The Support Elevator

[Santiago_Claus]

HAH! You noobz thought you had it ALL figured out, but I've got one none of you have thought of:

The Support Elevator: forget the Living Refinery, the Space Elevator can cut your support cost in half!

That's right, you pay HALF SUPPORT at the base that owns The Space Elevator ...

... but only if you're building satellites.

I know, you all have it figured out by now, but I'll explain anyway: what happens is that your mineral output doubles, while your support cost remains the same. This has the effect of halving your support cost, so long as you're building satellites.

This could be exploited directly be homing a huge pack of units to a base that only builds sats, or by setting a recently-conquered base with a massive support burden to satellite production.

This might be indirectly exploited by changing the build order from satellite to something else at some point before the satellite is finished building. The double mineral output after 10 is erased by the build-switch penalty, but you'll still have only paid half the support cost during every turn you were set to satellites.

Now before you go amending the official rules to prevent this awful exploit, realize that the tactic isn't all that practical -- satellites are very cheap relative to the point in the game The Space Elevator becomes available, so the actual usefulness of the "Support Elevator" is limited.

Still it's pretty cool. And you thought everything to find out about this game had already been found out ...

[Jamski]

Actually... ...I think this has been mentioned before...

But its worth bring up again anyway

The main "hammer" is that most of your units will be clean by then anyway.

-Jam

[Chaunk]

Well this does allow you to create blink wave troops, which are easily the best late game attackers.

[Maniac]

I hadn't thought of that yet. Great idea and thanks for bringing it up.

[CEO Aaron]

I prefer to use lots of cheap, clean units. Not the most effective use of my minerals, but I feel that by and large, the strategic value of having more units, coupled with the extreme simplification of my support arrangments, more than makes up for any surcharge I pay on my units.

[Archaic]

By the time I get to that point, the game is already over in most cases. If I really wanted to get more support out of the Elevator, I'd build a ton of drop troops, and re-home them to the bases they're used to capture.

[Pythagoras]

Originally posted by Archaic
By the time I get to that point, the game is already over in most cases. If I really wanted to get more support out of the Elevator, I'd build a ton of drop troops, and re-home them to the bases they're used to capture.

This is my strategy as well. Especially if I am in Free Market, I'd rather have the new bases riot (they're gonna anyway) and I'd like to spread out the productivitiy of my centralized, productive bases over my whole empire keeping the central bases productive and happy.

[Santiago_Claus]

This is the only useful purpose I could think up for using TSE for support: if you mind control a base with more units in it than it can support, to keep from having to disband them you could set the base to build a satellite.

Incidentally, units with a short lifespan shouldn't be made Clean: it usually takes 20 turns for the Clean attribute to pay itself off.

If you're in a tight struggle and taking losses of jets or marines or defenders Clean is a waste of metal. Worse still is if it takes up space you'd use to improve the survivability of your troops, like AAA or S-Gas.

On the bright side, sometimes it only costs 10 (of particular note is the basic former + 1 ability + clean).