Expansions
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about the expansions in the game and what is working and what is not. Here's what I came up with.
At the beginning of the game, your two choices with your gem count are really to upgrade to T2 super fast and to fast expand. A third option is if you're in the top you can coordinate with an ally to take out the neutral creeps right what I'll term the "third", or the easiest netural camp to kill off, and you both expand there, sacrificing the time to collect gems in the first minute. This third option is not available while playing with bots, for obvious reasons.
I'm not sure option three even works out in the player's favor, because you have to spend quite a bit of time killing off those creeps (even with two players), and you're very likely to lose units, which has a pretty big impact if the enemy tries to bum rush you, though you do have a tower right there. The benefit of doing this would that you get your third up super fast and you can route back to your natural and take it essentially uncontested, but you're still short of gems if you use your hero to take out the neutral creeps and if you don't, you have your hero wandering the map solo taking gems while your army kills the creeps and that's dangerous all on its own. Seems cheezy. TLDR for this paragraph taking the third super fast doesn't seem like a good idea.
That said, taking the natural super fast seems very vanilla. I can't think of a solid reason to rush for tier 2 units except for maybe (maybe) like the team with the "seige tanks" or something like that, but most of the t2 units seem to play better with an army in front of them. So this is my long-winded way of saying that honestly, taking the first expansion almost immediately seems like the only viable option.
So then my question becomes, why have it? One of the great strengths of Atlas' design is that it limits the base management to the bare bones and making decisions. So why force an expansion right off the bat?
The reason I'm questioning this is that it makes taking expansions feel pretty useless. Expansions take a long time to come online and I have not felt the effect of taking expansions on my economy the way I feel like I should. As evidence for this I feel like the fourths way out on the extremes of the map are rarely taken in the games that I've played and even more rarely fought over.
The one exception to that is that I feel like the 2x expanions really do provide a big boost to my economy. Not only that, but they're in a spot on the map that is contested, a lot. I lose those expanions, and it hurts. I feel my gold income drop, and I'm not able to build units/research as fast as I had been before. It gives me something to defend other than the super node towers, and splits units' attention. I have to make decisions. Its something to harass and that gets harassed.
I suspect that a lot of my concerns are as much map design as anything, and I've seen Day9 posting elsewhere in the forums that the maps are being redesigned (I say maps are being redesigned but there's only the one map LOL). So that alone may address my concerns.
TL;DR overall: the expansions don't feel strategically important except for the 2x expansions, which feel vital and exciting.
Comments
I definitely agree that expansion doesn't quite have the immediate oomph in economy boosting that it could, and I also agree that fast expanding to the natural does seem like the only proper line of play. The only squad I've ever been doing different with has been Vex, so I can get ignitors by the third wave of gems, but I'm still not even sure if that's the right call. I wish expanding were more of a decision than a necessity, and then gave more of a boost when you actually manage to take one.