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[Il Palazzo]

Oh, mine is a chad too. Cap III only, but he's been with me since the very start. I think he's got all the char modifiers there are.
But while the previous minors had ~100 relations, these two have ~50. So that makes much more of a difference than I suspected.

ed: 'mine a chad is too' :/ It's getting late, I'm forgetting how to write coherent sentences.

[Karlito]

Q: what does air SHQ do? Just provide combat bonuses from the commander, or is there some logistics side to it like with the regular ones? Like, is there any reason to plonk it near the front lines as opposed to somewhere safe?

Re: Air OHQ, to the best of my knowledge proximity doesn't matter, although it might. More generally it serves as an OHQ for all the units attached, with the normal bonuses and such, but it also allows for the development of some skills that are air-command specific, and that your SHQ commander will never get or apply (Ground Attack, Air Logistics, etc.)

For the record, Air Units do appear to have an HQ Power stat that decreases if you move the Air HQ far away from them- which affects how strongly commander bonuses apply. This is how regular OHQs work too- I don't remember them having an effect on logistics.

[E. Albright]

I suppose there's no harm in linking this utter tool's social media profile:

Spoiler: He's a regular Apollo (click to show/hide)

His lower capability has meant he's a lot slower to reach his potential, but 41 Charisma is respectable enough that I was willing to stick with the primadonna from turn 1 onwards. He's been slow to develop, but he's gotten to a pretty imposing level of swag.

[Il Palazzo]

For the record, Air Units do appear to have an HQ Power stat that decreases if you move the Air HQ far away from them- which affects how strongly commander bonuses apply. This is how regular OHQs work too- I don't remember them having an effect on logistics.

Yeah, makes sense. That question was again me not doing my due diligence in checking the basics. See, I thought Air OHQs were actually Air SHQs.

I suppose there's no harm in linking this utter tool's social media profile:

That's pretty much identical to my guy:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Cap II, not III.

[Il Palazzo]

Spoiler: You maniacs. You blew it up. Damn you. God damn you all to hell (click to show/hide)

Seriously, though. Talk about underwhelming. I saw your GR nuke and was picturing a nuclear holocaust of my precious armies. But it really is a one off attack with just the stats it has listed. 900 hard and 700 soft attack is not much, really. Killed nothing, and added a measly 200 rads to the hex. On our world that's considered a healthy minimum.

[E. Albright]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting much but I hoped for at least something. That was sad even by Hellraiser standards. Your hulking, lumbering mutant infantry probably mistook it for an express-delivered care package full of extra spicy bonbons.

[Il Palazzo]

Heavy battledress already? And here I was happy with finally rolling out heavy combat armour.

[E. Albright]

So funny story. My corp has been nagging me to give them 50-60PP so they can share a technology for like 10-15 turns now. It got to the point where I had 3 of them stacked up. So finally three turns ago I go ahead and play one. Mining Robotization. Okay, not terrible (I've got some trash techs I skipped that I dreaded seeing pop up), but it's not gonna make a real difference. Next turn, you start pushing me back with your hobmobs, and I'm feeling a bit more desperate, so I play an extra PP stratagem to be able to use the second one. And here we are.

I've had mixed luck with free tech this game - I was super-excited to get Demetalization early, but it ended up being a dud b/c I didn't have the machines or high-tech to actually build them. Power banks we already discussed. My third Archive strat gave me Jetpacks - not bad per se, but not really great and quite expensive. My corp gave me two free discoveries as well, and I got fairly lucky to get linear techs with them so they were instantly useful, but they weren't linear techs I actually needed - I only got personal armor and small arms optimization recently, which is why your troops tower like titans over my higher-tech ones. I want to use my corp's last free completed tech card, but at this point, I'm sorta afraid I'll be paying 60PP for Gas-Powered Small Arms, Methane Synthesis, Volcano Tapping, etc. I'm certainly due for some karmic payback with my tech RNG. OTOH, the chance it'll give me something I can actually use to keep from being overrun is probably too important for me to say no to, even if it means some hard PP tradeoffs...

[Il Palazzo]

Damn, corps can give such nice boons? Should have kept them happier.

As good as my applied science sensei is at making ok troops better than ok, grinding 1.7k hitpoints on every infantryman is going to be a different story.

ed: and here I was wondering why my shitty fighters don't even try to die in some dogfights with ostensibly better planes. Turns out one needs to hit 'update' after setting the intercept readiness. :/

[E. Albright]

I think the outcome of this war is already clear, though my desperate scrabble to get parity via tech may at least drag it out for long enough that it's interesting. Or maybe not; quantity has its own quality, and you've definitely got that on me, probably by an order of magnitude.

I'm suspicious that the rebellion I played way back on turn 35 really was what will ultimately kill me - that 10-turn delay chasing rebels around my capital instead of getting 3 more cities is probably the difference b/tw me being prepared to repulse your offense when it came out of the mountains, and the current grim comedy we're seeing. And if that didn't do it, my catastrophic logistics error on turn 66 that made me lose 15-20k troops to starvation over the next two turns is also a pretty good candidate for a death blow, even if I'm still stubbornly stumbling along...

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, I've been thinking this might be not enough of an equal match to keep it fun. Let me know if you want to call the game dead on arrival and start deliberating over the corpse.
In any case, I'm done for tonight.

[E. Albright]

We can do a few more turns, certainly. If nothing else, I do want to see if the final gift from Zimmer Corps is actually enough to even slow down the hobo train. Pretty sure it's too little, too late. Probably the only thing they could have given me that'd've actually changed the outcome of the war would have been ICBM tech, and this wasn't that.

[EuchreJack]

I had a game where I thought that I was going to utterly crush my enemy. And I did, for a time. Then one of their infantry units had Combat Armor, and I didn't even have Padded Environmental Suits. There was literally nothing I could do to that unit.

Granted, this was a small lunar moon, and we both only had basically one city, and it was much earlier. But tech properly applied can be quite powerful.

... it's also reasonably easy to trade bodies and land for time in this game. Even absolute garbage units usually take a whole turn to eliminate, and usually something survives to hold land next turn. But I'm no colossus like you folks.

[Il Palazzo]

Tech disparity can help, sure. But we're sort of already towards the best possible advantage for the defender - personal armour-wise at least. It's definitely harder to find weak spots in the line with every turn. But they're there, because there's only so many good-tech troops one can afford with a given economy (and the shittier, cheaper troops are not really worth the expense). I have been enjoying better economy, which leads to better economy, which lets me afford more of everything.

Still, I think the best advantage I'm leveraging here is the +65% from fanaticism. Possibly its various attack-improving unit feats too. The combat results are decidedly one-sided, despite often similar stats.
While I haven't closed, let alone rolled up a single pocket yet, coping with replacements from the sheer combat attrition must be taking its toll on EA's industrial capacity.

This is the first game I've ever managed to get fist profile that high, too.

Btw, boy do those offensives suck up supplies.

[E. Albright]

Yup. The big problem is that to get one subunit of HBD troops, I have to spend 2 machines - that's the exact industrial bottleneck. There's also some straight-up logistic bottlenecks where I made the mistake of doing a recruiting stratagem somewhere where only a trickle of the troops recruited can make it to my SHQ - if I'd've sucked it up and done it in my capital, having an extra 30k troops on hand would have made a big difference instead of the current trickle I'm getting from distant parts.

As you imply above, what it's coming down to is really the stereotypical thing for a high-tech power fighting a motivated lower-tech opponent: every casualty is hugely painful for me, and every tiny mistake I make is multiplied many times over. Forex, I'm currently kicking myself for wasting 2 turns researching missiles - I'm suspicious I'll never actually deploy any at this rate, and getting my research goal after them 2 turns later will very possibly be a matter of literal life or death for my regime.

I think this screenshot demonstrates the desperation of my position nicely: