Preparing for a possible invasion.

[General_W]

- ok this is good. Thanks all!

Here are the key lessons I'm taking away:

• Our EWS is even more critical, to prevent a nuke strike and invasion on the same turn.
• Large, concentrated stacks of defenders are a bad idea.
• Tactical nukes will be awesome for sinking large stacks of invading naval vessels.
• We will need to keep a large force of workers floating around to quickly rebuild infrastructure, clean up pollution, and rebuild Radar towers to secure ourselves against invasion in a post-nuclear-strike situation.

Even though tactical nukes will be valuable for us in defending our coast - I'm still not sure that we want to be the ones building the Manhattan project...
Though - if we build it ourselves, then at least we can time prebuilds for a few tactical nukes.
Thoughts?

 

[donsig]

I think that an air based EWS is very good now but if nukes become available then we'd want to be able to see enemy subs in the EWS area. We'd also want armed nuclear subs patrolling the seas.

Do we want to build Manhattan? I'm not sure yet. That opens Pandora's Box but also let's us prebuild weapons. If we don't build it and one of the others does we can be sure they'll have weapon pre-builds. We need to explore the strategic defensive value of nukes before deciding on that course.

Is there any way we can put some pre-builds in the bank so to speak? Have some ready to be able to build weapons if someone builds Manhattan? I'm thinking along the lines of what we did to get SETI.

The good thing about all this is we don't have to worry about this till FREE gets fission. Then space flight is needed for tactical nukes and satellites for ICBMs. If we continue to keep track of who lacks these techs we can relax. (Thanks PrinceMyshin for the tech tracking!)

EDIT: ICBMs cannot be moved? Tactical nukes can move from city to city and can even end their tunr outside a city. It looks as though nuclear weapons do not destroy other nuclear weapons. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[General_W]

The good thing about all this is we don't have to worry about this till FREE gets fission. Then space flight is needed for tactical nukes and satellites for ICBMs. If we continue to keep track of who lacks these techs we can relax. (Thanks PrinceMyshin for the tech tracking!)

I agree. Spot on. And Hooray for PrinceMyshkin.

Do we want to build Manhattan? I'm not sure yet. That opens Pandora's Box but also let's us prebuild weapons.

I've been thinking about this... and I'm just not sure that we want to invest 800 shields in the Manhattan Project. If one of the other teams wants Nukes - it should cost them 800 shields to start the war.

Is there any way we can put some pre-builds in the bank so to speak? Have some ready to be able to build weapons if someone builds Manhattan?

This would be very cool - if it's possible.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

it was the cap, so it had SOME culture. but it hadn't expanded.

I tried it again, popped a bunch of improvements in it so it expanded, same thing happened.

My guess is that it's some artifact of running in debug mode or something - if people who have used nukes in the game haven't reported this happening, I would guess it isnt' really happening.

Actually, what happened is that it cut the pop in half, then took out the other half, as opposed to cutting it in half each time - so I'd guess that was something abotu debug mode.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Here is a question:

Should we go on to stealth after we get synth fibers?

Stealth bombers are very, very expensive, but they do allow precision bombing, which would allow us to kill transports selectively, and killing transports is what it's all about...

 

[Yilar]

I would say no.

It is only gonna delay our spaceship minimum 4 turns. Rather just build subs.

 

[PrinceMyshkin]

Stealth bombers are certainly very powerful with long range, but they do not have stealth attacks like submarines. Precision bombing is supposed to target city improvements and then population first before bombing units in cities. Stealth planes are harder for air defenses to stop, but even stealth fighters cannot perform air superiority missions. We already have all the defensive techs we can ever use against them.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Oh - I thought they could target individual units. I've never used them, so...

 

[donsig]

Anyone know if jets on recon duty can be shot down in war time?

Is mech infantry considered a fast defender? (Can they retreat?)

Let's do some thinking about what we need to defend ourselves. We'll not concern ourselves just yet with unit support costs, I just want to brainstorm a bit to start a discussion about the level of forces we need to defend ourselves.

• We're counting on subs as our first line of defense. I've been playing with a combat calculator and it says a vet sub has a 95% chance to sink a vet transport. Nice. Any guesses as to how big a stack of transports we'll see if we're invaded? No more than ten? But it's a good enough guess for now. Our subs can only move five tiles. Nuclear subs can move one more tile. Could be very useful. A rough guestimate is that we'll need ten packs placed around our lands at strategic points in order to intercept any transports before they can unload. If we're guessing we'll see ten enemy transports then we'll want ten subs per pack. That's 100 units right there.
• Let's have some bomber squadrons out there, too. They can soften up the enemy navy and also strike any forces that do manage to land. The bombers have much longer ranges and can be concentrated rapidly so we'll need fewer squadrons and less units per squadron. My guess is five squadrons with 8 bombers each. That's 40 units.
• My best guess is that we're using 20 ships for our EWS. I suggest we keep this number though we refrain from using subs in the EWS. Destroyers and AEGIS cruisers only. But I think we need some redundancy in our EWS so how about we add a similar number of jets for the EWS? That's 40 more units.
• Let's not forget we have some workers. We have 15 domestics workers. Let's bump that to 20. (For those not keeping track we're up to 200 units.)
• We need some land forces (modern armor / mech infantry). Let's say we put in a total of 4 units per city. With 29 cities we'll call this 120 units to keep things round. We can garrison them in the cities for now since they can be rapidly redeployed in an emergency.
• SCI needs special attention. Let's put in 20 extra land units for defense and 10 jets for air superiority. The latter can be quickly redeployed if need be.

Ok, that's a grand total of 350 units. Is this overkill? Is it insufficient? Is there a better way to defend our lands? Off the top of my head I already see that we shouldn't garrison units in our inner cities - we're much better off having those units on the coast or in coastal cities. Should these land forces be solely modern armor or a mix of modern armor and mech infantry?

It's important to get a handle on how many units we need (and what mix) so we can prioritize our builds and determine the level of research we can sustain. It's going to be crucial for us to strike the proper balance between fast research and defense. Please contribute what you can to this discussion.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Well, bear in mind that we can draft a bunch of defenders just before an attack, so we can keep some of those units in our population.

 

[Yilar]

Jets can be shot down on recon missions. I've once had a helicopter shot down doing recon, but that was by a jet, so it is unlikely if not impossible for it to get shot down by a boat.

Mech inf is fast defender yes.

I agree about the sub part. I would place them 3 squares off our coast so they can hit the edge of our ews boarder without the enemy knowing they are there.

Once we get spies we will know the amount of units the enemies have, and we can base our results on that. I would not build anymore bombers. Build only modern armors, a few jets for ews and maybe a few naval units in the coastal cities. The priority should be given to modern armors.

 

[Niklas]

IIRC, recon planes can be shot down only by other planes set to Air Superiority missions.

Also IIRC, the question of fast defenders is really not well formulated. Any unit with higher move than its attacker can retreat. So MAs could retreat from Mechs, and Mechs from Marines, but not Mechs from MAs.

I disagree with Yilar. Sure we should build Modern Armor, but I still think that sinking the invaders before they reach our shores should be our primary defense. And as such, priority should definitely be given to Subs, Subs and more Subs. But the problem is that we have so few high-producing coastal towns, so it seems we need to supplement that with Bombers. One Bomber likely stops 6 units from reaching our shores. How could we not want to build those?

EDIT: In fact, it seems to me we could in theory have a defense built solely from naval and air units. If we have enough of those, who could even get close to our lands? But since it's hard to know what "enough" is, we should of course take other precautions too.

 

[donsig]

We could use the massive production capabilities of our inland cities to supplement our ship building program. We build whatever one turn units we can (land or air) and disband them in coastal cities for the shields. As we beef up our navy we should determine the size of land and air forces we need until our naval shield is in place. Once we reach the desired air and land forces we can go full tilt into producing and disbanding units to rush subs. As we build more and more subs we could reduce the size of our back up land and air forces if need be. This would also speed up sub production.

Thanks for the explanation of fast units Niklas. After all these years there is still so much I don't understand about this game. That's why I keep playing it. That and I don't yet have a computer that I can play on.

In addition to the size of the sub force we want and the interim(?) land and air forces we need, we must also decide if we will stick with regular subs or build the more expensive (but faster) nuclear subs.

We also should discuss what defensive improvements (walls, SAMs. civil defense and coastal fortresses) we want and where we'd want them.

We also need to decide if we want advanced flight for radar towers.

@AT: Yes, we can draft, but we'll only get 2hp mech infantry. I thought we concluded that modern armor would be better on defense, primarily because enemy modern armor cannot retreat from them. We must build modern armor before we're invaded to use them this way.

@Yilar: Our subs are certainly useless if they can't hit the on coming transports before they can unload. They will also be useless if they get sunk before they can attack the loaded transports. If we place our sub packs three tiles from our coast will they be susceptible to enemy attacks? (Can planes attack subs?) Will our sub packs be visible to our rivals' EWS systems? Do we want SABER and FREE to know we have these sub packs? We could add some defenders (destroyers and cruisers) to each pack but this further strains our weak ship building capacity. We need to keep our sea based EWS and it should include ships that can see enemy subs.

Sorry I have more questions that answers guys.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think that fortified fast defenders don't retreat, as well - so we don't have to worry about marines disloding defenders.

Has anyone ever used paratroops? Can they be dropped from aircraft carriers? and can a paratroop be dropped on a unit and attack? I ask because modern paratroops have a range of 8, which would mean that we need to make sure all coastal cities are garrisoned, or we run the risk of a paratroop attack that we cannot detect.

 

[Yilar]

Has anyone ever used paratroops? Can they be dropped from aircraft carriers? and can a paratroop be dropped on a unit and attack? I ask because modern paratroops have a range of 8, which would mean that we need to make sure all coastal cities are garrisoned, or we run the risk of a paratroop attack that we cannot detect.

No and No. The chance of someone building a paratrooper is less than 0,1%, they are THAT useless

 

[Yilar]

IIRC, recon planes can be shot down only by other planes set to Air Superiority missions.

Also IIRC, the question of fast defenders is really not well formulated. Any unit with higher move than its attacker can retreat. So MAs could retreat from Mechs, and Mechs from Marines, but not Mechs from MAs.

I disagree with Yilar. Sure we should build Modern Armor, but I still think that sinking the invaders before they reach our shores should be our primary defense. And as such, priority should definitely be given to Subs, Subs and more Subs. But the problem is that we have so few high-producing coastal towns, so it seems we need to supplement that with Bombers. One Bomber likely stops 6 units from reaching our shores. How could we not want to build those?

EDIT: In fact, it seems to me we could in theory have a defense built solely from naval and air units. If we have enough of those, who could even get close to our lands? But since it's hard to know what "enough" is, we should of course take other precautions too.

We can't possibly cover all the area our island with an effective bomber/naval army. We would need in 300+ units. When they invade it will likely come in 1 big stack with 10+ boats defending and 10+ transporters under. We can't possible cover that much ocean with 5-10 subs to sink the most of the transporter stack.

Seeing as we know they won't bring 60 marines, we can protect our cities from marines using our units, they will forced to land and that's where we get the option to hit them big time with modern armor blitz. We will have the odds on all attacks and more importantly we can control the battle (no 0,00001% battles).

 

[peter grimes]

......and how, exactly, do we 'know' they won't bring 60 marines?

If that's the sort of thing required to take one of our cities, then I'll wager that the other teams will try and do precisely that.

 

[Yilar]

Because it is very unlikely I should have written...

Marines only got 12 atk and cost the same as modern armors. I would rather land 60 modern armor on hills/mountains and try my luck there.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Marine on Mech infantry, fortified, in a metro, loses 95% of the time. 36% of the time it wins without losing a HP. So, it should take about 6-7 marines to take out 1 mech inf.

If we have a civil defense and radar tower, it wins 97% of the time, not taking a hit 45% of the time, thus needing about 10-12 marines per mech inf.

If they really want to land, they will be able to do it.


If they land Modern armor on a mountain tile, MA on MA wins 46% of the time, so we would need more MA than they have to defeat it. Course, if we hit that with 15 bombers, those we hit will likely die, but still.

Late edit: vet MA vs. vet MA on mountain wins 46% of the time WITH A RADAR TOWER. Without, it wins 33% of the time.

Can we ask BABE how many units SABER is attacking with? It would be good to know if they have 20, 30 or 50 tanks...

 

[peter grimes]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Marines the only units that can attack from a boat? Which means that in order for an invasion to succeed there has to be either an open tile for the enemy to land on, or the enemy must bring a ton of marines, right?

If that's the case, then all we need to do is block the coast and they'll be forced to use marines to clear a tile/town for landing the rest of the troops.

But any blockers will still be subject to bombarding ships, right?