What does the "convoy" option do exactly?

[LoD]

Curious, because this could be a basis of a new strategy.


LoD

[Velociryx]

The convoy option for supply crawlers amounts to resource shifting....moving one unit of one factor of production from one part of your empire to another (ie - if you have a base that's creeping up into eco damage, and you've exhausted your readily available options as far as mitigating that, one alternate solution to living with the eco damage is to "farm out" some of your prodigious mineral strength of that base to a base which is lagging a bit....thus, your overall mineral production (for the Empire as a whole) remains unchanged, but you can jimmy the numbers around.

-=Vel=-

[LoD]

1 unit? So, 1 mineral/nutrient/energy per crawler?

LoD

[Enigma]

Between bases yes. Only 1 unit. This is more efficient but also more costly than using crawlers outside of base squares because then they can only harvest 1 type of resource.

[Adam_Smith]

Does anyone do this? I used to do it in Civ 2, because it was the only way to really move food around especially after global warming. I never do it in SMACX.

[RoadRash]

I've tried it a few times. After a few turns, however, the "convoying" crawlers wake up and I have to give them instructions again. I believe this was due to the fact that I had just started constructing a SP in the target base.

I've seriously considered caravanning massive energy to my headquarters, while all my other bases use punishment spheres and build hardly any energy-related enhancements. However, my headquarters tends to be where I build most of my SP's so the darn crawlers kept waking up. Re-orienting them is tedious beyond words.

So usually I just crawler energy to my headquarters from off-the-beaten-path tidal harnesses. I love doing this.

[Enigma]

Actually Road Rash give me enough crawlers and I can make a complete paradigm economy . Crawler all energy to 6-10 bases with all improvements and punishment spheres in the rest. Virtually no maintenence for facilities and you have to build far less facilities. Only problem is that you would need 1000 or so crawlers to do it This really has no practical uses

[Adam_Smith]

The ideal empire in my head has 1000 supply crawlers and plenty of defense for all of them. In the real world (game) you don't have the time to do it, and even if you did your turns would probably last two hours and you would get bored and quit.

[RoadRash]

No doubt. I do think it's worth it to hawl energy from a dozen or so crawlers to my headquarters. By the end of the game, with enough SP's, that energy is multplied several times over.

With the right SP's it only takes a modest investment in crawlers for your headquarters to pump out 2000+ research per turn.

[LoD]

Thanks for the reply.

I was thinking aboutthe same strategy that RoadRash mentioned - to use crawlers to transport all or most of the energy to a couple of "core" bases, with all the tech/econ enhancemetns. However, since that way would be estremely inefficient, I'll stick to a standard method.

LoD