Hiverian Perimeters

[Alinestra Covelia]

This has cropped up once or twice in my games and it puzzles me.

If you play as the Hive (in my case, a purely hypothetical situation of course...) and conquer bases, some of them "gain" a Perimeter Defence when your little blue-flagged icon enters the city.

Others retain whatever Perimeter Defences they had.

Still others are "naked" bases - they had no PDs, and your conquering them does not automatically give them a PD.

What I find even more surprising is that sometimes if you conquer a base and it does NOT have a PD, then you can actually give it one... by conquering another base.

Why does this happen? Is there any rhyme or reason behind it?

[Xian]

ive noticed this stuff too

[Frankychan]

I also have noticed this....and it ticks me off when I capture UNHQ with their Perimeter base intact, only to have it taken away from me when my glorious Hive troops march through their capital.

I figure maybe it's collateral damage?

[Alex]

Does the PD appears in the base improvements list?

[Googlie]

I have the same comment re a current PBEM as the UoP

I'm on a conquering spree versus Miriam, and when I capture a base I don't get the NN automatically (but if a captured base does have a node then I get it asterisked in my facs list, meaning I can sell it for credits and still have it.)

Wierd

G.

[Ivellios]

IIRC, the same goes with Zak and his Network Nodes...

[Alinestra Covelia]

Well, the point is that with Yang's faction, sometimes a base that DIDN'T have a PD will get one when he conquers it.

If this isn't the case, then sometimes conquering another base will suddenly cause a previously conquered base to sprout PD magically.

Anybody know how this works?

[johndmuller]

It would appear that the game maybe *intends* to provide a Perim, NetNode, etc. when appropriate to the conquering faction, but is muffing it somehow.

In addition to the hit or miss acquisition of facs one *deserves* to get when conquering a base, I have noticed that it seems considerably more likely that a conquered base will retain a fac if it were the other factions freebie (i.e. a conquered Hive base seems reasonably likely to retain its Perim, etc.).

Speaking of what happens when you conquer a base, does anyone have any theories to share about what are reasonable expectations about what to expect will remain when conquering a base? It seems that nearly everything goes, but perhaps it is just a probability thing and the more facs the base has the more will likely remain.

Similarly, I would be interested in any theories concerning what determines whether an emptied base will disappear when you move into it. It seems that when the last unit is taken, the population goes down 1 and then it goes down 1 more when you move in, so if there are 3 pops and 1 unit when you start, there will be 1 left for you. Sometimes, however, a size 1 base will not go away and sometimes it will not be reduced when you take the last unit - I have hypothesized that if there is a sufficiently large food stockpile, that is when the pop will not decline, but I haven't looked close enough to be sure.

[Googlie]

I believe (and of course this depends on the accuracy of my memory) that I read a couple of years ago - when Jeff Morris and Chris Pine were occasional contributers to these forums - that they had programmed that a base lost a facility for every attack buy air or by arty or sea bombardment (but not for infantry attacks), but in any event that the act of occupying the base always destroyed any rec commons if one still remained.

Regarding base elimination, I think that a size 1 base (that only ever was a size 1 base), when attacked and emptied of its defenders, will disappear when occupied; a greater than size 1 base can be reduced in size, (nervegas, starvation as you sit on itys food tiles, etc) but will only disappear if nervegas is being used to obliterate the base (ie it can be entered and occupied if it reduces even to a size 1 base)

But of course the foodbox could be a factor - I've never scenario tested that one.

G.

[Spacecow]

Something along similar lines...

Have you guys ever probed a Hive city with nothing in it (except Perimiter), telling the probe to destroy a facility? Somehow once my probe took out their Perimiter... which really made me think twice, since, as the story goes, they live underground, which effectively gives them a perimiter. How in the world my little probe team popped those guys out of the ground, I'll never know. Maybe my probe team just snuck in and ripped a particularly nasty fart in there and everyone came flooding out to the surface... er, maybe not.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Mindworms also destroy Hiverian perimeters, which puzzles me too.

[Googlie]

Hmm - I'm not sure that the Perim Def is so much a structure as a mindset

(cf the movie and blurb re the CDF - at least that's the way I imnterpreted it in the Spartan Chronicles when sparta built the CDF and got perim defs)

G.

[Alinestra Covelia]

If it's a mindset, how would a probe team sabotage it?

[Googlie]

Oh there still would be a physical element - but I was meaning "mindset" in that it would be more of a way of defending rather than a bricks and mortar (or steel, or energy such as the Tachyon Field)

So the defense bonus would be due to better lines-of-command, citizens' readiness to come to the aid of the military, block defense with roving breachstopper units, etc

They could be sabotaged by:

mental sabotage, such as sapping the confidence, fear inducing drugs, hallucinatories, etc;

physical sabotage, such as false defense deployment orders, malfunctioning equipment, removal of block leaders, etc

(Of course, it could also be just a honking great city wall, too, but that'd be so ..... 21st Century, wouldn't it?)

[Hendrik]

I think that free unsabotagable perims from day 1 would be pretty unbalanced. The CDF does this, but IIRC it isn't possible to give factions facilities that can't be sabotaged through the faction editor.