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Total Members Voted: 31

Voting closed: April 17, 2014, 06:39:24 pm

[Loud Whispers]

Actually, as a big builder type player here. If you wait to build your army till someone is knocking on your door, you're doin it wrong. Against the ai you can do that, but against another player, you're in serious trouble. A builders best friend other than crawlers are clean reactors, abuse them. A builder should have one of the biggest armies out there since they aren't tossing them into numerous wars. Think beehive, disturb it and here comes swarms of military. This is especially true of morgan and any of the pacifistic builder factions, since as a builder you are generally seen as a plump easy target. You better be prepare to prove them wrong.

Problem is, you'll likely just end up with a bunch of low-morale obsolete garrisons facing off against a high-morale vetaran army with the best equipment available. Gods forbid you're facing Yang or Domai. You've got to flood the sky with needlejets.

Planned economy is to Morgan what communism was to America, and planned economy is to Deidre what China is to the EU.

Nice analogy.

Seemed most appropriate

[Patchy]

Actually, as a big builder type player here. If you wait to build your army till someone is knocking on your door, you're doin it wrong. Against the ai you can do that, but against another player, you're in serious trouble. A builders best friend other than crawlers are clean reactors, abuse them. A builder should have one of the biggest armies out there since they aren't tossing them into numerous wars. Think beehive, disturb it and here comes swarms of military. This is especially true of morgan and any of the pacifistic builder factions, since as a builder you are generally seen as a plump easy target. You better be prepare to prove them wrong.

Problem is, you'll likely just end up with a bunch of low-morale obsolete garrisons facing off against a high-morale vetaran army with the best equipment available. Gods forbid you're facing Yang or Domai. You've got to flood the sky with needlejets.

You say that like the builder never upgrades anything at all. xP

It takes only a few minutes to design a new set of units using the new weapons/armour/chassis/reactor tech you discovered. And then you just go change out military bases to produce the newer stuff instead. Yes, you end up with lots of obsolete stuff, but also some middle of the road stuff and some up to date stuff. And you can also upgrade the older equipment if needed, or it can be used to slow down or weaken enemy units for your uptodate stuff. There is a certain quality in quantity as well. And it won't take long for the builder to spit out new troops either while the enemy slogs through all your old units. By their very nature they have a well developed industrial and economic capacity as well.

[EuchreJack]

And nobody can afford upgrades like Morgan.  While Yang and Domai field swarms of ancient units, Morgan's army should always be state-of-the-art.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Morgan is a master of the economy. Why should he waste that mastery on unit upkeep instead of using the saved money to purchase a conveniently-located, SotA army whenever he needs to go to war?

[Parsely]

Is this game gonna be played?

[Patchy]

Morgan is a master of the economy. Why should he waste that mastery on unit upkeep instead of using the saved money to purchase a conveniently-located, SotA army whenever he needs to go to war?

Because Morgan and other builders are using the "clean reactor" ability on their units. This ability makes the unit cost zero support. They are essentially free of maintenance, and you can have hundreds of them. It is probably one of the most gamebreaking abilities. Especially since it means a builder can put the entirety of their sterling industy capacity to work making even more. There is no reason for Morgan not to have tons of these units to support his probe teams.

[thobal]

Is this game gonna be played?

Ah, now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs gameplay on your, on your dinosaur tourlet's play thread, right? Hello?
[taps the camera lens and breathes on it]
Hello? Yes?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Is this game gonna be played?

In May. The GM's said this a couple times.

Morgan is a master of the economy. Why should he waste that mastery on unit upkeep instead of using the saved money to purchase a conveniently-located, SotA army whenever he needs to go to war?

Because Morgan and other builders are using the "clean reactor" ability on their units. This ability makes the unit cost zero support. They are essentially free of maintenance, and you can have hundreds of them. It is probably one of the most gamebreaking abilities. Especially since it means a builder can put the entirety of their sterling industy capacity to work making even more. There is no reason for Morgan not to have tons of these units to support his probe teams.

News to me.
Alright. Now, let's get to my other points:
1. Convenience
-Simply put, we don't know which direction war will require us to have units in. Probably. Anyways, barring those unlikely circumstances, we'll need to either garrison our army throughout our whole empire, preparing for the day they might be needed...or we can just buy the units we need, where they are needed.
2. Efficiency
-Production we put towards units isn't going towards buildings, which improve a wide variety of things. Economy, future production, science--even wonders.
3. Speed of Response
-Oh no! The zealots are attacking! Quick, order the cities to make units! Great, our army will be ready in 3-4 turns! ...Or we could just buy it.
4. Banks
-Our credits don't do much good just sitting around in the bank. We don't even get any interest, lazy bastards.
5. AI
-"Aha! Those Morganites look like an easy target, they barely have any military! ...Crap, where did all those top-tier units come from?!?"

[Darkening Kaos]

Military Defence Type guy: the enemy has sent an army to destroy us.
Morgan: The treasury says that that army will be our army, send out the Probe teams.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Wait, probe teams can bribe enemy armies?

[Solymr]

It's called mind control, but costs money anyways :V

[GreatWyrmGold]

That's...kinda awesome. And another reason not to bother building a huge army.

[Solymr]

Yeah, and probes are also invisible to anything not probes or sensors I think. They don't see it coming.

[Patchy]

Probe teams are not invisable. Probe teams can indeed mind control enemy units. The problem comes when the enemy stacks 2 or more units together on the tile. Then the probe team can't do a thing about them. Deathstacks will kill a probe based defense strategy. And any faction can make stacks of units, and even the ai knows enough to stack units. Hence why having a real standing military is neccesary.

It has already been mentioned, but if the civ has the hunter seeker algorithm secret project, they are effectively immune to probe teams until late game. There are also the believers who by virtue of having a high probe rating can also be immune to probe teams. You can potentially have 2 factions that will completely laugh at your probe team based defense. The believers are also a very aggressive geared faction in both the ai and human hands. The probe team weaknesses are one of the main reasons the angels are generally seen as fairly weak faction overall.

Rush buying your army when the enemy first appears will get you some troops to fight back with, but it still takes a turn for the troops to be built and then a turn or 2 to move them to the front. In the meantime you have a dedicated warmonger running rampant over a bunch of your underdefended  bases and using your own road network to drive deep into your territory.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Who said the bases were undefended? They would have a small garrison, just not a full army.