Comparison of Beelines: Police State vs Free Market

[#endgame]

My 2ec:
My personal Morganite start:
(Adapted from someone else's Morganite strat)

Set both bases to build ME
Research Ind.Eco
FM
Research Biogen
Rush Rectanks
like a Viking!

[-SafaN-]

i usuly don't research biogen until after IA, so rectanks are bought by then. Its just an other way to do it.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by mmontgomery
One person suggested FM/Wealth forgetting about defense altogether at first, and forget about drones, just expand madly with CPs and rec tanks. So what if you have to make your first citizen a doctor.

The "so what if you have to make your first citizen a doctor" line I believe came from me. But I wouldn't advocate totally ignoring defense. Even 1 or 2 scouts could likely have saved your 3 or even 4 of your lost bases given the weakness of the early worms against bases.

So if I ever said to "forget about defense altogether", I would amend that to say, and make minimal attempts at defense. Your losses are too high but I can't say how many scouts would be needed until I saw the fungus and terrain situation.

I have sent you a PM asking for the initial start position and providing an email address to send it.

[Flubber]

One question if playing this-- Should I go for optimum play-- you know scout out the terrain to ensure I head in the right directions or should I play it blind as in a real game ( well sort of blind, you have indicated when I might expect to meet folks)

The reality is that knowing the map matters so I might do it two ways .. . once as if I were playing the game for the first time and THEN , going back and studying ther revealed terrain to plot my best FM/wealth strategy

[mmontgomery]

Try to play blind, and ignore knowledge of nearby factions. Since it is on Planet, I tried to ignore my knowledge of Planet as well. I played first as PS, which exposed a lot of terrain. When replaying as FM, I tried to make judgements strictly based on what I saw on the screen, and on what I had encountered on that particular game. Otherwise, if I had used prior knowledge, with FM I would have tried harder to expand west early to get to the landing site, even though initial terrain looked more favorable to the east.

[mmontgomery]

Originally posted by Flubber
The "so what if you have to make your first citizen a doctor" line I believe came from me. But I wouldn't advocate totally ignoring defense. Even 1 or 2 scouts could likely have saved your 3 or even 4 of your lost bases given the weakness of the early worms against bases.

So if I ever said to "forget about defense altogether", I would amend that to say, and make minimal attempts at defense. Your losses are too high but I can't say how many scouts would be needed until I saw the fungus and terrain situation.

I have sent you a PM asking for the initial start position and providing an email address to send it.

Playing defenselessly was really a lark. It came out much better than I expected.

The problem is, the worms usually show up only when next to your base. Even if you rush build something, it is too late. Which means you must already have a defender in place, and perhaps can rush a backup defender.

But building a scout in each base really slows things down, both because of the resources it requires, and because of the support. And it is expensive to rush scouts, so I usually just let them build. Which means after rushing recycling tanks, I have to get 40 resources if I build a scout/CP, verses 30 resources with CP. Reproducing every 30 resources verses every 40 resources may provide a speed advantage that makes losing 3 bases and a CP acceptable verses the fully defended situation.

Now ideally if you had roads between your bases, one could envision a centralized base with a single defender that could move to bases up to 3 squares away when a worm was sighted, thus enabling a single defender to protect perhaps 5 bases from worms. But this means spending 20 resources at some point building a former instead of a CP, thus slowing expansion a bit. Which brings back the point when it is best to go ahead and build formers/defenders/crawlers/probes and slow down breakneck CP only expansion.

[Flubber]

I've got a convert LOL

[Nabvrimn]

If you're ICSing with minimum base spacing you can have a rover (reverse engineered from a probe team) defend nine bases as long as none of them is blocked off from the center by fungus, forest, or rocks.

[Chaos Theory]

Formers form adequate emergency worm defense. Before you move a former away from its base, it should build a road, if for no other reason than to connect your bases. In this way, it is likely to be able to run back to guard the base if a worm suddenly appears.

If you have maximum base packing and roads connecting bases, a rover unit in a base can move to any of 48 other bases in a single turn.

[Net Warrior]

This is from Vel's synergy guide:

"Map Settings:
Keep in mind that almost all of my games are played out on huge maps, 50-70% water, arid conditions with high erosion. Not to say that these ideas will not be applicable to games played on other maps…the core principles remain the same, subject to modification by map size. Also, bear in mind that I never use pod scattering, which, when coupled with the conditions mentioned above makes the early mobility techs (flex and mobility) relatively less important to me than they might otherwise be."

......so keep this in mind when considering his ideas.

BTW, beelining to PS sure is an interesting alternative, especially with pod scattering on.

[mmontgomery]

Net Warrior, you have an excellent point. If pod scattering is turned off, half of the value of PS is lost (ability to send out scouts early without support or drone consequences).

The other primary values of PS are having each point of pop being productive (police instead of doctors), built in city defense from the police, early contact with other factions (treaties, trading), and easy harvesting of mind worms for energy.

[Commy]

I didn't really read this thread, just the topic. And Knowing Apolyton, we're probably not talking about the topic, but anyway...

Free market sucks
Police state sucks

Maybe a semi-freemarket such as the ones on earth is good, but the one in the game is just anarchy...

And I don't remember any democracies being overthrown, only police states and communes...

[Nabvrimn]

Originally posted by Commy
And I don't remember any democracies being overthrown, only police states and communes...

Weimar Republic

[Commy]

Keyword--REPUBLIC

Although they really are the same. Never heard of it. Anyway, to further that arguement, there are currently 4 communist countries that I know of.

China
Laos
Vietnam
Korea

Note that only one is a world power...

If you have more, I like to hear them, but I don't think there are any more.

Almost every other country is a republic, democracy, federation, or some form of a monarchy. Either way, it amounts to over 200 free societies to 4...

People may be stupid, but not that stupid. Something tells me that those 4 countries are doing something wrong...

[Lord Nword]

Where've you been? It's North Korea that's Communist

The countries that are really doing something wrong are those that are ruining themselves in civil war, over in Africa.

Edit: what about Cuba, or is that just a messed up dictatorship?