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Originally posted by lord of the mark
so far ive used crawlers either within city radius, or for the natural resources found outside, rather than improving areas outside of city just for crawlers. That sounds very powerful - Im saving it for when i get in trouble on higher levels.
so far ive used crawlers either within city radius, or for the natural resources found outside, rather than improving areas outside of city just for crawlers. That sounds very powerful - Im saving it for when i get in trouble on higher levels.
Earlier in the game you won't be able to use a fraction of the available space for workers. This led me to two conclusions:
1) I don't want my bases all that far apart. At most I'll space them 3 on the diagonal (every base's neighbors are located 3 tiles away to the NSEW), and usually 2 on the diagonal. 3 on the diag spacing gives each base 12 workable tiles, which is plenty, while 2 on the diag spacing gives each base 7 workable tiles, which turns out to be fairly optimum IMO. Close spacing also tends to give you a lot of turn advantage, as your colony pods quickly reach the new base site and start producing rather than costing the mother base a mineral for support.
2) I do want to use crawlers in the base radius for several reasons. For one thing they are a lot easier to defend that way, being close to garrison troops and within intereptor range of my base. Secondly, they don't have to travel very far, and neither do the formers that have to prepare the tiles that they work, both of which yield some turn advantage. The formers have the same advantages as the crawlers in that they are easily defended while they do their work. Finally, if my crawlers are nonetheless destroyed by the enemy, I can simply transfer population from specialists to workers to keep my production up while I build replacement crawlers.
I think these principals hold true generally for most styles of play, but they are particularly effective for a specialist heavy approach. Whenever you use crawlers you really want to terraform with the object of getting one FOP (factor of production, ie nutrients, or energy, or minerals) in a tile as high as possible, as crawlers can only haul one type of FOP from a tile at a time. In a specialist approach the most common type of FOP hauled is going to be nutrients, though minerals are also common. Thus tiles with condensors and farms (on flat or rolling tiles) are built up and crawlers assigned to haul nutrients to my base, or roads and mines (on rocky terrain) are built and crawlers haul minerals to the base.
Conversely, tiles which produce two or three FOP in nearly equal numbers are not very crawler efficient (eg boreholes, farm / solar, or forests after the early game). These are best worked, otherwise you are losing 33-66% of their potential. Or perhaps not built at all if your intention is to create all-specialist bases.
Energy parks and super science cities (SSC)
Super science cities are bases that have been optimized for high science output. This is usually done in a base which has one or more of the SPs that help energy or science production, such as the Merchant Exchange, and often an energy park or a trawler (sea crawlers which usually work tidal harnesses) fleet. Most people build only one (or none) SSC, located in the capital, which loses no energy to corruption regardless of your efficiency rating. Energy parks are simply areas which have been optimized for energy production to be crawled back to the SSC, usually some combination of terrain raised to 3000+ meters, solar collectors and echelon mirrors. They are expensive in former time, and in some cases difficult to defend, with energy trawlers typically being even more difficult to defend but with a more advantageous former turn to energy ratio.
Using these methods you can build a base's energy / labs production up so high that it will eventually produce one tech a turn by itself, the key word being eventually. Once you have reached this point, further expansion of the energy park / trawler fleet is useless for the purposes of tech, with excess labs being lost. At that point, it is time to either build another SSC, or to quit expanding your park.
Yang
The Hive is a very powerful faction when played to its strengths, and a number of approaches work well. A SSC in the capital is one of these approaches, as is a specialist heavy approach. SSCs in other bases are going to suffer from the Hive's tendency to run with low efficiency, losing tons of energy to inefficiency. The Hive has one key advantage for a specialization approach, and one fairly stiff penalty. On the advantage side, running Police State gives the Hive 4 supportable units per base without penalty, which means that it can easily support at least two formers per base. On the downside, the Hive's inability to run Democracy means that pop booms are much more difficult to achieve, requiring either a golden age or the Cloning Vats. Another means of getting your population up in developed bases is the pod boom, where small bases on the periphery of the empire can build colony pods rapidly (thanks to the industry bonuses) and regrow their populations rapidly as well (thanks to the growth bonus, and the base's small size), with the pods moving to the mature base and being used to increase that base's pop rather than building a new base.
What are specialists, why are they good?
Specialists are those guys on the right of your population queue in the city screen who don't work any tile. Instead they effectively supply you with energy. They don't produce raw energy (ie that stuff that is divided up into labs, econ and psych on your government screen), but instead directly produce labs, econs and / or psych.
Advantage #1: Specialists can't be drones, which means that you don't have to police them or nerve staple them or build drone control facilities for them.
Advantage #2: Specialists never lose any productivity to inefficiency, which can be considerable when efficiency is low, or the base in question if far from the capital, or when the base in question is captured.
Advantage #3: You can choose what sort of specialists to use, simply by clicking on a specialist and selecting the desired type from the menu that appears. This can be very useful for stressing one form of energy production over another when to do so via raw energy allocation in the government screen can be costly if you aren't running a paradigm economy.
Advantage #4: Specialists are not subject to the same production limitations that workers are in the early game. Thus a borehole worker can only produce 2 energy before Environmental Econ, while that same worker turned into a Technician or Librarian would produce 3 econ or 3 labs respectively.
It would be rather disconcerting to get attacked by say, 30 ODPs and to have your industry permanently crippled.
If your 2-2-2 rovers are up agaists 1-1-1(fanatic) units, them its an easy ride. Use the 4-3-2 rovers these upgrade to on a tougher oponent like Yang. Don't go after Yang early because of his free perimiter defences, making even 1-2-1 units indestructible untill you get better weapons 
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