Commander X16

I bought this game on Steam earlier today! I'm kind of confused on how to play still, I've looked through the manual but I found it a bit confusing. I've never really played an RTS before, but hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon. I'll have to look at some playthroughs on YouTube.

Anybody defeated every map on Hard level yet? So far I've been able to do it on River Divide, The Islands, Forest Trail, Inferno and Rocky. The Protoids are adamant that they're going to build on as much water as possible so they slow themselves down on the first two, and there's enough obstacles on the other three that it gives me a fair shot.

But that does come with an asterisk. Forest Trail and Rocky are easily winnable on hard because the landscape constrains how far and fast they move. I can get just enough resources that I can start with a few defensive walls and a couple of sentry pods just in case a few get close, then build a missile silo and start taking out the bases.

In Rocky it's even easier to take out the first wave because they're too busy trying to destroy rocks and they're all clustered together. One missile and everything else is easy pickings.

On River Divide the only winning position I've found is to be on the island. No matter which base attacks first, they all want to build bridges down the river and try to connect to the top-point of the island, making an easy choke point to build a wall and line up with sentry pods to pick them all off. I haven't been able to win from the other two spawn points yet.

On The Islands I've found that quickly building a solar plant and tapping into resources on the smaller islands then abandoning them to the big island in the bottom-left corner is a viable strategy, there's enough water and land in-between that I get time to build up enough sentry pods to hold the first one or two waves off. They'll take out my HQ, first power plant and whatever other plants I built, but I've got time to build replacements before they get to me.

On Inferno I've found that if I use one range of volcanoes without putting gas refiners on them I can use it as defensive works and then just build a small wall to stretch out the Protoids and pick them off, then build some light tanks to go pick off small batches of Protoids wandering in the desert while bombing the bases.

Open Field, Rock Circle and Big Islands, there's just too much open space with nothing to slow them down, meanwhile I'm so resource-constrained that by the time I get some defensive works up and a few weapons cranked out they're already beating down my doorstep.

I played a lot PlanetX3, but I have to say PlanetX16 is kicking my bottom really hard. I have to play it again in order to win at least once.

Very addictive!