I am Firemanpete, most notably from the alliances WWs, BoS, Hord, and most recently T. I have been playing battledawn since my freshman year of highschool which coincidently was also the first year of battledawns existance. I am known mostly for my ability to spread out early and cover significant portions of territory without the support of my teammates through activity, and yes a steady stream of reds in the early round.

The main placement goal is to put your players in the best position to succeed individually while not compromising security.

In the early round the plan is usually as follows:
Select locations that split up territory amongst your members, put heavy boosters farther away from the main area so that they can have free reign over their own territory and not step on anyones toes right off the bat. Similarly, put smaller or nonboosters closer together so that they may defend each other should the need arise.

Once you have figured out who is what type of player, it is time to select a location. Be weary of the center of the map, it is where a lot of casual players place which is what makes it a goldmine in early rounds, but it is also a hunting ground for alliances that are also going for first place. If you are going to place players there, make sure that you are confident that they are active and can handle their own when fighting 2 or 3 and maybe even 5 or 6 decent opponents at once while also expanding.

The best locations often are seperate from each other based on the location of resource outposts. Ideally you want to have 360 attacks from all of your allies on the resource ops surrounding their placement without impeding or competing with each other for any of the outposts. This allows you to acheive a maximum coverage and resource production in the early round.

Really advanced players should also have figured out their allies and enemies prior to the round so as to place away from them in order to avoid early round conflict which is often unpredictable and can be devastating to an alliance.

I will not tell you the secret to Sub placement because subs are the lowest life forms in BD and I will not help you contribute to the biggest problem in the game I love. Bootlickers can Burn.

There is really no way to begin expanding effectively on tick 1 without boosting. If you are a non-booster, stick to building structures and maybe a few spams to shoot at resource ops. This guide will specifically reference boosters.

1st tick boosts in order of importance:
Large Workers
Large Metal
Small Workers
Large Oil
Small Metal
Small oil
Emergency Workers - only for the very wealthy
Emergency Metal - If you have recently won the lottery

If you are limited in tokens, wait to use larger boosts rather than burning an upcharged amount on the small boosts. The trick is to get as many workers as you can justify as soon as possible so you can begin collecting significantly more resources per tick than your casual counterparts. Do not overdo it unless you intend on spending quite a bit of money, its better to hit large workers 3 times whenever it pops than to hit emergency workers once in the beginning.

You should IMMEDIATELY begin working on your structures. If you can get your farm, metal and oil up to level 3 before the tick 1 release, you have a good start. If you can get the damage and vehicle upgrade buildings as soon as the tick releases you will have a significant advantage. The majority of casual players go straight to building an army, consisting usually of different types of armored infantry. If you can get a few damage anti infantry vehichles out there, you will begin to waltz over any non-boosting competition.

Get a spy building as well. Spys in the early rounds can be effective since you are not really burning through your energy as fast as you will in later rounds and people do not generally anticipate spy attacks within the first 50-100 ticks.

A very rough order off the top of my head:
1- Farm, Metal, and Oil 3
2- Damage upgrade
3- Vehs upgrade (heavy as well if you are boosting a lot)
4- Spy
5- Farm/metal/oil 4
6- range & heavy (depending on alliance chassis)
7- everything else gates>nukes>shield (nukes early if you want R5 for the first war)

In the beginning of a round it is very tempting to rush some armor to start conquering and expanding immediately. I'm here to tell you that is a terrible idea. Build the damage upgrade and only rush a few soldiers in the beginning for resource ops. Even when you get the damage upgrade I'd advise against rushing units because it can cripple your production if you are not careful.

Vehicle Damage Concussive are your best friend in the early rounds (tanks are better but harder to achieve early without boosting hard). These bad boys can take out large amounts of infantry that casuals are building, they will make it easy to expand and more importantly they do not die so easily to armor. Use these as your spams and leave them in the OPs you take.

I cannot stress how important it is to have a strong spam/antispam game.

When building your first squads DO NOT MAKE FULL SQUADS, they are a waste of your time as most of your opponents will require less than half a squad to fight. I usually do 5 or so tanks in each squad. I also segregate my range from my armor, i know the "pro" build says to ratio armor to range, but if you want to farm XP it is easier to have armor that you can manipulate as to get maximum efficiency out of your range without any dying. More on that later.

This is the fun part. Of course if you limit yourself by making long distance attacks or not defending your outposts it can be quite the hastle. The trick is to capture outposts instead of building them. If you are thinking of building an outpost, first evaluate what you will receive from its positioning. If you gain more than one outpost, or any resource op it is optimal to place the OP. Just be careful to avoid making long tick attacks with actual armies. NEVER MAKE AN ATTACK OVER 6 TICKS LONG for an outpost or more than 4 ticks long for a colony unless the player is an innactive who has little to no units. Even then, it is better to place an OP and make the attack faster and safer for your units.

Do not get overly hung up on conquers, network is far more important. If choosing between where to attack - Resource OPs>Ops>Colonies

This right here is my biggest tip to expanding and really the reason I wrote the guide: When moving away from your colony expanding outward, replace your units with fresh ones. It should look like you have squads following each other at 3-4 tick intervals in every direction. This allows you to always protect what you have earned and continue to expand with your outer squads unworried about the outposts they just took.

Spams can be your best friend. Sending an armored infantry at someone who has a few squads you are going to kill can drastically influence your effectiveness in gaining XP. More importantly, most players who start off strong make an error early that costs them a few squads. It is vital to keep your squads alive in the early rounds if you want to expand at an accelerated rate. Send a spam before hitting that guy who you think has 30 armored inf in his base... if not you could lose your initial squads to a group of unexpected damage units and wait for the next boost tick to catch back up - not a sign of a numbere 1 player.

It is always important to know when to start a war. If an alliance is near you, best not to poke them until you can stab them everywhere at once. Most alliances will fight back if you just start attacking them right away, better to position your spams and units to attack all at once, particularly in the early rounds. If you time it right, several of their members will be offline and they will have no way of defending all of the attacks. This leads to termoil in their alliance as they are upset with the people who are not online and inevitably give up on the war and protect their own assets. This tactic works on all but the most dedicated of alliances, or individuals who employ the antispam per outpost strategy like myself.

Never wound that which you cannot kill. If you poke a giant, you are going to get squashed. Watch out for things like squad activity and resource OP ownership. Good players protect what they achieve, you do not want to be fighting an every-tick active player who doesnt care about winning early in the round. If they have nothing to lose and time to spare, you should just avoid them until you can kill them in one demoralizing sweep. Also watch out for the Obvious signs: If a player has medals, they may decide to become super active at a moments notice. If a strong alliance is leaving a player alone, its likely for a reason!

Never befriend someone who doesnt serve a purpose. Its nice to have friends, but when they are competing on the same turf as you are, it can hinder your ability to keep up with your enemies. Bootlickers ruin battledawn, they are (for the most part) innactive wastes of space that would be better served as conquers and OP providers (by force, not farm)

Stay out of my way!