Military units and low police rating

[Dis]

Is there any way to maintain units outside of your territory without massive unhappiness?

Now I know why I run green over free market most of the time. I like the ability to wage wars.

But free market is so tantalizing with massive money and research.

I noticed clean units don't affect that at all (I had my hopes up). I guess they only reducte support costs.

can you wage war in free market?

enlighten me. there is much I do not know about free market econimies.

[Blake]

There are 3 main ways:
1) Punishment Spheres. Simply build fun spheres in your large frontier bases, they will grow fast and work many tiles, seeing as they arent surrounded on all sides by other bases. With a high mineral output that can be further enhanced by Genejacks they can pump out many military units, while your interior are devoted to "builder" infrastucture, and prehaps build shell units and garrisons for newly captured bases. You can also rehome units from the interior bases to the punishing bases. As you capture enemy bases, install punishment spheres in them and rehome your armies, later you can sell the punishment spheres at your old frontier bases, allowing them to become full research bases.
2) Specialist bases. If a base has no workers, it cannot riot. So crawl minerals and nuts to a base, and turn it's entire population into libarians or whatever. Then rehome your military units to it. This is more hassle than punishing bases, because the specialist base likely wont have the massive mineral output, making clean reactors and building the units in other bases nearly essential. It's basically more tedious.
3) Go fast and hard. If you take the bases you attack in the same turn, your units will always be in your territory. This obviously requires overwhelming force and prehaps formers to build roads - because your units need to be delivered to the enemy bases quickly. This becomes really easy once you get magtubes and superformers. Chances are once every so often some units will be left out in the cold and their home base will riot, but it's no big deal.

Note that with method #3 you cannot use aircraft. In practise I use #3 when I need to take a few annoying enemy bases then resume building, but if I want to perform a full campaign under FM, then I use #1.

edit: The 4th way is to negate the negative police rating, by running PS, getting the AV and/or building brood pits. Hard to do in SMAC, and Cybernetic screws things up if you don't get the Cybernetic Backbone.

[Dis]

Thanks

#3 I have tried. I'm the Pirates, so I haven't even messed with land bases. I have taken over a Caretaker sea base though. I have total dominance over the seas. The pirates are pretty cool. I'm impressed with their research capability.

I think I'll try some punishment spheres. In all honesty, I have never ever built one.

[Skanky Burns]

You can do a quick SE change for a lightning war once you have built up forces, then change back to FM again.

[Chaos Theory]

You can also boost your psych allocation to produce more talents than you really need, then burn them back off with pacifism. This works particularly well if the bases not suffering from pacifism are in GAs. I've done this with Lal + HGP + 20% Psych and it's pretty nice, producing rolling GAs for +4 econ and +6 growth. Bases that can no longer grow can suffer pacifism and lose their GAs.

Note: this is not intended for hordes of units outside your borders, but rather for planes and small land forces. This can work well to take care of an AI that's bugging you, but is probably not sufficient to combat a human player.

[Enigma_Nova]

A size 1 specialist base with lots of cralwed minerals (or lots of clean units) is a pretty good way to go, especially if you plonk it closer to the front line.

[smacksim]

I find #2 the most fun, and during the early game, the most difficult to pull off. It takes a lot of planning. Where should your specialist bases be located (IE along the path to your most likely enemy). Will we need to add population via Colony Pods to get it to size 5? How many crawlers to be sent? Etc.. But the blitzkrieg #3 is usually the best choice, perhaps in combination with the specialist Air base.

-Smack

[Sikander]

Early on you might develop a small but not inconsiderable number of independant units via pods. You can keep them safe until you need them and then upgrade them and send them off to do some damage. And of course probes can serve as decent military units in the early game before clean. They work well when you are running FM / Wealth as they don't cause pacifism drones and aren't effected by your morale setting. You can build them on any land or sea chassis, and can armor them. They make a good force extender for your expeditionary force along with your independant units.

A lot of players use armored infantry probe teams to protect their bases while they are running a thin expansion early FM gambit. They are effectively clean, and do double duty as probe garrisons in your bases. As you can't use police anyway you lose nothing by having a probe team holding the base, and if you are running Wealth it will probably have higher morale than a regular military unit. The downsides are that they are a bit pricy at three rows, and can't be used in stacks to any advantage. But they might be well worth the effort.

[Enigma_Nova]

Sure about the stacks?
If an armored probe is a combat unit, wouldn't it survive having another unit in the base eliminated?

[Chaunk]

Nope, any probe unit is destroyed with the stack like crawlers. Even if armoured. Kinda sucks really...

[Commy]

Of course, you can always use mind controlling to attack your enemies. And, a good strategy I have learned is to coordinate like 10 bases on the frontier to all build a missile on the same turn. THen, on that same turn, target the same base, then airdrop into it. This way you won't have to worry about pacifism...

[Enigma_Nova]

For 10 missles you might as well make 1 PB and blow the crap out of the base!

[Dis]

you know, the funny thing happened. I was going to do some of that stuff, but I said **** it. I can be a lazy player sometimes. I'm not a very detailed micromanager.

I just switched to police state and green and blew everyone out of the water.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Commy
Of course, you can always use mind controlling to attack your enemies. And, a good strategy I have learned is to coordinate like 10 bases on the frontier to all build a missile on the same turn. THen, on that same turn, target the same base, then airdrop into it. This way you won't have to worry about pacifism...

I was using knowledge at the time. I had a -2 probe rating. Mind control was never my thing. Although earlier I was running wealth. Maybe I could have done it.

I was trying to steal a simple world map successfully without getting caught, and could not do it.

[Chaos Theory]

A negative probe rating doesn't have any negative effects on your own probe teams, IIRC. It just boosts enemy probe success rates and lowers their cost to mind control.