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Notes -
Zero-K is somewhat difficult to play and niche, personally I prefer Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (which has been taken over, updated regularly and sustained wholly by fans after the official servers shut down over a decade ago). There is absolutely staying power in the concept.
It's really aiming for RTS elitists, a much higher level of complexity than Starcraft. In Zero-K there are maybe 8x more units than Starcraft, there might be 5 different kinds of air to ground bombers, not to mention the gunships. You can fight on water and beneath the water, you can terraform the ground, you're commanding armies with maybe 5-10x more units in them fighting on multiple fronts, you're managing large-scale radar networks, building tactical missile defence, upgrading your command unit, managing an entire minigame of power/mass generation. Your wind power plants are actually more effective if you build them on a higher plateau!
There is no clear meta build, Supreme Commander certainly hasn't been solved and Zero K is even more complicated. It's certainly not a popular way to make a game though.
I never really liked the "tier 1-3 units" thing in supcom. Just seems like complexity for complexity's sake. I know StarCraft has unit tiers too, but they're implemented elegantly and your late game composition will always include "tier 1" trash units like zerglings and zealots.
"Lurker 'ling defiler" is a base of low and mid tier units that synergize with the high tier one.
Ignore marines ofc.
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