On creating synergy....

[Blake]

What about the strategy of building a land barrier all the way around your continent (much easier near the poles). The land barrier should be 3-5 tiles wide, and rather barren, with plenty of fungus, scattered bunkers and airbases, and the odd fringe base to facilitate the use of sensors.

######### mainland
#########
wwwwwwww inland sea
========= barrier
WWWWWWW high seas

The advantage of a land barrier is that it is a formidable obstacle to sea power (troop transports), in order to get land units to the mainland your enemy must do the following:
Land units on the barrier
Cross the barrier
Found a city on the inland sea.
Build a transport in that city.
Transport the units to the mainland

And with the full force of continetial airpower & drop troops crossing the barrier would be nearly impossible.

Ofcourse the barrier can be destroyed, by a PB, lower terrain, or tectonic missiles, but none of these are cheap or easy solutions.

It takes suprisingly little effort to construct a barrier, with the WP it only takes 8 turns to raise terrain, a couple of gangs of 10 formers (one in each direction) can complete the barrier in about 40 years, these formers are mostly supported by the fringe bases which are built along the barrier.

The land barrier provides the perfect defense against AI's, even if the barrier was unstaffed, and unpatrolled the AI would probably never manage to get units to your mainland. By planting fungus literally all over your barrier the AI will never found a base on it, creating the perfect defense against AI's (if extra bored ring the barrier with AAA troops, and airpower wont be able to get past either).

Did I mention the safe inland sea you get? Perfect for an energy or nutrient park, where trawlers can play unharrassed by AI's or natives. Also you turn a lot of unproductive deep sea tiles into productive shelf tiles.

The only downside of the barrier is you somewhat lock yourself in, making offensive actions more difficult.

[Kassiopeia]

Blake, that strategy is so strange, innovative and bizarre, that I'll give it a try.

[Sikander]

Blake,

I've done this before, or something very like it. It is an absolute protection from the AI which comes in handy if you are interested in a builder only type game. It works especially well if you can incorporate islands to cut terraforming time. I have also used a spiral technique, where you start out in one direction and then spiral from there, creating vast areas of shelf for trawling. You can also bring ships out from the core this way, though it is obviously slow going.

[Misotu]

Well, actually, this used to be my standard technique for very challenging SP games ...

The hardest one I ever played was Travathian's challenge, which was playing as Miriam, on a high ocean world, with tech stagnation, and the only allowable victory was transcend ...

It was virtually impossible - not to get into a winning position, that was easy. But to transcend in the time frame ??? Very, very hard, particularly if your problem was sea attacks from the Pirates.

The strategy described by Blake is very effective, but only if you look to develop the land eventually, while creating a new outer defensive land barrier which will, in turn, be colonised ... The "spiral" technique described by Sikander is the one ... you basically spiral out from the centre, raising land. The key to this is that you have a channel of land 3 squares wide spiralling out from the centre and separated from the inner ring by a channel of water 2 squares wide. This means that:

1 The inner land tracts are pretty much impregnable to sea assault - you see them coming way before they reach you

2 The water spirals are all terraformable

It is a very valid, and very effective strategy.

[Misotu]

Originally posted by Googlie
Try your hand at Yang from the TAA series (The Axis Awakens)
Download from:

http://googlie2.tripod.com/rynnsgallery/id5.html

(another shameless plug !!)

and test the theories against the tweaked AI (just diplomacy and strategy set up, but 3 researchers slaved to Deirdre - who starts in the jungle - one of whom is Roze - who has ab initio infiltration on all

Your allies will be the Believers and the Spartans and you'll be agin' the Gaians, University, Consciousness and Angels.

G.

I am trying it now ... we are recording temperatures of around 40 degrees C here, with 100% humidity. Over the last four or five days, we've started to sleep at around 3am when it's just about cool enough to manage in a rented place with no air conditioning ...

[NorthSwordsman]

I've been trying a variant of Vel's strat of crawlers and sea base ringing your main continent.

Vel's basic strat works extremely well, if you can get it built fast enough- that can be a bit of a problem unless you are really quick at building sea pods.

What I have done is take that strat and combine it with Blake's idea, with the barrier area 1 or 2 squares (if any) beyond the seabase's radius, with a few bases now and then on the barrier island, heavily armed/protected with perim def and tach fields as soon as I get them. The hardest part was getting the formers coordinated,

Here is an idea of what I've done (This was an mp game with another player, him as the Caretakers, me as the Usurpers.)

IIIbIIIIIIIIIIIIbIIIIIIIIIIII
sssssssssssssssssssss
bssssbssssbssssbssssb
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Key:
I=barrier island
b=base, land or sea
s=sea
L=mainland

Notes:

1) The barrier island doesn't have much in the way of development. Roads, sensors, mainly, with the occassional bunker as a roadblock.

2) the empty sea square level has 1 or 2 open sea spaces. those will be filled with trawlers eventually.

3) Sea Bases all have one SAM Chopper, with one attack chopper every 2 bases, eventually.

4) The mainland coastal bases have attack choppers at every base.

I figure this kind of indepth defense, if built quickly enough and solidly enough, will prevent Planet Busters from getting to your core islands, not to mention it will frustrate probe teams like nothing will.

Yeah, it takes time, but if you have just one dedicated mainland coastal base maxed out on pop, building nothing but sea pods, another base building nothing but sam chops, and a few handy islands between you and your main enemy... you can quickly make some nice defense layers.