Mind control probe too powerful

[Pythagoras]

Well no game is perfect, but one thing that really makes me throw things at the wall is when I have just gone through an extensive capture of a city and it gets mind-controlled and most (if not all) of my invading army gets taken by the enemy. This happens a lot when capturing alien cities and the size is reduced to 1 (making it cheaper I presume). What makes this worse is if those bastards are sufficiently behind in tech and now that they've mind-controlled by city and gotten my advanced units, now they have the prototypes of those units. So now not only am I set back without any units, but the other guy can start pumping out superior units. Combine that with the army they just took, and there goes my newly conquered area.

[GeoModder]

It's all about tactics, I suppose. Never thought of including probes in your conquest force?

[Maniac]

Indeed, simply build some probes. If they don't do that in multiplayer games for example, you're toast.

[Dis]

I never mess around with defensive probes that much (although I hear they are a must in multiplayer). How effective are they? I thought they were like only 50% effective, or maybe that was in Civ2.

Another strategy I take is not to take a city and place all my units inside of it. You want to move some units out onto the roads and scan for other units to destroy. And of course this would force the probe teams to go around. This may not work if the AI has put mag tubes on every square surrounding the city. In that case, I just say drop a few planetbusters . These units I take are usually infantry. I never put armour on rovers, but I almost always put armour on infantry. I've been using infantry a bit more recently. I try to create a more balanced army (although I still never get around to using artillery )

[anarchie]

Take no less than 16 units. Fortify stacks of two in a ring completely surrounding your newly conquered base. The base is now immune to probe attacks.

[GeoModder]

Better take a few extra just in case you lose some during the conquest of that base.

[Enigma_Nova]

Taking along probes is a good idea.
My slant on the matter would be to energy-rape as many bases as possible.
Do that, and your enemy -can't- mind control stuff.

[Chaos Theory]

I've never seen probing for energy give very much. I guess the proportion of your opponent's energy you get is the probed base's population divided by the opponent's total population, though I've never rigorously tested this. For a base you can actually reach, this tends to be pretty low.

[Jamski]

I find inciting drone riots very handy in MP It wastes a turn's income and production, while costing me nothing, and if done often enough to the same base can cause it to starve to nothing. Ah, the joys of probes

-Jam

[GeoModder]

A question on that, Jam. If you let a base riot, and a few turns later you take that base, will these drones come on top of the drones caused by the conquest of that base?

[Enigma_Nova]

That happens, Geo. Any incite drone lasts for 10 turns.
You can only incite drones once in Transcend (beyond that, every base citizen is a drone).

It's a useful thing to do, but limited in application.

[Jamski]

A question on that, Jam. If you let a base riot, and a few turns later you take that base, will these drones come on top of the drones caused by the conquest of that base?

To be honest, I have no idea at all

-Jam

[Chaos Theory]

On transcend, probe-induced drones are completely irrelevant when you capture (instead of liberate) a base, since even one conquest drone makes all the citizens drones and the conquest drones last for 50 years.