My last big hurdle: Specialist only bases.

[Senethro]

I've only been playing a year but I feel I've become a quite competent player due to reading this forum extensively. I've overcome all the early newbie habits like aversion to free market, 2/3 square base spacing and failure to capitalise on the excellance of supply crawlers.

I've played a lot of games with different styles but I have yet to sucessfully used specialist only bases, especially as part of ICS. From reading previous years I can understand why they are good but not how to arrive at the situation where you have them.

If anyone could enlighten me through explanation or through a series of savegames I would be very greatful.

[Net Warrior]

The simplist example is: (1) Found a base (2) Turn the worker into a doctor (3) Poof, you've got a specialist base....no drone riots ever, even with bombers homed there while running Free Market.

[Senethro]

1econ, 1lab and 2 psych per turn. Sheer genius.

[Ka Plewy]

I understand the theory, I haven't practiced it (much).

Crawl nuts to a base, turn everyone but a few into specialists, pop boom to hab limits.
I'd imagine if you can't pop boom with Demo/Planned, you would want to intiiate a GA pop boom to get the city up to size as quickly as possible, so you'll have to maintain a core set of workers for a few turns, balancing specialists with talents.
I've seen a significant increase in cash/labs when I have done this.

[binTravkin]

I could show that to you, but Im afraid that the only such savegames I have is PBEM and most not at the starting stages of game.

However I could transfer you a game where Gaians are having 1-3 workers per base and ~10 specialists per base per average.

The easiest way to do it is:
1.Have Gaians
2.Have WP
3.As soon as WP is in place start slowly building condensers/boreholes
4.As soon as you have clean reactors pump out quite a bunch of formers and form the remaining non Condenser/Borehole squares into latter.

The resulting pattern should be something like:

BHBHBH
CCCCCC
BHBHBH
CCCCCC
BHBHBH
CCCCCC

B = Base
H = Hole
C = Condenser

Crawl C, work H.

Each base has 2*4 + 3 = 11 nuts (=5 citizens, 1 worker, 4 specs)
6+2 = 8 mins
6+(?) energy (apart from that of specs)


The miracles of such layout are:

1.Put a SAM copter so it can cover 9 bases (inculding home), so noone can drop in.

2.Crawlers block the entrance of land units

3.You can cash in the 2 crawlers for each base to make/prototype a Chopper in 1 turn. Having 30 bases will almost make you winner in a surprise!

4.And the last and final - put a Flechette defense in each base and no Missile/PB will land! (each base has 9 FDs covering it which means 100%/2^9 = 0.2% chance to hit!)

[Sikander]

I've rarely needed to build bases that are completely specialist bases, though most of the time I build bases that are majority specialist, often very heavily tilted to specialists. The methods differ depending on what stage of the game I'm in. Typically I will only work high value tiles which produce multiple FOP types, like boreholes or kelp / tidals.

If I need to GA I'll not have more specialists than workers. Typically I'll need crawled nuts, especially before satellite production. The best tiles for this are either condensor / farms or forest w hybrid forests. Later on the condensor / farms / soil enricher wins out. Crawling sea nutrients becomes really viable once you get fusion, at which point sea crawlers become cheap.

One you can build all the sattelite types there is little reason (other than commerce) to use workers again. All you need are crawled nuts to build huge bases which produce immense energy equivalents via specialists, as well as raw energy and mins multiplied by whatever production boosting facilities you have.

[binTravkin]

Yeah, and remember - specialists are not affected by efficency!

[Senethro]

binTravkin: If you have any savegames at it would help me greatly. I'm having trouble making the maths of specialist bases add up in my head and seeing a good example would help. I don't mind if its PBEM, as long as the game has finished of course and you don't use the password for other currently running games.

Would you start out with 1 square base spacing or do you begin with the standard 3 square and fill in the gaps later when you make a decision to ICS? I also assume you're using the Lower Terrain command to fit all those boreholes in?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by binTravkin
Yeah, and remember - specialists are not affected by efficency!

Lab and econ output are unaffected by global efficiency losses true enough but WILL be affected by allocational imbalance efficiency loss.

[Chaos Theory]

Realistically, your bases and boreholes won't be so neatly aligned, especially early in the game.

[#endgame]

And if you snag some SPs, you may not even be able to switch over to 1x1 ICS later on.

[binTravkin]

Lab and econ output are unaffected by global efficiency losses true enough but WILL be affected by allocational imbalance efficiency loss.

Just how wrong you are..

See, basically there are 2 types of specialists, one of which gives you +3 labs, the other +3 econ and they're not affected by sliders and are sliders themselves because you can easily switch from one to another and have a full steam on research or vice versa.

This effectively eliminates any "+4 efficency bonus" if there ever was considered one as each and every faction can execute it with less or more effort (easiest faction to do it - Gaians as they can be in a state of permanent popboom for all the mid->late game).

binTravkin: If you have any savegames at it would help me greatly. I'm having trouble making the maths of specialist bases add up in my head and seeing a good example would help. I don't mind if its PBEM, as long as the game has finished of course and you don't use the password for other currently running games.

I will overlook my archives and make a save at the start of turn for you, so you don't need to know my password.

Would you start out with 1 square base spacing or do you begin with the standard 3 square and fill in the gaps later when you make a decision to ICS? I also assume you're using the Lower Terrain command to fit all those boreholes in?

I start with ICS1x1 and continue it all the game except for the Pirates (in which case I seek for base spots which contain 2 min bonuses in a base radius and are at least 3 tiles from the cost, so artillery can't reach em).

The grid looks somewhat like a cheese in the start because I do not try to put bases in fungus/rocky squares, not talking about monoliths. I just try to put the bases so they correspond to the grid (which I make up in first turn and which mostly depends on the 1st bases' location).

Later when I have the former horde up I can cover almost all base places in grid. If there's a monolith it only makes a nice exclusion in the regular grid which allows 1-3 of your nearest bases grow faster and to greater pop (so you can build some energy multiplying facilities in them and have them as main research/econ are till you get other bases up as well.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by binTravkin


Just how wrong you are..

See, basically there are 2 types of specialists, one of which gives you +3 labs, the other +3 econ and they're not affected by sliders and are sliders themselves because you can easily switch from one to another and have a full steam on research or vice versa.

This effectively eliminates any "+4 efficency bonus" if there ever was considered one as each and every faction can execute it with less or more effort (easiest faction to do it - Gaians as they can be in a state of permanent popboom for all the mid->late game).

Bin, please don't attempt to lecture me on something I pretty much introduced to this community. While librarians and technicians in the early game contribute +3 to lab and econ respectively the sweet spot times are when one gets engineers for +2 and +3 ( 5 effective points) If one attempts slider manipulation then, one will surely lose points when running sub paradigm efficiency. Certainly one can decide to run librarians and or thinkers at this stage it just would be fallacy to give up the considerable econ to do so.

So unless you are running an entire empire of all specialist only bases, then as you suggest efficiency doesn't even come into play as one simply allocates specialists appropriately. More often though most people run some specialist only bases with any number of conventional bases. In these cases, slider settings and sub paradigm efficiency come into play especially when engineers are allowed as they become rapidly the preferred specialist until transcendi (late late game).

[Senethro]

Today I tried ICSing with Morgan and have been incompletely sucessful. I started well enough, getting the WP by hook and crook (I had to disband defenders and sell techs to raise the money to hurry. I then had a bad point when I was surrounded by believers (running fundy, so buying their units wasn't an option) who had stolen all Cycon and PK tech and were a serious threat. Although I had lots of money and won through by hurrying and upgrading I wonder if I could have done better.

The typical state of my 18 odd bases at this time (I forget what date, but I hadn't lifted mineral restrictions yet) was 2 citizens each, one worker one doctor and recycling tanks. I was making techs every 8 turns, but on Free Market would have made techs every 4 turns. My Q: should I have built recreation commons and gone free market/wealth or simply stuck with one worker and a Simple economy until I'd uncovered the tech for specialists and could make really productive bases?

In essence, what facilities do you build?

[Chaos Theory]

To ICS with Morgan, you really need to pump your econ rating, to make small bases worthwhile. Rec commons are one of the few facilities I place in every base, and they're worth every mineral. For the investment of one tech, 4 mineral rows, and 1 EC/turn, you get to ignore two drones or superdrones.