question

[Flubber]

Originally posted by d=me
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But the problem is still the military part. I have problems managing my units effectively. Always happens the enemy get to attack me instead of me attacking them. Like my units always end up right infront of the enemy rover with 0 move points left somehow. Are there any tutorials on the Kung-Fu as been dubbed by Kataphrakoi?

The military part is the area where you can really trounce the AI since the AI will typically come at you repeatly down the same route. Some tips

1. If you are totally unprepared for war, suck up-- give the AI some tech, change SE settings etc etc-- its not usually recommended but if you aren't ready, you aren't ready.

2. Plan for war even when all is peaceful. For instance, create bases at choke points and create kill zones. This is relatively easy to do and can flow naturally with your terraforming. I find my normal strategy of mining many rocky squares and adding roads naturally creates these zones

Some methods (pre-airpower)
a) placing roads between your rocky squares gives you mobility on good defensive terrain.
b)The chokepoint base with a couple of good defensive units and maybe a perimeter defense
c)sensors-- you should ALWAYS know whats coming
d) combine the above-- Once I see I have a neighbor, I look for possible kill zones and expand to ensure I can set things up. The idea is to determine how far you want to expand toward that neighbor in order to pick where your first likely battlefield might be. A kill zone is an area of poor defensive terrain that an enemy must cross to get to you. You set things up so your rover goes down, shoots and then retreats. Sometimes the hardest part of doing this is sitting and waiting for the enemy to come to you . . but sensors and a road net are your advantages.

IN all this you have to realize that an enemy attacking you on the ground in YOUR territory is to your advantage. You know the terrain and have sensor advantages. You have a road net for greater mobility and shorter supply lines. Your units can heal better in your bases. One monolith or command centre can be a double boon for this.

In perfect setups where an enemy kept funnelling units down a narrow isthumas I can recall killing dozens of units with a force of only 3 rovers. There was a monolith one tile back and all the rovers had to do was swoop down onto a roaded rocky tile and shoot, and then retreat back for repair. I don't think I lost a unit sicne the enemy mostly kept sending 4-1-1 and 4-1-2s. After a while one of the rovers got to elite and I could pretty much forget about that little war

Seabourne opponents

Obviously if your enemy comes by sea and offloads, it is tougher to blockade them but many of the same principles apply

1. You have to have ways to get a sense of what is coming -- Even a lone unit left near a channel might give you a sense. Personally I like trawlers-- Yes it might get killed but often thats a cheap cost for the information of whats coming

2. Earlier game, the easiest tactic is the coastal blockade. Form the coastal tiles first with the idea of placing crawlers there. I have seen enemy transports mill aimlessly back and forth with nowhere to offload. Yes the ships can bombard you

3. Consider raising land as a defensive technique. I have frequently caused the AI consternation by raising up a peninsula. They either have to offload far from my key areas when I can pick them off at my leisure or go around when I can have shipping waiting for them.

4. When it comes to ships you have to understand attrition. With tech equivalency, there is no ship that has even a reasonable chance of survival. So if you want to go into naval warfare, you need to outnumber your opponent-- I usually don't go big into navies, having only a few warships that can rush out to kill enemies


AIRPOWER

Everything changes. Airpower reigns supreme. My advice in the airpower era is to have more of it than your opponent. Generally my approach is to try to kill all planes that dare land in an enemy base within range of my airpower. With choppers against an AI I have had the joy of killing 50 planes in a turn. The AI never realizes that I can sacrifice two units to kill his strong defender before letting my choppers decimate his airfleet.

Etc etc

Thats some of the basics

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
Unsure what point this discussion has.(building the ascent)

I think D=me thought that it was unfair somehow that someone could "lose" with a huge lead if they build the Voice if someone else builds the Ascent.

That is obviously not the case.

[Lazerus]

Whats 100million people compared to one godlike creature

[Kataphraktoi]

Whats 100million people compared to one godlike creature

As evidenced by Real Life, nothing.

Wasnt quite what you meant eh?

IN all this you have to realize that an enemy attacking you on the ground in YOUR territory is to your advantage.

Im of the opinion that simple being the attacker in most any sitaution gives you a 3 to 1 advantage by merit that attack is the best defence...this seems a little arbitrary but i ussualy am winning when attacking the enemies economy. of course if you stack SAM and AAA all over the place with craploads of probes and perim defences and etc, i may not be able to attack. but then, if i dont attack, all your passive defences are wasted as i spend it on econ(or attacking a less prepared player) i would take the effort spend on defence and instead work on building an attack

In perfect setups where an enemy kept funnelling units down a narrow isthumas I can recall killing dozens of units with a force of only 3 rovers. There was a monolith one tile back and all the rovers had to do was swoop down onto a roaded rocky tile and shoot, and then retreat back for repair. I don't think I lost a unit sicne the enemy mostly kept sending 4-1-1 and 4-1-2s. After a while one of the rovers got to elite and I could pretty much forget about that little war

I setup my defence behind a roaded monolith once. They would funnel troops in and stop on the monolith for a morale+. then I would have one of my elite rovers(was sparta) take a few out, then farm the rest of them ,heavily damaged, for more elites. In this case a defence of open terrain used the AI's pathing(desire to use monolith) to defeat it.

1. You have to have ways to get a sense of what is coming -- Even a lone unit left near a channel might give you a sense. Personally I like trawlers-- Yes it might get killed but often thats a cheap cost for the information of whats coming

You must have radar trawlers out, i feel. Im going to write an article on this in a month or so, with screenies etc( us RTSer's love screenies ) as i feel there is a lack of knowledge among many players about navy attacks. (And there isnt a specific article on lategame attack)

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi

Im of the opinion that simple being the attacker in most any sitaution gives you a 3 to 1 advantage by merit that attack is the best defence...this seems a little arbitrary but i ussualy am winning when attacking the enemies economy. of course if you stack SAM and AAA all over the place with craploads of probes and perim defences and etc, i may not be able to attack. but then, if i dont attack, all your passive defences are wasted as i spend it on econ(or attacking a less prepared player) i would take the effort spend on defence and instead work on building an attack

Reread my post-- my comments were clearly for the pre-airpower era-- I don't find it takes much expenditure to create these kill zones since you would want a couple of rovers around for worm defense anyway.

my airpower comments were along the lines of yours, kill your enemy first.

At all stages, attacking is better and a unit in the open is almost always vulnerable. I have posted on this idea a hundred times I would guess and am a huge proponent of "active defense". A pre-airpower kill zone is precisely that. Your defence is to kill anything that comes close

My empires will bear that out. I rarely build perimeters and you will find that some of my interior bases have a sole 1-1-1 defending it.


Your comments about the industrial benefits of a military threat are spot on. Its like when d=me talked about having 3 defensive probes per base. he's spending way to much resources against this threat

[Kataphraktoi]

Reread my post-- my comments were clearly for the pre-airpower era-- I don't find it takes much expenditure to create these kill zones since you would want a couple of rovers around for worm defense anyway.

True, i was thinking in terms of MP when i put that paragraph down.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi



You must have radar trawlers out, i feel. Im going to write an article on this in a month or so, with screenies etc( us RTSer's love screenies ) as i feel there is a lack of knowledge among many players about navy attacks. (And there isnt a specific article on lategame attack)

Late game yup-- Or in a pbem, I might create a grid of radar trawlers to cover to 6-8 tiles out in the areas that are not militarily hot. If they happen to be on a shelf square they may get a harness-- Once you have fusion trawlers are dirt cheap to build and its just less of a pain in the butt than patrolling constantly in the quiet areas. Toward an active enemy I have constant military patrols (usually radar interceptors, ships and probeships in combination) since you assume something is always enroute. I am a paranoid patroller and its rare for anyone to achieve tactical suprise


But in the previous post I was talking about earlier in the game when you may not have radar tech. THe trawler is admittedly less useful (and more expensive) but I still tend to build a few if there are any narrow approaches/good lookout places. When most shipping has a movement of 3-4 and your trawler can actually move each turn (its a real PIA to reactivate the units each turn and then patrol and then activate the gather command), you cover more territory than you think even with limited viewing range. If I have a landmass with a large coast and an open sea, this method is NOT that useful though since the resources needed for a good warning system are too much

The whole point of these trawlers is they can gather resources for a long time. I have placed a trawler on a tidal in a straight and assumed it would die sooner or later, only to see it remain unmolested for the entire game.


Overall I am a big believer in information. If you can infiltrate all of the other factions, you will KNOW what they have at sea and can even monitor when there are large numbers of units unseen to you -- This all gives you an idea of the threat you might face

[Kataphraktoi]

I have been finding success in using cruisers and large forces of weak rovers and probes to attack a player before airpower is available. sometimes i will also launch a diversionary war on some of his colonies to make him think im trying to psych him into building defences. i am amazed at how some players will continue building like mad when a cursory examination of f7 screen will show 8 full transport cruisers out of port and they only have scouts. the alarms should be going off by that point. and ive seen buster remark on this too, so i know its not just people i play with.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
I have been finding success in using cruisers and large forces of weak rovers and probes to attack a player before airpower is available. sometimes i will also launch a diversionary war on some of his colonies to make him think im trying to psych him into building defences. i am amazed at how some players will continue building like mad when a cursory examination of f7 screen will show 8 full transport cruisers out of port and they only have scouts. the alarms should be going off by that point. and ive seen buster remark on this too, so i know its not just people i play with.

When I played most seriously, I would make a written notation of the last known location of all transports and their range. I would note the coordinates of their closest possible approaches to me and the numbers and types of units unaccounted for . I would also look for trends in the units I could see. If most of your airpower passed through a abse in the west, I would think you were contemplating something in that direction.

Every turn, I would try to spot the transports and would estimate where they could be. A player with a transport and some troops poppopping would quickly turn that unto a fruitless exercise as very soon the possibilities spanned the globe. But more often it focused me since I could see that all FOUR transports could arrive together in only a limited number of places, and you would not believe how often that paid off in my long range scout finding the task force. And as you know, if they get found in the open, they are dead. Even that radar impact chopper can use its self destruct to hurt them a little

My favorite time was the one where I figured out where the player was headed but then raised land that blocked the approaches

But Kata -- on the main point, I have frequently been surprised by how many players exhibit a lack of concern about military possibilities. The second I see a chopper of yours in range of one of my bases I will call you up to chat about it and to reach an agreement on quantities of military in certain areas. Probeships, missiles ditto.

The problem for me, and the reason I largely gave up MP was that lack of time meant I did not have the time to do the thorough patrolling and examination and notetaking required to play at your very best. You can play very well without all that work, but to play at your BEST, I think that its needed.

[PJayTycy]

Originally posted by Flubber
The problem for me, and the reason I largely gave up MP was that lack of time meant I did not have the time to do the thorough patrolling and examination and notetaking required to play at your very best. You can play very well without all that work, but to play at your BEST, I think that its needed.

That's where demogames are handy... You can delegate those tasks

[Flubber]

Originally posted by PJayTycy



That's where demogames are handy... You can delegate those tasks

True-- I may play in the next demogame

[Kataphraktoi]

Overall I am a big believer in information. If you can infiltrate all of the other factions, you will KNOW what they have at sea and can even monitor when there are large numbers of units unseen to you -- This all gives you an idea of the threat you might face

I focus on intel as a main part of my play( i wont attack a uninfiltrated player ) however i greatly dislike the EG for example. The guy knows you can see him, and he will plan accordingly. But if you secretly infiltrate, then he will think you cant see him and be more (over?)confident. Possesion of knowledge is good, but secret possesion of that knowledge is just sweet (yes i know you didnt mention the EG)

Originally posted by Flubber



When I played most seriously, I would make a written notation of the last known location of all transports and their range. I would note the coordinates of their closest possible approaches to me and the numbers and types of units unaccounted for . I would also look for trends in the units I could see. If most of your airpower passed through a abse in the west, I would think you were contemplating something in that direction.

Every turn, I would try to spot the transports and would estimate where they could be. A player with a transport and some troops poppopping would quickly turn that unto a fruitless exercise as very soon the possibilities spanned the globe. But more often it focused me since I could see that all FOUR transports could arrive together in only a limited number of places, and you would not believe how often that paid off in my long range scout finding the task force. And as you know, if they get found in the open, they are dead. Even that radar impact chopper can use its self destruct to hurt them a little

I dont write down the locals of units, but i do check the f7 screen studiously. I dont bother to check their bases if they have no\weak military. Ill take screenies and mark them up with say ''2 scout, 1 chopper'' or ''1 scout, 1 cop'' above their base names if i feel like it and print it out. easier to look back and see whats going on with a glance. i did that in BE2. marks on the map like ''dropzone here'' or ''heavy defenses''or ''no defenses'' etc.

My dad and i played a civ game pbemish against a neighbor one weekend out at his place and had printouts and a wall covered with intel, heavily marked up...looked like a war room really planning a game like that is very fun. having to fight a person playing like that is a blast too, trying to get your units in secretly, doing stuff you wouldnt normally do because no one would notice anyway.

One of my games ive been a little sloppy and 1 player has many air units unaccounted for. I should really find those before playing the turn again.

My favorite time was the one where I figured out where the player was headed but then raised land that blocked the approaches

I figured that from your posts on sea defense,etc. You never fail to mention what is really a rarity and that would indicate you had it happen...

And as you know, if they get found in the open, they are dead.

Sure. But maybe not. Some people that like beelining for PE or PSA that only have lasers cant scratch a plasma transport(high morale unit also)...ussualy though they will have a way to take you out. Also, one way is to stack more cruisers on the transports that they have available to hit it that turn.

But Kata -- on the main point, I have frequently been surprised by how many players exhibit a lack of concern about military possibilities. The second I see a chopper of yours in range of one of my bases I will call you up to chat about it and to reach an agreement on quantities of military in certain areas. Probeships, missiles ditto.

The problem for me, and the reason I largely gave up MP was that lack of time meant I did not have the time to do the thorough patrolling and examination and notetaking required to play at your very best. You can play very well without all that work, but to play at your BEST, I think that its needed.

That was what i concluded of some people in relation to some stunts that should have atleast got a response that went unnoticed. Indeed a problem. I keep a log on my laptop along with discussions to myself. I come back over and read it later to see my weaknesses(after ive forgotten it somewhat). I get less random nitpickers of my posts that way too.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi


I focus on intel as a main part of my play( i wont attack a uninfiltrated player ) however i greatly dislike the EG for example. The guy knows you can see him, and he will plan accordingly. But if you secretly infiltrate, then he will think you cant see him and be more (over?)confident. Possesion of knowledge is good, but secret possesion of that knowledge is just sweet (yes i know you didnt mention the EG)

I dislike the EG since it takes away from the necessity to manually infiltrate. I think all such data should have to be gotten with probe teams

[Maniac]

Originally posted by Flubber
True-- I may play in the next demogame

Even if it's single player?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Maniac


Even if it's single player?

Ya why?? I can always learn fron others and in the last demogame multiplayer I was in, I had nothing to do with the turn playing . . . I think I only looked at the turn very occasionally. BUt I did serve as ambassador for a time and have always enjoyed the cut and thrust of roleplay