Kill The Enemy? Nope. Reclaim The Enemy? YEP!

[@TheBrDeath]

you were just taught an important lesson on maintaining your frontline presence. no static Defence and no units holding your front means constant enemy pressure will result in a leak. you cant STOP production to tech, you cant pull your entire defence away to attack somewhere else and you cant just suicide all your units in a push if youre not rebuilding them as fast. also that metal overflow at the start is because you stalled power, not because you had too much BP...

[@PandemicTrauma]

I just finished a game with this exact principle. Was frontline, built major amounts of arty, missile for vision and some LLTs early as static- I had a hard time gaining traction to get eco going when OUR back player moved up with Sheldons- I kept shoring up my line with his and when I was confident I went for T2 energy- slow and steady all while consistently pumping out T1 and some T2 eventually transitioning to full T2 unit production. Its the only time i've pulled it off as well, its probably the hardest thing to do as frontline because if you slack at the wrong time- your ENTIRE line is open. It was a great learning experience! Highlights that 8v8s are entirely team-dependent and backline can't just play SimCity until they scale eco to the moon. Love the vids Drongo! Keep it up, I learn so much from You, Brightworksgaming and so many other content creators!

[@hounddogzepp]

Yep. Front line is all about pedal to the metal building units. You only go t2 if you are feeling very confident.

[@visebro5580]

From my perspective (and i play more vehicles than bots) you don't need to spam whistlers because usually it's hard to get value back. Although having 3-4 whistlers with your medium tank army can give you nice line of sight and also ... 3-4 whistlers can nicely kill simple turrets.

[@kalamona6598]

adding a few whistlers for the view range is amazing tho.

[@timmietimmins3780]

@@kalamona6598 yeah, support unit. Not frontline unit. The issue is that their dps is just atrocious, so you have to have somewhere to hide when the real army rolls out. They have the energy cost of a stout and half the dps and less than half the health. In an energy limited economy, they have a worse than 4:1 brawling stats disadvantage.

[@TheSometimeAfter]

​@@kalamona6598he literally said that

[@bigblue4364]

I like to put down a con turret on my first or second T1 CON, then let the Com finish it while the con goes for Mexs Then immediately move the Com up, gives you that little buildpower boost you need on this map. Early on you have so much metal and so little power when you're frontline on this map, you need a bit more buildpower than you would on other maps, sinking that metal into t1 solar is cheap and easy and makes for a bunch of potential reclaim metal later on when teching.

[@UnknownSquid]

I like to do the same. The early build turret gives your con the freedom to go build energy, and you can divert the con turret between helping the eco or the factory. A little bit later get a second one. Makes it easy to automate scaling your T1 eco, whilst having a suitable amount of build power.

[@drewdubose2941]

Love the Frontline video! Really appreciate you making a video about a role you aren't as familiar with. The drongo effect is pretty rough sometimes, but i also understand why noobs want to pick eco seeing as your videos are the best and most recent guides. As for tips Im sure you realized that energy management and not building defense at the front were the early errors. Layers of static defense with units counters stouts early to mid game

[@MurrayRoke]

Hiya, I've been enjoying your BAR videos, and I have a thought for a video idea perhaps you could try it or just shoot it down out of hand.... 🙂 Here it is: 1) Go air 1.5) Possibly ask people to pay upfront by donating a wind turbine or three. 2) Rush your T2 Air construction unit. 3) Don't donate your construction unit, but fly it round each base placing blueprints for advanced metal extractors. the teammates then take over construction and you move T2 to the next base. I'm not sure if you could get everyone up to T2 mex faster than traditional approach, but it would be interesting to try. It does require more team coordination which may be it's downfall.

[@bigblue4364]

The pre-loaded AIs are in the options. Settings - Lobby - Random skirmish AI and Map

[@johnnyrum7636]

Maybe a Janus for every 3-4 medium tanks will help countering medium tank blobs.

[@timmietimmins3780]

If you have trouble spending your metal, swap some of your build power (not all) to T2. You aren't just low on build power, you are E-stalling. The counter to this is NOT to build nanos, as nanos cost silly amounts of energy (I think it's like 8 nanos to the fusion reactor, in terms of cost), and throwing down nanos and then having them build more tanks is also not the solution (tank production is also energy intensive.). Even constructors are not REALLY the answer, as that will only fix your E-stall in the mid term, not the immediate future, as while constructors can make wind, they themselves are energy intensive to produce. The answer is tier 2. Tier 2 is a huge metal sink, it does not disrupt your unit production much, and every point of build power moved over to tier 2, roughly, burns about 3 times as much metal per unit of energy spent, and I believe burns about 3 times as much metal per build power spent (sorry, can't check this, as the wiki lacks build power and I am not firing up the client). But I did the math for bots once, and I think that was the result. I know it's more than double. Also, as soon as you hit T2, your T2 lab functions as 1.5 nanos, so if you have enough nanos to use all your metal when you finish your lab, you will have excessive nanos (and be down that much energy), when your lab comes online. I haven't seen a lot of your recent play, but in the past, your style was super energy intensive, with mass reclamation (Which is very metal efficient, but at the cost of energy efficiency). If you find yourself in a situation where metal is no longer even close to your limiting factor, I would just start banking metal in things like a second production structure, and reclaim it only when you are actually ready to invest in major projects AND have depleted your existing metal bank.

[@KAClown]

I would generally have the commander rush the first vehicle con then get the first vehicle to build a construction tower and the commander rush that. Then I think sending the commander would be an okay option; I agree with your assessment at 37:45. Study AbsoluteLee's and PolarBearKing front play in the game that won against you; AbsoluteLee's play was incredibly strong, and you can improve his build order and strategy; their strategy is more applicable to bottlenecks than wide open fronts like Glitters, but they're still a good study in front management. 39:45 you make some observations about energy scaling; something you could do especially in early game build order is proactively give the constructor that is being built in the lab its marching orders before you switch your attention to microing units; a lot of the high level players will already have given their constructor orders to build a wind or mex field before they go back to skirmishing with their units. Also, your observations about doing more rovers aligns with the OS 40+ players engaged in 1v1; grunts, pawns, rovers, and even ticks feature a lot more prominently in the high level play than we see in the low level play; the emphasis tends to be on producing reliable streams of units rather than just specific numbers of like 5 of these or 10 of those. Generally speaking, the problem you're having spending your metal has to do with your build power being outsized by and bottlenecked by your energy demand; you're able to build faster than when you build with units, so you're able to scale your power demand than you're used to; you're going greedy for metal and taking for granted your energy production when it is inverted from what you're used to; you can get a lot of metal early but your intuitions about energy production aren't keeping pace. 42:00 your construction turrets do some of the defensive work. You can issue a fight command to them so they'll reclaim and repair everything within their reach rather than issuing each individual unit to be reclaimed (I'm not sure about how they prioritize with that command or how that interacts with widgets); DionkDynasty was using this in the previous game to clear entire forests and often to defend against incursions which I thought was pretty genius. The issue with your frontline plays is that you have the urge to push and often your pushes are not sufficient to break the opposition, so a lot of resources get wasted or donated to the opposition. Something you need to get better at is making sure you have a front that is contingent to your push force; you need to be leaving a real credible threat behind as a defensive line; committing the front to push means you leave openings even when you succeed which allows your opposition to leak at those moments. When you sent your lightning tanks to go after red, the radar of the enemy showed that portion of the front vacating, so they knew to push you at that moment, and they had built up an arbitrarily large force that was accumulating in wait for an opening. You literally gave them an opening that signaled their push opportunity. I am going to eco someone else in the comments that recommended "floating metal and can't spend it down? Build bot lab and get lazaruses" as a possible direction to go though for a pure vehicle start study that's not going to help you understand vehicles.

[@UnknownSquid]

One little side tip that this match demonstrated well. Don't build all your construction turrets in one chain reacting clump. Spread them out a little in lines of three or four around your key buildings and you wouldn't have had to rebuild them all twice like that.

[@UnknownSquid]

Pushing with the Stumpys at the same time as teching was definitely a mistake. Teching already makes you vulnerable, and losing your defence to a push only makes it double. What I'd have done at that point, would be to just hold the front and start producing Mausers. Your 32 stouts weren't enough to push with, but they'd have made an excellent screen to a line of mausers with a flak or two mixed in. Mauser and Stout combo is one of the best Arm T2 vehicle compositions for quick aggression after hitting T2, since it lets you keep your old units relevant. I often keep producing stouts for this even after hitting T2, since they're so much cheaper and more HP/metal efficient than Bulls (for the purpose of screening arty).

[@bytoadynolastname6149]

Watching Drongo send his units off on a wild push idea at 21 minutes while there's an entire wall of light yellow visible on radar just made me sigh.

[@kalamona6598]

Regardless of some mistakes, I appreciate you playing frontline. Also your initial harass was good too, and you were doing pretty okay, but you really need to focus more on units. Beginning a 4th afu, oh my god :D After the second just build more units, and some statics. Overall I don't think the team lost because of you, it was just that the enemy was a bit better.

[@babies784]

My favorite thing to do with vehicles on front is to make artillery vehicles. Use the "A" + right click and drag command like you would for bombers and just force the opponent to back away from the front line. It's important when doing this to have a line of medium tanks that you can bring forwards to counter when your opponent tries to push in and kill your arty.

[@ZopMaxima]

Seconded, I drive doughnuts with artillery to chip away at the enemy line. Whistlers for sight, some Pounders or Janus for that extra surprise when the enemy comes to your tank wall.

[@bucketofnubbins8532]

Build a radar early They're cheap and fast to make, and provide lots of intel in the early game. You can't counter what you don't see, and you can't rely on your teammates to push up and scout early. Always build a radar at or a bit in front of your first factory Always be building more energy there is no such thing as too much energy, as energy can be turned into metal if it is truly too much. I like to have 1 or 2 workers whose only job is to build windmills (if wind is good of course) you only need one worker around your base early, as nanos are a very efficient source of buildpower. (I might steal the wind worker to place nanos if he is close) As others have said, frontline presence is mandatory as otherwise leaks happen. Speed is king in the first 4 minutes you don't need jamming until the enemy has a well established front line, just rush in and kill the artillery with blitzes if they start shelling early I think Drongo's biggest issue early on is the energy production, for a high metal map like glitters, if you aren't building energy you are losing

[@dediprakosa7727]

You're a frontliner, your main task is to safe guard your backliner. Instead you ask you left flank and your backliner to support you attacking with meager result. If you want to really2 reclaiming gameplay use stealth/invinsible unit and supressing fire from arty after you build sentry.

[@JG-nm9zk]

Dongo getting salty because sombody is reclaiming his base. Something that he would have done in their position.

[@TheBrDeath]

does it to his frontliners near every game. he will selfishly lazarus his teammates in that situation to get his 9th afus up 0.5s faster and put them back 5 minutes. and then act surprised when they quit or tell him off "it was efficient bro"

[@kriegscommissarmccraw4205]

Watching drongo play is like watching cronchychomp cast. He left his section of the Frontline open and was surprised when the enemy waltzed right on through.

[@spongemonster_]

One tip, since you had so much metal you were unable to spend, you could have built a bot lab for some lazarus and a single cnstn bot (for a future T2 bot lab). Assuming you get more build power in the future and don't have that abundance of extra metal, this is less of an option.

[@lokian1174]

I like seeing people make use of whistlers, love that unit and been building my early frontlines to take advantage of them. Only issues I have seen is they seem to need sturdy cover units or dedicated repairs from a con turret since people love to rush them. They will always lose to arty in a standing duel but if they are getting repaired that wastes a LOT of the enemies time.

[@solidsound1579]

For the bit about getting a custom game to not have AI. Just save a game ( once at the beginning, set up the way you'd like) Then just reload that particular game.

[@ninjez07]

There's a setting to disable the pre-populated skirmish lobby. Can't remember what it's called off the cuff but it's there!

[@nuttywombat]

Re removing AIs from Skirmishes; Go to lobby settings and uncheck Random Skirmish AI and Map.

[@sneakycodfish2359]

Hello, 2 solar 4-5 wind. first con start nano for commander to build, then proceed to make 16 windmills. second con go take mexes. Once nano is finished go with com forward. 5 blitz or something like that before third con. Third con should help make units until you have like 6 missile trucks 2 mortars ish. then start making eco etc from there. Also the con making its way to the front through mexes should build a couple nanos and a radar jammer. I usually never struggle front against players on your rating on that map.

[@alanpaone]

you can always use more blitzes, and every time you have a decent front line you convert it into a metal donation and start from zero on the front line again. especially towards the middle of the match, you were focused on scaling eco and had a wide open lane. you gotta practice building eco without slowing down on units, its better to have a couple of fusions and a lot of tanks than a couple afus and nothing in front of them.

[@HonshuHigamori]

What is with the solar hate Its free energy Literally free Have too much metal compared to energy?? You build solars, reclaim them later, and since it costs 0 energy you have a net positive energy income and net neutral metal expenditure Its the eco equivalent of buying bonds, except with no inflation. Its literally just free income

[@SuperKitowiec]

Yeah, also it doesn't die when you touch it.

[@felixknof437]

Great gameplay! Love it! Drongo is doing fantastic games again!!! Even loosing, Drongo struggled hard, like everyone else, and still did excellent in the face of true devastation! That is truly BAR - I like!!!😊

[@chronographer]

Vehicle micro is much more difficult I think. While they are faster in a straight line they have much bigger turning circles and are more affected by terrain.

[@Swiftrootsdadudu]

How do you do the aoe mex command with the cons? like tell them to build all metal extractors in a circle area, on the extractor point I can't figure this command out for the life of me

[@TheZoepers]

in an other video on this map you said get energy storage before you move your com in front

[@warriordx5520]

Drongo using 0.1% of his actual power

[@sneyed]

Agree with most of ur analysis, but I think the big eco errors were building 6+ windmills in the first minute but not getting 1 early E storage in the first 5 mins, and then later going for the jammer at 6 mins when you were already struggling for E - jammers cost a whole bunch of energy to build and also keep draining energy after they are built. But apart from that you reacted properly in your base by building the solars and adding nanos (the first nano just needed to be a little earlier IMO)

[@onyxia8786]

Yo!! Next time you go vehicles, you should make mine layers!!!!

[@DarkerMonkey]

They most likely did not spend 95% of their revenue. Most likely only spent up to 50% on (mostly) servers and employees. The reason they almost look broke in the UK financial report. Is most likely that all revenue is moved to another company, Russian or otherwise. Common practice for companies to take revenue into one company and move it elsewhere, for tax reasons or other administrative reasons. Especially with international companies.

[@foddorais1422]

So if you rez before reclaiming you get 100% of the metal instead of 50% at the cost of energy to rez

[@SoowDeJu]

thanks for making content Drongo, even if you're being critiqued in the comments in every vid haha. Tbh im learning a lot from your ''mistakes'' and the people correcting them in the comments, even if they can be a bit harsh.

[@kriegscommissarmccraw4205]

He keeps blaming his allies for his issues.

[@LefteyeL]

Love your vids, Drongo, you’re doing a ton for the BAR and RTS fans

[@leoyoman]

i think your commander should help build a construction turret before leaving. It would accelerate the whole thing

[@kryptos6606]

Takes too long, in my experience (as a ~15OS vehicles player)--I try to have 2 cons left in base, with com pushing to the front (edit: basically Drongo's conclusion at 38:08). Specifically on glitters, I have the com straight walk up, taking at most 2 mexes directly along the way, and try to establish some light static, with a third con following behind capping all the mexes, then providing nano/jammer blueprints to build at the front. But the base nano goes up pretty quick after com leaves. Back when I tried to get a nano up first, I'd end up with one con in base AND starting from the back foot on the frontline because the com took too long to get there. Also, constructors provide energy. So, 2 vehicle cons=1 nano in build power, but also +20 energy.

[@theslicer4430]

some advice ive learned, 1st con goes and gets mexes, 2nd goes wind, 3rd helps factory and cammander leaves, 4th and 3rd both build a con turret and then one or both of them goes to build more wind. and ur first con that was building mex will join you at the front to build more advance def. you should never need to build basic solar (bar one after 3 mex) wind is just better. also solar takes more build power

[@apgamer4053]

drongo no matter what class you go you shouldent send your com untell you get down a nanoturret to help your base 11:06 11 min in and THEE drongos calling for backline meanwhile every other game hes in back its around 15 he comes up XD front line feels like time moves diffrent man

[@itwasme2435]

Hi, why Resurect unit before reclaming ??

[@cardgame98]

oh my lord so much time with energy overflow and zero converters

[@TheJBerg]

Tick spam is hard countered by the Juno tower

[@TheRealNimble]

Starlights were the wrong answer

[@TheRealNimble]

Wasted a lot of energy

[@Womblewobble1321]

Man watching that cookies guy eat all your stuff was infuriating. 2 of the tachyon beam tanks too

[@MercUSA]

I need you to make more videos and/or recommend another creator you think I should follow for this game. Please/thank you.

[@DanielBlack888]

I like BrightWorksGaming, thought it's casting of replays rather than playing. But that means we get to see different playstyles and some really high skilled players.

[@leendert16]

I like watching your video's but this one gave me alot of frustration to see lol

[@mtking4]

Stacking metal? Build another production building, problem solved

[@bunyaminyilmaz3798]

Drongooo AOE content plssss.

[@thegorn]

this.. and by AOE we mean AoE4

[@lucustwyatt1960]

lol you sound so entitled, it's a multiplayer game, no a single player game.

[@danielbevan9024]

Wish this was AOE4😢

[@SweetJP.]

This game is so bad xD. the early game counter attack on Drongo and he REFUSES to build a tiny turret for defense.