bronze made a funny on siddys skill tracker so i had to knock on him, i felt like my reply would make a good lesson for over all stratagy mentality and how everyone should look at the team game as a whole. what i commented was as follow

if its a 5v5 and you have 2 enemys to one side and 3 enemys to the other, then you turtle your ass and prevent both your neighbors from going eco whore just based upon your presence. even if you do lose, you want to make them upg their fleet tax as high as possible before you die so you fuck their eco whoreing. and further more the whole time your surviving in there your team has 1 more eco slot and when you pack it in your team has 1 less.

granted "Guard" isnt the proper term for that situation how about if your being pushed back on your front maybe 1v2? so your on defense but the ally behind you is the eco slot. your responsability is to hold off the enemy for as long as possible to prevent exposing your eco player too soon. id say its a completly differant stratagy defending you and your allied planets than it is to attack your enemys

based upon that id say you have offense, defensive, and econamic players, further more id break all 3 of those broad catagories into several sub catagories

i.e. offense can be broken down into, slow sweep destroying/ captureing/ pasifyin all enemy planets. raiding infrastructure. rushing homeworld. hunting fleets. etc

i.e. defense can be broken down into turtleing, guarding eco, stalling for eco/ infra, trapping enemy fleets, etc

i.e. eco can be broken down into all out immidiate trade port spam for late game feed, quick nuetrals grabs and first 10 sec of game feeds for brutal rushes, rush infra for team tecs, id even put RA into eco slot like the last game i played with JJ and KL and I ecoed up for a massive RA with max upgs all around on my ships ftw