Tweet
I hope Blake comes along to the thread. He can justify the numbers for keeping with a forest-borehole strategy better than I. The all important factor is how soon you are going to get to tree farms and hybrids. If it's slow, yeah, take up condensor building. If it's fast, use the formers to pre-form for base expansion, crawled energy, or crawled nuts. Crawling forest for minerals is not at all a waste. Consider the terraforming investment = 4 or 0.
Tree Farm, Hybrid Forest, Genejack.
The Genejack brings production up to levels very useful for building entire fusion units. For example, a frontier base that doesn't need to share could work 6 boreholes and 8 forests, for a whopping 54 minerals, increased to 84 by the Genejack, a base like this can build some serious Military, like Clean Shard Choppers or Defensive Hovertanks with all the bells and whistles.
Altough most bases will work 8 Forest and 3 Boreholes, for 54 minerals post-genejack - this is sufficient to build clean shard infantry in 1 turn with some minerals for support of unclean highly mobile units (ie shard choppers).
While you wont transcend quickly working forest & borehole (compared to condensor/specialists), you get a nice clean looking empire, immune to crawler harrass, pratically immune to pops (the forest mostly regrows over the fungus). And you have enough raw production to not need to rushbuy stuff or upgrade shells often. So half the appeal of forest/borehole is ascetic, or optimizing the amount of realtime required to win.
Boreholes (combined with forests) really are very important for The Hive and Gaians because they can't run Free Market (altough dee can get away somewhat by setting labs to 80-100% and harvesting worms for cash). A good Freemarketeer like Morgan doesn't need boreholes so much, so you can delay drilling them - which you'll want to anyway due to reduced support for formers.
Comment