Bracing

Bracing is the 1st material, the one you should use the most in all your games. It is the cheapest of all, builds fairly fast and it has a lot of usages.

Main use
Bracing is generally used as the Material to expand your fort, as it is very cheap and fast to build.

Though it is cheap, good players avoid expanding too much at the start of the game, as building unnecessary boxes can drain some important Resources.

Other uses
Amongst top players, there is a famous technique called woodspam, which simply consists of spamming a lot of wood in front of your fort.

Since wood has a good HP/Cost ratio (compared to Armour), it is more used than Armour by top players, who know wood defense, when done in the proper way, can do the trick.

Also, wood can be built in very spaced boxes, providing the only way of actually facetanking splash damage. Indeed, wood is weak to splash, but only if spammed too densly. You need to find the right balance, and adapt with your opponent's offensive plans.

Extremely dense woodspam on the other hand, built by extruding several layers of wood into the same box, provides decent protection against plasma lasers, and, to some extend, cannons (mind the plash damage!).