I wasn't intending to make this a full guide, but here we are. Some of the numbers (especially damage) are a bit off, but hopefully this will be useful to some people. After 200 hours and an awful lot of procedural-map first place times, I want to share.

I'd say the biggest things in the guide, nine-tenths of speedrunning DMD maps comes down to these. The rest of the guide has more numbers:

• Watch the mission at 4x before you start, and find the exact time where your base would be in immediate danger. When you play, focus 100% on economy until just before that time, and know how long it will take to build Cannons there. Any gun built before it's needed is a Reactor left unconstructed--and even worse is a Cannon firing shots at the shallow edge of non-threatening Creeper. It takes two and a half Reactors to support every Cannon or Mortar.
  
• Before anything else, look for a way to assassinate enemy towers at the very start of the map.
  
• Packet travel time really is a really big deal. Don't just upgrade packet speed. Park Guppies next to things that you need to build quickly--even if they're already in your network.
  
• Know what's worth building during the time you plan to complete the map. Instead of building a Bertha or a Forge that would come out too late to be useful, build a couple extra shields, or more suicide mortars.
  
• Don't build in the red under any circumstance during the economy phase. Deactivate some of the things you have under construction if you need to. It really makes a huge difference! It's better to be at +20 then at -2. Of course, full is just as bad.
  
• Dumping ten mortars into a pool of Creeper can reduce the level by six by the time they die. If you use "M" to formation move them so they all land at the same time, you can even save them after their fifth shot without too much trouble. Or, you know, just send in another wave.

Building something with level 0 build speed is nominally 1.9 energy per second. This holds most true for expensive units built near your Command Node.

Charging a Bertha is about 3.3/s.
Charging a Nullifier is around 3.6/s (about 14 seconds), and then it takes 2.5 seconds to fire.
Charging a Guppy is 5/s.

Everything else charges at ~1.9/s, but stabilizes at a lower number once full:
Shields stabilize at 1.5/s
Cannons and mortars stabilize at ~0.9/s
Terps use 2/s while running

Each command node gives 1.5/s energy.
Reactors give 0.4/s each. With a cost of 50, you'll make that back in 125 seconds.
Collectors theoretically give 0.25 energy each, but in practice, with mild hills and overlapping coverage, you can expect it to be more like 0.23 at the very most. At a cost of 5, expect them to pay for themselves in about 22 seconds. This makes them worthwhile to build in the direct path of Creeper if they'll stay up for long enough.
Collectors are designed to be about five times as cost-efficient as reactors when widely spaced. That changes if they're cramped. They nominally collect from a hundred tiles in a 11-tile-diameter circle, so each tile is 0.0025/s. If your collector will add less than 16 collected tiles (including the nine it takes up), it is not more efficient than a reactor; skip it until it's time to put a reactor there instead.

For replacing a command node with reactors, see the 'Worth the time?" section.
For the energy efficiency upgrade and why you should wait on it, see "Totems and Forges".

Ore Mines give very close to 1 AC per second.
A Sprayer in "always on" mode, or which is firing constantly, uses 3.5 AC per second.
One unit of AC in your command node is enough to one tile with 5-deep blue goo. Yes, it's confusing that one command-node AC is actually five world-map AC.
Sprayers only fill up to 50/100. To fill them the rest of the way, you need to "Enable AC Collection Field".
Bombers are fun, but almost never practical on a fast-paced map.

Before you build a an Ore Mine early, consider what you're going to use your Sprayer for! It's tempting to build up a large surplus early on, but even one sprayer will exhaust that very quickly. Most of the time you'll use a trickle of AC to keep scraps from getting through, not for dealing lots of damage, so it's okay to build an Ore Mine just before you start using your Sprayer.

160s: Bertha
60s: Command Node
40s: Forge
16s: Mortar
12s: Sprayer, Cannon, Sniper
8s: Bomber pad, Strafer pad, Guppy pad, landed Guppy, Nullifier
6s: Shield
1.5s: Beam
1s: Terp
Terps WILL NOT have time to terraform a square before dying if you land them in Creeper.
If a landed Guppy dies, its landing pad is destroyed, but a new one is automatically queued in its place.

Everything else dies instantly. So do any items still under construction.

Energy packets travel about 11 tiles per second, if my just-now measurements are accurate. Collectors are generally spaced 9 tiles apart. So, each collector you add in a straight line will add almost a full second to its build time. Since you can't build the next collector in a line until the previous one is finished, your first collector will actually take a little over three seconds, your second one a little over four, your third one a little over five, etc. Optimizing this really doesn't matter at the start of the game, but it explains how you can have an energy income of 2.5 and still build two collectors at a time without going into the red: they're far away.

Relays have twice the range of a collector (18 vs 9), and they conduct packets twice as fast (around 22 tiles/sec). If you need to send packets a hundred tiles away, using relays instead of collectors will save you 4.5 seconds on build and on charge...but you can do better than that.

Fly a command pod closer and packets won't need to travel as far. Your command pod can send packets while in the air, so you might find it useful to fly it directly overhead. If that's inconvenient, use Guppies. Even if you land them inside the same energy network as your command pods, they will supply energy if they're the closest thing to your target. Remember that the travel-time penalty happens twice for most things: they don't start sending charge packets until the last construction packet arrives.

Also, only the last packet really matters for speed. No matter how long the first packet takes to get there, it'll probably still get there before the last one. It's never too late to add Relays, or to land a Guppy next to your building.

Reactors take 125s to make a profit on their creation. If there will be less than two minutes left in the game after it's finished, you'll lose energy on the deal.

If you have more than one command pod, and you're running out of space, replacing it with reactors will take you from 1.5 energy to 3.6, for a total profit of 2.1/s. However, you'll lose the node's 1.5/s while you're building them, and even after they're finished it will take 214 seconds to start seeing the profit from this, plus you really have to do it all at once for a huge investment. Everything taken together, it's almost five minutes from the time you lift off your command node to the time when you get any benefit. Absolute last resort.

A bertha costs 250; construction finishes in 135 seconds.
Charging a bertha costs 150. It'll be charged it in around 45 seconds.
So overall, from ordering the construction of a Bertha to it actually firing will be almost exactly three minutes, or more based on packet travel time. If you have less than three minutes left in the game, clearly don't start building one. Before you start, make sure you can't win the game some other way faster without it, because dropping 400 energy with no immediate payoff can really cripple you. Of course, there are many beachheads that only a Bertha can take.
A bertha takes 30 seconds (!!) to turn all the way around. While it's charging, make sure you designate its target ahead of time. Use DISARM to keep it from firing early (on a map where you need to land an assault force, you want to fire when your units are just a few tiles away).

Terraforming can be more expensive than it looks. It's often only worthwhile when necessary to fit a unit to finish the map. Here we have a cramped space where we'd really like to add a second Command Node (in the map DeuS by MadMag). Command Nodes are very tempting because they're 1.5/s of "free" energy. But to fit one here, we would need to terraform twenty tiles by four elevation units each. A Terp terraforms one unit per second at a cost of 2/s energy, which means this will take a whopping 80 seconds and 160 energy to finish...for that price we're much better off just building the reactors. This is an extreme case, of course. Usually you'll find yourself terraforming 4 or fewer tiles to fit a Collector or a Reactor, but give it some extra thought on a short map or when you're not overflowing with energy. Every single tile you change will make a Reactor take 5 seconds more to pay for itself, and that can really stack up if you're trying to cram things in against a steep cliff! (Collectors, of course, are even worse, especially because of how little they collect in uneven territory.)

On a longer map, yes, build your Forge ASAP. But it's not always the best option by far!

A forge takes 54 seconds to build.

Each totem costs 1/s to operate. Your forge also costs about 0.25/s for maintenance, no matter how many totems you have--even zero.

Disabling your forge will temporarily disable all the upgrades you've unlocked.

Totems can stock up to 20 energy, but often hover at more like 10 depending on distance. They seem to charge at a rate based on how empty they are. If your totem falls off the network, you've got a few seconds of energy stored to hook it back up before you lose any output. So, the first few seconds that a totem is hooked up, it'll charge at double the normal rate.

Totems generate around 0.4 Aether/s, though it varies with how long they've been running. The energy cost does not seem to change, only the output rate.

If you want to purchase that first level of energy efficiency with a single totem, it will take:
54 seconds to build the forge + distance for building + distance for charging
50 seconds to gather the aether, plus aether travels from the totem to the forge at roughly relay network speeds
100 energy for the forge
10 energy for the standing charge on the totem
50 energy to gather the aether
12 energy for forge upkeep
All in all... about two minutes and 172 energy before you see ANY results out of your forge. You could build five reactors with that spare energy in the time it would take a forge to get online. Each level of energy efficiency gives you +20% to energy production... Are you bringing in 10 energy per second yet? If the answer is no, consider holding off on that forge.
Getting energy efficiency level 2 takes just as much time as getting level 1 + building the forge, and each upgrade adds a smaller proportion to your current displayed production. Forges are valuable, but unless space is very limited, energy efficiency is not the ultimate power that it may feel like at first.

Other upgrades are not as amazing as they seem, either: Range lets you bring more suppressive fire to a single target, but doesn't really increase damage. You don't want to snipe at other islands until you're ready to take it all at once; otherwise it's a waste of energy. Rate of fire is rarely any different from just building more units, since it doesn't reduce the cost per shot. Ore efficiency is terrible, since sprayers are situational and bombers are very bad when trying for a high speed. Energy storage is only useful when your outgoing energy is above 25 per Command Node, and even then I'm not sure.

Build speed is the true star of the Forge. It's flat-out guaranteed to shave seconds off of your score thanks to Nullifiers. It will bring your Berthas out earlier in the match (or your Odin, if you're that lucky). It even helps your economy, though only slightly: building Reactors faster might not be cheaper, but if you do them in serial instead of in parallel, you'll have extra energy when you're done. And faster build times on your weapons mean that you can wait longer before building beams, which might mean another Reactor before your Beams have to come out.

Energy efficiency is additive, not multiplicative. That means, at level 10, your bonus is (10*20%) and you are getting triple energy, but going from level 9 to 10 looks very small.

Build speed, on the other hand, doesn't follow any formula I can find, but is bigger than additive. At level 0 your energy/s is 1.8, but at level 10 it's 15. At high levels, travel time becomes the limiting factor, but with Guppies that's a solved problem. Ever wanted to build a nullifier in three seconds? (Build speed doesn't affect charge rates, just in case you were wondering.)

Move speed can be excellent, especially if you need to cross islands, but consider that sometimes it's faster to build new units than to move the old ones. It's hard to argue with faster Guppies though.

Don't forget this thing! It's on the Forge and it uses your Aether. When you're coming up on your very last Emitter, it's worth considering: do I really need to spend 200 to upgrade my firing speed right now? Will the two seconds I save from another level of Build Speed really help that much? Or should I just clear away all the Creeper in my path and bypass the fight entirely?

The Singularity doesn't destroy any Creeper. Instead, it always affects a circle 50 tiles across, centered on the point you select. It whirls the Creeper around and moves it into the center, and lasts for one second per ten Aether you spend on it. The weapon can't be activated unless you have at least 100 Aether, but you do have control over what percentage of your Aether you spend by using the % control.

Practically, there's just two good uses for the singularity. Either a 10 second burst, which is just enough time to get the vast majority of that area's Creeper into the middle of the Singularity where just one or two Bertha shots can wipe it out entirely (time them carefully); or a ~40 second burst, which will give you time to set up and charge a Nullifier without confronting the Creeper at all. The 10 second burst makes more sense unless your map has Berthas banned, though, and you'll still want a few Cannons and maybe a Shield just in case it takes a while for the Singularity to pick up all the scraps.

The Singularity takes 3 seconds to charge before it activates, which do not count against your Aether spent.

They take exactly three seconds to deploy and three seconds to return to base, and you can re-deploy them after a 30 second wait, whether you left vountarily or were forced out by damage.
They take two seconds to take off or land for travel.

They travel at around 0.5 tiles per second, which is just hideous. If you need to travel more than 64 tiles, you should take off and re-deploy. Plan your movements with plenty of time in advance, and feel free to get airborne before your destination is clear.

Command Nodes last for 60 seconds in the Creeper before evacuating. That's a massive chunk of time, and in fact is longer than it takes to neutralize something under most circumstances. So, don't be afraid to land them right in the middle of something. If you're desperate, you can even use one or more command nodes to bridge a pool of creeper to connect two networks.

Command Nodes provide 1.5 energy per second, but only when landed. If they are airborne, they can send out energy packets, but do not contribute their own energy to your total. Flying Command Nodes that have an energy stockpile can also operate outside of a network: they can collect Artifacts of Odin that they pass over, or even construct Nullifiers in the middle of nowhere, but maps where this would help are extremely rare.

Command Nodes do get a bonus from Power Zones: It dramatically increases their network connection range. I have never seen a use for that, though.

It's good practice to start out a map by running it at 4x speed and seeing when the Creeper will hit certain points. If you see that an enemy tower is still within nullifier range of a clear space after one minute, you can probably land a command node there and sneak a kill at the start of a map. A surprising number of the largest DMD maps are vulnerable to this, and it may be the only practical way to kill a tricky Runner Nest, or to render yourself spore-free for the entire map. Always be on the lookout for these stealth kills; they're an easy way to chop your completion time in half.

You can have an emitter ready to fire in:
1:10 with one command node and no collectors
0:55 with one command node if you build three collectors first
44 seconds with two command nodes, no other building required
Since it takes 2.5 seconds to fire, and an emitter can survive for eight seconds in Creeper (once finished building), you can kill some towers early on even if your ideal emitter spot is "underwater" a few seconds too soon.

You can build and fully charge a Beam adjacent to your command node in 24 seconds, but remember that every collector-distance away adds 1.6 seconds to the build+charge time. Spores travel 5 tiles per second.

Constructing a cannon (not fully charging it) is 14 seconds, plus the distance delay, if you want to put one up just before the Creeper gets to you. A mortar is 22 seconds.

Constructing and fully charging a shield (while disarmed) takes 56 seconds plus two distance delays. It's important to start building your shield long before you're ready to start a landing assault, since it takes the longest to put togther.

Non-command-node units buildings take 1 second to take off or land. Without any unit speed upgrades, they travel at 2.25 tiles per second. If energy is not an issue, then if you want to move a cannon farther away than 27 tiles, building a new one at its destination might get it there faster!



Budgeting Your Beachhead:
Don't overbuild reactors. You don't want to sit around with full energy while waiting for your units to build, especially if you decide you need a Bertha. Pick your beachhead units, add up their ongoing cost, leave some energy to keep building reactors, and time things accordingly.

An example beachhead might need 1 Shield, 1 Cannon, 1 Sprayer, 2 Mortars, and a single Bertha shot to clear the landing site. Given the ongoing costs listed under Energy Efficiency, that gives us:
1 Shield - 1.5/s
1 Cannon - 1/s
2 Mortars - 2/s
Total, 4.5/s.
On top of your ongoing construction and Forge costs, it'll take a little more than 11 reactors to keep going.
Charging a Bertha is 3.3/s, which is about another 9 reactors...or keeping three extra units firing.
Charging a Nullifier is 3.6/s, yet another 9 reactors.
Keeping two things building at a time is also 3.6/s, and you don't want to go less than that.

Overall, this means you can launch an attack as soon as you hit 15 energy per second...but we can do better than that!
Is a single Bertha shot enough to give you a stable beachhead? Turn off "Resupply" as soon as it's ready to fire. Keep building Reactors, and turn it back on when you can afford it. Your Nullifier won't be running all the time, and you can just disable your ongoing construction projects once you're ready to deploy it.
Overall this brings us back down to 8.1 energy per second, a much more reasonable number that will keep growing as you fight. You'll still need to keep your Forge running of course...but with energy output less than 10, you can start working on that after you've got your beachhead put together.

With such a relatively low energy cost to start your attack, the Bertha's build+charge time of 3 minutes starts to become the limiting factor. Start building it early, and prepare to eat that hit to your energy production. It'll take a few tries to get the timing right, but the smaller the map, the more important it is to start building your weapons early. Waiting on construction while your energy is full is the worst thing you can do in this game, and cramped quarters mean you'll run out of space to build -- and things to spend your energy on -- really quick.

One shield can generally establish a beachhead in 1-deep Creeper landing by itself, but any more than that requires more support. Two shields can punch through 1.5-deep Creeper, but the most dangerous part of landing a shielded assault is the fractional Creeper that won't get out from under the shields. Cannons or Sprayers are the most useful things here.

The "M" key is your friend. You want all your units to land at the exact same time, and holding "M" causes them to land in the same formation they took off from, which means landing at the same time as well.

If the Creeper is more than 3 deep, the position can't be held from inside it. You either need Bertha shots or suicide mortars to clear a path, and then your shields can hold it back. Bertha shots are very fast, and you should time them to hit just as your units are landing. Mortars are cheap in the endgame, and a mortar has exactly enough time and ammo to fire five shots before it dies. Ten non-range-upgraded mortars will drop the creep level in a 30-tile-diameter circle by about 6: aside from Bertha spam, this is the best way to clear a path to assault an island.

Strafers spend most of their time away from where you need them. There's very little that a Strafer can do which a Cannon can't do much better, especially guarding beachheads; half of the time they're flying away from where you want them, and that's not counting heading back to base to reload. Deploying strafers to fire-and-forget soften up an area is much more effective with just sending in suicide mortars.

Bombers are too slow. To use them effectively, you need to plan ahead with excellent timing. They're very good for soaking up excess AC that you can't fit into sprayers, but that's about all they're good for when speed is critical: they take 40 seconds from the time they arrive to drop a load of bombs on a point target, and they're even slower when ordered to target a line. A full load does slightly less damage than a suicide mortar, their landing pad can't be used to build something else while they're gone, and they have to fly back home afterwards.

Actual damage done by different weapons: These are EXTREMELY rough numbers for energy efficiency. It's tough to measure and I wouldn't surprised if mortars and cannons have identical ideal DPS, but the amount of wasted fire is very different.

Mortars seem to destroy around 80 units of creep, taking a conical chunk out of a 7x7 area or so, every 3 seconds (and spend 3 energy to do it) for a measured total of 27dps. Much of this can be wasted if the Creeper is very shallow, but with heavy Creeper presence, it's all used.

Cannons destroy around 8 units of creep in mostly a 3x3 area, four times a second (spending 0.25 energy to do it), for a total of 32dps. Much it is wasted if they shoot the edge of a wall of Creeper or if it's very shallow, and this is usually the case. A cannon's damage can be effectively doubled if it's sitting directly in a pool of Creeper.

Sprayers fire 3.5 units of AC per second, each of which deals 5 damage, for a total of 17.5 damage per second. None of it is wasted.

Bombers hold 60 units of AC, dealing 300 damage, but their long travel time and slow firing puts their overall DPS at somewhere less than 5.

Berthas vaporize up to ~150-deep of Creeper within a 15-tile-diameter circle. Against a truly flooded area (25 deep) in a ten minute map, this could be called around 5000 damage, and far more in a longer map; but a great deal is wasted once it's low enough to establish a beachhead. With a 45 second charge time, this is well over a hundred DPS. If you expect to spend more time clearing out Creeper than building your economy, a dozen of these can be excellent -- though usually two is enough for a beachhead; four if you want a backup to stagger your shots to keep it clear. Before you spend an extra thirty seconds building reactors for a truly world-ending Bertha fleet, make sure to think about how many you'll really need.

Guppies are vital for a beachhead that's outside your network. They hold 120 energy, which means a cannon for two minutes, a shield for 80 seconds, or ten assorted units for about ten seconds. In general, you can't afford to have downtime: your units only enough for 15-20 seconds of operation each.

The Guppy takes a little under a second to take off or land, and travels at 6 tiles per second. Expect to micromanage them. As soon as one runs out, hit 'return to base' and send another one to land in the same spot; this is twice the throughput of letting them manage themselves. If landing space is limited and that's still not rapid enough, you can order another Guppy to overfly your destination, so when you give the 'land' order it'll already be nearby. Finally, try to organize your Guppies in a line leading away from your forces. Units will take energy from the closest Guppy, and the worst-case scenario is that all your Guppies run out of energy at the same time. The ideal is that only one Guppy is closest to every unit at any given time.

Don't overbuild reactors. You don't want to sit around with full energy while waiting for your units to build, especially if you decide you need a Bertha. Pick your beachhead units, add up their ongoing cost, leave some energy to keep building reactors, and time things accordingly.

An example beachhead might need 1 Shield, 1 Cannon, 1 Sprayer, 2 Mortars, and a single Bertha shot to clear the landing site. Given the ongoing costs listed under Energy Efficiency, that gives us:
1 Shield - 1.5/s
1 Cannon - 1/s
2 Mortars - 2/s
Total, 4.5/s.
On top of your ongoing construction and Forge costs, it'll take a little more than 11 reactors to keep them running (and you really, really don't want your shield going into red energy consumption).
Charging a Bertha is 3.3/s, which is about another 9 reactors...or keeping three extra units firing.
Charging a Nullifier is 3.6/s, yet another 9 reactors.
Keeping two things building at a time is also 3.6/s, and you don't want to go less than that.

Overall, this means you can launch an attack as soon as you hit 15 energy per second...but we can do better than that!
Is a single Bertha shot enough to give you a stable beachhead? Turn off "Resupply" as soon as it's ready to fire. Keep building Reactors, and turn it back on when you can afford it. Your Nullifier won't be running all the time, and you can just disable your ongoing construction projects once you're ready to deploy it.
Overall this brings us back down to 8.1 energy per second, a much more reasonable number that will keep growing as you fight. You'll still need to keep your Forge running of course...but with energy output less than 10, you can start working on that after you've got your beachhead put together.

With such a relatively low energy cost to start your attack, the Bertha's build+charge time of 3 minutes starts to become the limiting factor. Start building it early, and prepare to eat that hit to your energy production. It'll take a few tries to get the timing right, but the smaller the map, the more important it is to start building your weapons early. Waiting on construction while your energy is full is the worst thing you can do in this game, and cramped quarters mean you'll run out of space to build -- and things to spend your energy on -- really quick.