Former/Crawler tips...

[Col. Emil Furst]

Like I've said, I'm not particularly an expert, and I find terraforming particularly tedious.

But mostly because I don't really know what I'm doing.

So I was hoping for some insight on how I should go about terraforming- I almost always just automate 'em.

For example (s), what is an energy park? Why are forests so useful? Why are mines so...not useful? How often should I be raising/lowering terrain? How would I go about maximising Energy, Food or Minerals?

Likewise, I don't use many crawlers- if I do, I usually send 'em far off, undefendend, to harvest some bonus square until something eats them. But it seems like not having any workers at all and just using crawlers is advantageus...why? How does that work?

I've mostly got the "Kill Things" aspect of the game down, but there's a whole other economic dimension I've not explored.

[Zeiter]

Wow, where do I begin?

Forests are useful in several ways:

*You can crawl 2 mins/turn from a forest square
*You can build tree farms and hybrid forests
*They are cheap as far as former time goes
*They spread by themselves

Forests are in fact considered to be so useful that many people just do a "forest and forget" approach, including me, from time to time.

Mines aren't necessarily bad, but they only really become useful after the min restrictions are lifted, and then people usually slap a crawler on them for +4 min/turn. Of course, mines should really only be build on rocky squares.

Energy parks aren't really necessary. Many ambitious people like to build them in order to get whopping amounts of energy and research per turn at their "Super Science City". I wouldn't worry about them just yet.

Raising/lowering terrain can be useful for getting higher elevations (and thus higher energy for your solar collectors), creating moisture on the western side of a mountain, or joining landmasses together (for an invasion, perhaps).

You'd be surprised how much crawlers can boost your resource intake. It's not uncommon for some players to have 10, or even 20 crawlers per base! Yes, we're a bunch of crawler whores , but just think: 10 crawlers all on forest squares getting 2 min/turn each, that's +20 min a turn! Over the course of 100 turns, that's +2000 minerals, for an investment of only 300 minerals. And crawlers can be used for other things too, like upgrading them in and cashing them for secret projects. It's insane!

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are probably old threads galore on this subject.

[Blake]

Boreholes are fantastic, you should drill them everywhere, in a grid if you have the discipline. If the ground is sloped, lower once then drill.

What I like to do is use pure forest/borehole, with hybrid forests there is enough food, and with sky hydroponic labs theres enough food leftover for a hefty helping of specialists. I also raise land a lot, to reclaim the sea for foresting (And later boreholing). Nice thing about forest/borehole is that you only borehole when you have spare formers - not needed for foresting. You can borehole lots, or just a bit. Pure forest by itself works pretty well, the boreholes are gravy.

Boreholes are relatively better for Yang, Dee, Dawn - those non-freemarketeers. For Yang boreholes are one of the few ways to get truly decent raw energy - say for commerce or pysch in a GA pop-boom.

[Santiago_Claus]

The greatest exploitation comes from swiss cheesing your available landmass with boreholes and cramming bases and condensors into the remaining space. Use crawlers on the condensors and workers on the boreholes.

If you don't want to do that, and I'm one of those who doesn't, it comes down to altitude. Why altitude? Because the resource we're after in quantity is energy, which is easy to get some of but difficult to get a lot of. Food and minerals lose their usefulness after a limited quantity (this is known as "diminished marginal utility") but the value of energy knows no avaricious boundary.

"Highlands and islands" is a good phrase to remember, because sea and high altitude tiles are your top performers.

The worst you can do is forest, and forest is pretty darn good. Forest is so good, in fact, that I don't build farm / solar unless I'm getting +4 energy or better from altitude and echelon mirrors. That means if at 2000m I don't have at least one adjacent mirror, or at 1000m at least two, I forest instead.

The "islands" reference: bases with access to water have a near-unlimited energy supply from the sea. Tidal harnesses with thermocline yield 4 ec's, which sounds modest until you realize just how FAST sea formers build them! The drawbacks are that you can't improve tidals and trawlers (sea supply crawlers) are costly before fusion.

After fusion, if you want more energy it's almost as easy as reaching out and taking it. Shelf squares (as opposed to unimprovable deep ocean and trench squares) are everywhere.

Coastal bases, defined (on a whim) as having at least 6 land squares and at least 3 ocean, have such a natural balance of resources -- land-based forests for minerals and ocean for food and energy -- they practically build themselves. Self-sufficient, they generate a very rapid return on a minimal terraforming investment. They are flexible; as you push crawlers into the forests or dig boreholes you can reassign more workers to the sea without starving of minerals.

A mostly-sea base will produce a lot of energy in a remarkably short time. You don't have any complicated, time-consuming raising of land or placing of mirrors to worry about, just build tidals everywhere and rake it in. The drawback is minerals. Plan specifically how you're going to bring minerals in or your vague dream, "I could drill a borehole on that island over there," will languish, and your high-tech sea base will wind up looking like medieval Paris.

The highland base is simply a base built at high altitude. I like to raise land in parallel 3000m ridges which interlock like a zipper to form a large 2000m valley between them. Terraforming costs are high (not as high as borehole swiss cheese, mind you), and you won't see really big energy numbers until you've formed a few turns. However, the energy output of a highland base is STAGGERING. 6 units per worker is average, and 8 is fairly common (7 and 9 if you run +2 econ or better).

Because higher altitudes bring drier weather, the highland bases sometimes need a little help with food, although raising terrain in ridges seem to alleviate this problem.

The final category of base location is the landlocked lowland base. Close-packed bases with condensors and boreholes are "optimal" here, but ... gah! Raise highlands instead.

If you can't raise the land (maybe you don't want to wreck the Manifold Nexus) you can "forest and forget", saving the real terraforming work for the highlands and coasts.

I'll mention condensors because they keep your population growing. Nutrients are the most valuable resource in the game, but have a hard limit -- a per-base population cap or "hab limit" -- for most of the game. Balance your nutrient production against your hab limit. Condensors are also a perfect candidate for supply crawlers because they concentrate production of a single resource.

A note on the Echelon Mirror: the EM is at the heart of the classic "energy park", which uses crawlers to harvest energy and is almost always built to maximize energy/area. Maximal output comes from alternating rows of EM's and solars atop a 3000m plateau laced with aquifers. Supply crawlers harvest the solars (and the EM's if you're hungry enough).

I build my energy parks in ridges and EM's in pairs to reduce terraforming time. I also throw bases down on or near the "park", sort of blurring the distinction between "energy park" and "highland base". Trading area efficiency for terraform time thus makes sense for me, since I have higher demand for energy producing tiles.

If you're putting EM's within your base radius, note that forest if adjacent will sometimes grow over them if you don't stack a farm. The same is true for condensors. Don't hold your breath, though. It's random.

EM's themselves only provide baseline energy, so you'd be well to choose the worst land (arid, flat ground for instance) to put your EM's on, and put solars on the better territory. Leave your workers off the EM's until much later in the game, when you can plant fungus on them and get a very well-balanced income. (If forest grows over them, so much the better.)

Fungus brings balance to highland and sea bases alike, but you won't get to enjoy it very long, because the game is pretty much over by the time fungus becomes profitable.

I hope some of this helped. I'm tired. :P

[Jamski]

Well... there's a new one even for me. Fungus under a mirror... not a bad plan in late game SMAX.

-Jam

[Enigma_Nova]

Former use:
Road it to crap.
If you want to crawl it, then you want to road it.
For the Micro-intensive types, you can 'dance' your crawlers for maximum income, but only if you have the network to move them.

Condensor Farms are good for growth.
Forests are good for minerals,
until Boreholes show up and whoop forest's ass.
Solar/Echelon is a good combo for energy.

Crawl nutrients to allocate Specialists to produce energy. 2 Nuts == 3 Energy early in the game (Librarians). Later on, 1 Nut == 4 Energy (Nutrient sattelites), so Nutrients start being massively profitable.
Crawl minerals to... build stuff, like more Formers and Crawlers.
Crawl energy if you have the park up, otherwise working Boreholes gets you by.

It is a good idea to upgrade your formers to Clean ASAP. With such high forming demand, 8 formers per base can be a tax on your resources.

EcoDamage
After your first fungal bloom
(In the darkness, something goes pop)
Every Tree Farm and Centauri Preserve you build increases your 'clean minereals' limit by one in every base.
So, Tree Farm up in your Forest bases.
Mines are at their most useful here, since you can crawl enough minerals to force fungus to spontaneously appear.

[Col. Emil Furst]

Alright, so I tried this out, and it did, indeed, ramp up everything for the early game.

But now all the crawlers seem to be doing is inhibiting my production by getting in the way of workers, and I have no place else to send them. (Smallish continent.)

Also, is there a way to re-set a Unit's Support base without sending it to that base?

[GeoModder]

The whole point of crawling is that it makes your workers free to be converted into specialists. Those give extra psych/lab output/economy to your bases on top of the commodities crawled into your bases.

And for your second question, I don't think so.

[CEO Aaron]

Crawling resources is, to me, a bootstrapping exercise. It gives you more production than you would otherwise have with equivalent population. Once you're working all the free tiles in your base radius, it's time to either a) send your crawlers further afield in search of resources, b) re-home your crawlers to outlying bases, or c) turn in your crawlers for mid-late SP's.

Also, as Geo points out, in the later stages of the game, specialists are very competitive with workers in terms of energy output, and once you have satellites, a crawler producing 6 nutrients can support 6 specialists, each of which also generates 6 extra minerals and energy, due to satellites, in excess of whatever other FOPs they generate in their own right. Even a borehole can't compete with that kind of resource generation.

The upshot is this: Controlling formers and crawlers does make every turn more tedious. However, they make your games shorter, because the boost you gain in production far outstrips any time saved by automating your units.

[Qwerty88]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova

Every Tree Farm and Centauri Preserve you build increases your 'clean minereals' limit by one in every base.
So, Tree Farm up in your Forest bases.
Mines are at their most useful here, since you can crawl enough minerals to force fungus to spontaneously appear.

Tree Farms have no effect on 'clean minereals', they effect terraforming ecodamage, the damage you get from having mines, farms, solar collectors, boreholes, ect., you effect clean mineral production only with >pop

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Qwerty88


Tree Farms have no effect on 'clean minereals', they effect terraforming ecodamage, the damage you get from having mines, farms, solar collectors, boreholes, ect., you effect clean mineral production only with >pop

Are you CERTAIN on this point as it goes against a number of pevious posts including pretty much all those from the people that first came up with the real way the ecodamage formula worked ( as opposed to what Prima might have said or was in the game documenatation files somewhere)

[Flubber]

Originally posted by GeoModder
The whole point of crawling is that it makes your workers free to be converted into specialists. Those give extra psych/lab output/economy to your bases on top of the commodities crawled into your bases.

I don't agree-- I crawl a lot of minerals in the early game when the point is NOT specialists. The point is increased production at a base. I crawl mines on rocky squares since to use a worker on them is somewhat of a waste-- the worker is better collecting multiple types of resources on other tiles.

[Santiago_Claus]

Emil, there is one way to remotely re-home a unit, a technique Kody used to extreme advantage in his famous Hive game: lose control of a base.

In his case he did it by building colony pods until the base disbanded.

The details: he put 2 bases very close together and both very close to a pack of mineral crawlers. When the first base would disband, the crawlers would re-home to the nearest base: the second base of the pair. The second would spend its first colony pod re-establishing the first.

When the second base depopulated and disbanded, the crawlers would re-home back to the first, it being the nearest base, and the cycle repeated itself.

Because he had the Planetary Transit System, all his bases began at size 3, and because of the remote re-homing rule, the crawlers could stay put whilst helping the 2 bases pump out an endless stream of colony pods.

Jamski, fungus-under-the-mirror is the coolest thing about highlands. It isn't very useful, mind you, the late-game being so short-lived, but on a purely aesthetic level it is very cool.

[Chaos Theory]

Tree farms definitely have an effect on the clean mineral limit in SMAX 2.0

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Tree farms definitely have an effect on the clean mineral limit in SMAX 2.0

No doubt (my latest game I'm around 50 clean minerals with only 4-6 pops and none of the facilities he lists)-- I was just trying to have Qwerty look at the issue again-- I suspect qwerty was simply repeating some wrong information that is posted somewhere-- it might even be whats in the manual since I think pretty much every source got this wrong until some gamers on here figured it out.