Fun With Industrial Sabotage: Your Guide To Beating Civ
J. M. Pescado:
The key to success in the Civ stage is purpose-built vehicles. While most vehicles are just randomly distributed between health/power/speed, often biased towards health because installing structural parts for aesthetic mounting will skew your vehicle massively towards health, I design special, purpose-build vehicles. When starting the Civ stage, *ALWAYS* use a vehicle that is 100% speed! This will give you a mostly unarmed, easily destroyed vehicle capable of a speed of 45, allowing you to zip across the continent and claim all the spice resources before your opponents know what hit them. Afterwards, you can speed your vehicles over to the enemy base and convert them to a health/power only vehicle, a Siege Brick, and pummel the hell out of them with guns/armor only unit (that cannot really move, but who cares, you're already there). All vehicles switched convert retroactively to the new vehicle at no cost.
What makes this MORE interesting is that the AI never switches its vehicle, so if your game, like mine, is full of specialty vehicles, the game's willful desire to show you your own creations combined with the fact that your own creations are utter crap when used as a general-purpose vehicle will basically cause the AI to footbullet himself as he tries to invade you with flaggers and gets mowed down in 5 seconds by a single turret without causing any damage, or simply cannot reach your city at all because he's trying to invade you with siegebricks that move at a pitiful snail's pace, taking literally 10 minutes to reach you, by which time you've taken his city out from under him.
On request, I can include a sampling of these sabotage/specialty vehicles, but mostly, they're not designed to look cool.
witch:
Yes please, I've just been opting for Maxis vehicles with high hit points. I'm not into designing vehicles and I certainly don't care what they look like.
Gus Smedstad:
The early snatch is definitely worthwhile. I typically go for 40% health / 40% attack / 20% speed for my post-grab units. Having some speed is of value because you may want to add reinforcements to an ongoing assault.
For Econ vehicles, the post-snatch vehicle's value is a product of its strength x speed. So you really want something more like 20% / 40% / 40%. Or even more extreme for boats or planes, which don't need to worry about getting snagged by wildlife.
If you can, you want to go all-naval. Naval units are stronger and have longer range than either air or land, and you get the same number of unit slots regardless of type.
The relationship between stats and percentages is not linear. Compare these two military land vehicles:
Name HP% ATK% Speed% HP ATK Speed HP/% ATK/% Speed/%
Spy Hunter 15% 5% 80% 240 12 37 16 2.4 0.46
Pkzw V 53% 29% 18% 467 21 12 8.8 0.7 0.67
At some point I may try reverse-engineering the equations converting percentages to real values, but I suspect that there's a lot of slop in them, because Maxis had to know there would be a lot of people playing vehicles more for looks than stats.
- Gus
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 October 04, 14:13:35
The early snatch is definitely worthwhile. I typically go for 40% health / 40% attack / 20% speed for my post-grab units. Having some speed is of value because you may want to add reinforcements to an ongoing assault.
If you want to add reinforcements to an ongoing assault, just retrofit to something that can move again. Otherwise, remain in siegebrick form.
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 October 04, 14:13:35
For Econ vehicles, the post-snatch vehicle's value is a product of its strength x speed. So you really want something more like 20% / 40% / 40%. Or even more extreme for boats or planes, which don't need to worry about getting snagged by wildlife.
I have begun to have uncertainty that the strength of an econ vehicle even matters, because I was able to take a city nearly as quickly with scoutwagons. However, the econ strength may improve the actual money earned by a traderoute...but possibly not the buyout time. More experimentation is required to confirm this.
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 October 04, 14:13:35
If you can, you want to go all-naval. Naval units are stronger and have longer range than either air or land, and you get the same number of unit slots regardless of type.
Naval is limiting because A: You can't reliably start with them, and B: By the time you get access to them, it may lack relevance to the situation.
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2008 October 04, 14:13:35
The relationship between stats and percentages is not linear. Compare these two military land vehicles:
Name HP% ATK% Speed% HP ATK Speed HP/% ATK/% Speed/%
Spy Hunter 15% 5% 80% 240 12 37 16 2.4 0.46
Pkzw V 53% 29% 18% 467 21 12 8.8 0.7 0.67
Actually, the relationship *IS* linear.
Compare the following: (Military Land)
Speed%SpeedAbsolute0%515%1130%1745%2360%2975%3590%41100%45As we can, see, for a vehicle (all vehicles respond the same to speed%), speed of the resulting vehicle is equal to 0.4X + 5, where X = Speed%. This is indeed a linear equation.
Each point of Health (all vehicles also respond the same to Health) is likewise:
Health%HP0%15015%24030%33075%600100%750From this, we determine that health is 6X + 150, also a linear equation.
Designing a vehicle for 100% power is impossible, as no hull component offers a null adjustment to health/speed, meaning anything you can add will force hull/speed%, so 100% power can only be approached asymptotically. However this table:
Power%PowerAbs0%1015%1630%2260%3490%46..makes it clear we are dealing with a linear equation again, which appears to be 0.4X + 10. All vehicles respond likewise. Military vehicles inflict Power damage per shot. The relationship is unclear for religious and economic vehicles. Rate of fire is constant regardless of power.
Therefore, here is our results
Vehicle TypeHealthEquationPowerEquationSpeedEquationCOSTLAND6X + 1500.4X + 100.4X + 5$1000SEA8X + 2000.6X + 150.4X + 5$1500AIR6X + 1500.4X + 100.8X + 10$3000As we can see from above, a sea vehicle is, cost-benefitwise, roughly equal or inferior to a land vehicle (We figure that sea vehicles are roughly 2/3 as fast when dealing with initial expansion, as a sea vehicle must traverse the a 180-degree arc of your landmass, while a land vehicle traverses only the diameter) when used for initial expansion, if you start with a coastal city. In addition, for your starting money, you may purchase 3 land vehicles, but only 2 sea vehicles. While sea vehicles have greater range than land vehicles (the exact numbers are unknown) and can outrange city defense turrets, thus enabling them to bombard with impunity, their AI is quite stupid and they tend not to effectively use this ability. Furthermore, two sea vehicles does not constitute an invasion force, and is definitely not worth the price of giving up all the land-based spice wells because sea vehicles cannot capture any of them! Choosing to split your investment is a poor deal as well, as your starting $3000, if split, buys you two vehicles only: A single boat, and a single additional ground unit, with an unspendable $500 left in your pocket.
Air vehicles are, of course, completely cost-inferior in all respects, costing 3x as much as a land vehicle and 2x as much as a sea vehicle, and are unable to capture anything. However, they are faster and able to fight in all terrains, and furthermore, their requirement of 4 cities to even build one necessitates the domination of your starting continent first anyway (It would be foolish to antagonize enemies on an entirely different continent before having finished mopping up yours!). By the time you can build them, you have probably exhausted the utility of land vehicles anyway (there are no transports, so you cannot move land vehicles over the sea, and should therefore disband them all and switch to sea or air vehicles, but then sea vehicles again lose their utility once you take all the enemy's coastal cities), and can easily afford their cost-inefficiencies.
Lots of fancy math I don't have time for can now be used to determine the perfect ratio of health to power in a military vehicle for all combat situations.
Fat D:
tankrush and planerush are fun again. With speciality bombers, you can have a bzzzzt -> boom effect
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