01-07-2004 05:29									#1
	Military units and low police rating Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Is there any way to maintain units outside of your territory without massive unhappiness?

Now I know why I run green over free market most of the time. I like the ability to wage wars.

But free market is so tantalizing with massive money and research.

I noticed clean units don't affect that at all (I had my hopes up). I guess they only reducte support costs.

can you wage war in free market?

enlighten me. there is much I do not know about free market econimies.

	01-07-2004 06:04									#2
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There are 3 main ways:
1) Punishment Spheres. Simply build fun spheres in your large frontier bases, they will grow fast and work many tiles, seeing as they arent surrounded on all sides by other bases. With a high mineral output that can be further enhanced by Genejacks they can pump out many military units, while your interior are devoted to "builder" infrastucture, and prehaps build shell units and garrisons for newly captured bases. You can also rehome units from the interior bases to the punishing bases. As you capture enemy bases, install punishment spheres in them and rehome your armies, later you can sell the punishment spheres at your old frontier bases, allowing them to become full research bases.
2) Specialist bases. If a base has no workers, it cannot riot. So crawl minerals and nuts to a base, and turn it's entire population into libarians or whatever. Then rehome your military units to it. This is more hassle than punishing bases, because the specialist base likely wont have the massive mineral output, making clean reactors and building the units in other bases nearly essential. It's basically more tedious.
3) Go fast and hard. If you take the bases you attack in the same turn, your units will always be in your territory. This obviously requires overwhelming force and prehaps formers to build roads - because your units need to be delivered to the enemy bases quickly. This becomes really easy once you get magtubes and superformers. Chances are once every so often some units will be left out in the cold and their home base will riot, but it's no big deal.

Note that with method #3 you cannot use aircraft. In practise I use #3 when I need to take a few annoying enemy bases then resume building, but if I want to perform a full campaign under FM, then I use #1.

edit: The 4th way is to negate the negative police rating, by running PS, getting the AV and/or building brood pits. Hard to do in SMAC, and Cybernetic screws things up if you don't get the Cybernetic Backbone.

Last edited by Blake on 01-07-2004 at 06:11

	01-07-2004 06:23									#3
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Thanks

#3 I have tried. I'm the Pirates, so I haven't even messed with land bases. I have taken over a Caretaker sea base though. I have total dominance over the seas. The pirates are pretty cool. I'm impressed with their research capability.

I think I'll try some punishment spheres. In all honesty, I have never ever built one.

	01-07-2004 06:35									#4
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You can do a quick SE change for a lightning war once you have built up forces, then change back to FM again.

	01-07-2004 06:43									#5
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You can also boost your psych allocation to produce more talents than you really need, then burn them back off with pacifism. This works particularly well if the bases not suffering from pacifism are in GAs. I've done this with Lal + HGP + 20% Psych and it's pretty nice, producing rolling GAs for +4 econ and +6 growth. Bases that can no longer grow can suffer pacifism and lose their GAs.

Note: this is not intended for hordes of units outside your borders, but rather for planes and small land forces. This can work well to take care of an AI that's bugging you, but is probably not sufficient to combat a human player.

	01-07-2004 07:40									#6
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A size 1 specialist base with lots of cralwed minerals (or lots of clean units) is a pretty good way to go, especially if you plonk it closer to the front line.

	01-07-2004 07:45									#7
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I find #2 the most fun, and during the early game, the most difficult to pull off. It takes a lot of planning. Where should your specialist bases be located (IE along the path to your most likely enemy). Will we need to add population via Colony Pods to get it to size 5? How many crawlers to be sent? Etc.. But the blitzkrieg #3 is usually the best choice, perhaps in combination with the specialist Air base.

-Smack

	01-07-2004 13:09									#8
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Early on you might develop a small but not inconsiderable number of independant units via pods. You can keep them safe until you need them and then upgrade them and send them off to do some damage. And of course probes can serve as decent military units in the early game before clean. They work well when you are running FM / Wealth as they don't cause pacifism drones and aren't effected by your morale setting. You can build them on any land or sea chassis, and can armor them. They make a good force extender for your expeditionary force along with your independant units.

A lot of players use armored infantry probe teams to protect their bases while they are running a thin expansion early FM gambit. They are effectively clean, and do double duty as probe garrisons in your bases. As you can't use police anyway you lose nothing by having a probe team holding the base, and if you are running Wealth it will probably have higher morale than a regular military unit. The downsides are that they are a bit pricy at three rows, and can't be used in stacks to any advantage. But they might be well worth the effort.

	01-07-2004 16:11									#9
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Sure about the stacks?
If an armored probe is a combat unit, wouldn't it survive having another unit in the base eliminated?

	01-07-2004 16:21									#10
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Nope, any probe unit is destroyed with the stack like crawlers. Even if armoured. Kinda sucks really...

	01-07-2004 20:58									#11
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Of course, you can always use mind controlling to attack your enemies. And, a good strategy I have learned is to coordinate like 10 bases on the frontier to all build a missile on the same turn. THen, on that same turn, target the same base, then airdrop into it. This way you won't have to worry about pacifism...

	01-07-2004 21:31									#12
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For 10 missles you might as well make 1 PB and blow the crap out of the base!

	01-07-2004 21:51									#13
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you know, the funny thing happened. I was going to do some of that stuff, but I said **** it. I can be a lazy player sometimes. I'm not a very detailed micromanager.

I just switched to police state and green and blew everyone out of the water.

	01-07-2004 21:54									#14
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quote: Originally posted by Commy Of course, you can always use mind controlling to attack your enemies. And, a good strategy I have learned is to coordinate like 10 bases on the frontier to all build a missile on the same turn. THen, on that same turn, target the same base, then airdrop into it. This way you won't have to worry about pacifism...

I was using knowledge at the time. I had a -2 probe rating. Mind control was never my thing. Although earlier I was running wealth. Maybe I could have done it.

I was trying to steal a simple world map successfully without getting caught, and could not do it.

	01-07-2004 22:08									#15
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A negative probe rating doesn't have any negative effects on your own probe teams, IIRC. It just boosts enemy probe success rates and lowers their cost to mind control.

	01-07-2004 22:14									#16
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Yeah, it's interesting probe rating.

A negetive rating doesn't affect your ability to probe (beyond probe morale, which is easily overcome), only your enemies ability to probe you.

A positive rating doesn't affect your enemies ability to probe you, only your ability to probe them.

Strange eh?

	01-07-2004 22:23									#17
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unless it is so postive you are immune to enemy probe team actions. Something I could get easy with Miriam.

She's the babe!

	01-07-2004 22:47									#18
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quote: Originally posted by Commy And, a good strategy I have learned is to coordinate like 10 bases on the frontier to all build a missile on the same turn. THen, on that same turn, target the same base, then airdrop into it.

Missiles are about as cost effective as the Bulk Matter Transmitter.

For the same amount of mins you could build 2-3 jets. Sure the attack strength isnt as high, but superior numbers more than make up for that. And their range is technically longer than a missile when you consider they can fly out two rounds instead of one. After your your attack you should still have half to one third of your air force left to help defend your newly taken city.

Just bump up your psych or change SE for a few rounds to take care of any pesky drones.

edit:
On another note, I don't suppose missiles can be countered by interceptors, so that would be one bright point for missiles

	01-07-2004 23:05									#19
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A positive probe rating less than +3 will increase enemies' probe action costs, but I don't think it will decrease their success rate.

The Bulk Matter Transmitter is surprisingly cost effective, when its actual effect is to give you +50% minerals in all bases, triggering massive fungal blooms and global warming.

	01-07-2004 23:15									#20
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quote: Originally posted by Chaos Theory The Bulk Matter Transmitter is surprisingly cost effective, when its actual effect is to give you +50% minerals in all bases, triggering massive fungal blooms and global warming.

Waaaaaahhhhhh?????

So wait a minute, the BMT lists +2 mins to all bases (which is more easily done with two min sats), actually gives +50% mins to all bases?? Is this in patch notes or something?

	02-07-2004 00:02									#21
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As a career FM junkie, I can tell you the best way to control the police problems associated with FM is to get OUT of FM while you're at war. It's quite simple: If you're going to go on the offensive and capture enemy territory, switch out of FM. When you're done, return to your home territory, disband your excess military, and return to development. Doing a whole load of backflips so you can field a large army while remaining in FM is just silly. Instead, scout your enemy, define your objectives, and devise a plan where you can achieve them quickly.

	02-07-2004 00:09									#22
	Increase Your PM Length

The actual effect of the BMT is something I had subtly noticed over time, and actually pinned down in Googlie's June challenge of the Gaians vs the Exploiters and the Researchers. Try it yourself if you want to know for sure.

Even if the BMT did just give +2 mins/base, it would be handy for a rush of base founding late in the game, since mineral sats are capped, and the BMT adds after that cap.

	02-07-2004 06:19									#23
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quote: Originally posted by Dissident you know, the funny thing happened. I was going to do some of that stuff, but I said **** it. I can be a lazy player sometimes. I'm not a very detailed micromanager. I just switched to police state and green and blew everyone out of the water.

Punishment Spheres are a suprisingly lazy option. Because once you build a punishment sphere, that base never riots. Never - no more micro. So you just rushbuy the Fun sphere, queue up rec tanks, tree farm, creche, command center, bioenhancment center, and it builds them all without complaint. Fun sphere are also a fantastic way to deal with drones when you have the cloning vats and nut orbirtals, just rush a fun sphere in every captured (or newly built base) and they quickly grow up (assuming a ready supply of 1 food or better tiles) and can thus build infrastructure from raw minerals rather quickly, if a base gets a decent amount of infrastructure (like enough for pysch based control) you can sell the fun sphere - but it usually takes a lot longer for a base to provide a useful amount of labs than to provide a useful amount of minerals.