Are Needlejets worthless or neccessary...

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Gremnon
There might not be any magic unit, but when it comes to defending bases, I find I use several units, with different abilities to help.
Normally two arty, one of each native, two standard land and if it's a sea base two standard sea and a transport.
I find that normally works for me. It costs a lot to maintain, but if you get high support or minerals in it shouldn't be a problem.

My comments about survivability of units were always about UNITS in the open. It is not very hard to have good survivability of units in a base ( again with tech parity)

That said, thats an awful lot of defenders except when in an active war. My typical base might have one conventional defender and many in my interior will have a really old unit. At the front, I will have 2-3 defenders and 2-3 probe teams plus whatever offensive units are available

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Sikander


Drop Artillery can really ruin your day if you've invested a lot on native units for instance. And unfortunately, natives aren't cheap. One of the reasons that I dislike the self-destruct tactic is that it discounts some of the elegance of the rock-paper-scissors system. What you end up with is largely a battle of offensive units with little regard to types or terrain or position, where your only defense is to have destroyed the enemy last turn.

I agree. It takes away any the defensibility of pretty much any stack you can consider and in fact makes stacking units pretty useless

[Gremnon]

You have a point about the large amount of defenders, but if I know I'm going to lose a base I'll relocate them to another base, support them from there and use them in an offensive against whiever takes the base.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Gremnon
You have a point about the large amount of defenders, but if I know I'm going to lose a base I'll relocate them to another base, support them from there and use them in an offensive against whiever takes the base.

THis hints that your units may have both good armour and good weapons? Do you design units that way as I confess that my units generally have best weapon or best armour but rarely both. But I view units as expendable and as I say , I don't keep many sitting around

[Commy]

Generally, I put clean reactor on all units...then I use a series of combinations...each base usually has about 3-5 garrisons...except those with SPs, the get 7-10

Hypnotic trance units are built first...
Then comes artillery...
Then comm jammers...
Then interceptors
Then AAA...
Finally, I'll build empath units...this may seem a little late, but my terraforming strategy, strangely, doesn't have that many pops once I get tree farms and hybrid forests....

If the base has SPs, I generally will put a few extra AAA and hypnotic trance units...

My crappy units, the ones that have clean reactor but really suck, I don't disband because, well, they have clean reactor...if I don't upgrade them, I make the designated defender since collateral damage doesn't apply to bases...

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Commy
Generally, I put clean reactor on all units...then I use a series of combinations...each base usually has about 3-5 garrisons...except those with SPs, the get 7-10

Hypnotic trance units are built first...
Then comes artillery...
Then comm jammers...
Then interceptors
Then AAA...
Finally, I'll build empath units...this may seem a little late, but my terraforming strategy, strangely, doesn't have that many pops once I get tree farms and hybrid forests....

If the base has SPs, I generally will put a few extra AAA and hypnotic trance units...

My crappy units, the ones that have clean reactor but really suck, I don't disband because, well, they have clean reactor...if I don't upgrade them, I make the designated defender since collateral damage doesn't apply to bases...

Wow -- my typical base has 1-2 garrisons with an offensive rover every few bases for wormkilling. Only bases in a hotly contested frontier would have more ( If I am the Hive I will have more simply for the support reasons)

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Flubber
The reason I used to like natives is that I thought they could have decent survivability and this made up for their cost. Arty changed all that for me . . . I just no longer see them as being worthwhile all that often.

If you are a green faction running Green, there's a very good possibility of capturing wild worms, and they are free as long as they are in fungal squares at the start of your turn (or being independent).

They can also hide in fungal squares, making them hard to spot.

Also, IoD are the best pod popping units.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


If you are a green faction running Green, there's a very good possibility of capturing wild worms, and they are free as long as they are in fungal squares at the start of your turn (or being independent).

They can also hide in fungal squares, making them hard to spot.

Also, IoD are the best pod popping units.

I agree totally with all of that. In fact, I will go further and say you WILL capture worms. They also have the benefit of being the most mobile explorer in the early game. I love early worms. But as the game goes on they become coparitively weaker as enemies have empath and trance and arty and 3r armour. Their only redeeming late game feature is that they ignore reactor strength. I still love the free worms but rarely find occasion to build very many of them

[Nabvrimn]

Build worms? Why would you want to build worms? They're useless without the offensive boosts from a positive planet rating. Find a big stretch of fungus in nobodys territory and farm worms. After you've got a few send your empath rover or whatever you're using as a farmer home and let the worms farm worms. Free money and free worms with no upkeep costs.

[binTravkin]

You can't farm worms forever buddy.

You have only a dozen or so (depends on Planet rating) of slots for free worms.
If you approach the limit, the possibility to capture worms decreases slightly.
So if you want a worm in each one of your 30+ bases you'll need to build em.

[Ka Plewy]

Originally posted by binTravkin
You can't farm worms forever buddy.

You have only a dozen or so (depends on Planet rating) of slots for free worms.
If you approach the limit, the possibility to capture worms decreases slightly.
So if you want a worm in each one of your 30+ bases you'll need to build em.

He didn't say he was farming to get just free worms, but also to generate cash. As Dee and the Hive, this is about the only way they can generate decent money.

[Senethro]

Originally posted by binTravkin
You can't farm worms forever buddy.

You have only a dozen or so (depends on Planet rating) of slots for free worms.
If you approach the limit, the possibility to capture worms decreases slightly.
So if you want a worm in each one of your 30+ bases you'll need to build em.

Whats this? CAn you only capture a certain number of worms per planet rating?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Senethro


Whats this? CAn you only capture a certain number of worms per planet rating?

There is no absolute limit that I have ascertained absolutely BUT with a + 3 PLanet rating I have observed that the chance of capturing a worm goes down as the number of worms you have increases. I have previosuly put forth a possible rough and inaccurate formula of something like

Chance of capture = 25% * PLANET RATING MINUS ( 10% * number of captured natives in your army)

I know this is wrong since I have captured natives even with 8 captured natives in my army ( its probably more a curve than a straight line). I don't know that the chance of capture ever gets to zero but once you have 10 natives or so chances seem to get real slim.

Because of this, I will sometimes return some natives to the wild to be killed fo cash in order to hopefully capture some in a more useful part of the world.

Try it out . Once you have 4-5 captured natives, there is NO WAY that your chance of capture remains at 75%.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Nabvrimn
Build worms? Why would you want to build worms? They're useless without the offensive boosts from a positive planet rating. Find a big stretch of fungus in nobodys territory and farm worms. After you've got a few send your empath rover or whatever you're using as a farmer home and let the worms farm worms. Free money and free worms with no upkeep costs.

Well if you are the UNI running FM, its sort of hard to farm worms.(unless you switch for a bit and farm intensively to creat such an army)

Why build them??

1. Immune to gas so your pop stays the same even if the native dies to the gas unit

2.Immune to reactor effects say if someone beats you to fusion

3. Wild Worms do not seem to attack your worms so a worm can be great for holding back that mass in the fungal pop by ZOC. Note that IODs will attack and Spore launchers will attack but it seems that you can sit a worm next to wild worms. very useful when in FM when you need time to concentrate your arty to make the kill easier

4. Unbribable and just as good as anything else when alone in the open ( and by that I mean not that great) and the best land unit for a long while in fungus.

5. Mixed force (in PBEM)-- If you build them and then hide them, its just one more threat an opponent has to think about

I have mixed feelings about worms and in many of my games, none of these uses arises. To be honest the most I would build them now is when I have a high mineral base that can kick them out one per turn



Those are the uses I see.

[Commy]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Flubber
...its probably more a curve than a straight line...[QUOTE]

Dang those quadratic formulas...I am having similiar problems in trying to find the cost of mind control...heck, it might not even by quadratic...

If anybody knows graphing pretty well, I'll happily hand over the data for someone to find the equation...