Silica!!! Aliens Faction Tips and Tricks!

Welcome to Silica, now that i've spent a few hours with the game itself, anyone that is struggling with getting the Alien faction built up, heres some tips in a game i played!!!!
Audio seems to plague me in this game, sorry if some of the commentary is cut out from the shear amount of incoming gunfire XD
RTS x FPS x C&C Renegade style game with amazing visuals
The game has just come out in early access and is available on Steam!!!
I will 100% be playing this a lot more with friends and also in online play in the days/months to come and follow the journey this game takes to full release.
If you Enjoyed this video please leave a Like, Sub and hit that bell button to stay up to date with me on more Silica
watch gameplay for multiple different games and shoutcasting over on / lycanmb
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Music by Scott Buckley - www.scottbuckley.com.au. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons... or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA

[@RocketCatRTS]

I've mostly been playing Alien Commander. Human commander is a part time job. You'll often be waiting for more resources to come in before you can do things, maybe exploring the map or micro-ing where you can. Alien commander, on the other hand, is 2 full time jobs at least! You can be constantly cranking out shrimp, building nodes in all directions and especially towards caches, and be constantly building and tasking military. What is the correct number of shrimp to build? If you're mining out deposits faster than you can push nodes and caches on new deposits, that's about right.

[@SuperDecimator]

Sounds like the pace of Starcraft

[@Rich4098]

It's a tough balance to find. So far I'm getting overwhelmed by the human attacks eventually.

[@battlewrathgaming5047]

I think the Aliens need a hydra nest kind of mechanic, too, some building you can build a point A and B to tunnel through terrain. Maybe give it a high heat signature for the enemy, so they want to prioritise it. This creates gameplay scenarios of distraction or offensive action.

[@whatwhat7119]

Ive found that if the commander moves the new units halfway up, or behind a ridge from where you want to be, the players can run their crabs up to the front line in 30s to a minute and swap back in. Most of the smaller units can be parked up on mountains/outcroppings so theyre hidden and very hard for human units to find them, and if they do theyll be instantly killed. i Just spent 5 minutes shooting down 2 harvesters as a scorpion and ended the humans economy so thats honestly needs to get fixed first, humans couldnt get to where I was and only my tail was available to get hit so despite 4 tanks trying to hit me nothing touched me until I killed the 2 and pushed forward with a goliaths. Took a tank out while it was distracted then went back up into hiding.

[@gtifighter]

@@whatwhat7119 what exactly should be fixed about a single scorpion killing two harvesters? like had the enemy commander sent some infantry to do the job, you would probably have died. in an RTS Game, you don't solve a problem by ignoring it.

[@whatwhat7119]

@@gtifighter I sat up in an area they couldnt reach and attacked harvesters from a range that I couldnt even see their health, like just inside rendering distance. They sent tanks and the bullets went by my tail and only rarely hit me infantry wouldnt be able to do anything unless commandos have jet packs, but that would require multiple player commandos because I kill them all the time as scorpions, along with other infantry they die in like 2-3 hits. Right now the game seems like humans have to rush down the bugs before goliath spam gets up, but scorpions trash tanks/quads in skirmishes so it becomes crabs/scorpions kill harvesters while scorpions gaurd the base from human motorized units and wait until the goliaths are massed. There are only 2 entrances into bases usually and I just got done with a game where I went 9-1 in the skirmish phase. We beat them so heavily that we were at their gates killing them as soon as they came out and then the army rolled in around minute 50 and they had nothing to stop us

[@Rysdad1]

Agreed. A nydus canal is a good idea

[@jackodenthal2392]

I've been waiting for this video! Silica is my new addiction, and you're clearly my dealer lol

[@LycanMB]

Haha you bet! 100% tune in for my upcoming stream again soon, Might make a weekend of it each weekend Silica Sundays

[@jackodenthal2392]

@@LycanMB That has a nice ring to it XD

[@coffeeandkhaos]

Cant wait for optimization on this game. I destroyed an online game earlier playing the alien commander like i was in starcraft lolol

[@DarukaEon]

Lmao! It was almost on cue where you said, "I hope the volume is alright," then you got drowned out by the gunfire. Ha ha ha! I've been on the fence about getting this game, but I'm more inclined to getting it now after watching you play and explain things especially from the alien side.

[@NEXUS-ALPHA-1-VOID]

The crab army does a crab rave for victory

[@LycanMB]

🤣🤣🤣

[@battlewrathgaming5047]

Last thought, but as commander, I'd assign defence units to lock down choke points. Use the terrain to control enemy movement. A big weakness to me seems the nest placement, having a whole exposed flank. Hopefully with the queen mechanic, we can better entrench into terrain.

[@ozqu]

Thank you for your wisdom, kind sir

[@reevo33]

Thanks for the video and explaining controls. I like playing Alien commander, it does require a lot of micromanaging to continue placing nodes and getting new biotics. I think placing a second nest somewhere else on the map and building units from there to attack in a different direction is currently a good strategy. Downside is if your node gets destroyed, your shrimps are cut off and will not deposit biotics. And if the human faction finds your location early and rushes your base, you'll be in a bad spot.

[@gelphaze1229]

A lot of love was put in this game.

[@ScottBot726]

Thanks for the video! Might be picking this game up - the game volume sounded better before you adjusted it. The reps and clicks were very loud

[@Acesahn]

Awesome looking game! I really hope they add battle damage to the vehicles and buildings, and the bugs too! It'd be so satisfying to see them broken into gooey pieces or for the harvesters to start on fire and leak smoke so you know they're hurting.

[@paulrussert]

Man this game looks SO good, especially since both command and FPS mode are polished and it looks like devs already patched the harvester docking issues. My only hope is that they find some way to actually utilize the large map scale... its so bit and units just take the same or similar paths and nothing exciting happens other than the straight line between the 2 bases... maybe that changes on situations where its not 1v1. Still going to pick this up maybe just wait for another update or 2.

[@battlewrathgaming5047]

Just a thought, I'd say for the [Shrimp] / gathering, try to keep the [bio cache] and the resource pool at the same terrain level, to remove the ineffective pathing of the [shrimp]s climbing around rocks. The only exception to this for me, would be putting the [bio cache] in a nook of rocks to increase defensibility.

[@Agora2021]

Feel like the aliens could use a light terraforming mechanic or something, just to change up the map visuals a little bit and maybe give light buffs to alien units on it. Or maybe that's just my Natural Selection experience talking.

[@mastertintiger]

this would also add to the fps side of the human faction. making it more visually interesting and give a better sense of "alien territory" vibes when pushing.

[@themagichatter1054]

yo dude, loving the content. Prob the best silica content out there, loving how quickly it's improving to, I'm curious, you or anyone else know what sort of community the game has, thinking of getting it, but it looks like it'll live/die on the community.

[@Appel79]

Now we wait for a C&C mod. 😉

[@Geekthenet]

Hey good content. Sometimes hard to hear you in the fights. Can you balance the mic/game sound ratio a bit more ? Thank you

[@LefteyeL]

Is there a way to tell units to burrow from the commander screen?

[@smokey_mcbong]

So from what I can gather if you play as the aliens. You want to tech up quickly and swarm the humans early because they don't fair well late game?

[@Anderson12690]

Actually, I love the idea of not being able to destroy un built buildings

[@Edaxidous]

my biggest problem playing aliens is when idle will always charge forward when getting attacked. Not only that if your not pointing them in the direction your getting attacked they won’t do anything.

[@24nero24]

are the resources infinite and if not is it possible to turn on infinite resource deposits

[@panzrok8701]

The resources are finite at the moment but the shrimps(alien gatherer) search for new resource nodes automatically. I don't know about the human harvester though.

[@Tes_1]

Love the look of this and cant wait to play it. Is there a roadmap or rough, full release date? I heard there's just 1 developer working on this??!! What a hero!

[@Tom--Ace]

Primarily one Dev, he had some helpers along the way but mainly him. He's my bro I can't speak for his timeline but there's a lot of improvements planned, for example me and him have been playing around with flying vehicles for like the better part of half a year but they're not all ready yet so they're not in-game It's been a pleasure play testing it, I hope people enjoy it

[@jasonwright8546]

​@@Tom--Ace Great job on this so far! It looks impressive. It is obvious a lot of love has gone into this.

[@randonrobertson3341]

I would have paid 70 to play this all day

[@randonrobertson3341]

I am excited for the future of this game

[@1makosyo1]

What key do you click to change from infantry to comander and control the army and building stations again? I can't seem to find the key to swap back and forth

[@LycanMB]

T to go back a forth from Commander to troops

[@WintersFinalstand]

I usually maintain more eggs then you do. Far, far, far more. And I branch out and create what I call hives, which are tower custers designed to push map control.

[@matiko280]

I wonder how big can an alien army get. Could you just spam crabs and constantly swarm your enemies?

[@LycanMB]

Yes you can, you can spawn loads of Crabs haha

[@Tom--Ace]

When me and my bro were play testing, I had a tendency to build up a human force of about 100-150 soldiers and vehicles for one big push. And that was nowhere near the limit. I've seen some monstrously large alien armies. It's down to your patience and your computer

[@jasonwright8546]

​@@Tom--Ace Have you and your bro considered having killed units drop biomass? It would give the aliens a tyrannid steamroller feel. Or would that be too op?

[@panzrok8701]

I built around 270 shrimps in one game and around 150 other units. They result was 3 FPS and then the game crashed.

[@ashleyc8303]

Lol I just did a Run last night playing this game as the alien commander and its pretty hard have to macro everything. Luckily the guys didn't give up when we had to deal with siege units. Lol they ended up using crabs and getting the enemy to shoot their own it was funny but did run the game into overtime

[@makkenr]

This game looks cool

[@ihmi]

The firefights are still too loud. They drown out everything else, including your talking. Otherwise though still a great video and I'm enjoying them! Keep em coming!

[@LycanMB]

Yeh haha, i tried turning it down, then all the gunfire just drown me out again, ill try and find a good medium for the next one

[@brushrunner]

If you record the game sound and your voice seperately. There is a trick in da vinci resolve where you can lower the frequencies of human speech from only the game, so 😅that even in a firefight we can hear you speak clearly. (Its the 1-2k frequency range)

[@Rich4098]

When you take direct control, does the AI keep expanding and building units without your input?

[@LycanMB]

No, not if you're commander, the AI will only take control if you are playing as FPS

[@firedirewolf]

ya know, seeing the human resource harvester from the top, Honestly surprised that there aren't cargo drones so that harvester's can spend their time grinding resources and only return to base if they fill up, like, once it hits 100, it starts heading back until it hits 50% from drone running in which case it turns around and goes back. Would think that they'd not be a priority resource since the vehicle can just make a full run on its own, but getting those little bits in so that a bigger harvest could be done would be quite nice... if a harvester actually doesn't return to base, you've probably spent too much on cargo drones like that lol. might would think that the bugs could build spawning pits at resource points to reduce their cost for higher unit deployment rates. if their version or resource silos were also their spawning pits, it would probably make the AI fix their issue of only one spawner... or at least that silos produced a tiny and slow trickle of resources after researching developments would potentially get them going faster since they are literally growing their units lol

[@wildlyawesome115]

been playing some of this game, but i cant get over 40 fps no matter what settings i use. have above the recomended specs as well

[@1MDA]

This video is more of a gameplay video than a tips video

[@NathanMcCoy-bo1zr]

Audio is much better this video. Gameplay was a little loud in previous video though this game gets a pass for that

[@LycanMB]

God Damn Gunfire is way louder then i realize sometimes haha

[@darkagerush3098]

Good vid, alien noises were very load, sometimes drowning out your voice especially Goliath boy just fyi

[@Shrimpins]

I was hoping this would be similar to Planetside with a lot more users per battle, but I guess that isn't totally impossible

[@danieltuccillo4132]

The frames really stop dropping mid game with 25+ people it seems. After that gets nearly unbearable

[@banaminatigaming]

is there any way you can make videos with cuts and edits. I cant watch an hour video.

[@jackodenthal2392]

What map were you playing on?

[@LycanMB]

Rift Basin, the smallest map of the lot

[@Rysdad1]

Can you play the game with a controller?

[@LycanMB]

Yes! but only in the FPS part, Commander id suggest using Mouse and Keyboard

[@Mighty_Oak214]

does this game run on lower end devices / not gaming pc or laptop?? thanks!

[@Tom--Ace]

It's tough to run. I was pushing for it to run well on steam deck, and it can run smaller battles well. But it bogs down in bigger ones and RTS mode Performance is something Dram is working to improve but it's a big game with a lot of units, so it does need a good rig

[@Mighty_Oak214]

@@Tom--Ace thank u bro much appreciated :)

[@jacksteal4792]

It’s not fox yet, gunshots really loud compared to you, other than that I hope to see more of this game.

[@LycanMB]

yeh trying to balance the sound for recording is proving quite a challenge

[@Steelninja77]

Your from the westcountry i see

[@LycanMB]

am indeed!

[@Steelninja77]

@@LycanMB yeah i was born there too. In Taunton but moved away as a kid but did go back for a bit. Lovely place Somerset.

[@MrSibercat]

Do they gather automatically?

[@LefteyeL]

Yes

[@sarni4218]

AUGH

[@jaheem666]

Very very hard to hear what you're saying when you were attacking the enemy base :)

[@sittingdingo1]

The c=volume and audio is actually so jumpy and jaggard that I could not watch. Please redo this video. Tia.

[@gr1mhammer]

very bare bones. doesn't even inform us on what keystrokes or functions to use. two thumbs down