Green Carpet?

[666'srevenge]

Im thinking about starting a game and going for green carpet strat I.E surrouding cities with forest and only bulding boreholes and the like for supply crawlers.....how would one go about starting a game with this strat in mind do you just bulid two formers at each base before you colony pods and get to planting trees or what?

[Sikander]

I would only build one former in every base if:

You support is 0 or lower.

You don't have a support free garrison.

It's early and your base only has one worker, and no recycling tank.

As for the green carpet, I wonder why you need the boreholes at all? Forest provides all three resources, and early on anything in excess of 2 FOP is wasted. At least to start, forests are the way to go. Using crawlers pays big dividends, but it's best to specialize tiles for crawlers, as they can only harvest one type of resource. Once restrictions are lifted, it's better to create squares which maximize production of a particular resource. Forests aren't very good for this, though boreholes are generally excellent, they are also expensive in terms of former time.

[Black Sunrise]

Weather SP and a former per city (with lots of cities, packed together as much as humanly possible), tons of forests, lots of sensors.
Only bad when there is a LOT of fungus, then you need to get clean reactors and have 1 big city (maybe two) crank out clean formers.
They: level terrain (if rocky), remove fungus, build road (if applicable), plant forest, construct sensors (if applicable), and raise terrain (if applicable).
Only problem is lots of cities running a forest economy, means lots of cities needing tree farms and hybrid forests, both very expensive in terms of time and cash.
Indra
Black Sunrise

[DilithiumDad]

My early core of bases builds two formers, then later bases make just one. Usually I will disband a few excess formers int he base making The Weather Paradigm after planting forest early (to allow for natural spread). Former-disbanding is only done prior to the advent of crawlers, of course. Additional rounds of former building start after fusion (rover formers cost the same as tractor formers), after clean reactor, and after super former ability.

[666'srevenge]

Thanks guys ......what Im saying is I ussaly specialize squares for production from the start but Im thinking it would be easier to work with forest squares because they make food,minerals,and energy even if it is at a limited amount I would obviously specialize squares for crawlers and eventually be running a forest economy with Demo/FM/Wealth or maybye knowledge. Im gonna go start a Gaian game right now to try it out and oh by the way for you ppl who knew me before Iwas booted Im playing Trascend all the time now. Luckily Im now

[Blake]

You want boreholes simply because once getting HF and/or Sky Hydro labs your bases will reach size 14 and still have leftover nuts, ideally you want a base at size 14 to have a minimum of excess nuts. So if your Size 14 base (everyone on a forest, HF) has 17 excess nuts you would be better off having 5 of those workers on a borehole, bringing excess nuts down to 2, at the gain of +20 Mineral, +40 Energy.

Once you have 14 Sky labs too you only need 4 forest workers to feed the entire size 14 base. Using true ICS each base has 3 workers. So pretty much any expansion less dense than ICS is going to have tiles not required for feeding population. So the solution is to drill heaps of boreholes.

In the early Late game, HF + Skylabs, using a typical 3 tile spacing each base tends to have about 8 tiles for itself, which could be split 2 boreholes, 6 forest. (leaving about 8 excess nuts, for population = 22 with habdomes, or you can turn the forest into condensors+enrichers for population = 39 - note that would take 25 years of pop-booming, really terraforming with habdomes in mind isn't worth the bother if your going for AtT)


Altough that doesn't tell the whole story, because other viable strategies include spacing bases a bit further apart, and then pop-booming them to size 14 as soon as tree farms are in place, in this case every worker needs a forest. Even then, if you are working a nut bonsus / a few Kelp tiles as well, it will be possible to drill one or two boreholes and still mantain 2 excess nuts.
In any case once you get Hybrid forests this base will suddenly have 14 nuts more than it needs, so a secondary terrraforming drive (using Clean formers) at this time can be a good strategy.

The terraforming I usually use (Free Marketeer) is intially go 1 former per base, all forest, levelling rocky tiles, letting forest expand over fungus. I'll start drilling boreholes as soon as Eco.Eng arrives, but only on a small scale at strategic locations (SP base, for example).
Once I get Bio-engineering (or bases with heaps of minerals, or Adv.Eco.Eng) I start mass constructing formers and drill heaps of boreholes.

The Hive terraforming I use (with WP) is a lot more intensive, drilling boreholes on specials ASAP, heaps of condensors, but still a healthy amount of forest (mainly to keep workers occupied, and to spread over fungus). Boreholes are doubly valuable for the Hive because they cant reap the benefits of FM, and ofcourse the +2 support allows ample formers for even the heaviest terraforming schemes.

[Lefty Scaevola]

I like lots of tall pine forests. I need the tall straight poles upon which to impale millions of captured and killed enemies.

No, wait I did not say that. Misquote! Out of context! it was my evil clone!

[bondetamp]

Originally posted by Lefty Scaevola
I like lots of tall pine forests. I need the tall straight poles upon which to impale millions of captured and killed enemies.

No, wait I did not say that. Misquote! Out of context! it was my evil clone!

Actualy, I think birch would be better for that. It is a bit easier to work with, so you'll get a million of them quite a bit faster. It also makes splendid fire wood, something that is sorely lacking in pine.

Of course, if you need really tall poles, like ten metres or more, then pine is the way of the future. But are you really fighting 1'000'000 King Kongs?

[knowhow2]

Forrest is great for certain factions. But don't provide much for other. For example if you're the Pirates and you happen to get your formers on some land you rather build some boreholes than forrests (cause nuts and enegry you can get from the seasquares).

For Gaians, UoP, Morgans the forrest is godsend. Infrastructure AND research.