Didn't know where to post this

[Ilya42]

Hi everybody,

I am new to the forum and I didn't know where to post it. Some time ago I started playing this game, however, my lack of experience is infuriating. I added to save files here so if you have a chance to look at can you give me any suggestions on the strategy and tactics.

In short I was playing Gains but maybe it took me too long to get to the crawlers and maybe terraforming wasn't done right, but by the moment i could deploy my network of crawlers Yang started to build air units and Mirian soon followed his suit attacking my supply system. I think i thought i would just get as much minerals as possible to push them back but the strategy turned to be ineffective.

Was there anything big I missed or done wrong?
I have attached several save files.

[bvanevery]

If you want minerals, you put your supply crawlers on MINES.  Not on all that other stuff you put them on.  Your crawlers are used very inefficiently.

You have a tremendously excessive number of crawlers.  All that production you used to make them, could have been used for something else.  Like troops to invade your enemies earlier.

Your game position is viable, it's just not worth playing.  Start over.

[Ilya42]

Thanks for the reply! My style of the game is pacifist, I had several reasons for doing this. First of all, I got the crawlers tech relatively late in the game (thanks to the Morgans btw, it was an accident that helped me to get it) I was planning to start on that earlier. Yang didn't have that landmass connecting our continents so I felt relatively safe. As a Gaian, I also thought that waging war overseas was not a good option given such strong opponents as the Believers and Yang.  At one point I considered outteching them by simply refocusing crawlers on energy (and forest is a great resource for that, unlike mines), however, I ended up fighting off both of them which put a heavy tax on my development.

[bvanevery]

Forests are not great sources of energy unless you've developed Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests.  In which case, you already have all the minerals you need, as the extra food they provide makes it easy to grow in a forest.  Tree Farms are pretty much core to the "forest and forget" strategy, of which I am a proponent.  You don't need supply crawlers for it at all.  What you do need to do, is plant forests on every flat square early in the game that has no minerals and isn't rainy.  Flat Rainy squares you might want to keep for making a farm, but Flat Moist and worse, put a forest on it.  You especially need 1 forest next to your size 1 cities so that they have minerals when they turn size 2, and get their colony pods done faster.

Oceans are great sources of energy.  You'd need to design a Sea Crawler unit for that.

I really don't think you should be wasting your time on that though.  Build more Formers if you want to be pacifist.  You lost 15, and that's not enough for an empire of your size.  1 per city is minimum.  You need more than that to pump up your resource base to something more scary.  There's a point at which you will have enough Formers, but you didn't get there.  Also, design and make a few Rover Formers while you're still in the Fission era.  They're more expensive but they lay roads faster.

On Rolling Moist terrain, I believe in putting a Farm and a Solar Collector.  It's a good balance for the needs of the growing city.  You don't want to forest these things because you're losing the benefit of the +1 mineral the terrain already has.  Forests are for improving terrain that doesn't have any minerals.

You could also keep building more cities if you're determined to be pacifist.  A few Interceptors and AAA units would keep enemy Needlejets off.

And who said you have to have enemies?  You chose to be Democratic when your next door neighbor is the Hive.  Gaian Police State is a perfectly viable strategy.  Look at your EFFIC right now, it's +7, totally absurd.  Even in Mission Year 2254 if you had gone Police State you would have had +1 EFFIC, which is good enough to get the job done.

Also what kind of a Gaian are you??  You managed a +4 PLANET rating, which gives a 40% offensive bonus when attacking with a mindworm.  Yet you didn't build any and seem to have captured 7 at most, and 1 Isle.  Don't you realize you could totally cream anyone with those things?  Even if you just want to keep a defensive fortress, you should have some captured mindworms around that you work up to Demon Boil size by not getting them killed.

 

In my mod, Gaians are actually a research faction.  They start with free Biology Labs, they get +1 RESEARCH and the AI has an Explore, Discover focus.  I got rid of stuff like pacifism and police penalties.  I did that for every faction, as it's a PITA and hurts AI play.  Very few factions have SUPPORT bonuses either, so even the mighty Believers only get +1 SUPPORT.  The Morganites go from -1 SUPPORT to +1 SUPPORT as they needed it, lol.

[Ilya42]

Thanks for this great input! I am more like a weekend gamer right now so I will try to implement this knowledge when I have some free time. I play sporadically and every time I start a new game I try a different strategy. Seems like one of the strongest sides of this game is that no strategy is 100% universal. You need to adapt and adjust all the time. Truth is I had never tried using crawlers excessively so it was my first attempt to see what it's like. In some of my previous games, I made some feeble attempts to use native life forms as a Gaian. However, that was before I could actually breed them, I used worms near a circle of obelisks to provoke them jumping out of fungus but I never seemed to get enough of them. I need to try a different approach with these worms because I know I haven't used them to the full potential.

[bvanevery]

The higher the PLANET rating, the more you can tend to support before capturing doesn't seem to work anymore.  I think map size also matters.  You can get huge numbers of mindworms on Huge maps, even with only a +1 PLANET rating.

Don't forget about capturing Isles of the Deep.  Make a Gun Foil as soon as you can.  You can scare up Isles by running into sea fungus squares, but it's more reliable to go pop sea supply pods with it.  Isles are going to come out soon enough.  If you set the "verify the odds before fighting" option, it's a bit of a cheat but you'll either capture the Isle, or you'll be shown the odds of what it'll take to fight it.  Since you didn't capture it, you can back off and avoid it, keeping your ship intact.  Same trick works on land for mindworms and spore launchers.

[Ilya42]

After a little break (work), I returned to the game.

I've tried capturing and breeding worms but found it not very effective against Yang.  However, I've decided to attempt finishing the game with the given situation, however hard it was. After some consideration, I just decided to bomb Yang with conventional missiles, everything went smoothly and I even captured some of the bases but lost almost all my air force (interceptors).  I suspected an attack from the Believers but as usual, they caught me by surprise   I find it impossible to fight off 2 of them at the same time. I switched to energy making military model and now simply steal technologies from others. I don't think I can last long this way though))

[bvanevery]

In the Believers' case I'm not getting what's to fight off?  They're kinda far away from you and their homeland is a joke.  I'm surprised you haven't infiltrated them.  That makes it difficult to assess what you're up against.

I notice in your force mix you haven't built any AAA units.  That would put a stop to Yang bothering you with his air force.  You could use AAA units as a shield to march down into his lands.

You know Monopole Magnets.  Building mag tubes straight into Yang's heart is how you'd kill him at this point.  You'd use AAA units to keep your Formers safe while they build the mag tube lines.  After you've connected your empire with that, chuck out mindworms galore.  You've got +4 PLANET and they should be able to take out just about anything.  I notice Yang has very few Trance or 3-Res units.

You never built Hab Complexes in some of your cities, which is why they are stuck at size 7.  That hurts their production.  It may be that you're just not making enough stuff to get your jobs done.