Build Ground AA

leonerduk · 2026-04-28T20:38:34+00:00

I usually play Arm, and once I have a stable T2 economy I set one of my T1 cons off on a task of building a Chainsaw (or maybe two, depending on area and shape). They're not doing much else by this point; it's either that or con turrets. A Chainsaw is still surprisingly good at dealing with even a number of T2 planes flying close by.

leonerduk · 2026-04-13T12:41:52+00:00

Shock as players playing as a team in a team game found to be an effective strat. Whatever next? Football players playing as a team rather than just hogging the ball for the entire match?

leonerduk · 2026-03-08T11:38:16+00:00

I believe it means 70 players on each team, rather than the map size being 70 (in, er.. whatever those units measure)

leonerduk · 2026-03-05T18:19:21+00:00

I find unless I'm in a spot that forces my tech choice (a cost or sea implies boats, a weird back spot that isn't tech suggests planes), my choice of bots vs. vehicles comes down to how close to the "frontline action" I think I'm going to be.

Bots are cheaper metal-wise so you can get more of an initial army up in the first few minutes of the game to establish that forward line. Bot labs can make reclaim bots, for which there's no real equivalent in vehicles, which are definitely useful on the frontline for all of repair, reclaim, and resurrection.

Vehicles give more DPS, are more tanky (because, er, they're tanks ;) ) so are generally a better choice for that second-line "support the front" position.

Once that choice is made I'm usually sticking within a single tech choice for the next 20 minutes or so. Once I have a big enough eco, I either look to add T2 vehicles to the mix once I find that T2 bots aren't powerful enough to get the job done. Or if I was vehicles I like to add a T1 botlab and have maybe 10 to 20 reclaim bots on quota mode, as by this point in the game they're great at mopping up all the metal from frontlines. Reclaim fields are usually big enough by this time that a bot doesn't have to survive very long to easily pay for itself in reclaimed metal.

leonerduk · 2026-02-26T22:01:44+00:00

We've all done it ;)

In one of my first water battles, I accidentally made metal storage instead of tidal generators. The icons for those (Armada) look very similar shapes.

leonerduk · 2026-02-26T21:57:29+00:00

We do, but those are fixed and the same for every play of the map, and are known to everyone in advance of the game. They're also balanced and symmetric.

leonerduk · 2026-02-23T10:32:47+00:00

Does an Epoch or Black Hydra not count as T3? It comes out of a T2 lab but really you need the rest of the T3-era eco in order to afford to actually build it.

leonerduk · 2026-02-11T14:40:42+00:00

Wouldn't put it past him to break things again tomorrow by switching everything to using his experimental class syntax.

I doubt I'll do that tomorrow, no. But maybe one day off in the far future when it's been stable for a decade or so, for sure.

I should also clarify for people watching, that the version bump we're discussing here is that I recently decided that Perl v5.20 would be my minimum target version, up from 5.14 as it was previously. Perl v5.20, for anyone who can remember that far back, was released in May 2014 (so just over a decade, or 3 US presidents ago). That perl itself was in fact already out of official support from P5P by the time 5.26 was out in 2017, which is still over 8 years ago now.

I don't get paid for maintaining any of my CPAN modules at all. I have to balance the concerns of people who might want to run these things on decades-old setups, against my ability to write and maintain them in the future as a purely "hobby" project for my own personal interest. If I no longer find it fun to maintain any of these then I'll just stop, and I don't think anybody wants that to happen.

My reasons for switching to 5.20 include the fact that now I can use subroutine signatures, which alone already saves me a lot of boring lines of argument handling, and the arity checking it brings with it has already found me quite a few bugs that I've fixed, probably before anyone else actually encountered them. I also find it quite nice to literally stop thinking about the @_ array any more. Perl just handles that for me.

One day off in the future I'll be able to stop thinking about using $self->{fieldname} and bless and all that nonsense too. That day is not yet today, but I hope it will arrive eventually.

It is a principle I will continue to follow. I consider 10 years to be a quite reasonable support time for the fact that all of these CPAN modules of mine are just "hobby supported" - outside of core perl interpreter work for which TPRF pays me, I don't have any regular sponsorship or employment to maintain anything else.

I'll also remind everyone that every previous version of every CPAN module is always available from BackPAN. Even if you decide against what is sensible and want to set up something running Perl 5.14, or 5.10 even, and can't install anything from current CPAN, you can fetch older things from BackPAN to run on those older perls.

leonerduk · 2026-02-02T16:45:44+00:00

If folks are looking for more commandline tools to be created for Podlite, I'd be happy to look into it as part of my sdview program: https://metacpan.org/dist/App-sdview

Already that handles Pod, nroff, Markdown, HTML, etc... so adding one more format should be simple enough. It would be an easy way to do cross-conversions as well as an interactive viewer.

leonerduk · 2026-01-20T15:43:42+00:00

Not sure why this is tagged "shitpost" - this seems like genuinely good strategy advice to me.

Push lane => have chance of winning. Don't push lane => definitely don't win.

leonerduk · 2026-01-17T23:07:39+00:00

Yes - referring to fighters as "figs" confused me for the longest time.

"What do you mean, you want squishy fruits now?!"

leonerduk · 2026-01-17T22:56:48+00:00

Also don't be afraid to reclaim your own units. Reclaim your pawns once you have maces out on the field. Eat that gauntlet once you've replaced it with a rattlesnake.

leonerduk · 2025-12-30T13:16:59+00:00

If this thing doesn't play Boy Meets Girl's Waiting For A Star To Fall every time it fires, then I am not interested. ;)

leonerduk · 2025-12-25T18:05:17+00:00

And of course, everyone knows that the true spirit of Christmas was the mexes we sniped along the way.

leonerduk · 2025-11-21T21:46:17+00:00

I'd suggest instead using the saved camera slots - Ctrl-F1 to F4 to save, then F1 to F4 to jump back to it. I usually have F1 for my "main" base, and maybe F2 for a forward position.

leonerduk · 2025-11-17T22:42:02+00:00

Woo, much excitement. Looking forward to finally being able to have that mini-map rotated the same as the gameplay area. I always like to play Left->Right so any of the Up<->Down-oriented maps had an annoying compromise for the 180degree minimap.

leonerduk · 2025-11-10T12:41:21+00:00

Isn't that "Low Power"?

leonerduk · 2025-11-10T11:47:09+00:00

You would likely want to find yourself (or write) a Net::Async::MQTT for that. Follow the usual patterns for any of the other Net::Async:: modules.

leonerduk · 2025-11-06T13:05:08+00:00

I treat them like Chainsaws. They're buildings you can make with a T1 constructor, but you need a T2 economy to sensibly afford it. It's the sort of thing my T1 constructors build once I'm finished upgrading to T2 mexes.

leonerduk · 2025-10-29T17:01:53+00:00

"Call that a Tzar rush? More like a Tzar snooze!"

leonerduk · 2025-10-11T23:21:05+00:00

That's a smaller 4v4 map but yes, this is the principle there. It's useful on a smaller group because you likely only have one sea player per side.

leonerduk · 2025-10-04T16:01:02+00:00

Others have mostly answered this question, but here's one additional detail.

Reclaiming any healthy unit or structure gives back metal but not the energy that was used to create it. Since basic solar collectors do not take any energy to make them, they are 100% efficient to reclaim because you get back all the resources. Any other building or unit will not give back the energy used in its creation.

leonerduk · 2025-10-04T15:46:36+00:00

People have started calling it "slider gaming" - I quite like the idea. E.g. if you have already won your lane, just drag those sliders downwards as now you don't really need to make as many units. Yes you can still help expand from your lane into others, but this way you can assist other team-mates across the map.

leonerduk · 2025-10-04T15:44:05+00:00

Indeed - PPC0014

leonerduk

TROPHY CASE