Couple of tech/tactics questions

[Mordante]

Hi chaps,

I've recently started playing my first se4 pbem game and a couple of the implications of my race choice are now coming home to roost (16-17 turns in).

How do people rate Crystal tech as a race speciality? - the shard cannons certainly don't look that good on paper, but does the armour-skipping make up for it? Also, are there any advanced crystal combos that make the technology a reasonable alternative to physic or Organic.

Troops-wise; my race has rubbish ground troops but is it possible to win out by pure weight of numbers? What happens when a landing is not opposed by enemy ground troops? How does the racial mod stat actually turn into combat points (does -40% take 40% from weapon damage or from some type of abstract combat total?)

Happiness; my race is peaceful (happiness through treaties and avoiding wars) what kind of balance is good? ie. 2 peaceful relations and 1 war; or does any war damage global happiness. Basically, can you offset the negative happiness factors of a particular war by cultivating lots of peaceful relations elsewhere?

Lastly, ship maintenance, I've noticed some old hands going for ultra low maintenance strats with their ships - is this likely to be some kind of win through superior ship points strategy without needing to fight? Also, is there any tech root to reducing maintenance within the game?

Any answers gratefully received,

Kind Regards

AndyC

[Suicide Junkie]

One of the nifty bonuses with crystal tech is the facility that reduces maintenance on all ships in the system. Combined with the shield-boosting Energy Lens facility, you can have a tough, cheap defence force. Just don't leave the system!

The shard cannons are pretty crappy, unless you're up against organics, but I'd still use the shard missiles unless they go nuts on PDCs. With the 2-turn reload rate on the missiles, plus armor-piercing warhead, you can really hurt the enemy with a stack of sats.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Crystal Armor is useful, too, since the armor regenerates shield points when the armor takes damage.

The Solar Collector facility is most useful in finite resources games, since it only depends on the star(s) in the system, and doesn't reduce the resources on the planet.

As for happiness: build an Urban Pacification Center in every system. (You have to research Psychology, which gives you Applied Political Science; researching Applied Political Science will then give you the Urban Pac Center).

Sheer weight of numbers helps with ground troops; also, try using two types of ground troops. One type uses the "Ground Cannons" found under Troop Weapons. The other type uses the "Small Cluster Bomb" found under Smaller Weapons tech area. Ground Cannon fires every round, for decent damage; Small Cluster Bomb fires once every two rounds for high damage.

[raynor]

quote:

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Lastly, ship maintenance, I've noticed some old hands going for ultra low maintenance strats with their ships - is this likely to be some kind of win through superior ship points strategy without needing to fight? Also, is there any tech root to reducing maintenance within the game?

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In my current game, my opponent has twice as many ships as I do even though we both have the same resource production. The biggest difference between us is that he's paying half as much maintenance and can thus field a much larger fleet than I can.

Right now, it is possible to attain ZERO maintenance by choosing the Merchant Culture which gives you a 5% bonus to maintenance and then setting your Maintenance characteristic to 120%. This puts you at 2500 points. But you can get back down to 2000 by setting Repair Rate to 80%, for example.

Strangely enough, with your maintenance set to 125%, the game thinks your maintenance should be the 25% bonus *minus* the existing maintenance of 25%. Thus, you pay no maintenance at all.

Some folks think that no maintenance isn't worth it--especially in a human vs. human game where your human opponents probably put their points into either faster research or faster production. I, myself, think that zero maintenance would be an overwhelming advantage. It all depends on who you ask.

[Triumvir Emphy]

in the mod area there are several spreadsheets that describe all the tech's including crystal for easy comparison.