More on supply crawlers....

Velociryx · January 11, 2001, 20:07

Was going over the backbone reasons for building crawlers, and re-remembered an important point. It's touched on in the strat guide, but perhaps not spelled out explicitly, so I figured it warranted a post.

The A#1 reason to build crawlers as quickly as you get the tech for it is RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF INFRASTRUCTURE.

Play a test scenario. Build two bases. Have one base work on developing core infrastructure, and have the other one build it's crawler suite to maximize mineral counts first, and THEN build infrastructure. Of course, the base that is not building crawlers will take an early lead in infrastructure development, but remember, if you set those crawlers to harvesting minerals, then each subsequent crawler will take less time to build, and even without rushing anything, the base that builds crawlers first will finish its infrastructure FAR ahead of the base that does not (creating LOTS of turn advantage for you).

So, if you want to toss up infrastructure faster than anybody else, run FM for cash (to help pay rush-costs), and build crawlers like they're going out of style to "give yourself" a huge industry bonus, and you're set....

-=Vel=-

Artemis · January 11, 2001, 21:59

This morning I built a crawler to see if they were much use. Now between Fritz and Vel I am a crawler-aholic. Love those crawlers. I have designed them with different levels of shielding so they are aesthetically pleasing also

Vel, you mentioned your strat guide. I have only been able to get ver 2, I copy/pasted straight from 'Vel's strat guide - version 2' post. I have tried the post 'signed, sealed etc', and your home page for ver 3. Your home page comes up unknown so I downloaded a copy (163kb sound right?) from Spartan Chronicles but when I tried to unzip it (pkunzip) it came up with 'no files found'. Where else can I try to get ver 3??

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-you become responsible for what you tame-

Wiglaf · January 11, 2001, 23:35

Vel's back

To be honest, I think crawlers hose the game. They're little bugs with wheels that radically throw the game to one player then the next. Multi games turn into air raids to knock them off, much like Starcraft's SUVs.

Once I get over the phobia, though....

Velociryx · January 12, 2001, 00:51

****Cloned Post Hunted Down And Killed****

-=Vel=-
[This message has been edited by Velociryx (edited January 11, 2001).]

Velociryx · January 12, 2001, 00:53

Back indeed, Sir SMACed.....even tho I don't get much opportunity to play the game these days, I can't seem to stay away from my first real home on the 'net....

And Artemis, I shall do some copy/paste magic and send you a copy of the file, as soon as I hit "submit" on this post...

Ahhhh, and I'm glad you've joind the ranks of the crawler-addicted!

SMACed has a point though....crawlers make the game really easy to run away with. Liberal use of them is one of the keys to doing such things as....oh...say, rushing half a dozen SP's to completion in a single turn, which can pretty much lock up the game....even though the AI doesn't take a mineral hit when they switch from one thing to another, if they've got 300 mins built up on a project, and you steal it out from under them by building it first, they'll invariably switch to a military unit, and once completed, they lose all but ten of the excess minerals, which can put you REALLY far ahead of the game. Do that to a faction 2-3 times and they're as good as toast....too much lost capacity...OUCH! And, in MP, they're big time targets!

-=Vel=-

Velociryx · January 12, 2001, 00:58

Looked up your profile, Sir Artemis, but no e-mail addy was listed. Try getting to the site this way: Click the link below to the main page. Head to the forums and look for the "SMAC - Strategy and Tactics" section. Inside, you'll see the thread containing V3.

-=Vel=-
http://www.angelfire.com/sc2/hartpence

Artemis · January 12, 2001, 01:01

On that note then, I will limit myself to two crawlers per base at any given time - shaking already. Only play SP so I like the AI to give me a run for my money. Mind you it already does because the one thing I know for sure is that for everything I know there are ten things I don't.

Vel, the link comes up with 'could not find page requested'. I have emailed you my email address. It's the old saying "I am not paranoid - everyone is out to get me", so my email is not in my profile. Thanks for your help on this tho'.

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-you become responsible for what you tame-
[This message has been edited by Artemis (edited January 12, 2001).]

Blake · January 12, 2001, 01:16

One usful comparison I found was:
Recycling Tanks, cost 4 rows, gives 3 "resource points"
Crawler, cost 3 rows, gives 4 nuts, or 2 minerals/energy

The comparison clearly shows that in the early game crawlers are always a better deal than tanks, especially considering 2 minerals is worth more than nuts or energy in the early game. This assumes spare terraforming, and forest poliferates like crazy and there should be plenty spare once IndAuto comes along.

Anyway I used to be a (resource) crawler addict but I weaned myself off them, usually one per base is enough for me (for an extra farm/condensor tile). I still have no difficulty winning on transcend, and I get a better framerate. I still use the little buggers to hurry SP's, but usually make them the rover variety.

On a side note I played a OCC recently and discovered that mirrors outside your territory don't boost solar panel output. I discovered this after building my energy park. sob. My game became a 2CC

Artemis · January 12, 2001, 01:33

OCC, 2CC??

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-you become responsible for what you tame-

Helium Pond · January 12, 2001, 02:06

I got really tired of supply crawlers because they're a lot of freakin' work and not much fun. I use them now, but sparingly. I don't generally go over 3 or 4 per base.

Blake: I wonder if, by chance, the solar collecter had a forest underneath it? I built a huge energy farm once, and forest spread underneath it, and I realized that the forests were knocking out the effectiveness of my mirrors. You can't build mirrors on top of forest, but unless you put a farm under the mirror, forest can spread under mirrors, effectively "killing" them. Just wondering if that could have been a factor.

Googlie · January 12, 2001, 02:24

Hmmm - Artemis;

just went to the Spartan Chronicles site and clicked on the download for the strat guide.

With DSL, I opted to open it right there, and it did unzip to give all the text (490kb unpacked)

So the file is there.

I used Enzip to zip it - don't know if that makes any difference - all my PBEM mates have no problems with my Enzipped files.

And Vel, btw, I hope you don't mind what Rynn did to your guide - some color in the headings and sub-headings, etc. I assumed your permission to post it on the SC site was a blanket-in-perpetuity permission.

[This message has been edited by Googlie (edited January 12, 2001).]

Velociryx · January 12, 2001, 07:36

Not at all, Brother Googlie! In fact, I might just have to DL a copy of it to have a look! Might be a good place to start from if I do decide to once again expand the guide....

-=Vel=-

Gregurabi · January 12, 2001, 12:04

OCC = One City Challenge
2CC = Two City Challenge (I guess

)

The stratguide.zip file from the Spartan Chronicles site is 166826 bytes and contains a single MS Word document (872448 bytes). Extracting the text from the .doc file with catdoc gives about 390000 bytes of readable text. (That's one huge guide!

I do wish it were in HTML instead of MS Word, though. But since I'm not willing to spend the time to make the conversion, I can't really complain.)

DogberryMan · January 12, 2001, 12:32

This might sound stupid, but what is a one city or two city challenge?

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"Are you good men and true?" Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene III

Fitz · January 12, 2001, 16:29

If anyone wants a version of Vel's V3 strat guide in Microsoft Word, edited and such, go to the SMAC page in my website:
www.serverofdoom.com/fitz/

Edit: Server of Doom seems to be down right now. Try it later if you're interested.
[This message has been edited by Fitz (edited January 12, 2001).]

Wiglaf · January 12, 2001, 18:23

quote:

Server of Doom seems to be down right now.

quote:

Might be a good place to start from if I do decide to once again expand the guide....

Tell me when to upgrade to broadband

Googlie · January 12, 2001, 18:41

Gregurabi:

It's been updated since you looked. (I put a different version on the site - results in a more compact .doc)

Googlie

[This message has been edited by Googlie (edited January 12, 2001).]

Blake · January 12, 2001, 22:52

quote:

Originally posted by Helium Pond on 01-12-2001 01:06 AM
Blake: I wonder if, by chance, the solar collecter had a forest underneath it? I built a huge energy farm once, and forest spread underneath it, and I realized that the forests were knocking out the effectiveness of my mirrors. You can't build mirrors on top of forest, but unless you put a farm under the mirror, forest can spread under mirrors, effectively "killing" them. Just wondering if that could have been a factor.

I've noticed forests spread under mirrors, I know it reduces the tile to a forest output, but I think it still has the mirror effect. It also seems that you can built bases on mirros and they still act as mirrors. In my game the park was freshly built and there was no forest nearby. I should probably test the territory thing, but I've also found with mirrors and solar panels it sometimes gives you the wrong values for the food/min/energy box which comes up, making tests difficult. In my game when I built a city on my energy park my bases energy output shot up about 50%.

Rynn: · January 13, 2001, 01:02

DogberryMan:

As the name implies, the OCC is to transcend (at transcend level) by building only ever one City - ben done several times, so the challenge became ever more limiting - prototypes only, then only the oroginal scout, then zero facilities, etc.

All in the name of making the game more challenging for the elite players.

the 2CC is, as said, the sdame concept but with 2 bases.

There are many such challenges in the old threads such as the lumberjack challenge (all you can do is build and then cut forests for the 5 mins credit) and the probe challenge (must set your research at 9999 years and steal every tech - no trading allowed either)

They tend to be a lot of fun and certainly make you hone skills that otherwise might be underutilized.

IIRC Vel finished the OCC as the Gaians with one lone mindworm garrison and something like 55 crawlers bringing in the energy needed to purchase transcendence. Easiest factions seem to be gaians, pirates, drones, with miriam being by far the hardest.

Sikander · January 14, 2001, 23:35

Blake,

I think the map in the base screen can only show 8 values of a particular resource, with the highest one being 8+. Thus you have to resort to manually removing the worker or crawler from the square and noting the difference to obtain the production value of those very high production squares.

Blake · January 15, 2001, 04:01

quote:

Blake,

I think the map in the base screen can only show 8 values of a particular resource, with the highest one being 8+. Thus you have to resort to manually removing the worker or crawler from the square and noting the difference to obtain the production value of those very high production squares.

That is true, however the situation I was dealing with my solar park was the solar panels producing 2 naturally (low terrain + uranium flats) and then in theory another +4 from the surronding mirrors, for a expected total of +6, I only got 2 energy, until I built a city in the middle of the park.

Anyway I thought I had better test this, so I made a scenerio with a large flat energy park, half was in my territory and half in neutral territory. The result was that any mirror in your territory increases the output of an adjacant solar panel which is being worked, regardless if the solar panel is in your territory or not. Then the drones were nice enough to build a base next to my park so I tested enemy territory too, mirrors don't work in enemy territory either. I tested this by moving the crawler back and forth over the border, and crawling energy. In entirely neutral/enemy territory the value was 2 energy, in my territory 6 energy. To be sure I also set my SE to +4 effic and cranked energy to 100% and genned a turn to make sure that amount of energy was correctly credited, it was.

So any echlon mirror built in neutral/another players territory does NOT help your solar panels, atleast in SMAX v2. I'm also guessing this is why I thought that sometimes the energy given at the crawler resource select dialoug was inaccurate, because both times I recall it given "wrong" values my park was partly in neutral or pactmate territory.

Aredhran · January 15, 2001, 09:22

Yeah, this is a known "feature" of SMAC. You'll notice that the same behavior also applies to sensors.

It would be nice if such terraforming enhancements worked even if in neutral territory, maybe with an "owner" flag (originally set to the builder, then changed by "capturing" the enhancement by moving a unit on top of it.

Aredhran