04-04-2003 02:26									#1
	Cool! Cultural/Military combined arms strategy. Tired of ads?

This strategy only works if two conditions are met.

1) you are at war, or can and are willing to go to war with the target civ.

2) You have enough influence/culture to at least stand your ground in that department. Someone who is being slaughtered in the cultural battle grounds probably can't make this work.

Basically, I learned two facinating things in my last game during a very intense war.

1) A culture-increasing starbase is effective not only when there are no friendly planets in that sector, but even if there are no friendly planets in adjacent sectors as well. They may be less effective, but I've had three starbases each with a +503% bonus take down the Drengen in a matter of turns.2) The manual tells you that by stationing military at a system, it's less likely to revolt.

So, the trick is to build up one or more culturally maxed out starbases in a single turn (so that the victim has no time to adjust to the change in culture) and then you blow away the garrison ships defending the systems as soon as they get the skull flags indicating that they're having cultural problems. Having no garrison makes the matter that much more severe.

I discovered the first item quite by accident, and the second was a simple matter of looking at the implications sideways.

This isn't that much better if you have plenty of transports ready, but it's still fun watching entire sectors fall in 3-4 turns. Until I learned the trick about killing the garrison, this would usually take quite a bit longer.