Crawler/Former Defense Strategy

[miltonic]

I usually play my games with the welfare of planet in my mind, very little if any eco damage. That is, until the very end when you get Robotic Assemly/GeneJack among other mineral boosting facilities.

Once all those beauties become available, I forego the way of Planet, forsaking the ways of the pure and earth-conscious, so I can indulge in sinful, planet-raping debauchery.


Problem is, Planet rapes back. In effect, my formers and crawlers take the brunt of the Planet Rape. As they should because they are bring in near 100 eco damage to each base. But I wan't to protect them I do. Is there an effective defense against the Planet lifeforms when trying to protect a giant crawler/former force?

[Qwerty88]

a good stratagy for defending your non combat units is to build the defensive units you keep in your bases to defend them and send them out around your base to shield those non-combat units. Another good thing to do if your using Alien Crossfire is to build the Manifold Harmonics secret project with a good planet rating and use fungus as your only source of nutrients, minerals, and energy, but you really have to defend yourself then.

[Skanky Burns]

Do you force a >pop< early on so that eco reducing buildings actually have an effect?

[Commy]

Well, I can't really say much except for get used to it, because honestly, even playing as the gaians or cult, I might get 100 or so eco-damage. So like that other guy said, go for Manifold Harmonics and make fungus your friend. You might also want to build neural amplifier and dream twister to fight off those pesky mindworms easier, and don't forget to use hypnotic trance.

Ultimately, you're just going to have to deal with losing all those formers and hope for a quick victory.

[Velociryx]

get the neuro amp and put synth armor on them all. Piece of cake, and problem solved, however, I would argue that the kind of eco damage you're talking about is overkill in the extreme.

Sounds to me like you're going with a heavy mineral focus into the late game, and that's where the eco damage stems from. Far better to crawl vast amounts of energy and simply rush what you need, regardless of mineral counts.

As an example, in a fairly modest game (minimal use of crawlers, no energy parks, etc), blind research and tech stag, I was raking in nearly 5k ec's per turn, and getting tech in three....I'd hate to imagine what it would have looked like without the techstag.

Needless to say, EVERY unit I had was upgraded to clean reactor, all my formers had best armor/reactor upgrades (trance until I got the neural amp, at which point, it was redundant), all crawlers had synth armor to get rid of the noncom penalty (plus, it gives a bit of a boost when cashing them in later), and I had a handful of empath rover guards milling around for good measure, but once I hit restriction lifting, there was no more eco damage, and thanks to the formula, there's really never a need to see eco damage, because every tf, paradise garden, hf, etc you build, increases the threshold by +1 (including if you scrap a tf and rebuild it).

Best way to avoid eco damage then, is to have a mid to late game round of expansion on some virgin continent, and just use a "forest and forget" terraforming paradigm.

In these cases, the goal isn't to hyperinflate your score (tho, with the PTS, it certainly does that!), but to use the bases to continually increase the clean mineral threshold (build base, rush tf as the first build, and you're rolling). Just after Ascetic Virtues is the ideal time to begin such an expansion, since the support boost generally gives you free mins at base founding again, even if you were previously running SE choices that would otherwise prevent it.

In these cases, you're not building bases for their strategic value, but rather, as an insurance policy against ecodamage in the developed core...and of course, they will develope quite nicely over the remainder of the game, which gives you more options as well.

IMO, playing in the style you're describing is radically working against yourself, since you don't need THAT kind of eco damage to win against the AI, essentially you're creating additional work for yourself (each pop destroys some of your precious terraforming work, leading to the necessity of rework, and undoubtedly you are faced with MASSIVE waves of native life attacks, all of which eats away at the productivity gains the enhanced output gives you, blunting its usefulness).

-=Vel=-

[Blake]

A long time ago not much was none about ecodamage. Then that changed, there is in fact a very good way to reduce ecodamage, it's just not documented in-game or entirely common sense.

First, you need to force (or wait for) a >pop<
Then each "goodfac" you build allows 1 more clean mineral per base, there are four goodfacs:
Treefarm, Hybrid Forest, Centauri Preserve, Temple of Planet

You can sell, destroy or give away goodfacs and retain the +1 clean mineral bonus. So you could build treefarms in all the bases you give to AI submissives, you will still gain the global ecodamage reducing benefit of the treefarm (however, your AI won't)

Clean minerals start at 16 - meaning any production past 16 causes ecodamage - this is what clean minerals, or clean mineral limit means - the point where you start getting Ecodamge (this is independent of Planet rating, which only increases/decreases existing ED). Each pop also increases clean minerals by 1.
So say early in the game you get 4 pops, this brings the limit up to 20.

You build 20 bases, in each base you build a treefarm, now your limit is 40. You can safely get full sized bases working forests and boreholes. Then you build hybrid forests in each base, bringing the limit up to 60, now you can build genejacks as well, and still suffer no ecodamage at all.

With the addition of Robotic Assembly Planets some bases start getting into the 70's and 80's, causing ecodamage. So you build 20 Centuari Preserves, bringing the limit up to 80. But then your bases exceed 80 production, instead of founding new bases, just scrap all the existing CP's, and build another 20. Now the limit is 100. Continue scrapping and rebuilding the CP's as your production grows, and you'll never suffer ED.

A little ED late game is actually a good thing, because each >pop< generated a stack of worms worth 600+ - just raise land so they wont pop in ocean.

Why do you need a >pop< before gaining the benefit of treefarms? Thats a non-common sense bit, it doesn't make sense. You just need to do it.

[miltonic]

Thanks for the input guys. I think my strategy is concerning some of the folks on these boards....fear not! It was a hypothetical situation and I was just being silly. (For the most part)

I actually have been following the >pop< Clean mineral strategy since I've read an article on it, although, in truth I thought it was too good to be true concerning the fact that you could scrap and rebuild TF, HF, and CP, every time getting +1 clean minerals. But the vets have eased my suspisions on this. I suppose if there is no reason for eco-damage....then I will continue to walk in the path of righteousness. Planet....I pardon you.

OK! Break out the Planet Busters!!!!