Here's one way to think about strategies in Zero-K. There are only a few viable
types of strategies:
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Rush / cheese
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Porc and eco
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Expansion and aggression
Rush/cheese comes in many specific varieties. Some that have been popular in the past include: Com drop, com nap, warrior drop, scallop drop, blastwing rush, Krow rush, com push, and good old-fashioned raider rush (the archetypes being Zerg rush in StarCraft and Flash rush in Total Annihilation). All of these work more-or-less the same way: if the opponent isn't prepared for it you get a devastating early advantage, but if the opponent scouts the rush in time to prepare then you end up way behind. Zero-K's approach to this has generally been to nerf rush strategies that are flatly uncounterable but allow those that can be countered
with scouting. Intel is a critical part of Zero-K, and that explicitly includes from the very first moments of the game. Accordingly, early scouting is critical
by design and players who decide not to scout are taking a calculated risk that their opponent isn't making a cheese play (or that if they are that the non-scouting player will still have time to discover it and respond).
Porc and eco is a favorite of new players that have come from other games such as TA and SupCom, but in Zero-K it is a very poor strategy. It works well against bad players but is rarely effective against experienced players. Once your opponent sees that you're building heavy defenses and going light on mobile units they will start naked expanding, grabbing all the territory and securing it with much lighter defenses. Eventually their mex advantage will outweigh any initial eco advantage you might have, and at that point it's just a matter of them choosing how they want to overwhelm or penetrate your fortress's defenses (and they have many options to choose from).
Expansion and aggression is the fundamentally successful strategy in Zero-K; it's explicitly baked-into the game design. The most successful players are those who are best able to execute this type of strategy, i.e. who can expand faster than the opponent while being better at aggression. "Better at aggression" means striking the opponent's weak points with strong forces (and doing so early and often) while avoiding the opponent's strong forces and deflecting them from the player's weak points. Making good trades is an essential skill for executing this strategy well - avoiding suiciding units, and using good counters.
In reality, a successful strategy can be thought of as a blend of offense, defense, and eco, with them forming a strategic RPS triangle where offense > eco > defense > offense (similar to the tactical RPS triangle of raider > skirm > riot > raider). If your opponent is overweighted in one area, you can profit by investing more heavily in the area that counters it.
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Within those broad outlines, there are a wide variety of specific strategies you can choose. If you're doing porc-and-eco, what is your endgame? BB? Nuke? Bomber spam? If you're doing expansion-and-aggression, do you naked expand or lightly defend? How much do you invest in radar? In scouting? Do you scout with air, cheap units, or cloaked units? Do you spam light units or invest in heavies? Do you upgrade your com and push with it or keep it cheap and protected in the back? There are many possibilities and few wrong choices, as long as you are a) expanding and b) aggressively attacking the enemy weaknesses with your strengths.
So one answer to your question:
quote:
What are some strategies to use? |
... might be "there's an infinite number of strategies, just be aggressive and expand with whatever units you like". A more interesting answer might be a very long list of things like:
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Slasher push
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Air control and bombers
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Make a silo early near your base and use it to control the midfield
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Send Scythes to snipe coms and kill factories
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Spam constructors and tower creep everywhere
The list will be interesting and fun to make and discuss, but it will necessarily be incomplete, and to some degree misleading, since they don't change the fundamentals of "expand and be aggressive". Some might even call these tactics rather than strategies, but that's a terminology quibble that's not really very interesting.
So let me turn the question back to you: what are some strategies that
you know about already, and what kinds of things would you like to hear more of and talk about?
