At what cost do you stop crawler-whoring?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Leon Trotsky


Fission trawlers? I only used them so far in harnessed, energy bonus, geothermal shallows tiles... I'll try to build more of them in the future.

I don't build a lot of them as they are too expensive but there are occasions where I want to block a strait and I consider it more worthwhile. A foil would consume a mineral a turn in support anyway while the trawler collects something and is support free.

If you don't mind micromanaging, you can manually patrol them each and every turn, returning them to collection status after their movement is exhausted.

Their value to me is pretty much the same as having a warship or probeship patrolling-- Its not so much the resources they are crawling ...... I just really like when I have an early warning system out there

[Aabraxan]

There's an article on using them here:

http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_orp.shtml

[Hydro]

I like supply foils with deep radar (which is free) since this gives me advance detection and a tripwire defense. For instance, in a MP my PKs had Believers on a large island south of me. I did not want her foils or transports sneaking up to capture my beautiful bases so I physically lined my coast out to 8 hexes to make sure no transports could show up unannounced (paranoid air patrols were out in force, too). If one went missing then the air force was called out and the Orange Meanies were sunk or offending aircraft blown out of the sky. Deep radar foils are also handy lookouts in fungus - you can see them but they can't see you unless they try to enter or fly over.

The tripwire worked fine until the Believers started nuking me, but by then it was a moot point anyway. After having a half dozen cities incinerated my PKs then showed her what a real high tech army, air force, and navy looks like. But the point is that I had advanced warning - and that is priceless (and I even got my investment back in about 15 turns).

Hydro

[Zeiter]

I tried a game using the 5 min row colony pod and 5 min row crawler modification, and it seemed to work pretty well. So well, in fact, that I lost. And it wasn't just an early game rush. It was a long-drawn out early-middle game contest (chaos weapons), with reverses and counter-reverses. The key to the game was the fact that Yang had the Xenoempathy Dome. Do not underestimate the tactical significance of that SP in combat.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Hydro
I like supply foils with deep radar (which is free) since this gives me advance detection and a tripwire defense. For instance, in a MP my PKs had Believers on a large island south of me. I did not want her foils or transports sneaking up to capture my beautiful bases so I physically lined my coast out to 8 hexes to make sure no transports could show up unannounced.

A slight modification to this approach (although much more time consuming) that will give much more early warning is to move each supply foil out two squares then back to its original starting position to resume crawling desired resource. This then gives an even greater heads up to anything thats encountered in these "long range sweeps".

Question: does Deep Radar pick up subs?


D