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Flubber
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With a view of the Rockies
Aug 2000
time: 22:22
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Bumped since there seem to be a number of new players and this thread touches on a number of non-obvious strategies
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Frankychan
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In the Kingdom of Hawaii (CPA Member)
Sep 2001
time: 19:22
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quote:
Originally posted by Adalbertus
Frankychan,
You're a nearly exclusive Hive player, am I right? Then you're right with your crawler spacing. You'll play with a high police rating and have lots of police, ok.
If you have normal or negative police rating, it's different. You'll have to invest loads of resources in appeasing drones, when you have a big empire. Or you go specialist. When you go specialist, you'll have enough unused tiles in the base radius. And if your base is far away from your HQ, all normal or crawled energy is lost to inefficiency. Not so specialist research and commerce. So you'll want to crawl nutrients to get a specialist more or two. |
 You got that right. I'm a Hive player. Ahhhh, I didn't know about that. That kind of sucks that you don't get a growth bonus. I usually fill out my base tiles around the middle of the game.
I figure you just build up your empire, get enough votes, then repeal the U.N. Charter. I usually do this and just nerve staple to my hearts content for those bases that I can't send my police to.
Wow, maybe I should try and experience the other factions. I don't think I've ever played the Peacekeepers yet, so I'll try them out.
But once you go Hive, you never go back.
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Flubber
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With a view of the Rockies
Aug 2000
time: 22:22
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Ah frankychan
The beauty of this game is in the unique attributes of the different factions. I have been totally immersed at different times in about 7 of the 14 factions . What works for the Hive will be mediocre for the university and impossible for the Morganites. Finding the nuances is what keeps me so involved in this game
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:22
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quote:
Originally posted by lord of the mark
so far ive used crawlers either within city radius, or for the natural resources found outside, rather than improving areas outside of city just for crawlers. That sounds very powerful - Im saving it for when i get in trouble on higher levels. |
Actually this is a completely viable strategy (using crawlers within the base radius), and whether or not you wish to use them outside of the base radius has more to do with the the particulars of the game you are playing than the difficulty level. Obviously if you space your bases so that there is no or little overlap, you will have a lot of unused tiles within your base radius. There are 20 workable tiles in a base radius, and even Lal with the AV can only work 18 of them before hab domes (unless he has pod boomed the base to 20 pop). This will also require a lot of drone control capability, as 20 workers and no specialists requires a lot of psych / police to keep out of drone riots.
Earlier in the game you won't be able to use a fraction of the available space for workers. This led me to two conclusions:
1) I don't want my bases all that far apart. At most I'll space them 3 on the diagonal (every base's neighbors are located 3 tiles away to the NSEW), and usually 2 on the diagonal. 3 on the diag spacing gives each base 12 workable tiles, which is plenty, while 2 on the diag spacing gives each base 7 workable tiles, which turns out to be fairly optimum IMO. Close spacing also tends to give you a lot of turn advantage, as your colony pods quickly reach the new base site and start producing rather than costing the mother base a mineral for support.
2) I do want to use crawlers in the base radius for several reasons. For one thing they are a lot easier to defend that way, being close to garrison troops and within intereptor range of my base. Secondly, they don't have to travel very far, and neither do the formers that have to prepare the tiles that they work, both of which yield some turn advantage. The formers have the same advantages as the crawlers in that they are easily defended while they do their work. Finally, if my crawlers are nonetheless destroyed by the enemy, I can simply transfer population from specialists to workers to keep my production up while I build replacement crawlers.
I think these principals hold true generally for most styles of play, but they are particularly effective for a specialist heavy approach. Whenever you use crawlers you really want to terraform with the object of getting one FOP (factor of production, ie nutrients, or energy, or minerals) in a tile as high as possible, as crawlers can only haul one type of FOP from a tile at a time. In a specialist approach the most common type of FOP hauled is going to be nutrients, though minerals are also common. Thus tiles with condensors and farms (on flat or rolling tiles) are built up and crawlers assigned to haul nutrients to my base, or roads and mines (on rocky terrain) are built and crawlers haul minerals to the base.
Conversely, tiles which produce two or three FOP in nearly equal numbers are not very crawler efficient (eg boreholes, farm / solar, or forests after the early game). These are best worked, otherwise you are losing 33-66% of their potential. Or perhaps not built at all if your intention is to create all-specialist bases.
Energy parks and super science cities (SSC)
Super science cities are bases that have been optimized for high science output. This is usually done in a base which has one or more of the SPs that help energy or science production, such as the Merchant Exchange, and often an energy park or a trawler (sea crawlers which usually work tidal harnesses) fleet. Most people build only one (or none) SSC, located in the capital, which loses no energy to corruption regardless of your efficiency rating. Energy parks are simply areas which have been optimized for energy production to be crawled back to the SSC, usually some combination of terrain raised to 3000+ meters, solar collectors and echelon mirrors. They are expensive in former time, and in some cases difficult to defend, with energy trawlers typically being even more difficult to defend but with a more advantageous former turn to energy ratio.
Using these methods you can build a base's energy / labs production up so high that it will eventually produce one tech a turn by itself, the key word being eventually. Once you have reached this point, further expansion of the energy park / trawler fleet is useless for the purposes of tech, with excess labs being lost. At that point, it is time to either build another SSC, or to quit expanding your park.
Yang
The Hive is a very powerful faction when played to its strengths, and a number of approaches work well. A SSC in the capital is one of these approaches, as is a specialist heavy approach. SSCs in other bases are going to suffer from the Hive's tendency to run with low efficiency, losing tons of energy to inefficiency. The Hive has one key advantage for a specialization approach, and one fairly stiff penalty. On the advantage side, running Police State gives the Hive 4 supportable units per base without penalty, which means that it can easily support at least two formers per base. On the downside, the Hive's inability to run Democracy means that pop booms are much more difficult to achieve, requiring either a golden age or the Cloning Vats. Another means of getting your population up in developed bases is the pod boom, where small bases on the periphery of the empire can build colony pods rapidly (thanks to the industry bonuses) and regrow their populations rapidly as well (thanks to the growth bonus, and the base's small size), with the pods moving to the mature base and being used to increase that base's pop rather than building a new base.
What are specialists, why are they good?
Specialists are those guys on the right of your population queue in the city screen who don't work any tile. Instead they effectively supply you with energy. They don't produce raw energy (ie that stuff that is divided up into labs, econ and psych on your government screen), but instead directly produce labs, econs and / or psych.
Advantage #1: Specialists can't be drones, which means that you don't have to police them or nerve staple them or build drone control facilities for them.
Advantage #2: Specialists never lose any productivity to inefficiency, which can be considerable when efficiency is low, or the base in question if far from the capital, or when the base in question is captured.
Advantage #3: You can choose what sort of specialists to use, simply by clicking on a specialist and selecting the desired type from the menu that appears. This can be very useful for stressing one form of energy production over another when to do so via raw energy allocation in the government screen can be costly if you aren't running a paradigm economy.
Advantage #4: Specialists are not subject to the same production limitations that workers are in the early game. Thus a borehole worker can only produce 2 energy before Environmental Econ, while that same worker turned into a Technician or Librarian would produce 3 econ or 3 labs respectively.
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Adalbertus
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Cologne, Germany
Feb 2001
time: 06:22
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I've still not yet played all factions. I quite regularly play Uni, Gaians, Hive, sometimes Morgan, Drones or Cyborg, had a start with each Spartans, Cult, and Pirates, and the rest I even didn't touch. So far the first two years into the game.
Sikander,
Two comments:
- Spacing 3 in diagonal gives you 16 workable tiles per base (the overlap tiles count 0.5 each, not nothing).
- Specialist advantage#4 isn't that huge IMHO. You should try to get at least 4 FOP per tile even in the early game. The important bits are #1 and #2
Reading this thread I just realised that as soon as you have Nessus Mining Station (and Hab Domes), there is no reason to keep Boreholes. Turn them into nut production and get minerals from space. Only exception: SSC.
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Mongoose
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Harrisburg,PA USA
Apr 1999
time: 00:22
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I am pretty sure you don;t have to go through ODPs to get to other sats...just to get your PBs through. It is very doubtful that you would get blown out of near Chiron orbit by the AI. Another human, however...
In a pbem I just completed, I did what I just described...put up 30 or 40 ODPs and knocked out all of my UoP opponent's skyfarms and power sats. I had intended those ODPs to clear the way for a carrier-borne PB assault. No joy. The map was too large. A few turns before I was going to be ready to instabuild 20 or so Fusion PBs, I finally got infiltration on him....he was 14 techs ahead of me and looked to be able to transcend before I could get my carriers close enough, MCC notwithstanding. So, I did the only honourable thing....PB'd the Hunter (held by the UoP's ally, AI Lal) probe-raped the PK in the aftermath of the PB attack, cashed in my hoard of 7 AAs and beat the UoP to transcendence by two turns. Playing Hive, mind you. How sweet!
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:22
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quote:
Originally posted by Adalbertus
Sikander,
Two comments:
- Spacing 3 in diagonal gives you 16 workable tiles per base (the overlap tiles count 0.5 each, not nothing). |
Argh, good point. I actually used to know that, but haven't used the spacing in a while. It also leaves one empty square per base that is not workable, which is a great place for an echelon mirror and a crawler for your SSC. This assumes that you aren't playing a heavily specialized approach, but instead a raw energy approach. Raise the empty square to 3000 meters, and the 8 workable squares around it will rise to 2000 meters. Put farms and solar collectors on those squares. They'll produce 4 energy each, as well as 3 nuts (assuming they are rainy, which you can assure by using some condensors in the ring of squares around your base if necessary. Another nice touch is to drill a river on the 3000 meter high square where the echelon mirror is.
quote:
Originally posted by Adalbertus
- Specialist advantage#4 isn't that huge IMHO. You should try to get at least 4 FOP per tile even in the early game. The important bits are #1 and #2
Reading this thread I just realised that as soon as you have Nessus Mining Station (and Hab Domes), there is no reason to keep Boreholes. Turn them into nut production and get minerals from space. Only exception: SSC. |
True, I sometimes quit building the boreholes after Nessus, and always after hab domes.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:22
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quote:
Originally posted by Sikander
1) I don't want my bases all that far apart. At most I'll space them 3 on the diagonal (every base's neighbors are located 3 tiles away to the NSEW), and usually 2 on the diagonal. 3 on the diag spacing gives each base 12 workable tiles, which is plenty, while 2 on the diag spacing gives each base 7 workable tiles, which turns out to be fairly optimum IMO. Close spacing also tends to give you a lot of turn advantage, as your colony pods quickly reach the new base site and start producing rather than costing the mother base a mineral for support.
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In civ2, there was range of basing styles, from ICS to full perfectionist with no overlap. Partly cause i liked big, perfectionist cities, and partly cause i saw ICS as something of a cheat (especially in SP) i rarely built any significant base overlap.
In SMAC, with large amounts of terrain virtually worthless at the beginning (A. Fungus B. FOP limits that take several techs to get past - vs civ2 beeline for monarchy C. and just apparently less generous regular terrain - no equivalent of a roaded shield grassland) trying for no overlap at the beginning leaves too few good city sites. In my current game at emperor - oops - thinker - im hemmed in by miriam and yang - i built 3 close non-overlapped bases - to expand to the east past a load of fungus,i had to go pretty far for my 4th city. So now im trying to use some of the former/crawler info ive gotten here to build in army with 4 bases, and go after Yang, rather than try continued peaceful expansion. Ive managed to get the particle impactos and am now switching to units, but tech advance has been slow (and im university) I presume this strat would have been much easier with larger number of overlapping bases.
BTW, i am going after Yang first, as i assume miriam, with weaker tech advance, will be easier to get rid of later. Hive seems more of a threat.
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Hydro
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Winfield, IL, USA
Jun 1999
time: 05:22
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I agree with Jam. Kill Miriam first.
But probe Yang to death, stealing energy (and any tech, if he has it) to cripple his economy before he gets going. That way you punish both nasty factions where they are the weakest before they get up to speed!
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20-10-2002 22:13
, I built the granddaddy of them all using the hive after building the Living refinery, and supporting as many units free as city size. 
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