Convoying resources between cities using crawlers - do you ever do it?

[Misotu]

I'm intrigued by this - I experimented with it once, just to find out what happened. As far as I could see, if you send a supply crawler into another city and tell it to convoy resources, it will transfer just *1* energy, nutrient or mineral from the supply crawler's home base to the target city.

Baffled.

Did I do something wrong? Is there an option to transfer more than 1 unit of resource using a single crawler? If there were, I could see the point. But if not, why would you ever do it? There must be a reason for including this capability but it has me stumped. So does anyone out there ever do this? When and why is it useful?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Mis,

Yep thats all it does. 1 measly resource point woohoo/big deal right.

Maybe but maybe not.

Now why would you want to transport 1 resource point. The alternative is to simply harvest the appropriate resource and bring in goodly quantities of nut,min, or energy using that same crawler rather than simply shifting resources from one base to another. But suppose just for a second your tight spaced in base spacing (i.e your land is at a premium) furthermore you've t-formed all your squares to forest. If you start using crawlers to harvest you essentially waste 2/3 of the potential resources the land yields you. Acouple of bases with hybrid farms should have extra nuts around to share with a nutrient challenged or base w/o tree farms/hybrids.

One nice side benny is that the crawlers are internalized in a base and thereby not as easily picked off by marauders.

I find there is almost always something better to do tho' then building crawlers for transport purpose. I tend to favor advanced t-formed options that lend themselves to a greater concentration of one single resource making it ideally suited for crawler harvest and hence less wastage and less crawlers required.

[mark13]

I think it was meant to be the sole original crawler function, to transport convoys from one base to another. Then they realised that it would be really cool if you could bring them in from outside. That's what I think anyway...

But yeah, it is, pretty much, an obsolete function, I find it is much easier to build a crawler in the city that is short and bring in whatever is needed from the land. It is often more productive, also. Unless, as OO pointed out, the proximity of enemy invaders is more precarious than usual, in which case it is probably better to ship them in from another base. But this is only to be used in extreme circumstances, IMO.

[Purple]

Don't forget the multipliers.

For example, crawling one energy from a so-so base to your Best Energy Base (it has energy improvements and SPs), it yields more energy and research than it would at the source base. If that same base is your Best Research Base, the yield is even greater.

[mark13]

Purple:

Your method would yield some gain, but would it not be even more resourceful to build a crawler, change the home base, and go off and get energy from elsewhere? You would get more than 1 energy his way, and you would still keep the energy at the 'so-so' base the crawler originally came from....

[Misotu]

Thanks for the replies. Interesting. I was sure I was doing something wrong...

Ogie, I can see what you're saying. You're right if you look at it from the point of view of maxing out the potential gain of every single square. I can *almost* envisage a situation where I might use this but then, being practical, I never have to date and I'm not sure I ever would. After all, by the time you can build crawlers so quickly and cheaply that it would be worth it you're usually into orbital space. In which case, shuffling stuff between bases is never the issue - orbital improvements dwarf the difference you could make this way.

Actually, I tell a lie. I *have* used it, just once. In an MP game when I had moved a crawler to my super-science base to rush-build the ToE. I couldn't upgrade it that turn, because it had moved, so I convoyed one more energy into the science base just for the hell of it, because of the lab multipliers I had there. I got quite excited, because when I clicked on my base *the crawler did not appear*! Ah hah! I thought. A way of hiding the fact that you have a couple of protected crawlers, safely in the base, ready to build an SP and nobody knows (not even me unless I'm careful _grin_)

But that must've been a bug, because when I checked next turn I could see it and so, I guess, could everyone else ...

I think it would have been quite fun if they'd made a crawler able to convoy up to 3 or 4 of something between bases. Now *that* might actually be worth considering in terms of a super-science base, under unusual circumstances ...
[This message has been edited by Misotu (edited October 25, 2000).]

[VoodooChild]

Thanks for checking on this for me... I should get my new puter today!!

I'm going to have to look at the efficiency formulas again, but I had planned on using my excess crawlers to move energy from my out lying bases or my punishment sphere base to my capital to eliminate waste, but this new info may change my thinking somewhat.

Mayby I will have to go with an armored crawler version to use in the field and go with more of a specialist population since I plan to live under a Free Market.