Crawler usage

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Dissident
I still can't see crawling squares your own city workers can work.

Aside from rocky mine squares of course. Or putting a borehole on flat arid land.

If you have no overlap in your bases you will have 20 workable tiles in a base radius. Unless you use pod booming you will only be able to work 18 of those max (until hab domes become available in the late game) and then only if you are playing Lal and built the AV. So even in this instance you will have two tiles in the base radius that you can't work. And it will take quite some time to get to this point as well, you have to research hab complexes and almost certainly lift nutrient restrictions as well, and then either pop boom or slowly grow your way to the top.

By building crawlers you can take advantage of that land near your base much more quickly. You don't have to painstakingly march your formers and then your crawlers to the frontier either, they can instead improve and then exploit those nearby tiles much more quickly. Finally you can much more easily defend your crawler from harm with your garrison, and if a critical crawler is slain, you can always shuffle a worker to the tile until you can replace it.

Building crawlers is like pop booming via your production queue. By spamming forests in the early game and building crawlers to work them you can quickly bootstrap your industry and get all of those tiles working for you while you wait for your technology to put you into position to pop boom more conventionally. If your faction cannot do this (pop boom) easily, then crawlers are even more critical.

[Dis]

but using the above map, the bases are so close together, with the crawlers you will have citizens with no squares to work.

[binTravkin]

I think Borehole is wasted if its worked by Crawler instead of worker - crawler halves its production!

Others -
Forest -> half wasted when u get FM - 2 mins & 2 ecs r equal - not so expensive as Borehole
Farm/condenser -> best use for a crawler!
Mine -> Who the fk builds mines??? Only squares where mines are profitable are rocky+minbonus & volcano
Volcano+mine-> crawler wastes 2 ecs (can live with that)
Rocky+minbonus+mine -> crawler wastes 1 ec (good!)

Are there any other types of terraforming on land beside those mentioned?

Farm+solar??

Maybe if you get rainy area on high ground (but its very unlikely)

Best layout is 1 square between bases & bases nicely ordered as Skanky shows
BUT: I NEVER use crawlers to work those 3 squares!
I need 3 workers to have GA!
Those 3 squares are often:
1hole
2farmcondensers

Which yields:
8nuts
6mins
6ecs
at minimum

+
3nuts
2mins
1+ecs
from base

is summary:
11 nuts
8mins
7+ecs


I usually play Morgan, so my bases are at 4 pop, all GA & only few facilites in them - good income form them!

[Sikander]

Mines are quicker to build than boreholes, and no wastage if you crawl them. Still I don't tend to build all that many of them, and of course only on rocky tiles.

[Enigma_Nova]

If I ever have to road through a rocky tile and I'm short on former time, I stack a mine on it.
Usually I'd borehole the thing or level it and farm/condensor it, but mines take only 8 turns as opposed to the above.

A mine on a mins bonus is a beautiful thing - 7 minerals before restrictions are lifted.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
If I ever have to road through a rocky tile and I'm short on former time, I stack a mine on it.
Usually I'd borehole the thing or level it and farm/condensor it, but mines take only 8 turns as opposed to the above.

A mine on a mins bonus is a beautiful thing - 7 minerals before restrictions are lifted.

Yea, I had one in my last game in my fourth base, and it worked out very nicely to snag the WP.

[Cosmic]

I wasnt an user of specialists myself but after reading about people experiences here I started to look at then and I have to admit that its really interesting!... this game offer so many prossibilities, thats because I love it!