The Economy in Total Annihilation Based mods works very different from the usual RTS, such as C&C or StarCraft. The main difference is that the resources are not gathered in small amounts and then transported to a “drop-zone” where after a small number will be added to the amount of the resource you’ve already gathered. In TA you income and outcome of resources is constant. After you have placed your first Metal Extractor you are getting a small amount of metal constantly. So if your metal income is +10 and you’re building some units in your lab which results in an outcome of -7 your metal storage will still be filled with a speed of +3/sec.
That said, lets go straight to the point:

My main rule is: Everything should go smoothly.

Metal

Having a lot of metal is bad. Yes, you heard correct. And there is a very simple reason for this. Metal in its pure form is useless. Imagine 2 players, its a 1v1 and we’re 3 mins into the game. Both of them have played the same and their income is identical. There is only 1 difference, Player 1 still has 300m in the storage whereas Player 2 used this 300m to make more units. What do we have in the end? Player 2 has 300m more fighting for him on the battlefield resulting in the defeat of Player1.

In most cases you should keep your metal storage as low as possible. Empty Storage => More units ; Full storage => Empty Battlefield.

P.S. I said “in most cases” for a reason. There are times where you plan to have some metal at a certain point of the game, such as when you want to tech up really quick or when you want to reach a certain point of the map and build an HLT at a crucial position.

P.P.S. If you’re going to reclaim a “mountain” of metal keep an eye on your storage. It hurts so much to see somebody reclaiming metal while he/she has a full storage resulting in the metal being thrown away. Note that if you’re playing with allies reclaiming with a full storage will result in reclaimed metal been shared equally between all your allies, which is rather helpful (unless your team consists of a bunch of noobs who spam LLTs all over the map).

Energy

Having a lot of Energy is good. Never ever stall energy! If you do, you have to change something right now. Metal Extractors need energy to work, if you don’t have enough energy you soon won’t have enough metal as well. Same goes for radars. Not to mention the inability to use D-Gun. So how do we achieve a smoothly growing of our economy without stalling? First of all, you have to keep an eye on your resources. If you see that you’re running low on E, do something now before you reach zero. Because once you do it’s much more difficult to get back. The Build Order I use in most cases is building 3 Wind Generators (for maps with decent wind only) before the Lab and a 4th one before I build the radar. Keep in mind that you need E to build Windgens. If you have enough M and you’re really desperate you might want to build a solar which are 3x as expensive as Windgens but don’t require any E to be built. Solars are also more stable, that concerns not only their E output but also their HP. So it might pay off for a new player to make solars even on high wind maps as long as he/she isn’t sure whether he/she will be able to kill opponent’s raid.

Basically after making a lab and some units you should send a constructor to build an E farm, so that it would be busy for the rest of the game. This way you won’t have to worry about your E and get a chance to concentrate on the battlefield.

Energy = Metal?

Not exactly true but it’s still a fact that you can transform E into M by using Metal Makers. And you really should use them. A full E storage should almost always result in an additional MM. Here its the same as with the metal “bleeding”. Since E is untransformed M, its unwise to throw it away. An E storage might be of use for greater effieciency of MMs, though this opinion is not shared amongst all the players. Once you switch to the Moho Economy it’s probably wise to reclaim your lvl1 MMs since the Moho Mines are more efficient.

Author: TheMightyOne