Is it me or is production really slow?

[Songs 1]

OK, going into campaign I found the first few islands pretty easy! Then I unlocked laser and a few other bits and bobs, going onto the fulcrum islands and the islands previous to it I noticed that enemy laser's do one hell of a lot of damage to unarmoured walruses and at this point of the game it takes 3-4 snipes to take out a manta... this lead me to constantly churning out manta's and walruses from the production facilities to keep the game active and interesting, however the production for items when you have no material stored up is insanely slow..

To make 6 walrus and 6 manta and the gear to go with them it would take me all night probably, I know most of you will probably just say 'well don't lose them then... play smarter...' I'm guessing your correct but how do you do that with really bad AI on the walrus and stupidly powerful turrets and lasers.. I actually resorted to taking most visible turrets out with my plasma cannon on the carrier before I sent anything what so ever onto the island.

If I'm doing it wrong please advise me !

[Suranis 1]

You just have to balance things. Make sure you have more mineral islands than production ones, and check your islands and have those with good minerals churning them out. In the Beta we found 500 minerals to 1 production was a good ratio to aim around. Also if you are doing nothing else build fuel, as its always needed and you build up minerals that way as fuel uses little minerals for the time invested. Learning to manage your production to replace losses is part of the game. :)

On Outpost I actually started building Walrus hulls and machine guns during the mission for later because I knew I would need them. Walruses and mantas actually build pretty fast and Machine guns are crap but cheap. Also check your equipment. After finishing the Outpost island I found a Walrus laser, 2 quad guns and some walrus armour sitting in the carrier storage, alone with a few other nice bits and pieces. Use the laser as your anti sniper, A quadgun walrus should help deal with mantas and rely on machine guns for your other weapons for now. The other walruses are expendable but keep your laser Walrus alive at all costs.

And check out my Workarounds for the Walrus AI thread. Using those tips really helped me as Walruses are much safer when they are all together.