Siege a city as harmony

[Minor Annoyance]

Does anyone else find it difficult to siege a city as harmony? With the brawler and other units having the +40 if not adjacent, it's hard to set up ranged units with a defender if your weakening the defender by using it that way.
The obvious answer is don't take that perk I guess. It seems better for the AI anyway as it does reward them for not having a well organized plan and having units off on their own. Perhaps I should take the other ability if I plan on conquest and use the non-adjacent perk to defend a wide area. Not sure with the viper. It has non-adjacent vs better pillaging. The fast movement lends itself more to invasion than defense, but the pillaging perk could work for either. When invading you might not want improvements destroyed, but when defending, sending fast pillaging unit into enemy territory to tie up their units could keep them from a serious attack effort.

I wonder if pillaging tiles contributes to war score? If it does you could win cities in a peace agreement without ever trying to attack a city directly.

 

[x2Madda]

In answer to your question, No I do not find it more difficult. You can simply ignore the bonus modifiers you would have gotten for going solo. More guns = more damage regardless of bonuses so it is worth losing the 'if alone' bonuses in exchange for bringing more weapons.

As for your musings, Harmony seemed to have been designed with a more guerrilla warfare style approach which can work against human players but against the AI will just result in you having a bad time while they swarm you (or commit suicide trying too).

 

[Ryika]

Harmony in general is designed to be defensive, both paths - damage boost in Miasma and going "solo" - don't work too good offensively (against the AI). I think the one "offensive" mechanic that is built in is the "Force Units to move to another tile"-stuff, because it allows you to basically get units to move towards your army if used correctly, which destroys their formation and makes the AI do nonsensical moves while it tries to fill up their ranks, often opening large doors for Melee-Into-Range attacks. But frankly, that strategy is really, really slow.

So I agree with x2Madda - best offensive strategy is to not utilize their bonuses and just use their army as if it didn't have any special traits. That makes it so their army is not as strong as the armies of the both other Affinities, but to defeat the AI it should be more than enough.

Of course, if you start a game thinking that you want to be aggressive, just not going Harmony may be the best idea.

 

[Gokudo01]

Minor_Annoyance I can give another opinion(from an Apollo player).
Harmony is the best to play the offensive game, my easiest domination games were always with Harmony.

Yes the 40% strength while alone is better in defensive set up but you can use it in offense with some good management.

But they forget to talk about the best trait of their base unit :

All terrain costs 1 movement, you are not hindered by hill or forest you can surround a city, you have no issue to retreat or repositioning.

You can easily zone your foes out because the marauder has got two useful t3 promotion.
The defensive one allows to control 10 tiles with two extremely though units even t2 unique melee units will have a hard time to deal with your "basic marine" alone.

the 20 hp damage allows you to damage units inside a city and/or dealing AoE damage again Supremacy zerg.

the Cobra is the best armor in the game :

Free pillage, can move after attack ... you can see the combo while invading. And because you can't fortify it, it's always better to attack and pillage or attack and run away.
You don't care about repairing it after, you don't want any Terrascape or farm spam as harmony. You will change almost every improvement when you'll get the city.

Dragoon is slow and need +1 movement promotion to be as fast as Cobra with 5 more strength or can be specialized into some kind of Battering ram.
Redeemer are only good to destroy Ranged/Missile rover units.

Do I even need to talk about minotaur ? Longest range and no need to set up.

Their downside comes from their unique units.
First their Evolved version is most of the time, better at defence. It means that if you are playing the offensive game, you'll need to get some side points into Purity or supremacy. With 30% strength when near friendly units, Xenoswarm are super competitive. Moreover their production cost is really low( half of t2 battlesuit ).
You can say the same for true or prime xenocavalry.

True xenotitan is just the best city smasher, even with 110 strength in your cities, they won't last long.

Overall, harmony are extremely good to play aggressive. Mobile, cheap and expandable, their only weakness is the lack of "Super powerful" unique units before xenotitan.

Lastly, you are the only affinity which always can make a good use of "hack orbital units".
Hack satellite put some miasmic condenser, after put some tacnet hub and profit.

 

[Ryika]

Hack Satellites, Affinity 11+ Promotions and the Xenotitan as arguments for why Harmony is the "best" offensive Affinity?

 

[Gokudo01]

Hack Satellites, Affinity 11+ Promotions and the Xenotitan as arguments for why Harmony is the "best" offensive Affinity?

Yes I'm so sorry. I'm not able to invade the world before turn 150.
I think I should be really ashamed of myself ... or not

 

[Ryika]

No, of course you shouldn't be ashamed, but claiming that Harmony is "the best" Affinity for offensive play and then focus on the very small part of the game where they actually have a synergistic army and ignoring the large part where they don't seems a little odd to me. ^^

The Unique Units and the Tier 2 Upgrades for the Basic Units - especially the raw "Combat Strength when next to a friendly Unit"-Upgrades that Supremacy gets - are so much stronger when trying to push into enemy territory during the earlier parts of the game.

 

[Gokudo01]

No, of course you shouldn't be ashamed, but claiming that Harmony is "the best" Affinity for offensive play and then focus on the very small part of the game where they actually have a synergistic army and ignoring the large part where they don't seems a little odd to me. ^^

The Unique Units and the Tier 2 Upgrades for the Basic Units - especially the raw "Combat Strength when next to a friendly Unit"-Upgrades that Supremacy gets - are so much stronger when trying to push into enemy territory during the earlier parts of the game.

You seem to forget how you get the affinity points. There is a large part of the game ( the first 100 turn) when you won't get more than 3 into any affinity.
After that, you should focus on getting those two key techs asap :
bionics and cognition.
Then your science output will skyrocket( And I think you know it, you seem to know Beyond earth )
In 70 - 120 turns, you can get 13 + affinity level. By turn 200-220, you are usually able to start gates or mind flower.
So the window where Supremacy is actually "good" is super super short.20-30 turns at most.
That's why I don't think they are the aggressive affinity. Moreover, the cities' strength grows too fast and mid game, you are fighting 70-100 strength cities with 24x1.20 or 24x(1+ 0.08*x ) units.
God, even Overseer which should be the super ranger against cities got a hard time to weaken those cities.

And you can't win domination in 20 turns against cites with 70 strength.

ps : I won't even talk about triton/Poseidon which is so good to take cities in water maps.

 

[Ryika]

You seem to assume that only a late-game focused Combat Strategy is viable, which it is not. You can very well start taking Cities during the early parts of the game, take 1-2 Capitals, then have a short period of teching up when the AI has their Defensive Buildings in Place, before you go all-out warmongering and take over the rest of the capitals to close up the game around turn ~160-190, depending on how annoying the terrain is. The biggest part of that second war DOES make use of t2 units.

And all of that is not to say that Supremacy is not a great Affinity on t3 either. The Combat Bonuses from t2 don't just vanish - Supremacy does not have as much utility as Harmony has, but they work great as an army. In many ways Supremacy's bonuses make it great at rolling over both, armies and Cities, while Harmony's bonuses make them great at... well, being annoying.

 

[Gokudo01]

I really like to see you play on standard map (8 players ) standard speed apollo game to see how you manage it then

Because I really like ( seriously, no sarcasm) to see domination win in 160 turn.
Impress me please


edit : if you want to show me, pm me. I will gladly come to watch you with the streaming on steam
I'm never against learning.

 

[Ryika]

Well, 160 is maybe stretching things a bit and would heavily rely on cheesing 1-2 capitals with boats, but other than that it's not that hard. Not interested in streaming, but here's a general rundown of the strategy:

Start with either Brasilia or AU, Artists, the thing that let's you see Titanium immediately and a free worker. Use your scout to find some titanium around you, ideally near a neighbor of yours. Go down Prosperity to get the free settler, then switch to Might for the Affinity Bonuses. Fill early production downtime by creating Scouts (focus on Alien Skeletons and Progenitor Ruins) and create a Trade Route to your expansion. From that point on produce nothing but Marines, until you have 8 or so (some more if your don't have a neighbor that is easy to attack). Start positioning them towards the second City of your neighbor while you research your first Affinity Upgrade.

As soon as you have it, declare war and try to bait his units, kill as much as possible while you go down Might for the free Affinity Level, take his expansion by moving in aggressively (yes, you'll lose some units here). Fill up your ranks with rangers, make sure you get his Capital before he gets access to Defensive Buildings -> There you go, you're now sitting on 4 Cities and should tech up a bit. Get the Spy Academy and Arrays + the Workers required to build them, produce a bunch of Artillery Units and reach affinity 4 (which can be kind of annoying if you didn't get any extra Supremacy from Ruins/Quests) to upgrade them.

Pick a fight with an easy target and try to get a few of his cities, don't forget to bring an army of workers (which should - since Roads are free - create very useful resupply-highways while they're moving over to the new cities) to make good use of the high-population AI cities, while you aim for Affinity 6/7 to upgrade your Soldiers and Rangers. Once you have both of them upgraded you shouldn't have much of a problem rolling over almost anyone. Your Economy will tank big time once you're taking cities left and right and if you are too slow (which WILL happen if terrain is bad) you will likely have to fight against a better upgraded army, but thanks to your arrays you should have enough energy to resupply your losses and finish the game.

 

[nimling]

I usually take the suicide damage perks instead. Pyre Zombie style woo.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

A thing to keep in mind is that isolated Harmony units are very resilient to air attacks, so you have the freedom to turn your own airforce into bombers.

 

[hevans900]

Start with either Brasilia or AU, Artists, the thing that let's you see Titanium immediately and a free worker. Use your scout to find some titanium around you, ideally near a neighbor of yours. Go down Prosperity to get the free settler, then switch to Might for the Affinity Bonuses. Fill early production downtime by creating Scouts (focus on Alien Skeletons and Progenitor Ruins) and create a Trade Route to your expansion. From that point on produce nothing but Marines, until you have 8 or so (some more if your don't have a neighbor that is easy to attack). Start positioning them towards the second City of your neighbor while you research your first Affinity Upgrade.

As soon as you have it, declare war and try to bait his units, kill as much as possible while you go down Might for the free Affinity Level, take his expansion by moving in aggressively (yes, you'll lose some units here). Fill up your ranks with rangers, make sure you get his Capital before he gets access to Defensive Buildings -> There you go, you're now sitting on 4 Cities and should tech up a bit. Get the Spy Academy and Arrays + the Workers required to build them, produce a bunch of Artillery Units and reach affinity 4 (which can be kind of annoying if you didn't get any extra Supremacy from Ruins/Quests) to upgrade them.

Pick a fight with an easy target and try to get a few of his cities, don't forget to bring an army of workers (which should - since Roads are free - create very useful resupply-highways while they're moving over to the new cities) to make good use of the high-population AI cities, while you aim for Affinity 6/7 to upgrade your Soldiers and Rangers. Once you have both of them upgraded you shouldn't have much of a problem rolling over almost anyone. Your Economy will tank big time once you're taking cities left and right and if you are too slow (which WILL happen if terrain is bad) you will likely have to fight against a better upgraded army, but thanks to your arrays you should have enough energy to resupply your losses and finish the game.

You've actually had success with this on Apollo? I think the key part to this is the baiting of the enemy army - you'd have to plan this in advance because the AI are gunna have a crapton of military even at that stage (they start with 3 combat rovers and a ranger if I remember correctly? - can't find the list right now). Don't forget the fact that Apollo units start with 30exp.

 

[Metecury]

Xenotitans anyone? You can even oneshot smaller cities with them.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

If you can field a Xeno Titan you should ask yourself:
"Why hasn't my Mindflower won me the game yet?"

 

[Ryika]

You've actually had success with this on Apollo? I think the key part to this is the baiting of the enemy army - you'd have to plan this in advance because the AI are gunna have a crapton of military even at that stage (they start with 3 combat rovers and a ranger if I remember correctly? - can't find the list right now). Don't forget the fact that Apollo units start with 30exp.

At that point the AI isn't on Affinity 3 yet, so the combat rovers that it starts with don't really do that much (which is funny, because if it started with Marines, then they would be a real problem). I'd argue the Bonus-EXP are also more of a downside for them, because they basically skip an Insta-heal during the fight - which isn't really made up for with the +10% combat strength.

But yes, the important part is baiting out the opponents army. You have to start near enough that the AI rushes towards you and fall back a bit so you can move in with melee units to destroy rovers without getting it into city attack range - and then find the right moment to push forward with your soldiers so you don't get stuck in the endless loop of reinforcements that follows if you're not quick enough. That's the tricky bit and where I often have to reload the game a ton of times (which I'd say is due to the fact that I'm still really bad at combat and miss the right situation, not because the strategy is unreliable).

Once you have that city, healing up your army and setting up a good concave to move into the capital once your rangers are ready shouldn't be too much of a problem. (Well, if the terrain isn't horrible of course, but I guess it's self-explanatory that an early aggression strategy shouldn't be attempted then.)

In many cases you'll capture a worker sitting in that city which can be used to bait the AI into capturing it and suiciding their units that way. Doesn't work as reliably as it did in Civ5, but if the AI isn't in "retreat-mode" it sometimes works out just fine.

 

[Metecury]

If you can field a Xeno Titan you should ask yourself:
"Why hasn't my Mindflower won me the game yet?"

Meh, I always try not to go for world domination but no matter what I always end up declaring war on everyone. I find it way more fun than building the wander and sit there. Besides, those pretty affinity units are best to look at in combat.