, unless the unit is a constructor. If so, they will also reclaim and repair everything in range. I love putting my cons patrolling behind the fortifications of the frontline.
For bombing runs you click attack command (A) and click and drag right mouse click. You can paint areas very easily.
Check out the Metal/Energy proportion of the units/buildings. Everything that has buildpower costs a ton of Energy. Solar panels cost no Energy and T1 Energy converters cost no Metal, so if you are overflowing one and starving on the other you should use your BP accordingly. If you are overflowing energy, build E storage, E converters or Buildpower (con turrets). Laser defense is also quite E intensive.
To mass reclaim, click E, hold ALT, click on the unit type to reclaim and drag an area. You can easily reclaim armies and wind turbines and solar panels like so. Reclaim is very useful and wastes NO metal. Unfinished buildings will slowly return you the metal inputted at no cost.
More on reclaim, I see players losing a chunk of the base and becoming demoralized. If you have the build power you can recover very quickly, your own wrecks will pay for most. This does not apply if nuked.
The avoid having rezbots all clumped together reclaiming, spread them out and THEN shift queue the reclaim area command. They will be assigned orders depending on the position.
T2 mexes give you 4 times the metal and should be the first thing to level up once you have T2 cons.
Alt+Num sets an automatic command group for the unit type, including all new units built. Is conserved across games. "º" as number deletes the assignation.
@@WASDhero Showing me the ropes!! You will be remembered sir! 😊
Thank you for making BAR videos, having a calm and perceptive approach to what can be done, where one can improve.
Looking forward to see more and more people checking this game out, now that uThermal got into it, previously Winter played it about a year ago or so.
The third faction is coming up nicely, adjustments are being made to units.
Looking forward to see the Hovers worked on at some point, to have them as a fully fledged way of starting/playing alongside of the already established possible openers (bots, vehicles, ships and planes)
It is surely a slow burn for the more adult audience, who are into bigger scale team oriented RTS.
i don't think i'we ever seen anything close to BAR, where we can have even 25v25 or even more players atst on a map.
p.s.: I'm secretly wishing for more Co-Op options, but lucky for me 3rd parties are working on custom Raptors and Scavengers gamemodes, develloping interesting mutators for them to keep the difficulty and the exitement high.
There is this entire PvE community, paralell to the more streamlined PvP gamemode in BAR.
@@mrnoid9949 heya I try thank you! I’m very into BAR right now, just enjoy gaming with random people likewise. The competitive games can be a bit too serious/competitive sometimes but i don’t mind that’s life lol.
I lost sea last night and someone said thanks for holding so long it’s so awesome plenty of BAR players are quite mature and understanding but sometimes not 😂.
I’m sure this game will get so much better with this developer and design team, they know what they are doing
Great Video. Love the explanation of the thought progress. Especially because it is a more "normal" level of play.
Replay casts of pros can be at times daunting and demoralizing.
Still getting the hang of quickly teching and booming against ai in skirmish.
Maybe you could comment on how exactly a t2 transition should look like/occur?
@@Tobias-ld2pv will do! Appreciate this feedback a lot Thankyou!
Try to keep the maces out of balling up - wolverines and tanks have aoe. Your main advantage with bots is maneuverability and numbers which help you get the flank bonus which is needed to overcome vehicles. Right Click Drag lets you draw a line your units will try to form up on as opposed to just right click. Also recommend trying out the controls for - Right Click to set Priority Target rather than Attack its a little tricky to get used to at first - but you might find it easier to focus on maneuvering your bots and right clicking an enemy to set their target without disrupting their movement.
Bots vs vehicles both have tradeoffs. The issue with vehicles is you don't get rez bots, even if medium tanks are an amazing offensive tool. With vehicles you can push through but not reclaim easily, with bots you can reclaim but not push through easily, is how I see it.
Hounds have a 2ndry fire mode 'Gauss' much more useful than the primary, would give it a try!
LLts kinda useless after 5min, with anti swarm towers that's basically no defence, Heavy lazer, dragon claws and gauntlets all are good defence, some might say units > porc however a good defence means you can do stuff with your army rather than sitting on your lane which seem to do all battle.
Speaking of army, plz try making 10 grunts to every thug you make, will find you have a lot more options and can raid etc
Thanks, good tips! I usually only use gauss against tick swarm as it’s more reliable hitting them but I must I’ve seen some better players in games use it constantly.
LLTs yeh they suck just something cheap and convenient for commander to build, to deter aggression or guard against ticks it seems
@@roguel1ke They are very good, but in a specific comp. They are used to hit very fast units that could get past your conventional rocket or plasma units, but also, they provide front line fighting power, in direct mass combat.
The thing is, maces already do this fine. You don't get that value. LLT's are great if you have say, wolverines, or rocket bots, to give your long range skirmishers somewhere to stop retreating and make a stand. you can expect to lose LLT's whenever they enter combat, but normally, your army stands in front of them, and they are the fallback position, NOT the front line.
Heavy laser towers imho, have no real role against vehicles. They are relatively fragile, they have not great dps per cost, and they get outranged by vehicle artillery in T1. Their main utility is that they can hit rocket bots reliably, have enough range in excess of rocket bots that you can stand in front of them and the heavy laser can still fire if your front line is engaged, and as a result, greatly help a front line against rocket bots.
But against vehicles, they don't really have the dps to do a lot to tanks, and they don't have the range to hit artillery. and they are quite vulnerable to artillery.
Against vehicles, imho, you will be much happier with dragon's maws and agitators The dragon's maws are good against tanks and resistant to artillery, the agitator is good against artillery as long as it has a front line unit keeping the artillery far enough back, (at least 300 units behind a front line of dragon's maws). And mines are also great, but that requires you yourself to be vehicles. Tanks tend to move in a large ball, rather than dancing in a spread line like bots are good at. And it's more punishing for them to abort an attack after they discover land mines, as they are much less agile.
Maces DID get a recent buff. 11% more health. Thugs also got another 100 health, but got a nerf to build time so they don't repair faster, they just have more total health.
As for how to defend against vehicles?
I think you build the wrong kind of porc, lacked scouting, didn't invest enough into APM free repair, and frankly, had too many maces.
Maces are at their best when retreating. they get much more accurate against advancing enemies, but the range advantage against tanks gets a lot larger. You can trade very profitably against stouts as long as you are walking backwards. You get limited value out of more maces, as AOE starts becoming a real problem for them like any other unit. You want a front line you can back away through and not feel like it dies immediately for no value. IE: not really light laser towers.
Dragon's maws (I don't know claws, maybe they just have too bad single target dps) help fill the gap, because it's radar immune, and because it can zone artillery away from your build power while being highly artillery resistant. This is what you maneuver in front of and behind in T1.
What you want though is plasma artillery. Because vehicles repair so well, they really want repair power, and they don't get lazarus, so they build con turrets. You can one shot these with plasma artillery in high arc mode. This drastically helps you defend against vehicle pressure, while also punishing wolverines. Just remember the rules. at least 300 units behind the front line, so it doesn't get spotted and you can't artillery it down without the front line brawling with you first. A plasma artillery can just one shot all the mexes, take out all the build power it can find, and then slowly work down anything else it can hit.
Also, you should have built way way more early ticks. I saw a ton of engages where not having vision cost you. The laser turret duels? ticks. you are wasting energy firing by radar there.
The pawn probe? ticks should have done that, you wouldn't have lost any units. The next two engages, where you maces stumble into range of a LLT in one, and a dragon's claw in another? ticks.
The allied team mate rushing in with rockets? he needed vision there. You could have provided it with a single tick. You should always have a tick in your production queue.
Really, dismantling porc, you need to know what's there, or you take terrible engages. Basically every major battle I saw you fight, you started by stumbling within range of enemy porc. This is costly for you. it's one big part of why your maces melt so quickly (it's also that you have a 3 deep line against artillery). They can see as far as they can shoot, but that's not enough. You need to see as far as the ENEMY can shoot, which is over 400 units. Thug/mace can't handle that.
@@timmietimmins3780 good to know! They arnt bad I was just shocked against a conservative armour player how bad the trades were. Especially once the wolverines have a critical mass they seemed outclassed.
What’s porc?
@@timmietimmins3780 also you seem to have a good head for mechanics, I guess my point is with this frontline play is look you can take bad trades and really struggle with game knowledge even, but if you can conserve your forces somewhat and not suicide charge you can be a good enough punching bag for the game to turn.
Frontline quite often gets greedy, doesn’t t2 at all or gets wiped from the pressure, and loses the game because of either one quite suddenly. And apparently it’s a lower chevron position lol
@@roguel1ke static defense. It's short for porcupine. It would have been useful in this circumstance as it would have allowed you to concentrate more firepower in T1 on a small frontline, without becoming more vulnerable to AOE. As you identified, that was really one of your major issues.
You are right, once you get to a mass of 3 deep units with them almost touching, Artillery start to get very scary. To zone out artillery, you will find it much easier with a smaller number of units that can be in a relatively loose single line and can move forwards and backwards unpredictably to somewhat avoid shots, and until wolverines hit absolute critical mass (more than 15 wolverines, if I recall), you can use pop up T1 turrets to have somewhere to retreat behind if you get pushed, and offer you front line combat power while not making you quite as vulnerable to artillery.
After that, you really need to tech up (and this doesn't have to be to units, you can just build scorpions, which are much cheaper than a T2 lab but outrange wolverines), or go to counterbattery of your own, which can be plasma artillery in T1.
You can somewhat mitigate this by having a front line of a modest number of your thugs, which just retreat to the rest of your thugs when pressured, but this means you have to give up substantial territory before you can start to actually fight decisivel, and means the enemy can somewhat slow push you. But you will lose fewer of them to artillery, and have less strain on your clearly overloaded repair capabilities.
@@roguel1ke Yup, for sure, conserving forces is extremely important. I think a lot of low OS players notice they are losing units for nothing, and panic, and think "I have to do something, or this will just end in me dying". Not realizing that if your opponent is 20 OS higher than you, just dying more slowly IS victory.
I notice you have very good force conservation in general, it's how you get like 40 maces, but almost every time you probe, you cause no damage and lose something for nothing. I don't blame you for doing this, it's hard to play against higher OS players.
But I point it out because it's an extremely common theme in lower OS play. The feel you need to do something, and then just hastening the snowball against you. Your team mate never had the most remote chance of taking down that heavy laser tower, and he would have lost more slowly if he had not tried, but kept those units back to fight later.