Preparing for a possible invasion.

[General_W]

We need a lot of extra workers if we are going for Advanced Flight next.

Not really.... as long as our EWS is in place, we can wait till we see the enemy armada, then start building Radar Towers along the threatened coastline.
No need to do it ahead of time, really.

We won't even have time to redeploy bombers. I can see now how cruise missiles would not be much help. Those cities slated to make missiles would be better of doing two turn bombers.

I'm not sure that trading 11 Cruise Missiles for ~6 bombers is that good of a trade.
If the name of the game is: "sink as many ships as possible before they can land" - then our money is better spent on ships.

Now that I've slept on it - I think our priorities should be:

1. Modern Armor
2. Subs
3. Destroyers

I'm not sure we really need to build anymore bombers or any missiles.

Just think about it - every sub that can attack direct at a transport can take up to 6 units to the bottom with it. It's kind of like a Cruise missile that can be deployed out to sea with a range of 5 that can also choose it's target.

It seems to me like it might very well be worth the money to build an enormous fleet of those?

I just think any invasion fleet is going to come underneath a huge stack of defending naval units... I doubt our bombers will ever be able to do enough damage to sink even a single ship out of an uber Naval SOD.
We've got to have a way to bypass the defenders and get at the transports underneath.

 

[Niklas]

Just think about it - every sub that can attack direct at a transport can take up to 6 units to the bottom with it. It's kind of like a Cruise missile that can be deployed out to sea with a range of 5 that can also choose it's target.

... but can't be quickly redeployed from one side of our continent to another at the first sign of danger. Not that we have any other unit that's better...

If Cruise Missiles had range 6, I would say build build build. But they don't, and thus they're pretty useless to us. The fact that they are one-shot doesn't make much of a difference - our Subs likely are too...

I agree with the priorities listed. MAs > Subs > Destroyers > any other units.

 

[General_W]

... but can't be quickly redeployed from one side of our continent to another at the first sign of danger. Not that we have any other unit that's better...

exactly.

Still - that's why we're building the Modern Armor!
Much better to face 1 invasion force than 2.

 

[peter grimes]

Much better to face 1 invasion force than 2.

...Which makes me wonder...

If I were Free, I'd be talking to Saber right now about how to handle The Council. I'd try to arrange a joint strike designed not to eliminate, but to injure. Raze two or three core cities, then retreat. The Council would still be 'in the game', but no longer a serious threat for number one.

The question then becomes: Is such an arrangement possible, and if Yes, then how do we throw a wrench into the works?

 

[Yilar]

If I was free I would research synt fibers, upgrade all existing tanks (with leo its only 30 gold) and then launch a massive attack on the council. Remember Saber is strong and can upgrade tanks to modern armors next turn. Actually i'm more worried about saber breaking their deal with us and attacking us shortly with their mass modern armor stack.

 

[Paul#42]

Those two are likely facing this problem: They cannot trust each other.

Whoever invests a large force to "cripple" us, falls behind the other. A joint venture might fail badly, if any of these two does not invest the force they had agreed on.

If I was one of them I'd try to quickly attack the other and rather face The Council later.

But after all this game has been far away from my rational thinking several times...


And we should be aware that our subs won't sink many units but just destroy the end of a ship chain (if they are smart).
But we would certainly feel better if we assumed to do much damage...

 

[PrinceMyshkin]

Thanks, donsig and Paul for the tips on tile assignments. Many of these were implemented though we didn't have enough workers to accomplish all just yet. More suggestions are always welcome, here.

I agree with the general consensus of modern armor>subs>destroyers, but also feel that an airforce is going to be important. Two towns are still on jet and bomber duty for now and are building vets with airports. Jets will be very useful on SCI for air superioty as we already know Saber has an airforce and carriers. Jets tear bombers up pretty good in my experience. Also, when bombing a fleet that has carriers a few jets can bomb first and shoot down any jets they may have to defend against our bombers. Then the bombers come in and less jets are left for defense to shoot them down. We need something to soften any stacks that may land after our EWS gives us a turn warning and our bombers can be rebased to do this the turn they land. We can't afford to have towns building artillery and cruise missiles as well, I'm afraid, to handle this job and neither are effective at defending SCI.

Saber doesn't need to break a deal with us to attack as our peace treaty officially expired this turn after they gave notice of cancelling it already.

I know from Gong and reading tech trade history here at the Council that Saber never traded luxuries with Free nor any techs. It's difficult to believe this has changed now and they feel the need to cooperate against us. Saber is also only two techs behind and is still in the race for space to an extent if they wish and should be worried more about Free. I agree with Paul, they must protect against each other, but also fear that much has not been rational this game already. Maybe Free or Saber feels they can attack two civs at once?

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think the limited range of cruise missles make them pretty unuseful for ship operations - they can't reach the end of the zone...

 

[Hasdrubal Barca]

1. We got airports, not need to waste workers to having airfields the enemy can capture and use.
2. Lets face it, if a sub attacks it will most likely die the following turn, but not before sinking the transport with its selectiv attack.
3. Only when your people ain't rioting, if free or saber should break war we would riot like crazy and drafting would be impossible.
4. We are doing "barricades", no need to build "useless" forests that decrease our production.
5. Yes, but ain't we already doing that?
6. Artillery generally sucks against real players and would be foolish to use in our sitiuation. I think PrinceMyshkin can back me up on this, Free brought artillery (instead of tanks) with them, only for us to capture and use against them

Against enemy bombers i´d say Mobile SAM is also pretty good stuff, at least 2 to protect our Advanced Armor units.


1.Airports are way too expensive and we could be building other things and can be bombed into oblivion, Airfields are cheap and can´t die to bombing
2.Destroyers and Cruisers have gretaer movement and on sea that is essential...hit and run...but i´d get a few subs also...
3.Over-limit metro drafting wouldn´t make us riot and would provide cheap mech inf from time to time.
4.Barricades can be bombed into oblivion, forests cannot...
5. By long distance recon flight i meant right over their core/heads to have a feeling of what type/quantity of units we will be facing.
6. Artillery is good against an invasion force or to be used in a defensive role, 4 arts in a stack are deadly aganist an enemy attack i´m not saying to build 50 arts, half a dozen will do the trick and provide for a more variety of options, hell, build it on high corrupt cities.

 

[Paul#42]

1. Airports are usefull to build veteran air units, Airfields cost a worker and I recall they destroy the tile improvements.
2. Destroyers and Cruisers cannot chose their aims so they'd be useless against highly stacked convoys.
3. Over-limit metro drafting would give us (long-term!) unhappyness. Some metros are already close to balanced happyness.
4. forests provide one food, and no extra shield through Railroads.
5. You mean by the top vet Mech Inf in the capital you can derive what's gonna launch the attack on our coast? impressive...
6. anything an Artillery can do, a Modern Armor does a lot better. At the same upkeep cost. And with defense ability.

 

[Yilar]

I finally got civ installed again (new computer), so I ran the "same" numbers from earlier, but instead of building what I consider rather useless units I prioritzed armors.

Based on the turn 226 (not including any changes already made), I predict we can make this by turn 238 with some micro:

City		Build/turns	Made in 12 turns	   notes
Institute	  Mech/1	   12 Mech 
The Treasury	  Armor/1	   12 Armor		
The Chamber	  Armor/1	   12 Armor		
Gulag	          Armor/1	   12 Armor  	
Silo	          Armor/2	    6 Armor   		1 turn left
Admiralty	  Armor/2	    6 Armor   		1 turn left
Arboretum	  Armor/2           5 Armor   		1 turn left
Aerie	          Armor/2	    6 Armor   		1 turn left
Igloo	          Jets/2	    1 Bomber and 5 jets	   
Meeting Room	  Destroyer/3	    4 Destroyers 	1 turn left
Bayou	          Destroyer/4	    3 destroyers 	3 turns left
Pier	          Destroyer/4       3 destroyers 	3 turns left
Marina	          Destroyer/8	    2 Destroyers    
Red Tape	  Sub/4		    3 subs		
New Yard	  Sub/5	            2 subs 		2 turns left
Phoenix	          Sub/6	            2 subs 		5 turns left
Ways	          Sub/8	            1 sub 		3 turns left
Nursery	          Sub/10	    1 sub 		5 turns left
Chamsuri's Cove	  Sub/9             1 sub 		3 turns left
Beach	          Sub/15	    0 subs 		2 turns left

Here's the totals:

Unit	     Total
Mech inf      12
Armors	      59
Bombers	       1
Jets           5
Destroyers    12
subs          10
	
total	      99

Which would bring up our total units to:

Unit	        Total
Workers 	 14(not including slaves)
Marines		  4
Tanks		  7
Mechs		 50	
Armors		 59	
Transports	  2
Carrier		  1
Subs		 17
Destroyers	 20
Battleships	  3
Bombers		 12
Jets		 17
Cruisers	  5
Total:	 	211 after disbanding the 3 guerillas

Btw I realized something else while looking at the save. We have loads and loads of unused water tiles, but we don't have a worker farm to create workers to join

Also maybe we should consider switching a few of the destroyer/subs builds over to cruisers to upgrade later, we will be quite limited economical by our huge army soon.

 

[General_W]

Why so many Mech Infantry? Certainly those shields would be better as Modern Armor.

And I think your plan is WAY to lite on Submarines.

If Saber/FREE lands a stack of Modern Armor on our shores, one of our tanks has a 66% chance to kill each one (at full health)

A submarine has a 95% chance to kill 6 tanks (on board a transport)

This is a classic no-brainer to my thinking! Even if we have to build 100 subs, it's a fabulously good investment compared to how many tanks we'd need to kill an equivalent number of enemy units once they land.

 

[Niklas]

We'd need 10 subs for every one that will get a shot at an attacker though. And we probably won't kill 6 armor, since the transports we sink will be the front of a ship-chain. But it's still 6 armor that won't be dropped off on our shore.

10*100s*1/0.95*1/6 = 175 shields per armor repelled
120*1/0.66 = 182 shields per armor repelled

So yes, subs are generally a better investment, but not by much.

 

[Hasdrubal Barca]

You are trusting that subs will be able to reach the invading stack..by my game experience they rarely do, the enemy will be aware of that possibility and sweep the ocean to find a weak spot, maybe even try a chip hopping and in the same turn they load on their continent they unload on ours ... so it could be a rather waste of production...better of building bombers...

Airfields also provide instant defense to air units, in case of an invasion enemy bombers will target in cities: 1st airplanes,2nd boats, units/improvements. Our bombers will be readlined in airfields but most likely will survive. 4 Airfields around our square continent should provide suficient cover.

We just have to put ourselves in the mind of the offensive and see where would it be easy to drop a horde of marines and on the same turn invade the continent with Armor/Cavs. Without forests this is impossible to stop and even if we can kill it on the turn after, the damage will be allready done.

I´m not saying to make the forest operations now, i´m just saying we should have the manpower needed to do it in 1 turn and on the field.

 

[donsig]

I finally got civ installed again (new computer), so I ran the "same" numbers from earlier, but instead of building what I consider rather useless units I prioritzed armors.

Given the discussion we've been having I can see why you'd do away with the cruise missiles. You're only making 3 less subs so that's difficult to argue with. You're doing away with 11 bombers which I think is a mistake. I'd rather have the 5 bombers from The Institute than the 11 mech infantry.

 

[Niklas]

I'd rather have the 5 bombers from The Institute than the 11 mech infantry.

Why wouldn't it be 12 bombers instead of 12 mechs? Bombers are only 100 shields, right?

But I agree with the sentiment, I too would rather have more bombers than mechs.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I've been taking a look at the map. There are only a limited # of cities that FREE can launch a 2-turn invasion from (either stacks of transports taking 2 turns, or ship chain where they use 2 sets of transports).

These cities are:

Coastal Geek and Lake Port on the south side of FREE homeland
Footloose and Monte Cristo on GONG's former 11 tiler
Freeborn, Sid City and Martin Luther Kind on FREE's 11 tiler
BuyOneGetOneFree on the far west coast of the former GONG land.

There are similar spots for SABER, I am sure.

To me, the most likely jumpoff spot is FREEBORN, with an attack on The Bayou, with bomber support, because they can get as many bombers as they have on the attack.

The Bayou is the ONLY tile we own vulnerable to land-based bomber attack from FREE until stealth bombers. We probably want to add a barracks/civil defense/sam missle battery to it, since they could dump a lot of bombers on it if they attack.

We might want to add a coastal fortress, as well.

The Nursery is similarly vulnerable to an attack from the 11 tiler SABER owns that they took from BABE, if they put an airfield next to Cattauragus.

I am thinking it may make sense to move our EWS out some, to cover where they would have to stage if they were planning a 3 turn invasion, giving us an extra turn, and allowing us to concentrate our defenses around a 2 turn one.

In particular, I might concentrate submarines near the bayou area, to intercept a force at what is probably our most vulnerable spot. It may make sense to move our carrier north, to bomb any carriers they bring. Removing bomber support makes marine attacks much harder.

 

[Yilar]

Given the discussion we've been having I can see why you'd do away with the cruise missiles. You're only making 3 less subs so that's difficult to argue with. You're doing away with 11 bombers which I think is a mistake. I'd rather have the 5 bombers from The Institute than the 11 mech infantry.

I'd rather have 5 armors than 5 bombers

 

[Yilar]

Why wouldn't it be 12 bombers instead of 12 mechs? Bombers are only 100 shields, right?

But I agree with the sentiment, I too would rather have more bombers than mechs.

Bombers don't get wt bonus, so they take 2 turns. We can however do 1 turn jets, but they are only really usefull for recon missions and we do have quite a few already. Maybe dropping it down to 60 shields and then making armors is a better choice.

 

[donsig]

One turn jets transferred to The Bayou might be worthwhile.