Energy Matrix

 is a defensive unit  with high health and Prompt.

Strategy
 is of a similar cost-to-HP ratio as Wall, but also provides of absorb more than the standard Wall, allowing for a way more efficient defense over the course of a game. It is therefore very important in an Energy Matrix game to use one of these as the backbone of your defense instead of a Wall.

When you see Energy Matrix in a set, you know that early attack can be absorbed very effectively, so you should probably purchase a third Engineer on your second turn as you will want a lot of Drones before you start making attack. However, although this is true of most random sets that contain Energy Matrix, base + Energy Matrix and no other units is a curious exception, see below.

Since 's supply is very limited, it has to be supported by other defenders (for instance Walls or Chieftains). Also if you have no other defenders with lower health it can be easy for your opponent to take advantage of its high health through offensive finesse.

In Base Set + Energy Matrix
Base + Energy Matrix has been analyzed a lot by many strong players and discussed on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Prismata/comments/6uuool/apparently_in_basematrix_you_dont_go_3rd_engineer/). Their conclusion is that player 1's winning move is the common build "Natural Animus" (DD/DD/DDA) and player 2 cannot defeat this line by going 3rd Engineer (or by mirroring low-economy). There are a number of factors that contribute to this being the case despite Energy Matrix generally being a high-econ enabling unit:


 * In base set, Tarsiers are by far the best attacker, so you really want an Animus as your first tech building. However, neither player has an efficient line for that. Both would have to float a huge amount of gold. Therefore, it is strong for player 1 to just go Natural Animus. So, for example, if there were a half-decent non-red attacker, such as Tantalum Ray, low-economy would probably be losing.
 * Energy Matrix costs, and it nullifies the early attackers so well that the 3rd Engineer player won't have anything good to do with their blue for a while. It will likely be spent on Steelsplitters, which are very inefficient attackers.
 * Another factor that only applies to player 2 trying to go 3rd Engineer against player 1's rush is that p2's build ends up with 4 gold leftover and is thus all but forced to buy a Conduit. This Conduit does very little since Forcefields won't be needed for a long time and Gauss Cannons aren't very efficient either. Some of the players participating in the analysis believe that player 1 can also win with a 3rd Engineer against player 2's turn 3 Animus build, so perhaps it takes all three factors to make 3rd Engineer lose.

The player 1 Natural Animus in general has the property of being naturally high econ, as it can go by DDA/TTD/TTDD/ then TRDD/TRBE for the Blue defense, for exact.

Change log

 * September 18th, 2015
 * Cost decreased from to.
 * No longer comes with a Pixie.