Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Patchy on April 23, 2014, 04:12:55 pm

Actually, as a big builder type player here. If you wait to build your army till someone is knocking on your door, you're doin it wrong. Against the ai you can do that, but against another player, you're in serious trouble. A builders best friend other than crawlers are clean reactors, abuse them. A builder should have one of the biggest armies out there since they aren't tossing them into numerous wars. Think beehive, disturb it and here comes swarms of military. This is especially true of morgan and any of the pacifistic builder factions, since as a builder you are generally seen as a plump easy target. You better be prepare to prove them wrong.

Problem is, you'll likely just end up with a bunch of low-morale obsolete garrisons facing off against a high-morale vetaran army with the best equipment available. Gods forbid you're facing Yang or Domai. You've got to flood the sky with needlejets.

You say that like the builder never upgrades anything at all. xP

It takes only a few minutes to design a new set of units using the new weapons/armour/chassis/reactor tech you discovered. And then you just go change out military bases to produce the newer stuff instead. Yes, you end up with lots of obsolete stuff, but also some middle of the road stuff and some up to date stuff. And you can also upgrade the older equipment if needed, or it can be used to slow down or weaken enemy units for your uptodate stuff. There is a certain quality in quantity as well. And it won't take long for the builder to spit out new troops either while the enemy slogs through all your old units. By their very nature they have a well developed industrial and economic capacity as well.

Yup, and you'll get wealth values when you finish beelining for supply crawlers. And you are making a point to beeline to them right? They are game breakers.

Use probes and probe foils to scout and go green if you have to go to war. -5 police isn't as bad as most people think it is. Annoying yes.

Heh, those AI morganites are gonna get creamed. They have a so very unfriendly mix of possible neighbors in there for them.

A pack animal caravan will still show up even if no depot is accessable at the time. I've accidently forgot to leave the drawbridges down on more occasions than I can recall to testify to this with.

I don't remember the exact stuff in the raws I had to change, though i do remember having to shrink the eggs to get them to hatch. And yes only the married women could lay fertil eggs. Took me a couple tries to get it to work.

I had a seperate hatchery burrow that only the moms were allowed in, and a normal fortress burrow that didn't include the hatchery. Nothing too complicated. The locked doors were just an extra layer of control should I have needed it.

Alright it has been more than a few years since I've played smac/x and thus the Data Angels faction. Like all, in the hands of a human they can be effective.

If I had to compare them to another factions style of play, it'd be a mix of Morgan and Lal. Like Lal, Roze has no real weaknesses, she is merely average at everything except probe teams where she is above average. A good Lal, has to be good at reading the opponents strategy and adjusting his to counter, and likewise Roze needs to be too. She doesn't have the raw strength to overpower the other factions at what they do best, she is more about the finesse. And in order to use probes effectively, she needs credits and lots of them. So a playstyle based around hitting FM early and maintaining it, with exception to a few certain times(planned for pop-booming and green for wartime), is key for her and Morgan. Mind you Morgan doesn't have planned for pop-booming.

She does have a few specials worth noting, she has an intrinsic planatary datalinks built into her faction, get out and infiltrate everyone and you are gaurenteed a tie in 3rd place for tech lvl. Also when you get the tech to allow covert ops centers to be built, she gets them free in each base. The +2 faction bonus combines with the +2 ops center giving your bases an intrinsic hunter seeker algorithm through superior probe rating, thats just for your bases though, units in the field can still be bought if I recall.

I'm going to end this here, before this becomes a huge write-up on the data angels.

I experimented with an egg-laying civ awhile back. You needed those locked doors + burrows with an egg laying civ. Otherwise your female half of the population would essentially be useless as they'd do nothin but sit on nestboxes, while occasionally leaving to eat/drink/sleep only. It also made it a bit more annoying to run an egg industry for food, as you needed seperate burrows for that and only your males could be allowed in to collect eggs.

As for actually getting kids, it worked. The moms would leave the nestboxes to eat/drink/sleep but would come back afterwards and the *egg(s) would still hatch. Granted sometimes they wouldn't and I never did figure out why that'd happen.

*Armok help you if you were silly enough to make them lay a large number of eggs(copied croc raws) and you get 50+ children in 1 go.