Supply Crawlers

[Barinthus]

I've never used a supply crawler in my whole time of playing SMAC. I figured it's time to start learning so next chance I get to play my current game, I plan to do just that.

Can anybody reccommend any stragety regarding supply crawlers?

Is it festible to redesign them so they can gather resources in ocean squares or it wouldn't work? I haven't tried yet so.

Thanks in advance

[SativaX]

From what i learned here , you can do a good deal of different strategies with crawlers.

For instance

- if one of your bases is buildind a special project, you can drive some crawlers to that base and they will help build the project by adding their worth of minerals to the total acquired yet, you will however lose the crawler upon doing so.

-you can also assign a crawler to work a map square ( land or ocean ) so that it gathers either minerals / energy / nutrients of that sqaure and adds them to their homebase output

Other strategies are also important regarding crawlers but im not the reference for such things. i can however give you some insight about what they are

some involve improving the crawlers model in the workshop in order for them to be worth even more minerals , but i never quite was sure how it works.

also you can use them to slow down ennemies when they are invading you , by making a "great wall of china" with lots of crawlers hehe

surely someone with more experience will give more info , hope this helped

[zanthus]

Something I like doing, especially when playing as the Pirates, is using foil supply ships to gather food for my cities, since kelp forests (the farms of the sea) automatically expand by themselves. Then I let my cities focus on minerals and energy, and import all of my food from the open sea.

[zanthus]

Originally posted by SativaX
also you can use them to slow down ennemies when they are invading you , by making a "great wall of china" with lots of crawlers hehe

Another way to do this is to give your supply crawlers armor. This way, your enemies have to fight through your crawlers. Also, by giving your crawlers armor, they are no longer "non-combat" units, meaning they don't take the defense hit of I think 50% when facing psi combat. This does increase the cost of the crawlers, but since you can use them to advance SPs at their full cost, you can always use them for that.

[Hercules]

There is tons of advice both here and at the CGN site SMAC Academy.

Beware of a slight downside though when playing against a Human player in a Pbem.

Those supply crawlers, if you rely to much on them can be taken out fairly easily and give the attacker a morale boost as a bonus while ruining your production.

[johndmuller]

DataAeolus, when you start using crawlers, you will discover that they speed your growth tremendously. Many people here believe that crawlers are way overpowered (and especially so versus the AI, which hardly ever uses them to gather resources), but most of us use them anyway, quite often to the max.

For openers, you can use them to bring in extra nuts, to speed your population growth or to make up for shortages due to whatever and allow you to support higher populations than would otherwise be the case. They can also bring in mins from mines or other min producing tiles to speed your base production. Likewise energy to rush and/or support your facilities and keep you from running out of cash. At various times in the game you will surely have a use for additional resources of one kind or another. This usage (and the ability to feed SP's) is(/are) so powerful that most players look to direct their research in ways that lead to Industrial Auto early in the game so they can build crawlers and take advantage of the benefits ASAP.

While it is possible to grow and prosper without using crawlers, one must manage the base development very carefully at transcend to avoid critical shortages of one thing or another that can lead to extremely slow growth. In fact, in many ways, the game is more challenging without crawlers, so people occasionally experiment without them or post alternatives and/or adjustments aimed at rebalancing the game - such as moving the tech prerequisites further up the tech tree and/or substantially increasing the construction cost of the supply crawler pod.

[The Mad Monk]

One thing I almost always do is turn my super science base into crawler central: nearly every crawler and trawler (ocean going crawler) is either built or rebased there. The crawlers fill the squares that result from my base-building strategy, while the trawlers are sent throughout the world, attempting to locate and use every last unclaimed energy special.

[Kody]

While people say that not using crawlers makes the game more challenging. It can also be challenging trying to use crawlers to their full potential. A fair number of people seem to just put a crawler on a resource and leave it there.

However, if you're using close base spacing or have monorails then it opens up the whole arena of resource balancing and pulsing. The balancing act is reducing the number of resources queued instead gathering them together to finish builds earlier or make growth happen earlier. If you look at any normal turn you'll notice that you often have many minerals sitting in your build queues that if put all together could make a couple of units. The pulsing part is there are often advantages to pulse a particular resource to one place and switch where those resources are pulsed to (otherwise some bases will be left behind). For example stockpile favours someone that pulses most of their minerals to a builds that complete next turn. You get more ECs. From what I've experienced in an actual game, getting a near optimal usage out of crawlers requires moving 50% to 75% of the crawlers every turn.

For simple example you have two bases each has one crawler on a 7 mineral mine, 2 minerals form a crawler on a forest and gets 3 minerals from the base squares. Both are building crawlers. Crawler cost 21 minerals each because you have +3 industry. Stockpile bug is allowed.

For 5 turns allocating crawlers and forgetting about it.
Turn 1:
Base1, 12 minerals per turn(3,7+2), 0 minerals queued
Base2, 12 minerals per turn(3,7+2), 0 minerals queued

Turn2:
Base1, 12 minerals per turn(3,7+2), 12 minerals queued
Base2, 12 minerals per turn(3,7+2), 12 minerals queued

Turn3:
Base1 - builds crawler, 12/2 = 6 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base2 - builds crawler, 12/2 = 6 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base1, 14 minerals per turn(3,7+2+2), 3 minerals queued
Base2, 14 minerals per turn(3,7+2+2), 3 minerals queued

Turn4:
Base1, 14 minerals per turn(3,7+2+2), 17 minerals queued
Base2, 14 minerals per turn(3,7+2+2), 17 minerals queued

Turn5:
Base1 - builds crawler, 14/2 = 7 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base2 - builds crawler, 14/2 = 7 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals

Totals:
Mineral Production: 12+12+12+12+14+14+14+14 = 104 minerals
Stockpile Energy: 6+6+7+7 = 26 ECs

For 5 turns rehoming crawlers.
Turn 1:
* Rehome all crawlers in Base2 to Base1.
Base1, 21 minerals per turn(3,7+7+2+2), 0 minerals queued
Base2, 3 minerals per turn(3,0), 0 minerals queued

Turn2:
Base1 - builds crawler, 21/2 = 11 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base1, 23 minerals per turn(3,7+7+2+2+2), 0 minerals queued
Base2, 3 minerals per turn(3,0), 3 minerals queued

Turn3:
Base1 - builds crawler, 23/2 = 12 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base1, 25 minerals per turn(3,7+7+2+2+2+2), 2 minerals queued
Base2, 3 minerals per turn(3,0), 6 minerals queued

Turn4:
Base1 - builds crawler, 25/2 = 13 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
* Rehome all 2 mineral forest crawler from base1 to base2.
Base1, 17 minerals per turn(3,7+7), 6 minerals queued
Base2, 13 minerals per turn(3,2+2+2+2+2), 9 minerals queued

Turn5:
Base1 - builds crawler, 17/2 = 9 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals
Base2 - builds crawler, 13/2 = 7 EC stockpiled, crawler goes on a nearby forest square +2 minerals

Totals:
Mineral Production: 21+23+25+17+13+3+3+3 = 108 minerals
Stockpile Energy: 11+12+13+9+7 = 52 ECs

The differences in the examples are.
Mineral increase = 108/104 = +3.85%
Stockpile Energy increase = 52/26 = +100%

Now if you remember that with this game the effects works like compound interest. So after 11 five year periods (55 years) the mineral production increase alone is +50%. So if all other things are exactly the same your empire will have 50% better situation with it's production. Assuming you're allowed stockpile too then the increases in your economy start getting quite impressive, your industrial potential is doubled over someone else not managing their crawlers properly in roughly 25 years.

[Jamski]

One thing I almost always do is turn my super science base into crawler central: nearly every crawler and trawler (ocean going crawler) is either built or rebased there. The crawlers fill the squares that result from my base-building strategy, while the trawlers are sent throughout the world, attempting to locate and use every last unclaimed energy special.

Don't over-do it. One base can only produce one tech per turn. If a base is making more labs than is needed for the next breakthrough, the excess is wasted - even if its THOUSANDS of lab points.

-Jam