precharged engineers???
- Thread starter boychuk
- Start date
Put a Settler or Engineer to work on something, but "wake them up" before they are finished. The number of turns of work are "stored" with them and will transfer to whatever job they are next assigned to. You need to keep track of which Set/Eng has how many turns of work saved, and also know how long different kinds of things take (roads, RR, bridging, forts, etc). The longest job seems to be terraforming a Mtn into a Hill, which takes 30 Eng turns.
There is also a way to use more than 2 Set/Eng to accomplish a job in one turn, but you have to move them in one at a time, set them to work, then wake the bottom working one so that only two are working at a time. Look around for a better description thread.
There is also a way to use more than 2 Set/Eng to accomplish a job in one turn, but you have to move them in one at a time, set them to work, then wake the bottom working one so that only two are working at a time. Look around for a better description thread.
Alice
Warlord
wow, I didn't know engineers could do that. Is this a normal practice, or is it considered cheating?
la fayette
King
Normal practice (IMO)
funxus
Orange Cycloptic Blob
Normal practice here as well, but it's too tedious and too easy for me to screw up to bother with 1-turn transformations (or 2 or 3 turns).
funxus
Orange Cycloptic Blob
Nethog's Reference Pack IIRC. It contains a lot of what you need...
la fayette
King
boychuk,
Read this:
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20497
(anything you might ask about settlers and engineers)
Read this:
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20497
(anything you might ask about settlers and engineers)
AGRICOLA
Warlord
COMBAT ENGINEERS --- NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM
I prefer to use the term Combat Engineers (CE) rather than the cumbersome "pre-charged engineers" (Sappers or Seabees would do equally well). I have found them absolutely essential for major offensives or Blitzkrieg, both for their offensive and defensive capabilities. They let me "stretch" the available engineers by enabling a single CE to do the work of two or more regular engineering units and to do it at once.
Offensively, CE units make it possible to immediately build a road on river terrain or change a road to a RR on any kind of terrain. For example, if there already is a road through forest, hills, river valley or any other difficult terrain, it takes at least two turns to build a RR no matter how many regular engineer units you stack. With CE units you can immediately build the RR needed to get your attack units to the objective without loss of movement points.
Once you have finished the attack phase, you will almost certainly have stacks of immobile, damaged attack units outside cities. If you use CE's to build fortresses for these stacks, put one or two units with high defensive values in them and park a bomber on top, then your vulnerable damaged units can only be attacked by enemy fighters and cannot all be wiped out by a single, successful enemy attack. In situations where a strong enemy reaction is likely, I have used CE's to transform the terrain to forest in order to give the stacked units an additional 50% defensive bonus.
A few general suggestions about CE. Sort out the ins and outs of stacking engineer units for "charging" to get one CE unit with 2 charges and one engineer unit with no charges in a single turn. During charge accumulation, park the units on a railroad to avoid loss of movement allowance when they are moved to where they are needed. Also, order them to Transform Terrain rather Mine or Irrigate to minimize chances that they can complete the task before you want to use them. Before saving the game or ending a turn, center the map screen well away from the area where the CE are in preparation by clicking on another of your units or cities. When a saved game is re-loaded or the next turn begins, the first units the computer will "process" tend to be those on the map screen. You don't want any "processing" before you get a chance to activate any CE units you want to use.
I prefer to use the term Combat Engineers (CE) rather than the cumbersome "pre-charged engineers" (Sappers or Seabees would do equally well). I have found them absolutely essential for major offensives or Blitzkrieg, both for their offensive and defensive capabilities. They let me "stretch" the available engineers by enabling a single CE to do the work of two or more regular engineering units and to do it at once.
Offensively, CE units make it possible to immediately build a road on river terrain or change a road to a RR on any kind of terrain. For example, if there already is a road through forest, hills, river valley or any other difficult terrain, it takes at least two turns to build a RR no matter how many regular engineer units you stack. With CE units you can immediately build the RR needed to get your attack units to the objective without loss of movement points.
Once you have finished the attack phase, you will almost certainly have stacks of immobile, damaged attack units outside cities. If you use CE's to build fortresses for these stacks, put one or two units with high defensive values in them and park a bomber on top, then your vulnerable damaged units can only be attacked by enemy fighters and cannot all be wiped out by a single, successful enemy attack. In situations where a strong enemy reaction is likely, I have used CE's to transform the terrain to forest in order to give the stacked units an additional 50% defensive bonus.
A few general suggestions about CE. Sort out the ins and outs of stacking engineer units for "charging" to get one CE unit with 2 charges and one engineer unit with no charges in a single turn. During charge accumulation, park the units on a railroad to avoid loss of movement allowance when they are moved to where they are needed. Also, order them to Transform Terrain rather Mine or Irrigate to minimize chances that they can complete the task before you want to use them. Before saving the game or ending a turn, center the map screen well away from the area where the CE are in preparation by clicking on another of your units or cities. When a saved game is re-loaded or the next turn begins, the first units the computer will "process" tend to be those on the map screen. You don't want any "processing" before you get a chance to activate any CE units you want to use.
la fayette
King
Very good summary, AGRICOLA!
XinYu developped (long ago) a method which allows the use of multiple engineers for finishing any job in ONE turn, but that method is rather complicated and if you make one mistake, you spoil the whole work.
IMO it must be stressed that it is very easy to precharge an engineer with several turns' work and, if you use 2 of these, you can achieve about any task in one turn.
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