Crawerless strategy. Long.

[yavoon]

aye, I always get into trouble when replying to a builder's thread. I don't reach 4 goodfac, infact I rarely reach 2. most of my games are done w/ an extreme prejudice nature to them. since I'm more in luv w/ war strategy than # crunching terraforming, though surely I have to know about it to play.

just as a for instance kinda thing, since I get the feeling I don't play normal smac games. I'm hive right now in like 2197? or something std map 30-50 water, I got bio engineering like 6 years ago. Lal, Zak and Deidre have all surendered to me. Santiago should be gone in like 4-10 years. I don't have a lot(read any) of the facilities that make the game's eco damage non consequential. I think my bigger bases produce 20-30 minerals right now, and I most certainly get pops. my games are much dirtier and less precise than builder games. so I'm kinda trying to edge towards a more practical view of things, if thats not gna hang here, then my bad.

[Spacecow]

fun with number crunchers... how far will Blake go?

I didn't bother to check the numbers, but I was wondering if you included a couple of calculable technical details like facility maintenance, terraforming time vs. turn advantage vs. former support costs, and drone control?

I.E. I got the impression that bigger bases were better because they utilized more satellite resources, but they also have more drones, which require more facilities, which require minerals to build and energy to maintain. Unless I'm thinking stupid, you *could* incorporate all this into your calculations, if you wanted to, and tell us the effects...
Also, you mention the tradeoff between forests vs. the terraforming time to build all these neato condensers/boreholes/etc, but you forget former support costs. If you put 16 formers on a square, you could get a borehole/turn, right? But that would take 16 minerals and the time to get the formers where they're supposed to go. What's the optimal number of formers to assign to the task?

Now, in theory, if we're talking drones, the number of bases plays into this, as well. Don't forget about energy lost to inefficiency, if we're going to get a number of bases into this mix. And while we're at it, don't forget to consider just how your SE choices affect everything (after how many bases or after how much time is the efficiency and growth of democracy better than the support and police of police state?). Of course, what would SE choices be without the technology to get those choices? Would that put an extra emphasis on labs? Or would the energy credits be more useful as an investment for rush building those facilities to enhance the labs later on with net nodes? Or would energy banks be better? Which techs in the tech tree should you research first? And if we REEEEEALY wanna go wild, consider different terraforming styles for different factions and for DIFFERENT VICTORY CONDITIONS! Hee hee hee hoo!

Come on, Blake... you know you want to calculate it all out...
And once he does, a couple of mindworms will come along and put him back to the drawing board. :P

Okay, getting back to reality now... what about drones/facility maintenance/former support? We can leave SE, # of bases, and just which techs to research first for later discussion...

[Sikander]

Actually smaller more numerous bases are more efficient with satellites for several reasons. Firstly, every base you have gets one FOP per sat up to it's population (assuming it has an aerospace complex, otherwise halve this). Secondly after the first 16 specialists all of the specialists become psych types, which only net you 2 econ apiece (assuming that the psych is superfuous after a point). Thus it is more efficient in the long run to build a lot of smaller bases when it's satellite time, especially before hab domes make building really big bases a pia.

Another advantage of building lots of bases is that you have fewer tiles to terraform per base (and with all of the extra base squares fewer tile to form period), or put another way you have more support per tile with which to form your terrain. You also have more build queues with which to crank out formers and crawlers (as well as military if necessary) which increases your productivity of these items a lot. Clean reactors tend to solve half of your problem, the only investment being your initial cost.

On the minus side you have to spend more minerals on building up your (many) bases, and you may well have a lot of econ going to support. SPs which give you free facilities are great for this type of Borg strategy, as they save you coming and going. Drones are not much of a problem if you are using crawlers to harvest a lot of your squares, and are not much of a problem in any event if you are pop booming, as the psych and semi-psych drones are cheap and plentiful enough to take care of business, especially if you add a psych facility or two. The dual use psych facilities like treefarms and the hospitals should do nicely.

Reliance on specialists also means that you don't have to worry about inefficiency much either, as a vast majority of your energy production will be immune. And by the time you get mineral sats you can even go back and replace your boreholes with Condensor / Farm / Soil Enrichers for plenty of ecodamage free mineral / energy / food production via your population.

[Blake]

I regret that after trying to Calculate the relative merit of Democracy and Police State, in terms of support costs, efficency and drones, I hit a wall... essentially, when playing without crawlers the SE is so well balanced it is quite impossible to say which is better... except in limited circumstances.

Anyway, a few things which simplify stuff:
Clean reactor: Put clean on a former and it becomes a one-of payment. No ongoing support. Therfore it is effectivly free, making former time free. Thus once you have clean you can do as much terraforming as you want - the more the better.

If I care to consider support before clean I can.
A former costs 1 mineral per turn.
A borehole requires 24 turns to drill, therfore it costs 24 minerals. It produces 6 minerals per turn and 6 energy. Assuming Netnode and Energy bank the energy should be worth about 4 minerals. Therfore a borehole requires a little under 3 turns to pay for itself - transit times for formers are neligable, especially if you plan stuff in advance, like I do.

The forest requires 4 turns to plant, add 1 turn for movement. It produces 1-2-1. Because most tiles produce an average of 1-0.5-0 a forests relative production is 0-1.5-1. Using the same energy:mineral value as boreholes it would require about 2.5 turns to pay for itself - this is assuming you have the man power to harvest it ofcourse, it doesn't start paying for the former time until you start working it.

*GASP*

The thing with terraforming is all terraforming is really really cheap, in terms of time to pay off the former construction/support cost. So working out which terraforming is 'best' isn't really a meaningless activity.

*GASP*

Oh what the heck, I'll explain some of the quantities behind democracy... Demo provides +2 EFFIC in exchange for -2 SUPPORT, there is a +2 GROWTH too...
Anyway, lets say you are on a standard map and have 6 bases using a standard faction, your bases are quite close together and your quite cash straped, you'll be keeping your bases at size 2 for a while, for the moment unable to afford rec commons on a large scale.
The +2 EFFIC would allow you to place about 3 more bases before drones... the tradeoff is 1 more mineral used for support at each base.
You have 6 bases, so there goes 6 FOP/turn right off the bat.
You'll probably salvage 3 energy from INEFFIC, this is worth *about* 2/turn FOP.
So, you plonk down 3 more bases, each of these works a forest. Each new base produces usable resources/turn of 0-3-2, oh heck, theres a river too, so lets make it 0-3-3. But one of those 3 is lost to INEFFIC so it's back to 0-3-2. This translates to standard FOP/turn of 4.5 per base. And because you have 3 new bases that provides about 13 FOP/turn.
You need to build a scout at each new base, but they have one free support slot anyway. Unless your mogran, but in that case you get +2 energy per base tile, and as luck would have it 2 energy = 1 mineral (in this stage of the game) so morgan is in the same boat as the others.
Getting back to it, you have 13+3 = 16 more FOP/turn, at the cost of 6. Leaving 10 FOP/turn profit. Each base cost 36 minerals (Planned +1 industry) to set up, total = 108 minerals. Requiring near enough to 10 turns to return the investment.
(the initial switching cost of ~25 FOP (transcend difficulty) requires 2.5 turns to repay...)

So it requires about 12 turns to get a return on investment of switching to Demo. After which you earn 10FOP/turn - incidentely in this case 1 FOP = 1 Mineral.
That is pretty much the worst case, in reality you'll probably utilise a mineral/energy bonus, for another +1-2 FOP/turn, additionally in about 15 turns after being founded these bases grow to size 2, bringing an additional +7 FOP/turn. Then you got the thing known as exponential growth / turn advantage, which makes the investment even better. But that's okay because I didn't consider the approximately 50 FOP lost by the 3 bases dropping to size 1 and supporting the CP's for a few turns.

CONCLUSION: It is worthwhile switching to democracy!

Spacecow, I could have just told you to f*ck off and die, but where would the fun in that be....

[yavoon]

I know I k now, I'm the pooper of this whole thread. but I'm actually intereesting in when to go demo, since usually I despise going it early for probably personality reasons.

so just a few questions. why can't the player w/ less efficiency just build the three more bases too? is there like a brickwall at the efficiency limit? how big are his bases? how much will the 3 extra drones hurt? wut if they do nothing? oh and is that 3 more bases on a huge size map, or would that apply to any size map? I think ur saying that democracy kinda makes up for itself in getting u back some energy. but isn't energy split between labs and econ. so even if its 2 energy/mineral u'd need to mine 4 energy to see that, though u would get the intrinsic bonus of the labs, u'd still lose productivity.

also there are a few things better about having bigger bases. say u have one base twice the size of two smaller ones(in productivity). and u wnt to increase labs, so u have them build network nodes. the big bases node will finish first, and start raking in advantage, the two smaller bases will take longer and cost twice the support. also the second of the two smaller bases confers atleast 1 extra drone(unles its really early) because of b. drones. prolly all moot cuz I actually like lotsa bases.

another thing I despise about demo is the % reduction it does in productivity of my smaller bases. if u take one mineral away from a base thats only size 2 and working a 2/1/2 and 1/2/1 that frigging hurts. and everything at that base will be lagged pretty significantly. mayhaps I should rehome formers to only larger bases, since they can more easily take the hit? but then my high powered production centers are bogged down w/ the empire's formers.

[Blake]

If you build 3 new bases w/o more effic you get about 3 more drones over your empire, this means you lose the use of 3 forest tiles, or a loss of about 7FOP/turn. Or you could shell out for rec commons which would cost about 1FOP/turn to mantain... if you can afford the rec commons (ie pod popping is on and you got a few big $$$ pods) then your prolly better off just buying rec commons. (I hate demo, myself)

This is what I usually do, being a dedicated Free Marketeer (you need the rec commons anyway).


Getting away from #crunching Punishment Spheres are gods gift to free marketeers under crawlerless. Even if you are using crawlers they are much more robust than specialist bases, in terms of being difficult to shut down. They are immune to crawler killage and have increased resitance against mind control.

I usually prefer to build PS's in captured bases, mainly because my own bases usually have lab improvments. However I still build energy improvments in a PS base.
note: The 'labs' value on the base screen is not correct when you have a PS, however the correctely halved amount is added to accumulated labs...

[yavoon]

I dont know if its fair to say 3 more drones means 3 unworked forests. cuz thats simply not my experience in the game. and I regularly blow by the efficiency limiter.

[Zakharov VII]

Originally posted by yavoon
I dont know if its fair to say 3 more drones means 3 unworked forests. cuz thats simply not my experience in the game. and I regularly blow by the efficiency limiter.

On Transcend, a size 2 base has 1 drone and 1 worker. The 1 drone is usually taken care of by your Scout Patrol (assuming 0 police). If you get an extra drone at this base, then you'll have problems. We're assuming you can't afford Recreation Commons, so the only other choice is to take a worker off a forest (so that 1 drone makes you take off 1 worker).

If all your bases are in this situation (size 2, no drone facilities), then that's 1 less worker at 3 of them, or 3 less forests total.

also the second of the two smaller bases confers atleast 1 extra drone(unles its really early) because of b. drones

Yes, but the total number of drones is still the same - say you have a size 6 base and two size 3 bases. The size 6 base will have 5 drones (5 drones), the same as the two size 3's (4 drones + 1 bureaucracy drone). One good thing about smaller bases is that you essentially can use more police! The size 6 would have 1 drone taken care of by the one police (assuming 0 police on Social Engineering), leaving 4 drones. However, the two smaller bases would each get 1 drone taken care of, leaving only 3 drones!

prolly all moot cuz I actually like lotsa bases

Same here - what I discussed above isn't too important, because I still sometimes like to make only 5 really big bases (don't get me wrong, I've had my super-duper number of bases before, but sometimes I do like only a few )!

Z

[yavoon]

I know when bases riot thn. but u forget a very common occurance in early game. the size 3 base w/ a rec commons. since size 3's need them, that base can take an extra drone.

or the size 1 base pumping colony pods, that can take an extra drone too as its pop gain and colony pod are usually timed closely. only if yer base is caught w/ its pants down, moving up from colony pods to facilities, is it gna get smacked.