TLDR: Build either one. Both are fine most of the time, especially if safety is not a concern or you don't want to chase the last 5-10% efficiency.

I've answered this question many times here on reddit and it's in my guide as well, but people still occasionally ping me when I build fusions as if I'm doing something wrong. So here's an analysis of this deceptively complex problem.

(Note: All numbers reference cortex fusions; conversion assumes T1 converters because those are the most efficient while you're building your economy)

Naive efficiency comparison

The Advanced Fusion (Afus) is 37% more efficient than standard Fusion in terms of both metal and energy cost per energy generated (27% just on metal). Many players see this number and immediately conclude Afus is always better. But this ignores a crucial factor: build time.

An extreme example to illustrate this:

Let's say you have 10M/s income and 0 metal stored:

• Fusion completion time: 467 seconds
• Afus completion time: 1005 seconds

During this 538 seconds difference, the Fusion generates 591846E (8455 metal after conversion)

The Fusion literally pays for itself almost twice before the Afus even starts generating energy! So much for that 37% efficiency advantage, it's clearly not that simple.

The relevant numbers

The key breakpoint is 60 seconds - if you can build a Fusion one minute earlier than an Afus, their effective efficiency becomes equal. This applies to both metal and energy.

An easier metric to use is metal spend rate: 130M/s is the threshold where:

• Below 130M/s: Fusion is always more efficient (assuming perfect build execution)
  • For example at 60M/s, the fussion is more cost effective by about 20%
• Above 130M/s: Afus can be more efficient, but never reaches the full 37% advantage
  • Even at 500M/s spend rate, Fusion is only 14% less cost effective which I think is insignificant at that point
  • The theoretical maximum efficiency gap for Afus is only 18.6%. This is impossible to achieve in practice; it's just the limit of the equations.
  • The cost effectiveness difference becomes less significant as your income increases. For example, if Afus is 20% less cost effective when you have 60M/s income, that difference delays you by half a minute. But a 10% difference in favor of Afus when you're at 268M/s will mean a delay of less than 2 seconds.

It's important that this 130M/s is not the income, but the metal spend rate. For example, even if you have 500M/s income but spend 400M/s on units, you have only 100M/s to spend on energy production so you should build Fusions (at that point it's only 5% more cost effective but still).

Hidden costs and considerations

Build power (BP) efficiency

The Fusion is significantly more BP efficient than the Afus, so switching from Fusion to Afus requires 18 seconds' worth of your income invested in con turrets just to match the increased BP need. Interestingly, this is true no matter how much income you have. For example if you can build using 100M/s, you would need 9 con turrets for Fusions, but 18 to build an Afus.

Metal produced

It's important to recognize what effective efficiency means in practice. The Fusion building itself is clearly less efficient, but with a 60-second head start in energy production, the effective efficiency is the same because you will simply have more metal produced. You will have better metal income sooner, you just have some of that additional metal in fusions. That is not lost metal! You can reclaim and replace the fusions later with Afuses to get back this additional metal.

For example, on Glitters, with the default 48M/s income on the eco spot, you could build 11 Fusions or 4 Afuses (both after you have one fusion already). In both cases, you lose efficiency: with fusion, you lose efficiency with the last few; with afuses, you lose with the first few. In the end, you will reach an additional 12000E/s income in both cases (12100 with fusions to be precise) at pretty much exactly the same time . But with fusions, you will have the cost of 4 afuses and an additional 10700 metal in the buildings, so you can later replace them with 5 Afuses essentially for free. So even at the same effective efficiency, I would argue Fusions are better, especially if you take into account how much safer they are.

Practical considerations

1. Energy spikes
   • Afus creates huge energy spikes so requires pre-building more converters/storage to not overflow which delays the Afus, or your overflow which can help the team of course so it's not a waste
2. Build efficiency
   • building Afuses typically leads to more idle con turrets and each idle turret is wasted resources or APM to reclaim them
   • but you can safely build fusions a couple squares away from your lab for example, it won't cause problems and you can use the same con turrets you use with the lab. If you do the same with Afuses it's only a matter of time until you have a crater where your lab used to be
3. Safety
   • Cortex Afus is surprisingly safe against Armada nukes
   • BUT against everything else on average Fusions are safer. They can be built in 2x2 grids to prevent chain explosions (leave a space equivalent to the size of one fusion between each 2x2 grid)
   • Fusions can be built near your other stuff, they won't make you lose everything if they explode
   • The same defences can protect labs, mexes, and spaced Fusions while you would need more defences (like AA) to protect Afuses on a different building site
4. Build complexity
   • Afus: Simpler placement, less frequent need to place buildings
   • Fusion: preferably you use a more complex layout, more frequent building, spacing is important so it's harder to build them perfectly. Also, one T2 constructor is probably not enough to place them and the convertes both after a certain point

Conclusion

Fusion is Never Bad - Less efficient above 130M/s metal spend rate but the difference is rarely significant and it's the safer option.

Building Afus too early can be a bad idea but even when they are less efficient than fusion for example at 100M/s, they can still make sense because even though you will lose some metal produced, it's just simpler to build them.

This post is about a small optimization. Usually, both work in practice because you will probably lose significantly more metal in other ways, so compared to these other ways, the difference is often negligible. For example if you're building 30 con turrets before you start an Afus at 100M/s, then you're already lost more metal than you could ever lose by building a fusion instead of an afus.

Build either, both are fine most of the time, especially if safety is not a concern or you don't want to chase the last 5-10% efficiency.

Even though I only cared about Cortex, I did the math for Armada as well, just not very carefully. With Armada, it looks like the threshold is only 94M/s and the efficiency difference at higher spendings can be higher for Afus's favor as well, for example Arm Fusion is 21% less cost effective at 500M/s spending. I assume because the Arm fusion is just that much worse. Still I think there's nothing wrong with building arm fusions above that threshold, it's still safer and you still get more metal produced.

Disclaimer: I did the calculations in four different ways, and they gave me slightly different results. I assume this is due to rounding and because I considered the E and BP cost for these buildings differently (for example in one case I calculated with number of con turrets while in another with the raw BP). Therefore, the 130M/s is not necessarily the correct number; the other calculation gave me 124M/s and 58 seconds for the break-even point. This difference results in less than a 1% change in the long term results, so I think it does not matter but feel free to correct me if you replicate the calculations and find the correct numbers.

Also, I made another calculation after I wrote this post. That calculation does not focus on cost effectiveness but only on target metal income and I think it is accurate and includes everything except converter costs. The result of that can be seen in this chart.

Honestly, the only conclusion you should draw from this chart is that the difference is small. I say this because I know how sensitive it is to the values I used. For example, if I add just 600 extra metal to the fusion's starting conditions, then the two lines will only intersect at 600M/s. So, pretty much anything can be more important than which one you build.

Edit: small correction for the chart: It should correctly show the metal income values while building more Fusions/Afuses, but because the calculation includes the E cost of the buildings, the income values would be higher at any point when you stop building them. So for example the 402M income on the chart is 402 while building fusions, but it would be 433 when you stop building them.

Last game I took over someones units/base because it was flashing on the map and it said "take over" (or something similar).

Next the player started cursing me saying he never left but only lagged.

I had guessed he had disconnected or simply left and later rejoined the battle. I had however no way to give the units back.

Pretty much the title. I'm totally clueless about this game, i suddenly got a casting video from my youtube home and it attracted my eye.

I mainly play games like age of empires 2 (and Total war, but i feel it's too different), and i wonder what are the gamedesign features that sets BAR apart from all the other RTSs. I tried to look on the internet, and i found no good explanation. The one from uThermal kinda helped, but im kinda lost. Can anyone help me?

I have it sort open lobbies on top (as is the case with most people I imagine). But even then, the lobbies will keep jumping around. Could we just have it also sort by most recently open at the bottom or something? It seems to jump around with no rhyme or reason.

If I had a dime every time I went into a lobby I didn't intend to because the listing jumped just as I clicked, I'd be able to buy at least a family sized pizza.

Maybe just a pet peeve on my part. Maybe everyone's just living with it when it's a quick fix.

Does anyone know what causes bombers to fail dropping payload sometimes?

Is it because you give them a ground attack command on a spot before scouting and when they get close something shows up there?

Or is it something with the targeting commands? Because it never happens when I have multiple bombers selected and use Shift+A and spread the targets but only when I give an individual A attack command to one bomber.

Beyond Annihilation.

Love this game to bits but the current name's a mouthful, if everyone wants to keep referring to it as "bar", BA works just fine!

Shower thought finished

Edit: apparently BA already exists as Balanced Annihilation, I didn't know. Beyond still sounds better.

Okay. It's one of those games. Your lane neighbor is pretty noobish and sadly is not reacting to you getting defeated in detail and you being 2v1. You've decided you're not going to whine about it in the chat and instead will do the best that you can to, if not win, at least survive or lose less bad so that maybe the rest of the team can come back later and bail you out.

What do you do? How do you play this bad hand the best you can?

Fairly new player was curious when it's best to use static defenses for map control. Or just how to best hold on to map control, is it best to use static defenses or should I just produce more and more units for defenses and have separate units for pushes?

Too often my com has decloaked when I wasn't taking damage, performing any actions, and had way more than enough energy. I can have afuses and stores of energy that doesn't dip remotely near low and my com will still decide it doesn't want to be cloaked anymore and get itself killed. It's almost inevitable, it happens so often. I watch these things closely and there's no indication as to why it happens.

Yes, I know energy costs 1000 when walking, before someone says it. Again, this happens with full energy, no damage, no actions. So what am I missing?

COM BOMB = walking / transporting your com straight into the enemy and self destructing it.

The question is in the title, I would often use this to break frontlines and open up opportunities to run through with stouts / ticks into the backline while eating the scrap left from my com to tech or hard push for a win. clarification that I would not use this tactic in fun games with friends unless my com was caught out and would not survive. nowadays I rarely use this tactic as I have not seen anyone else do it and am assuming it is considered bad manners. I will maybe make a video on it highlighting how I go about fishing for opportunities but I'd rather not sow that into the community if it is frowned upon.

Hey guys, we have a LANPARTY on friday. Would you recommend the game for newcommers? How long does a match takes probably and would you think its easy to find in in a multiplayer game? We are 6 people.
THANKS

I read that the game is a "passion project", and developers are collaborating on it willingly without any payment in the free time and all the hardware (servers), are payed by the lead dev who has a "normal job".

That's cool, but we are only humans and when you see thousands and thousands of players, one eventually can think "10$ isn't that much for individual", and slap a price tag on it...

Is there any information about the game going pay 2 play ?

Or maybe some "cosmetic content", "ads", or any other way to monetize the game ?

TLDR: Don't make more than 21 windmills and make 1-2 early energy storages during canyon t1. Practically you should set a con to build a block of 20 windmills and pull it off once you have enough E stored for geo.

After doing some math and testing, the most metal efficient limit to the number of windmills for the canyon player in glitters is 21. With 21 windmills a tier 1 cortex lab spamming grunts at 1k build power will never stall on energy production and will consume a little bit less than the total amount of metal per second that all of the canyon mexes produce. The grunt is the least energy efficient spammable t1 unit which means that other viable t1 unit compositions will consume less energy than 21 windmills will produce and won't need more than that number. Make sure to build 1-2 energy storages early to support your windmill economy and to store energy to take your geo with. This amount can be calculated for other roles but it's extra important to hit a fast geo timing in canyon so don't make more winds than you need!

This game is truly phenomenal. I’m curious how it will expand with a steam release?

Currently, we see several statistics at the end of the game, one of which is mouse pixels per minute. The problem is that this statistic is just tragically overthought. What if one person has a resolution of 4k and the other 1024x768? The statistic will tell you that you have a score several times lower despite exactly the same mouse movements for both players.

This statistic should be based on 100% of the current screen resolution instead of pixels alone. If someone moves the mouse across half the screen - 0.5 is charged. No matter what the resolution is, the result will be much more reliable and will mean something.

The only thing you can conclude from this right now is that someone has a higher resolution than you. And I am convinced that this was not the intention and someone simply did not think it through. It's a simple fix, probably for a few minutes if someone wanted to.

I checked the results by changing the resolution, I reduced twice the resolution - i get 2 times smaller mouse pixel stat. I also asked people with high score - everyone just had 4k resolution.

This stat caught my attention, as the idea is great and can actually represent a player's speed quite well if implemented correctly. Now - useless.

This post is about players who think there's only one way to play the game - their way.
They often complain about strategies that are different from theirs, even when those are not just viable but sometimes straight up better.

Here's a concrete example: I have a bomber rush build on Isthmus that uses early energy storage. The build needs enough energy for a bomber, scout, and two fighters as early as possible. Instead of the "standard" 3 mexes + lab + winds approach, I build ~8 wind turbines before the lab and store their income. When the air lab finishes, I have enough stored energy to assist it with the commander and quickly produce the units.

This is objectively the fastest way to get the mentioned units - I've tested it extensively and you literally cannot hit the optimal timing without storage. Yet I've had players rage about:

• Building early E storage
• Going for bombers
• Not giving them an immediate transport just after those units

Even if we assume my strategy is suboptimal (it's not), their complaints are counterproductive and just rude - especially when I tell them upfront to expect a transport around only at minute 3.
In one recent game, a player complained about a "delayed" transport that might have cost them 200 metal in lost island income, while they:

• Hard E stalled for more than a minute
• M stalled so badly they couldn't build mexes
• Requested two transports but left one idle (and paid with only one wind turbine)
• Used the other transport to move a con turret they couldn't afford due to stalling instead of capturing the island
• Lost the island anyway because enemy commander simply walked there
• Just their build in general was bad. If you're reading this I can show you a better one

So my "mistake" might have cost them 200 metal with the delay, their own mistakes cost them many hundreds.

The same player also complained about our eco player picking Cortex (wrong again at least about the reason they mentioned).
They made dozens of major mistakes but focused on criticizing other's valid strategic choices.

I could list many more examples:

• Getting pinged for building multiple fusions (even though I know exactly when it's more efficient than an Afus)
• Getting flamed for starting with 4-5-6 mexes instead of 3 (I even have a post on reddit proving it's better sometimes)
• etc

Everyone makes mistakes but somehow I don't spam chat rudely pointing out others' errors because it's not helpful during a game.
When someone uses a suboptimal build (like the person this post is about), I still focus on winning and having fun instead of sending a dozen messages about how bad their build is.

The most frustrating part is when players (especially those with red or blue colors) are so arrogant they think they know the only way to play and they're just wrong. If you think someone's strategy is wrong, offer some advice - don't write "fuck that guy because he built a storage"

The game has room for multiple strategies. Being toxic about non-standard approaches just makes the community worse.
We should assume that the standard approaches are not the best in literally every time, there's obviously room for improvements and it's hard to find better ways if every little deviations from the standard can cause someone to rage.

I already have many builds that I think are better than the standard ones. You're welcome to peek at my replays. You might think, "Well, that's weird," but if you analyze them, you might realize they're all viable, at least on occasion. If you look at the replays, you will obviously see mistakes. It's hard to play perfectly with constant experimentation, but I don't think I need to be ashamed while my win rate is above 60%.

TLDR: Just don't assume you're correct in everything every time and that everyone else plays wrong.

Or whatever that new weird name is, what's the lore on that anyway?

Shoutout to delta siege wet and OG greenfields

Ultimate Guide to Armada Bots From Noob to Pro https://youtu.be/8_E3EJQw0gk

I've been getting tired of hunting and clicking on things to build them, and want to try out the "grid optimized" hotkeys. However, I can't seem to find a reference or cheat sheet for each building using those keybindings. I was thinking something like a table that showed first keystroke across, then second keystroke down (or vice versa), with the resulting building in each cell.

Anyone know if such a reference exists? If not, maybe I'll sit down and make it later.

Edit: After attempting to make my own, I realized why there isn't one: It's complicated by the fact that different units have different build options. So the c-c might mean one thing for commander, another for t1 con, another for t2 con. My original idea of having an easy visual reference to glance at bogged down in the the multi-dimensionality problem, and I stopped.

So, I think I'll just learn by doing like everyone else already did :)

I've been testing myself against balanced BARbarAIn and then played my first two multiplayer games 8v8 both times. I got bottlenecks in metal so fast I spent the whole game just building energy to power energy converters. How can I power my economy without getting in other's way and what do I do when I need to build constructors but I have to stop everything else to get it done in a timely manner?

There are currently too many low OS high rank players ruining actual noob lobbies. If you have 1,500 hours you shouldn’t be in a noob lobby. I find it happening way too often that I’m a higher OS than players that are 100x better than me. I can barely transition to Tier 2 at the proper time let alone know what units counter each other.

I feel 80% of the community is playing in noob lobbies. WHY??

It even gets to the point where they spec or kickban actuall noobs because they ruin their "Noob" labeled lobby experience.

Do we need a new name for BAR "noobs"? Something that encapsulates the 15-35 OS high chev players that populate most of the noob lobbies.

Is there a planned single player campaign? Is someone already organizing and working on this or no?

Last night I played a Supreme Isthmus game (which I'm now realizing is my least favorite kind of lobby; I have yet to have a fun game) as air, the second time I've played air on that map. We lost, and I'm still reflecting on what happened and what I could have done better. I also think I got advice that I'm reluctant to take, since I think it's bad advice. Here's the replay: https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=2c6d18677904c932a72ef669bc8ec8bf

My air opponent was Huan, and when I saw that I immediately told the team that he's a better air player than me and they should build AA (they did not build AA). I admittedly fumbled delivering transports and scouts to the two sea players; I wanted to get cons and my own scouts out first, but the sea players expect transports and scouts almost immediately after request. (I also was having difficulty with the controls transferring control of units to the other players, which happens sometimes and is annoying.) I was told in past games that I needed to scout more, so this game I did do more scouting, and it looked to me like there was not much fighter coverage on the other side of the map. I decided to invest in Shuris since they're one of the best ground support aircraft in the game. But when they were ready, I realized that there was no pushing anywhere on the map by either side for the shuris to actually do anything (Shuris must have ground support to be effective). They ended up being a wasted investment.

I build a number of cons and I admittedly try to eco as hard as I can in my games, even though I've never played an eco role. I see the difference between an eco and a non-eco player as being the difference between building and not building units; basically, even though I build eco, I want to have units in production all the time, unless I've decided at some point I can lay off production to focus on eco due to a stable front or needing to rebuild.

I mention this because suddenly Huan comes at us with a large force of T2 fighters and bombers and wipes the eco player's base. My air force was defeated completely. The eco player said that my mistake was doing too much eco; I only apparently need one fusion reactor, not three, and should not be building metal converters.

It kind of does not matter what happened after that because we never recovered, once the enemy eco player did a marauder push and killed the backline (and me). When the game was over, I saw that the enemy air actually had a significant economy with 3 AFus and was well ahead of me in economy for a significant portion of the game. This made me suspect that the advice of "make less eco" seemed incorrect.

I watched the replay to see what Huan was doing. His teammates did not ask for transports, and his eco player supplied a T2 con MUCH earlier than me, so he had a T2 economy much earlier. He built fewer air constructors but had dedicated con turrets just to eco production, like wind farms and energy converters. Interestingly, he stopped air production for a while and just focused on building an economy, with a light fighter screen. I do recall noticing this, but never exploited that fact; actually, the enemy team thought I was going to do a bombing run but it never came (that was when I built shuris instead that basically were never used). When he did go back into (T2 air) production, he produced it fast while I was basically starting up my T2 economy and air production in addition to building an anti-nuke (I think I'm the only player who made one), so I was not getting a scouting run in. I stopped watching after his first devastating bombing run.

So I'm now reflecting on what lessons to take away from this, it seems they are:

• When the sea players ask for scout+trans, make that priority 1 or they will yell at you. Also, try not to fumble it.
• The scouting was initially good but the follow-up was bad; Shuris were the wrong play because the ground forces on the front were timid. I could have encouraged them to attack, telling them they'd have air backup, but really I should have built a T1 bombing force and attacked the air player, then the eco player. I had good reason to believe, based on how little AA there was and what little fighters I was seeing, that there would be little air resistance.
• While the advice of "eco less" is probably incorrect (I've seen a lot of replays where the better air ecos hard), and I think in this game that eco is something you should constantly do but in varying degree, there are definitely moments where eco should stop and unit production be the focus. To prevent idle constructors, have them support the lab. For air, you have a moment where you decide that you need more fighters right now, or want to try a bombing run, so you momentarily stop eco to do that, but for the most part eco is something that should constantly happen, as long as you remember that eco equals victory later. I actually could have done better with eco by building fewer constructors and more con towers around wind farms. (Also, our team's eco player dropped the ball too by not delivering a T2 con as quickly as the other team, but I could have punished Huan for his eco.)

This is my post mortem of the game, and I would like advice from others.

Hiya, Ive been digging around on Youtube and im looking for any highly skilled players on Youtube to watch, I can find countless commentary videos from YTbers like Winter and TheBrightWorks but im specifically looking for POV's of high level gameplay rather than spectator gameplay so I can see how they are building up their eco and units early on compared to my own gameplay, minor things like how many wind turbines to build in the first couple of minutes isnt something you can really see in a commentator match.

Haven't played in over a year and decided to give BAR a go again. The new build menu UI is terrible, how do I go back to the old style?