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AR and Smart Bombing Wed, 17 January 2007 17:02 Go to previous message
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 In this thread a discussion started about how AR colonizers need to have a planet’s population killed off before they can colonize it. First,

Dogthinkers wrote



mazda wrote on Wed, 17 January 2007 00:11



gible wrote on Sat, 13 January 2007 03:36

AR viral bombing happens between fleet battles and meeting the MT.
If you are also using 'regular' bombs on the same planet then the viral bombing does not occur
The presense and activity of other players bombers does not have this affect.




So if the bombers don't clear it then it won't get colonised ?
That's probably worth knowing, for an AR.





The really significant part here, is that AR races can't use combinations of conventional bombers and coloniser-bombers to clear worlds quickly. If they want the colonisers to bomb, the conventional bombers actually have to leave orbit



Then,

Kotk wrote

Why so lot about that viral bombing?
AR colonizer bombers are actually not so cost-effective, especially in ironium and germanium terms. Somehow it feels better to use traditional bombers. The colonizers have some qualities but lets see...
Preserve installations.
Have better fuel.
Have lighter weight.
48 colonizers can have LF of cargo space.
Pop is not dying when travelling in quantities of 22kT.

But why should AR care about installations; its not that expensive to have SFX and LF with; the minibombers also dont die too lot when overgating and for pop not dying ... who wants to MM split/merge them colonizers each turn to have that tiny effect?




I responded that Kotk is right, except possibly in the case of a low growth AR, which would be harder hit by 3% losses in an LF. Travel time would also factor in as well.

There's already been a lot of discussion about how smart bombs are generally useless, and now we're also hearing that viral bombing is next to useless as well? This got me wondering that's entirely true. Maybe AR bombers and smart bombs could be useful for something. How about in an alliance? The smarts would kill a large portion of the population, and then the AR colonizers could finish off the remaining colonists. The race with the lower player # could use the smarts and the other one use the AR bombers. I decided to do some research to see how well this would work. Starting backwards:

End game, max tech: 6 B52's with 3 TGMS, 16 Annihilators, two complete phase shields, and two Super Fuel Tanks (for 618 I, 2946 B, 336 G, and 4098 R) could be brought in against 100 neutron shield defenses by the player with the lower number and would kill 147,400 colonists (assuming a planet with 1,000,000). That same year, 20,000 AR bombers with a QJ5 and Orbital Construction Module (160,000 I, 80,000 B, 180,000 G, 220,000 R) would be used by the other player and would kill another 839,600, leaving the population at 13,000, which could easily be pop dropped with an LF, so that you keep all the factories and mines. You’d also need to throw in some SFX’s. If the player with the higher # is doing the pop dropping then they wouldn’t need a separate LF to do the drop—they could just put colonists in the colonizers. Obviously, the main problem with this idea is the huge costs involved. For the cost of that bombing fleet you could build 120 nubs with 18 Arms, 6 complete phase shields, 6 Nexi, 3 jammers, 3 superlat, and 3 TGMS and still have plenty of B, G, and R leftover. By end game minerals are more important anyway, so chances are you wouldn’t want to invest that much just in order to get some extra factories and mines, unless you were able to get 50 planets this way—and even then it might not be worth it. But it’s still an interesting way to do it, such as if you already had plenty of AR bombers from earlier years.

Mid game or against WM: 17 B17’s with 2 TGFS, 8 Enriched Neutrons, and a fuel tank against 100 laser battery defenses would kill 298,100 colonists. 3500 of the same AR bombers would kill 623,000. You could then pop drop the remaining 78,900 pretty easily. Costs of the AR bombers would be anywhere from 4-40 times higher than for the smarts, depending on techs and whether you’re limited by minerals or resources. This time I think it’d be much more tolerable though, and you could still go around and get several more planets, so your colonizers would pay for themselves after you’ve taken enough planets.

A bit earlier: 200 mini bombers with QJ5 and Smart Bombs could kill 605,500 on a planet with SDI defenses. 500 of the AR bombers would kill another 369,700, leaving 24,800 for the pop drop. The AR bombers would probably cost pretty close to the same amount as the mini bombers in B, G, and R, but quite a bit more in I.

Before defenses: Most players don’t build defenses for quite a while, and against these players the mini bomber-AR bomber combination would be pretty deadly. 65 mini bombers would kill 817,000 and 65 AR bombers would kill 130,000, leaving 50,000 for the pop drop—and in this case the mini bombers would be more of a limiting factor.

Before smarts: Before smarts or defenses, you could go in with 475 AR bombers, kill 950,000, and pop drop the last 50,000. It may be more cost efficient to research smart bombs instead though, depending on bio cost, your current bio level, etc.

All of this would depend on a lot of things.

Attacker: On your part, how much population do you have for dropping and what’s your growth rate? What are your resource and mineral and production limits? What are your present tech levels? How does your race design fit in? If you’re an IS, you’d have to get the smart bombers and the AR bombers from your AR ally (or another ally), maybe in exchange for speed traps, which would be particularly useful for an AR, since they absolutely can’t have their stations attacked early. If you’re a WM you could do the pop dropping even more easily. If you have expensive factories and mines it might also make it a lot more cost effective to use this strategy. Probably the best candidate would be an HP WM with a low growth rate and expensive factories and mines with TT that has the best possible smarts and an AR willing to trade their colonizers to them for battlecruisers, dreadnaughts, and cheap weapons. After all, the AR would need a lot of ships for defense, particularly around mid game, and it would also be about this time that the HP economy would be ready to really start moving. The AR could also have cheap con for RM’s, and that would greatly help in miniaturizing colonizer costs fast. In late game their mineral fountain would help the WM out in capturing tons of planets intact.

Defender: And what about the enemy? How many defenses and of what type have they built? What is the population of their planets? Do they have OBRM? Are they IS, JOAT, HE, WM? And in addition, do they even have enough factories and mines on their planets to make them worth taking this way? The best target would probably be a 3i low growth HE with tons of factories and mines and OBRM that hasn’t built defenses yet, with a low level of and expensive energy tech so that even once they start seeing these attacks coming at them it will take them a great amount of time to get decent defenses up. This sort of a race would just get crushed to this kind of an advance, even if they’re not really that many years away from critical mass (wherever that is).

Of course, the biggest problem is probably finding an AR to ally with and that would want to sell of their colonizers. In a team game though that wouldn’t be much trouble. An AR and WM on a team could plan ahead to use this strategy to take out their enemies, the WM going for weapons and bio and the AR going for high con to miniaturize the colonizer cost. If you added in an IT they’d be able to gate their RM’s and the WM’s DN’s as well. It would be interesting to see the AR-WM-IT combination in a huge universe filled with 4, 5, and 6% HE’s.

Yeah, bread too.

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