The 8-Bit Series follows many of the traditions of the Westwood style of RTS. Because of this, it has a base building system that is workerless and works off proximity.

In other titles of this subgenre, the build area tended to be restrictive. The first game of the Tiberium series, Command and Conquer, required new buildings be placed adjacently! This was somewhat compensated for by the ability to make units that could deploy at other locations like the Mobile Construction Vehicle, and strong harvester units to allow long range harvesting.

The 8-Bit series brings a new twist to this mechanic. Gone are the units that deploy into structures, but the build area around existing buildings is very large. To get proxy buildings and econ expansions. it is necessary to bring your base to that location. But thanks to the generous build area, you can!

It is rather counter-intuitive to think of building important structures in the middle of the map as standard play and not an all in cheese, but it isn't so strange when you think about it.

The alternative to crawling your base onto the map is long range harvesting and a safer central base. The positives of having all your buildings in an easily defended spot is cancelled out by the negatives of long range harvesting. While harvesters have good health pools, they are no match for harrassing units. With so many harvesters all over the map you have a lot to cover.

Base crawling reverses the risk, your buildings are available for harrassment but your harvesters are now inside a sprawling base and not out in the open. However, because the buildings can produce the units you need to protect the base you now have reinforcements appearing right where they are needed. The buildings are less helpless than the harvesters are.

For Renegades, Guardians, Deathsworn and Lightbringers, this style of sprawling base is pretty much mandatory, for the reasons stated above. However, Marines and Cranioids feature a harvester with no need to travel to a drop off point. For those 2 factions alone, base crawling is optional and only used for getting production buildings closer to the enemy. A Marine or Cranioids player may choose to have a large central base where all their important buildings hide behind a ramp.

So now we know why base crawling is important, on to the easy part! The actual process is simple, when you can place a new building you should get vision on a spot as far as possible from the previous building, the closest possible spot to the goal.

A building, any building, will allow construction within a circle around it where the player currently has vision (through a unit or building). The radius is the same for all buildings. The circle includes any passable tiles regardless of elevation. There does not need to be line of sight or a short path between buildings, you can build over chasms, through walls, up and down ramps.

Most buildings have a sight radius less than the build radius, notable exceptions are the radar, headquarters, castle/lodge, towers/turrets. For the rest of the buildings, efficient placement requires a unit to be nearby to give vision.

Because any building will do, you will often use tech buildings as part of your chain of crawling buildings. If you were to put them deeper within the base and not use it to gain build area, you would slow down the base crawl. often, this isn't acceptable, so some very high value buildings can end up in the middle of the map. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but typically the risk of falling behind on map control is greater than the risk of losing that building.

Turrets/towers are often a bad choice for crawling. For Renegades and Guardians this is because the power used by a turret is equal to 2 production buildings, which help train units faster, which do a better job defending than static defense does. For Deathsworn and Lightbringers, power is no concern. However, it is still often better to use a farm or a production building.

Therefore, the bulk of the buildings placed to crawl your base are going to be related to producing units. This is fortunate because you need units to defend the sprawl that you end up with.

Please enable annotations when watching this video, as I explain what I am doing in them.

This video was taken in skirmish so it could focus specifically on the crawling of the base. In the video I am using Renegades and explain why I am placing each building. The video does not shed light on how to play either of the 8-Bit Hordes factions, which is beyond the scope of this guide.

Base crawling is a small thing to master, but once learned you will stand a fighting chance in multiplayer.