Border Wars

[Yxklyx]

Haven't played in a while so trying to remember some things...

I'm the University and share a long land border with the Drones - we seem to be getting along well as we both are Democratic and Planned. The Drones keep building new cities near my border and I have to build my own to stop the incursion which is infringing on some of my roads. The question is how much can these borders keep changing? Can the Drones build a city such that it starts taking away resources from one of my own cities? Can something be done to stabilise the current borders?

[RedFred]

Originally posted by Yxklyx
...The question is how much can these borders keep changing? Can the Drones build a city such that it starts taking away resources from one of my own cities? Can something be done to stabilise the current borders?

1. Quite a bit of border change can happen if you are not careful. If the gap between two of your cities is large enough, the AI factions can move right through you.

2. Yes. SMAC rewards the faction that plants the most recent city by giving it more of the space between it and the city from the other faction.

So, for example, if your frontier city has a border between the third and fourth tile away and a Drone city gets started on the fourth tile, the border will be redrawn. The Drone city will get resources from tiles two away from your city in the direction of the Drones.

3. Several strategies are useful to stabilize the borders.

You can outpoach the AI by continuing to build small frontier cities at your mutual border and push the Drones back. Your only limit is that two cities cannot be in adjacent tiles, you need to leave one or more spaces in between.

You can place a military unit right beside a Drone colony pod. If there is any threat of war, they will often retreat. If you are not pacted you could also try ZOCing the colony pod so that it never reaches the frontier.

Of course, the ultimate border stabilization is to go to war with Drones and push them right off your continent.

[Flubber]

Borders will always be "halfway " between the cities of the opposing factions.

Borders cannot be stabalized or "set" in any fashion. Therefore many players will race to the border with a view to claiming territory and then fill in the gaps of their empire later. Personally I will accept some cramping as a result of having a more compact and defensible empire.

Youcan lose city resources to an opposing border push. The worst of this is when an opponent puts a seabase off your coast (with a 3 tile border)-- You are then unable to place a worker on that tile inside "their " territory

[Clear Skies]

In SMAX at least, I think that another faction planting a seabase next to one of your land bases cannot steal land tiles from you, although the poaching of sea tiles is annoying. (Using the IoD-release-into-wild-right-next-to-the-new-base trick works on everyone except whoever possesses the PTS).

However, land and sea boundary redraws are very irritating, especially when they take resource tiles from large bases or bases on arid soil. I once had all my workers in a near-Great-Dunes base pushed off their tiles onto Dunes ones by a Peacekeeper 'invasion', and my base nearly starved to death.

My advice: either acquire the base in whatever manner you wish, swap it for your disadvantaged base using diplomacy , use mindworms released into the wild to destroy the newly founded base or simply go to war with them and take it by force.

I chose the latter option. Lal, meet dirt. Dirt, Lal's face. You'll get to know one another well

[Fitz]

The only thing I didn't see mentioned/clarified is that the AI will only place a base down inside your current borders if you are in a war setting. Instead, they place the base inside their own territory, right on the edge, which pushes your line back.

However, if the AI has expansion room in another direction, and they cannot place a base down without overlapping their resourse radii of their bases, they generally wont. I exploit this all the time by placing some border bases that force the situation, either by matching the AI base radii (or overlapping even) or by leaving only a single square in between.

There is an inherrant advantage in those border bases, in that they make it very difficult for the AI to attack you. Personally, I find it hard to make bases anything less that perfect (all improvements, as large as possible), but in these situations I will slap down a perimiter defense, and start stocking defenders. If your border base overlaps resources with a core base, move the workers around to stagnate growth at whatever size works best (usually 3-4 for me) and only build units at these bases. Obviously you'll start hitting support problems eventually, but then it's time to:
1. continue building support requiring units and rehome to other areas of your empire that need them.
2. Crank out mass #s of probes and go to town.
3. Make supply crawlers for use by your core bases.

Once you get clean, even if you don't always use it (I prefer smaller armies with 2 abilities each usually), design 3-4 garrisons, one counter punch rover, an artillery, an interceptor and bomber, etc etc, and have those border bases use all their minerals to set up an impassable border.

Course, in Single player you don't really need an impassable border. Those border bases can just crank out clean best weapon no armor rovers and slaughter the AI. Not much fun though, and it won't teach you what you need to know to beat another human player.

[johndmuller]

In SMAX, if not in SMAC, a land base gets "control" of adjacent sea tiles so that the invading AI sea base doesn't get to take that/those tiles away (but they still block you out of further tiles in their radius).

If I don't feel like fighting over the sea territory (for example, when it is your pactmate doing it), sometimes I just put trawlers on particularly good sea tiles before the AI gets to put a worker on them. The AI doesn't take offense at this and I get to reap at least part of what I improved; if you box them in enough, they never grow and thus don't compete much for space. You can also poach on neutral's sea tiles that aren't being worked, but with a (seemingly unrelated to your incursion) chance of getting into a war.

I think you can do the same thing on land, although the AI may be more jealous of its land boundaries.

Back at sea, the AI will let you do things like planting fungus on their improvements without objection - they will then stop working that tile; you can put your trawler on it (or worker if you have joint rights to work it) and then reimprove it at the cost of several former turns and several unproductive turns.

Or you can just take the d*** base and get it over with.

[Fitz]

I think you can do the same thing on land, although the AI may be more jealous of its land boundaries.

In a recent game, I crawled the square that the AI kept trying to build a base on. I was hoping it wouldn't build on top of a crawler, and I didn't wnat to put a border base in that area.

Unfortunately, it built the base anyway, which stopped my crawling. But while there was no base there (I kept demading the base and disbanding it), the AI didn't seem to care.

Not the perfect test case, since he was probably too scared to pick a fight with me.