Nautillus Pirates Strategies

[Blake]

Well, the pirates have names for land bases too .
But really, do whatever is fun for you, for me, going inland is in character, because if I found myself at the helms of an aquatic faction, I'd definitely want some dry land bases. For some reason I have this image of pirate sea bases as crowded, dank and with the stench of fish permeating throughout.

Especially in the starting years many of the citizens would greatly appreciate being able to return to solid land. Imagine landing on an alien planet, then never actually setting foot on it. Unless you want half your population to live in a permament state of sea-sickness (psychological, not physical) then build a few land bases.

Tho really, do whatever you want. Thats the point of SMAC.

[anarchie]

I must agree, the pirates' main strength is their mobility. Your first two bases should crank out two gun foils each, as five gun foils will get you popping pods like craaaaazy. After the foils, have them build sea colony pods. The fact that they are so expensive is nullified because you'll be finding material pods like nobody's business and completing them instantly. And because of the pods' long range, you should be able to plop down every single one of your bases on a nutrient or mineral bonus, and you'll get a nice cash/labs boost if home gets put on an energy bonus. One more thing about popping pods - if an IOD eats the pod, your foil loses a move, so try not to run into a pod unless you have 3 or more moves. It's not such a big deal with the 1:1 sea psi, but those loaded IOD are like little bags of energy credits, just as if you ran into a manufacturing pod.

Since the pirates' most annoying downfall is their efficiency, I decided to run along with that and use specialists like they're going out of style, as someone else here had suggested. Since specialists are immune to inefficiency, I can freely put bases on the other side of the world, and as long as they sit on a nutrient bonus and have some kelp nearby, they'll do just fine. This means that the oodles of cash spilling out of those pods will go right into the network node fund; using the Scout Patrol trick, they rush for less than 150 each.

[Lazerus]

pirates treasure island perhaps ?

[JonasBane]

I've recently played a few multiplayer games with the Pirates, and I would disagree with the "go for land" tactic.

One of the Pirates' biggest advantages is that they can get to opponents easily while having their own bases relatively difficult to reach. For the first 20 turns or so the only threat comes from native life. And even afterwards your would-be opponents have to put together a signifigant investment in both time and resources to mount a credible threat. You can defend with cheap infantry units compared to their more expensive boats. Not to mention that almost your entire military will be naval, allowing you to use your full military might compared to your opponent's smaller navy. Add the MCC to the mix and your navy becomes even more dangerous with their extended range.

If you go land from the get-go you lose almost all of your inherient advantages. Now you have both Lal's inefficency and Aki's growth penality with none of their advantages. Not to mention you're at a time disadvantage since you won't build your first "land base" for atleast ten turns or so.

Going for land does make it easier to pull in minerals. However, until the cap-lifting techs come about you won't be able to take advantage of this. Instead, building mining platforms and kelp farms nets you 2 nuts and 2 mins, something you won't get on land short of a monolith. Once you switch to FM you add 1+ energy to that, and should you get the ME then all these squares become 2/2/2.

Instead, I tend to use my initial bases to ring a small island. This gives all my sea bases easy access to shelf squares to fuel initial builds. Then after I make the switch to Dem (usually after I know I've got the MCC locked up) I start to send colony pods to the landmass. This gives my sea bases some tasty forest at the edge of their production radii when hybrids come around, and "claims" that territory so some greedy landlubber doesn't try to encroach on it.

Yes, you do pay a premium for your formers and colony pods. But consider that every colony pod carries with it a "free" recycling tanks and can get to its build site in 2 turns max. This alone saves you time and minerals. Your formers can get to a square and begin improving it on the same turn. And your generic nut improvement, kelp farms, spread on their own. From a development standpoint, your sea bases can be just as competitive as land ones.

JB

[Adalbertus]

@anarchie

Hm. I never played Nautilus, but I wonder why popping pods that early has an advantage. Sure, you get money and maybe a facility or unit built faster, but you miss the two most interesting things: AAs, because you don't pop with a transport unit, and "free" IODs, because your planet rating is 0.
But anyway, you should be faster than the other players

[CEO Aaron]

Well, early cash can carry more comparitive turn-advantage than an AA, if you're building the right things with it. 50 ECs used to rush a former can carry large dividends over the course of the game. With luck, however, you can pop a pod which will deliver a unity transport foil, which will offer the best of both worlds. Just escort your transport, which does the popping, and let the other foils spot pods and kill the occasional worm.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Adalbertus
@anarchie

Hm. I never played Nautilus, but I wonder why popping pods that early has an advantage. Sure, you get money and maybe a facility or unit built faster, but you miss the two most interesting things: AAs, because you don't pop with a transport unit, and "free" IODs, because your planet rating is 0.
But anyway, you should be faster than the other players

Well early, one of the sweetest pod pops is one that completes construction of a very expensive thing like a sea colony pod. This can greatly hasten growth. Also there is a time advantage to money. A 100 ec pop is far more valuable in 2106 than in 2160 because of the compounded effect of whatever you rush with that money.

Best of both worlds is to rush antransport and find and colonize the nexus. You can easily has a transport out there in the first 5 years while the nexus is a luck of the map thing.

I do find that, for more distant pods, it is rarely worth the effort to try to pop with a transport. If you do get an AA it can be a long trek back and you usually have to use a warship as escort-- the AA starts to lose its allure when you think of how many other pods can get poppedby two ships in the time it takes the transport to get back. I generally pop the closer pods with a transport and use warships for the more distant one. I may lose out on a couple of AAs this way but an insta-rushed treefarm, research hospital or even a net node can net you more minerals than an AA while I would stack up an early 100 energy credits favorably with cashing the AA for a tech.

Lastly, waiting to get a transport there MIGHT mean someone else pops the pod first. The AI is often quick to go for flex and start getting those pods

[Barinthus]

Wait, you can get AA thru sea pods? I have yet to get one... I've never tried using a transport to pop a pod. If I was to, would that increase the odds of getting an AA?

[Flubber]

You can get an AA from a seapod ONLY if you use a transport -- if you use a warship or probeship one of the other results occurrs since these ships could not carry the AA back.

[Mr. Harley]

First, be aware of your weaknesses. It's not the extra nutrients to grow that hurt you, or the loss of energy due to efficiency. You can make up for those easily, using Kelp Farms/Tidal Harnesses. The problem is that you cannot Pop Boom without allocating energy to Psych, and the efficiency drones. Those you are going to have to fight with throughout much of the game after the first fifty years or so.

Your other BIG weakness is support. To properly maintain a coastal base, you need a Sea Former, a Land Former, and a garrison unit. Thus you end up needing one more unit than you can support for free. Then add the necessity for transports, and until you get clean technology you will always be juggling support.

Research is critical, and actually related to pod popping, another very important part of the early game strategy. Let me explain. First go after Centauri Ecology, so you can build your first formers, land or sea. Second beeline for Centaui Empathy, it lets you go green, and it also lets you build the Empathy Guild, which let's you discover any sudden foil construction by the other players. You'll KNOW you are safe unless that happens, and if someone starts building a fleet, you will know to start taking preventative measures.

When you pop pods, remember that a materials pod will finish whatever is being constructed at the nearest base in squares. Plan your production around that, and you can make plenty of Sea Colony Pods and Seebees (Sea Formers with the best armor and whatever special abilities you can cram on them). I tend to support popping the pods early, you may get a unity transport, and then pop the pods using the transport so you can get AA and Ogres.

When you go green, you can start to capturing an army of independent IOD (isles of the deep) and use them to pop both ocean pods and pods just inland on the coasts, denying them to other players. You can establish a nice little fleet, and then you can go Free Market and avoid the drone penalty because they are indepenent.

After you go green, work on relaxing energy and nutrient restrictions. Unlike many players who instead beeline for Industrial Automation, your nutrient/energy production increase 50% on Kelp Farm/Tidal Harness squares as soon as they are relaxed. You have a 3-1-3 square, and with some base improvement a 4-1-4. You should build on/beside a coast line (islands are nice, you get to keep your immunity to conflicts but can build forests and then boreholes) so two specialists working a forest/kelp-tidal duo produce 4-3-4 for fairly low former time. With base facilities you can get this to 5-3-5 easily by the end of the early game. Boreholes are even nicer.

Next go for industrial automation. I've actually gone for that before the relaxing nutrient/energy restrictions, it depends on how many resource squares my bases have, and what tech I've traded for - if I have all the precursors trading from let's say Morgan, I'll build it if it's the next tech. I once put my headquarters at the edge of the geothermal shallows, as an experiment (kept restarting on a large map of planet until I knew I was starting near it - I've never gotten the inland sea ) and put it where I had one nutrient and two energy resources. It was just unbelievable.

You won't do as well, but make sure you place your headquarters with at least one energy resource, and preferably one energy/one nutrient resource inside the production radius. If you do, going for industrial automation for ocean trawlers can be awesome. Put a tidal harness on an energy resource and you get five energy, and if you go Free Market/Merchant Exchange/geothermal shallows and you get EIGHT energy, with no efficiency loss. Sometimes you can offset the cost of trawlers by building them on fringe bases and getting materials pods to make armored ones, which are handy.

The comment about exploring is also important. If you can find the Jungles first, put bases there if for no other reason to deny them to other players. The same goes for the Manifold Nexus, and if your SE is Green, you won't believe the amount of IOD's you'll capture! Mt. Planet is also good, especially if it's on an island, which happens fairly often. Garland Crater is also worth risking land conflict, I at least have found it less often on an isolated island.

Finally, for the later portions of the early game, you will fall in love with marines. Find the Aliens, steal some tech and get them pissed. Now bombard their coast line. They'll start building impact or missle foils, maybe even resonance lasers. Keep track with infiltrators, and withdraw to five squares away the turn before production. When they come out, make sure they still aren't in their base, and go find them. With a marine detachment you can capture between a third and half, depending on armor, weapons, etc. They are independent! I've used this technique for all my later game production in single player, Marr kept obligingly churning out those foils and sea colony pods.

Once other people have air power, be careful. You are now vulnerable. However, Lazurus pinpointed an interesting strategy. I cannot remember the tech, but once you can build deep sea improvements, make some nerve gas choppers. Go on an atrocity spree. You can force substantial sea level increase, as much as 1000 meters in 20 years. If nothing else it will keep your opposition busy, and if you make some raids and kill some critical formers, you can mess up their attempt to save their terraforming. The Pirates are a challenge, like Morgan, but they can be really fun to play.

[Barinthus]

I've not had much experience with marine units. How do they work, really? It seems to me if I load a marine unit on a transport and use the transport to 'attack' an enemy vessel, the marine unit will carry out the attack and either destroy or capture the vessel?

[Illuminatus]

No, no you see marine unit ability applies to combat vessels (althrough all Pirate units for some reason have marine prefix) - in battle there is a fifty percent chance that attacking vessel will board and capture defending vessel. This ofcourse, applies,only if you are winning in combat.

[Starfarer]

Personally, as the Pirates, I take one of Santiago's comments to heart.

"This is in many ways a water planet. It can be ruled from the waves."

Oh yes indeed it can.

I've found that, for me, the best Nautilus strategy is to put the pressure on and keep it there.

I'm almost entirely uninterested in actual CONQUEST as the Pirates, but instead, I focus on constant and unending harrassment unntil I'm ready for a full-blown land invasion consisting of enough if an army to take three to five bases at once.

Some people, I'm sure, never invade any other way. Me, I prefer to establish a beachhead and expand from there.. for some reason, it's insanely hard for anyone to RETAKE a base.

But me, to see me using more than five units in any invasion of any sort is unusual. Unless I see significant opposition in their weakest base (which is invariably the first one I take, for purposes of an easy beachhead), I take them down hard and fast with two or three units, then expand, expand, expand.

I receently conquiered Hi'minee's entire landmass with a total of three infantrry units and one chopper. I took one base, rushed a powerful defender, took three more, rushed defenders in each, then three more, etc.

It took all of three turns before she was begging for me to stop.

But in any case, with the Pirates, I believe the best strategy is not to expand to land as quickly as possible, but rather, to expand to several strongpoints in the ocean, infiltrate everyone, and wait... prepare a fleet, wait, and attack everyone simultaneously.

You make a lot of enemies, but when everyone's busy trying to just retake the three bases on each of their landmasses you just smashed to bits, they're not likely to unite in a counterattack. Then you can sue for peace and rebuild.

And when faced with a strong beachhead on tyheir own landmass as well as a well-armed fleet blocading them from reinforcing themselves from outposts, they'll usually take temporary peace over a possible annihilation now.

But then... that's just my experience.

Ta!

[The Mad Monk]

Thanks -- you just gave me an idea for my current (non-pirates) game!