Supply crawlers, need some opinions

[Linamints]

I've seen a lot of people say that supply crawlers are valuable to game play, and I'd like some opinions just how valuable they are, and how they should be used in strategy.
i don't personally use them, and I'm curious what I'm missing out on.

So please share your opinions on supply crawlers.

[Mart]

This thread tells a lot about crawlers:
http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/7428-Supply-Crawlers
and there is some early version of Vel's guide, where he has special chapters about supply crawlers.
http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/115038-Where-is-Velocyrix-s-freeware-guide

And personally, SMACX wouldn't be the same without crawlers.

[Yitzi]

On the other hand, I'd like to post a dissenting opinion from our own resident expert:

Actually, workers are more useful than crawlers except in the extreme case of Hab Domes, high value specialists, easy pop boom, etc.; otherwise, crawlers have niche uses, but certainly do not outperform workers.  So crawler are not overpowered.

In the early to mid game, before any of this comes into play, workers can fully harvest a square, particularly forests because they are so easy to plant, where a crawler can't.  Furthermore, I have to have a minimum city size of 5 to even think of a specialist, which is rarely the case for the early game.  And even if I got a size 5 city to use a specialist, the specialists are not very good.

So I am far better off having my workers harvest multi resouces squares like forests and an occasion farm/collector or borehole, and have my crawlers harvest my mines.  And not much anything else, except filling in the occasional need for extra food here and there.

Once energy limits are lifted, I can crawl an energy farm.  But this is not as easy as it sounds.  First, for maximum effect, I need for the crawler to first move to my HQ.  Then I need to move from my HQ to the energy farm, which is normally at a boundary of my territory.  So overall, a crawler might have to cover 25 or more squares before it becomes effective.  Even if I have roads everywhere, that is still 8+ turns.  For my trouble, I get 4-5 energy, where my crawler get probably get to a mine and get 4 mineral with a lot less bother.  Both are useful, but unless you think crawling a mine is "overpowered", then it is silly to think energy farming is "overpowered".

It takes a lot of real game experience to decide what is truly overpowered. These "overpowered" tactics that some worry about are rarely deployed, and in the few games they are deployed, it is in moderation.  Probably only one game in 5 do I see someone who has created an energy farm, and even then, it is just 9 squares, not an entire board.  I do not encounter people who crawl everything and make their citizens specialists.  I only rarely encounter ICS, and easily defeat it.  And most of the other things that seem to be a cause of concern show up very rarely.

Why don't I see these things?  Is it because the players are stupid or ignorant?  No! Because there are too many things basic analysis does not take into account, such as the time and resources and technoligies required to set things up.

In the early game, the only compelling place for crawlers are on resource specials that I cannot reach directly from a city.  It is otherwise not worthwhile to spend 30 resources for a crawler that can only get me 1 or 2 FOPS; I have much more productive places to put those 30 resources, namely formers, colony pods, and facilities such as recycling centers, childrens creche, tree farms, network nodes, etc.

In the mid game, I do build crawlers to cover all of my mines, but very little else.  Again, there are better things to do with my resources.

In the late game, with sats and high value specialists and food enhancements, once can come up with a scenario where crawling every square is almost as useful was working every square.  But at this point in the game, who cares?

[gwillybj]

I have only one use for Crawlers: Harvesting resources from outside the base radius. Everything inside gets a worker eventually. The way I tesselate the bases, each one gets two crawlers. Best use? It's how I roll.

[Geo]

Certain upgraded crawlers are good for fast secret project building though...

[Yitzi]

Certain upgraded crawlers are good for fast secret project building though...

True...I consider that an exploit, though.

[ete]

Crawlers are a safe default investment, usually good to build unless under great pressure or having not developed key facilities or not built enough formers to keep pace with pop growth and existing crawlers. They cost some, but it pays back pretty quickly (iirc 30 mins is a standard crawler, so harvesting a rocky road/mine it pays for itself in under 8 turns, and every turn after that your base gets +4 minerals) and other than initial investment (mins+former turns to improve a square) they're cost free, and better still you can get the full cost of them back to rush a secret project which is a huge deal! Imagine you build 5 crawlers, leave them working rocky road/mines for an average of 30 turns, then cash them all in to rush a secret project. Your initial investment of 150 minerals gets dumped right into an important project, much cheaper than rushing it with energy, and better still those crawlers have in the meantime collected 600 minerals! That's enough to build up facilities near-fully at several early game bases, sustain 600 former-turns worth of upkeep, or (and here's a fun bit) build yourself another 20 crawlers (even without taking into account that those crawlers will pay for more over the 30 turns).

There's also crawling nuts and energy to consider, nuts allow you to grow bases significantly larger because they bring in nuts without consuming any, and energy.. well, energy is the core of the mid/late game, and if you've got former power spare to build energy parks, routeing all your energy crawlers to your efficiency 0 HQ feels like cheating the first few times you do it, the research rate can become insane.

Of course, you need well developed squares to use them much, and you need land which is not in too direct competition with workers (though a crawler can often sit on rocky squares till fairly late on).

There are plenty of situations where something else will be a better long term investment. Unless you have a lot of formers, get more formers first, as EM explained formers are absolutely vital (in large part because exponential crawler expansion requires immense teraforming power). If there's an important facility or SP you want to go for, they are likely better investments. But crawlers are basically never a /bad/ choice at times of peace, and they are often great.

[Mart]

In my games I use crawlers early and they have mostly importance then. They solve problems of drones in bases that can grow too quickly. When there is not enough energy harvested by workers, assigning too much raw energy to psych hinders research and economy. Crawlers can boost nutrients, minerals or energy (as needed) without drone problem. Later in the game as factions can easily grow to large population, workers can get crawlers job done better.

Still, another great use of them is Secret Project instabuilding. It requires good planning, and it is also micromanagement. However, the reward is when I get a tech, yet the same turn I can read "... 0 more minerals needed" ... and the next turn I watch a movie.

Crawlers have also another interesting property: they just cost rows of minerals, not minerals. E.g. when running planned and wealth, my basic crawlers cost 24 minerals (3 rows). Hive in that setting need only 21 minerals! (3 rows). Later on, I switch to, let's say as Hive, Police, free market, power, and my crawlers give 33 minerals, 9 more (or 12) but it is still 3 rows.

That was not probably meant as exploit: you can hurry prototypes with crawlers. Important when you have no skunkworks yet, and just need that new tech expensive unit now/next turn, and are not willing to overpay with energy.

And that would be repeating: crawlers to give their benefit of crawling need to have a tile with at least one abundant resource. That needs terraforming. So formers are needed first. And they need to have "safe" environment to work. Building formers in order to loose them soon in mindworms attacks or vendetta faction raids is wasteful doubled. You loose minerals and you loose time! So some scouts or trance scouts are yet to be built before. There are various ways of making formers safer.

There is some balance in between all of this. With more played games experience comes. And then, after many years, some new players surprise you with new strategies...

[Yitzi]

Crawlers are a safe default investment, usually good to build unless under great pressure or having not developed key facilities or not built enough formers to keep pace with pop growth and existing crawlers. They cost some, but it pays back pretty quickly (iirc 30 mins is a standard crawler, so harvesting a rocky road/mine it pays for itself in under 8 turns, and every turn after that your base gets +4 minerals)

Yeah, but there's the cost of making that road/mine too, so you end up with an effective time-to-pay-back slightly over 14 turns (at 14 turns-to-pay-back, a former-turn is worth slightly less than 1.5 minerals for the former, plus 1 mineral for upkeep, so 2.5 minerals times 11 is 27.5; added to 30 gives 57.5, which is slightly more than 4X14), or with clean formers of a bit over 13.5.  And rocky/mine/road is one of the best uses of crawlers; put them on a forest and you're down to 20 time-to-pay-back.

and better still you can get the full cost of them back to rush a secret project which is a huge deal!

I think this is a substantial part of what makes crawlers so powerful: You can use them to rush projects at full value.

and if you've got former power spare to build energy parks, routeing all your energy crawlers to your efficiency 0 HQ feels like cheating the first few times you do it, the research rate can become insane.

Of course, if you've got that much spare former power after improving your bases, that's a lot of minerals that could probably have otherwise gone into other stuff...

There are plenty of situations where something else will be a better long term investment. Unless you have a lot of formers, get more formers first, as EM explained formers are absolutely vital (in large part because exponential crawler expansion requires immense teraforming power). If there's an important facility or SP you want to go for, they are likely better investments. But crawlers are basically never a /bad/ choice at times of peace, and they are often great.

Yeah, I think this is the key: Crawlers are often not the best choice, but are always useful to some extent.  I think a large part of it, though, is the "cash for secret projects after using them" bit...actually, even without the ability to use them first that may be a bit overpowered because you can store up production to rush the CBA or similar the turn you get the required tech...(and I say that having used that strategy for the Apollo Program in Civ/Civ2.)

[Geo]

Yeah, but there's the cost of making that road/mine too,...

If you start to include those costs, you need to take the 'cost' of growing the mine-assigned citizen into account as well if you don't plan to put a crawler on it.

[Yitzi]

Yeah, but there's the cost of making that road/mine too,...

If you start to include those costs, you need to take the 'cost' of growing the mine-assigned citizen into account as well if you don't plan to put a crawler on it.

Definitely.  Of course, that's not directly relevant to the comparison to "make less formers and crawlers and more facilities"...

And crawlers are definitely the best way to use mine/rocky/road.  But there are only so many rocky squares...

[Nexii]

Early game I definitely agree with EM that formers, colony pod, recycle tanks are much better for explosive growth.  I've found recycle tanks the optimum use of early game energy since units cost more energy per mineral than facilities.

One big downside in crawlers that you still need a former to improve what they will be crawling and a space to improve.  That and they're more difficult to protect - except in some special cases I find that most of my land squares are covered by a base.  So then you're crawling far squares which is risky due to opponents and alien life killing them. 

One thing I struggle a bit with is how to optimally grow/manage early game bases.  It seems that with 100% Forests the base size will level at 3, until Tree Farms (3N from base, 3N from 3 harvested Forests).  With the drone fixes it seems difficult to ICS many size 3 bases.  For that matter, it becomes difficult to control bases larger than 3 before NLM, Tree Farm, Holo.  Rec Commons is reasonably efficient at 40M to control 2 drones.  I assume optimal play is still to get as many small bases as possible until Tree Farm tech, and build Rec Commons > Tree Farm > Creche?  Or is it better to build Creches before Tree Farms?  I've also found that bases take a long time to make Tree Farms if you don't have some crawled Minerals.  To get Creche (50M) and Tree Farm (120M) is rather slow for a size 3 base (8M).  It would seem two mineral crawlers (+8M, on rocky/mine/road) at 60M cost would be worth it to half this time?  Given the ongoing benefit as well..

This might be all getting a bit aside.  I feel that crawlers are overpowered in their 100% secret project conversion rate.  I think this should be nerfed down a bit to 50% or 75% the crawler cost, other military units only get converted at 50% the cost I believe.  Yitzi I'd argue the first faction to get a tech should actually have a big advantage in completing its SP.  It's one of the mechanics that makes researching a tech more valuable than trading or stealing it...but there should be more of a cost/downside...rushing should never be free.

[Yitzi]

With the drone fixes it seems difficult to ICS many size 3 bases.  For that matter, it becomes difficult to control bases larger than 3 before NLM, Tree Farm, Holo.

It's actually not that difficult, unless of course you play the game on "super hard" difficulty mode.  (Otherwise known as Transcend.)  And yes, making Transcend really hard was part of the goal of the drone fixes; I feel the hardest difficulty level of a game should be a real challenge.

This might be all getting a bit aside.  I feel that crawlers are overpowered in their 100% secret project conversion rate.  I think this should be nerfed down a bit to 50% or 75% the crawler cost

Could be done, but that removes their ability to let multiple bases work on a project.  So I think a better approach is to house rule that a crawler can only be cashed in for a project if it was "declared" for such when made, which requires the project in question to have been started, and a crawler declared for a project cannot be upgraded or used to convoy resources (unless undeclared, at which point it may no longer be cashed in).  Probably also limit how many bases can work on crawlers for a single project at a time.

Yitzi I'd argue the first faction to get a tech should actually have a big advantage in completing its SP.  It's one of the mechanics that makes researching a tech more valuable than trading or stealing it...but there should be more of a cost/downside...rushing should never be free.

I, on the other hand, feel that rather than a non-overcomeable advantage at a big cost, it should provide a large but overcomeable advantage (by getting a head start on the project) at no extra cost.  This also results in how much advantage you get depending on how far ahead you are, which is a good thing because it makes things less of an all-or-nothing race.  (As for trading or stealing...trading needs a trade partner, and a tech that could give a project is probably going to be expensive; stealing is more of a concern, regardless of which tech, and probably should have an option to be made harder and/or cost credits.)

[Nexii]

But if you're declaring crawlers to a certain secret project, what happens if someone else builds it first?  You could have crawlers on route.

I can sort of see how this would work, but when you can switch SP to SP at 100% there's other exploits to get around all this.  I can declare one SP I don't want, and then switch to a new SP I really want when I get the tech.  Consider sometimes this is legitimate strategy if you get beat to a SP.

I still feel like a penalty to crawler-to-SP conversion and a small penalty for SP-to-SP conversion would better fix this.  Something like 60% and 80% minerals kept respectively.  I see no difference between crawler pooling an SP and rushing it with energy, and the latter is penalized

[Yitzi]

But if you're declaring crawlers to a certain secret project, what happens if someone else builds it first?  You could have crawlers on route.

I can sort of see how this would work, but when you can switch SP to SP at 100% there's other exploits to get around all this.  I can declare one SP I don't want, and then switch to a new SP I really want when I get the tech.  Consider sometimes this is legitimate strategy if you get beat to a SP.

I still feel like a penalty to crawler-to-SP conversion and a small penalty for SP-to-SP conversion would better fix this.  Something like 60% and 80% minerals kept respectively.  I see no difference between crawler pooling an SP and rushing it with energy, and the latter is penalized

Rushing with energy is penalized quite a bit more, though, as rushing is always supposed to be at a substantial penalty, and projects are substantially past that.  As for switching SP to SP, I think an 80% conversion rate is a good idea (I'd implement it by transforming the "free retool/no free retool" option into "lower conversion rate/higher conversion rate" and allow both rates to be set in alphax.txt.)

In any case, I think a better way of focusing on a project, once I've made it viable, will be convoying minerals from a bunch of bases to the base building the project.  This still means, though, that you can focus the entire empire on a project (may not be such a problem, just means that projects should be more expensive), and that there's nothing stopping you from putting all your projects in one very-very-very-well-defended base (more of a problem...I'll have to think about how to deal with that.)