The Cult???

[waab]

Tried to play with the Cult, and must confess I am not doing well at all...so I wounder is there someone out there who actuly know how to play with fungboy?

SE-settings and so one...

[Flubber]

Fungboy is a miserable builder so you have to use the one advantage you have and start capturing native life.

Send your worm exploring through the fungus right away, Your goal is to increase your army, pop pods and make friends. IN AI hands the Cult seems intractable but you can play nice and try to make some early tech trades


technology wise, I try to get doc: flex and get to sea as quickly as possible for cash and prizes. In multiplayer, I figure I will lose the race to IA to the better builders anyway. Having cent. ecol and soc. psych means that you have formers and some good trade bait for those you meet. It also means you have a decent chance of getting the WP since you can be a little less concerned about building defenses

SE choices

You can't go wealth and the -1 Econ start means that FM makes little sense. I generally find myself in Demo/Green/KNowledge by default with trips into PLanned for pop booms. I try to time the 'planned" switch to coincide with multiple rush builds. Trips into Fundy or power is possible if in an intense war but I generally am trying to keep efficiency up. I don't recall going police state since the worms are usually suport-free most of the time anyway and the polce effect was not enough to compensate for the efficiency effect.


General plan

My general plan is to try to momentum rush a faction or two. First techs researched are mob and flex to find out whats out there and then head for impact weapons or probes/IA depending on what you find. While doing this you try to gather your worm army. 6 or 8 worms are pretty typical as your support-free and fast moving army that regenerate in fungus. An early AI opponent is usually killed off fairly easily as you can get some pretty high morale boils from the worms you do kill and the defense bonus in fungus gives your worms some decent surivability. Even a human opponent has a difficult time dealing with worms intelligently used in the early game. Trance units might make your life more difficult but merely evens out the inherent 3-2 odds. Since you will likely have a morale advantage , except against the spartans, and you will have a +2 Planet rating, there is not much that can stand against a worm in the early days. Having an impact unit or two along multiplies the defenders problems. Against a human opponent, even if you can't conquer him, you have accomplished quite a bit if he has to build military to fight off your free army.


The good thing is that you can do this while developing infrastructure since you can develop a decent army without building many units. Until I see a potential threat or a potential victim, I don't build many conventional units other than a few ships to get out there and create some IODs. In the early game I focus pretty much on pods and formers and will go to crawlers as soon as I can to try to produce additional minerals. Bottom line is the cult is somewhat unique in its ability to momentum rush without investing any minerals in the effort to do so.


Basically, try to capture enough bases and steal/ barter enough tech, get enough subservient folks, capture enough pods to jump start your faction. If you can continue to rush faction after faction ( smaller map) GREAT.

you may face a choice where you are sufficently big and have enough bases and resources and cash that you think you can outbuild the " better builder factions" as your empire is bigger. This can be done but requires a very successful conquest to garner this much of an advantage. If you can't garner an advantage early in more than one of pop, bases, tech, territory, allies, or pods/AAs, you will be in for a hard time.

The effectiveness of native life only decreases over time and it is largely inneffective against a well sensored foe. Airpower and empath are also wormkillers. Worms and IODs can still kill anything out there on a pretty equal basis but lack of mobility is a problem. The worm is the best thing out there in the early going as it zips 3 squares through the fungus but this is pretty pathetic even against an opponent with rovers on strategically placed roads.

Worms can be useful later as

1. sentries
2. wormkillers-- love that cash
3. base defenders-- key here is the police effect AND the fact that nerve gas does not come into play . . . even if the worm loses, the base population stays the same--
4. cannon fodder -- I often have sent multiple worms on suicide missions since I know that each worm that dies, increases the chance that the next one I find will be captured-- Any damage the worm does is a benefit. --


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THis advice is largely focused on Multiplayer since a human can outbuild the AI with any faction. But in multiplayer, following the conventional builder line with the cult is suicidal against equally competent opposition. You cannot compete equally in either energy or industry if you developed in a similar fashion. So you must develop differently and grab what advantages you can.

[CEO Aaron]

Crank out some early units, find a patch of fungus, troll for worms, you've got a 50% capture probability, and if you don't capture, you'll get a hunk of planetpearls, cash you desperately need, thanks to your weak economy. Bad industry and weak economy means that rush building facilities will be a rare event. Try to keep your facilities to the bare minimum, expand aggressively, and generally hang in there until you can beg/borrow/steal the techs to Pop Boom (Democracy and Tree Farms). You're going to lose out on early wonders, so don't even try, concentrate on being bigger than the folks who built them instead.

The only things you have going for you are Worms, so use the early and often. Use captured worms to garrison early bases, the double police effect will keep you from having to build expensive drone control facilities. Once you get Centauri Genetics, you'll be able to use 3 worms to garrison your larger bases, each of whom will quell 2 drones.

Once you've got your Pop Boom under way, things begin to look better for you: Specialists will provide research free of efficiency problems, and you'll have enough mass to overcome your Industry penalty.

SE-wise: Planned is your only option early. You'll need the growth to keep pace with your more productive rivals, and to counteract your industry woes. Free Market is right out, as it will only give you +1 econ net, not enough to compensate for the huge hit to your planet and police ratings. Ironically, Green is the last place you want to go until late in the game, your planet rating won't do you much good until you've unlocked techs controlling fungus production. As long as you're running planned, try steer clear of Police, the efficiency hit is brutal, your tech rate will be better under Fundy, it's that bad. Democracy isn't a bad pick, even before you boom, since Worms on fungus require no support.

[Flubber]

Just a couple of points on my post as opposed to the CEO

1. Planned versus Green-- Planned early only makes sense but for the industry and growth but I found that I would often spend a fair bit of time in green once I got the tech. Since I generally expend my worms, the +4 Planet rating made captures almost a cinch and the efficiency really increases the energy coming in. The extra 20% on the attack came in handy as well

2. I would not necessarily give up on early SPs. The free worm and early captures means that you can forgo early scouts while the worms troll the nearby fungus. This alone should put you on relative parity-- Personally I make a strong attempt for the WP.

3. I use worms for police only in the later game. Early I send them as far afield as possible.

4. I have been known to use Demo/ Green to skew my allocations toward cash-- you fall behind in tech a little but conquest is where you hope to make up any tech gaps.

Dang-- I like this discussion so much I kinda want to try them out in MP again!!

[CEO Aaron]

Your points on Planned v. Green are very apt, but I prefer to avoid Green since you really only see 25% increase in capture rate, and a 10% increase on attack, for which you pay a substantial penalty in your growth rate. If pressed I prefer to switch to Fundy, which bumps morale for all units, by 12.5%, and keep my industry at 0. Basically, until you've hit the Bureaucracy cap for the second time, I think the growth and faster pod builds will serve you in better stead than the efficiency.

My thoughts on early game energy for the Cult are thus: For cash, you should be farming worms. For tech, you should be probe-raping and/or shaking down your neighbors. Thus, you can see how I only have so much use for efficiency. When your energy production is high, that's when efficiency becomes critical.

On early SP's, I agree, getting one or two isn't impossible, but without Industrial Automation, you're unlikely to be able to pick which one, and with your slow tech rate, you're risking turning all those turns of production into so much dross when the last SP gets nabbedd.

[Flubber]

ceo aaron

On planned versus green

This is something I struggle with every time I play the cult-- when to switch and for how long-- I am not happy in either as I look at the benefits of the other. I do spend a lot of time in planned early and find that I am ready for some "green" time by the time I get the tech. With Demo, allocations can go to 100 % cash and I build up a nest egg for the next switch to planned and the rushes that come with it. I have probably blown through the Bureaucracy limits before I even get the tech . I actually ( and this is sacrilege) like the slowed growth as well . .. I see no harm if it is part of a plan that lets me get drone control in place before booming the base. Once the bulk of my boom is done, I find growth to be somewhat unimportant ( you boom when you need to) and the difference in 0 versus 4 efficiency can be telling. I really miss the industry though ( The Free Drones are a favorite of mine..


Planet rating

I could have sworn that I got 40 % on the attack with +4 Planet ( something else to check that I may have assumed wrongly). As for capturing worms, I found that my experience has been pretty consistent with a formula that would go something like

Chance of capture = (Planet rating * 25%) MINUS (10%* Number of Captured natives currently )

THis is NOT an exact formula but has fit my experience. I just know that I have NEVER failed in a capture attempt with a +4 rating if I had no worms , it seems about 50-50 when I have 5 or so. I think someone else on here proposed this theory and I have found that it accords with my experience. The reality is that it is tough to test the absolutes in gameplay since I always have some captured worms before I get to +4. Conversely, if I have 10 captured worms its hard to know if the chance of another capture is 0 or just very small -- I seem to recall capturing an 11th native but it was an IOD and I wondered if that had some effect or if I had miscounted my captured versus built worms

Early Sps

It is possible . . . I have tried Googlies scout patrol sacrifice as an option. It is very wasteful of minerals but can be done . . The cost-benefit of the tactic is questionable but I have tossed a scout patrols into an SP build--

[Mongoose]

Flubber, you are right. Cult + GREEN = +4 Planet, which is a 40% increase in Psi combat. If you can manage the Dream Twister as well...1.5*1.4 = 2.1 !!

The problem with worm police is support. If they're in a base and they aren't independent, they chew up a mineral a turn. Additionally, except in the case of nerve gas attacks, native life make miserable defenders. (Neural Amp makes a lot of difference here!) It is possible to rotate your ind. worms back for police duty and your supported worms out to the fungus, but that takes a long time if you have the worms in attractive fungus patches all over planet. I have found that the best worm trolling is at some distance from any of your bases...it might be territory dependent as well. All in all, it is much simpler to build a 2 row clean policeman and use the worms away from base...in the fungus where they excel.

[Flubber]

My worms would almost never come home. The worm police feature might be good to boom up a major base without drone issues but I would rather that they were out there, harassing some one else and conquering more territory for me

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

One bit of advice I offered in the Dee thread. Fun-boy lives and dies by his ability to scare up and either capture worms or harvest pearls. Maximize your capturing by getting a speeder ASAP. Move along rivers in fungus if possible for up to 4 times the ability to scare up worms.

[waab]

Thanks everybody for the help, it has gone a little better since I went from police state to demo. But I don't know about planned...I think I stay in green.

[Flubber]

Whatever you do, don't lock yourself into one SE choice. The cult NEEDs some time in "PLanned"-- Horde some cash while in green and then spend6-10 turns in planned booming your population and rushbuilding facilities at a cheaper cost

[waab]

facilities? If I will be hounest I just play Fungboy more or less as I would play Yang, before the patches...

[Flubber]

Originally posted by waab
facilities? If I will be hounest I just play Fungboy more or less as I would play Yang, before the patches...

Everybody can use some facilities. Even yang or fung-boy would benefit from a good base, boomed up with some facilities to bring in cash and tech