Covet Thy Neighbor's Scrap Pool
OK, I've talked about winning the game, good defense, circle-strafing, and all that good stuff. Now we get to the heart of any successful game: Bio-metal management.
With the recycler, your capacity for scrap, or Bio-metal, is 40. Once deployed, the recycler produces one unit of scrap every three seconds, so you'll reach full capacity in two minutes. Unfortunately a lot of units and structures in Battlezone II require more than 40 units of scrap.
That's where the scavengers come in. Scavengers basically have two real functions: they're either deployed at a scrap pool (a deposit of Bio-metal) or sent to scavenge the landscape for bits of Bio-metal.
Once a scavenger is deployed (referred to as an extractor as it is extracting scrap from the pool) it increases your total scrap capacity by 20. Extractors also extract Bio-metal much more quickly, at a rate of one unit per second. Once you can build upgraded scavengers, each will be able to extract two units of Bio-metal per second instead of one.
A roving scavenger automatically adds five points of scrap to your total for every bit it picks up, if the roving scavenger is under your total capacity.
There is no bonus for continual scrap production, so once you hit your capacity, that's it, no more scrap will be extracted. Basically, you should never stop building units and structures - use the queuing function so you won't keep coming back each time. There shouldn't be any excuse not to be using your scrap in some form, unless you're building it up for a bigger unit or structure.
Also notice that your fastest scrap producers produce scrap first, followed by the slower ones. Say you have an upgraded scavenger, a regular scavenger, and a recycler, so your scrap capacity is 80. The upgraded scavenger (or extractor in this case) will produce the first 20 units of scrap, then the regular scavenger the next 20 units, and the recycler will fill out the remaining 40 units. If, for instance, you're building a vehicle that costs 20 units and you wait until you are back at capacity, only the upgraded scavenger will be used, at the fastest extraction rate.
Because the recycler is painfully slow, you'll want to try to minimize the use of the recycler as much as possible, so keep the number of scavengers as high as you can (which means finding as many scrap pools as you can). Note that only one scrap producer is active at a time, so having four scavengers does not mean they will produce four units of scrap per second but rather they'll produce one per second.
This also means you'll need to keep your scavengers well protected. For the ones closer to the enemy (those in the middle between bases will be hotly contested), think about the same principles you use to defend your base: what terrain features benefit you, where can you place your defenses to do maximal damage, and so forth. Will you have enough resources to form a circular perimeter or produce a more effective barrier? Always try to keep the more endangered extractors guarded by at least one mobile unit, as well as by more stationary turrets or other defenses as you see fit.
Next:
General and multiplayer strategies (cont.) 
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