Is the Ultrasonic Fence trade protection choice worth taking?

[truth is life]

The conventional wisdom is that the obvious best choice in the building quest you receive for building the Ultrasonic Fence is the one that protects your trade units. After all, the +1 range only protects a fairly small area that you could also clear through military force, whereas your trade units often venture farther forth, to other factions or stations, and through areas where there is no protection against alien attacks.

But lately, I've been wondering. I have never--not even once--had my trade units attacked by aliens in Rising Tide, playing on Vostok and Gemini (but not Soyuz or Apollo), whether before or after I've developed the Ultrasonic Fence, or whether or not I've taken that option. Admittedly, I take every possible effort not to antagonize the hive mind; I never attack aliens or raid nests, even when there are multiple Krakens or Siege Worms wandering through my developed areas and destroying all of my improvements (I use military units to shepard them away, instead). But if you're doing this as well, I wonder whether the +1 range option might not now be better than the trade protection; after all, if they're not going to attack your trade units anyways, discouraging aliens from approaching quite so near your cities and hindering your worker and military units is more of a benefit than adding some suspenders to that belt.

Has anyone else noticed this in Rising Tide, particularly on Soyuz and Apollo? Has it changed their calculus on which option to take?

 

[Ryika]

Pre-Rising Tide: If your Trade Network is entirely internal and your cities are packed closely to each other, AND if you're planning to actually build the fence in every City the second option is clearly superior as it automatically defends all your trade routes as well as keeping Aliens off your lands.

Of course there was little to no reason to really build Fences everywhere and that's the main reason it was mostly a black-and-white issue. The first Choice only requires a single fence for the full effect and that one can even be sold after the quest has triggered (as ALL trade routes are protected, independent from whether there is a Fence in their city of origin). The second choice needs fences everywhere. It's much easier to just keep some soldiers around to deal with potential aliens as you really didn't get punished for killing a few aliens here and there, even if you were trying to be friendly with them.

In Rising Tide: If you're not attacking Aliens at all (not even once) and not pillaging their nests then Aliens will not attack your trade routes (or any other units) even if they pass through them, making the Quest Choice useless (unless of course you want to do so later in the game).

The other choice is okay-ish in that scenario as it gives you the ability to push the aliens out of your territory without actively harming them. Well, if the fence even works at least. More often than not it simply doesn't do anything for me and Aliens continue to wander in and out of my territory at will. Although that seems to change when I load a savegame, so maybe that's just a bug. Not sure why they even changed the Fence-Functionality in the first place though, it worked fine mechanically. Looked a bit silly to have all Aliens be pushed away at once, but still.

 

[g02703]

My trade units always get attacked by aliens if I didn't choose that Minimize Ultrasonic Fence option, so I always choose that trade-protecting option.

In RT, aliens are only discouraged from entering your Ultrasonic Fence radius, and even with that building, they still (quite often) end up adjacent to that city, so the +1 UF radius doesn't really help.

Be aware, though, that even when you chose that trade-protecting perk, they can still be attacked by aliens if the aliens' status against you is red.

 

[DWilson]

Unfortunately in RT they nerfed the UF by making it a non-absolute. Considering it wasn't very useful for anything other than trade routes before, this was a very bizarre decision.

 

[truth is life]

It's much easier to just keep some soldiers around to deal with potential aliens as you really didn't get punished for killing a few aliens here and there, even if you were trying to be friendly with them.

Really? I thought that there was a 'special' behavior that kicked in when you hadn't killed any where they would never attack you (except for Settlers) even if you got close to their nests. That's what it seemed like to me, although I admit I didn't do a scientific test.

Regardless, I found the Ultrasonic Fence useful for dealing with Siege Worms early in the game, since I never seemed to have units that could realistically beat one when they first started showing up and they wreak havoc on the infrastructure and, quite honestly, I tend to play a SimCity peaceful development game instead of warmongering, so I rarely have much more of a military than I need to deter AI attack and escort settlers. With the +1 range, it was impossible for Siege Worms to enter any of a city's worked tiles, so Workers could spend their time working instead of fixing damaged infrastructure, and I didn't need to keep large armies around (in the low tech levels) to deal with Worms. Krakens are almost worse nowadays, but of course the Ultrasonic Fence isn't quite so effective now that they can actually destroy infrastructure...

The other choice is okay-ish in that scenario as it gives you the ability to push the aliens out of your territory without actively harming them. Well, if the fence even works at least. More often than not it simply doesn't do anything for me and Aliens continue to wander in and out of my territory at will.

I've definitely noticed an effect in my current playthrough. Although I've been playing Supremacy (I like the Supremacy military the best), I've been buddy-buddy with the aliens as I mentioned above, with multiple cities in close proximity to alien nests, besides a generally large number of aliens being around (I've noticed this in all of my Rising Tide games; there are lots and lots of aliens all over the place). When my bases don't have Ultrasonic Fences there are usually a huuuuuge number of aliens wandering around the place, which makes worker actions rather difficult (less because they're attacking and more because they're getting in the way), whereas when they do have Ultrasonic Fences there usually aren't more than one or two hanging around at any given time. The frequency of Kraken and Siege Worm 'invasions' also seems to be lower, though I am less certain that this is an effect of the Ultrasonic Fences per se (they seem to wander away and disappear after a time, usually...though in my current game I had two Siege Worms wandering around my capital for, quite literally, hundreds of turns--it was Marathon--which was very annoying. I was able to herd them away with a few infantry units, though).

Overall I find them to be a very useful piece of infrastructure, so it surprises me that you and other people do not. The upkeep cost usually isn't much of an issue for me (and especially wasn't in this particular game, since I was going very energy-heavy--the thought was that, playing Al Falah, getting lots of energy was really good so that I could keep my cities on Development as much as possible, buying buildings instead of building them. Plus it was a very oceanic map, so I needed lots of energy for tile-buying), though the production build cost can be...

 

[Dargov]

In the current version, I find the best way to keep aliens away is to leash the ones that get close once you have the ability. Before then, I tend to simply build walls of military units or take the Might talents to help/utilise alien hunting if I'm in a high alien area.

I still take the Trade Units can't be attacked ability out of habit, but I typically send trade routes that I can defend since I tend to be in a cold war with some scrub AI most of the game to improve my relations with the others (I play on Apollo). In my current play through I'm not sure
I've even built a single fence.

I think now like many things in BE:RT, its a lot better balance. You have 3 choices:

A) Don't build fences at all (hammers go elsewhere)
B) Take the trade route defending choice if you are initially peaceful with aliens, have them all over your territory before you start exterminating>
C) If you need to keep aliens out of particular areas, build fences and improve their radius.

 

[Syrkres]

I almost exclusively use the Trade protection because I was always losing trade units to aliens. I rarely have cities next to each other rather trying to place them strategically instead. And would often lose lots of trade units.

Note: I don't think u need fence in every city to protect all your trade units, as I often only have 1 in my capital. (could be wrong though).

 

[Question]

The trade route choice is a no brainer because you only need one fence.

Since you can get artifacts from pillaging nests, its beneficial to pillage nests rather than keep them around and spawn potentially hostile aliens.

Its pretty easy to de-populate your territory of nests after you get marines and above.