Shadowfury333 would you say defensive play would be making more constructors and having them constructing.

Steel_Blue is on the money, and for the record building a bunch of constructors to build everywhere is a third style of play—expansion—which counters defensive play by swallowing the map for free because no one is raiding/rushing, but is shut down by aggressive play because of those raids and rushes slowing everything down, if not outright winning by attacking right before the expansions pay off.

quote: I want to get really good at the expansion strategy.

This only works if you know your opponent will not go into the aggression strategy.

Which they should, because it captures the initiative and can seamlessly transition to either two of the other strategies *after containing you in a stranglehold*.

Ex: "interception defense" vs "aggression": aggressor can always stop trying to actually kill your stuff, and instead settle for making you unable to expand - switching intent to kill with intent to contain - by running around and threatening to kill things if you stop intercepting. Meanwhile as you are intercepting, they can safely expand themselves (transitioning into contain-backed "expansion" strategy, essentially).

"expansion" vs "aggression" can imo only survive when raiders that the aggressor employs are easy to stop by constructors rapid-plopping emergency turrets, or when you're also running an "interception" subroutine with higher efficiency than the enemy runs his containment (e.g. your raiders are better than his, you are way better at micro, your intel advantage is really big, etc), or if he fails to scout your expansions before they lay eggs - something that's hard to pull off in the age of Sparrow.

Default to fast aggressive reconnaissance by combat, then switch to a balance of kill, contain, intercept, or naked-expand according to aggro-provided intel.

Strategy? Maybe even meta-strategy.

I'm advocating picking an initial strategy that is least likely to fail against other strategies and can easily flex to exploit what the enemy is doing.

Etsuri's attack began at 0:36 when he started building the first glaive. His attack was ready at 1:07 when the fifth glaive came out. They started moving at 1:08 and arrived 34 seconds later at 1:42. In eleven seconds they killed one bandit, one convict, and three mexes; they took no losses and retained control over the territory, thereby preventing recapture of the expansion without a large investment.

Jasper had essentially lost the game by 1:53.

What could Jasper have done to prevent this loss? Did Jasper make a mistake, or was this strictly a matter of blind RPS?