1-1-1 Clean Police

[Ned]

I normally build police scout units for drone control and have typically upgraded these to 1-3r-1*2 Clean when I get both Clean and Fusion. However, in my last game, I instead simply upgraded to 1-1-1 Clean Police. This upgrade is a lot cheaper (20 ec's per). One can then add further 1-1-1 Clean Police units to bring a base's total of these units to 3. This will passify up to nine drones, depending on one's police setting. And being clean, they require NO upkeep.

Obviously, these units provide no defense against a surprise attack, which typically means you have to invest in both a navy and an air force to patrol one's borders. But that asside, these units just have to be the best in the game for providing effective and cheap drone control.

I am amazed that I only just now started using them.

Ned

[GeneralTacticus]

I remember I had an incredibly succesful game as the Pirates on the Huge Map of Planet, where I was using these. Anytime a base started rioting, I built one of these. Once I had the Telepath Matrix they were pointless, but I didn't disband them. I later upgraded them to top-of-the-line drop units, meaning I had an extra 22 of them! I should add though, I could afford it only cos I was making 5000+ ECs a turn.

[vitamin j]

I think non-lethal methods is one of the cooler special abilities in the game. A 1-1-1 police unit is good, esp. to rush into a freshly captured base, even w/out clean reactors. You'll hardly find cheaper drone control. If the one min it costs to support them keeps one square working, you're still coming out ahead. It's SOP for me to garrison all my homeland bases with clean 3-res police, once the tech is available, for the police benefit plus the extra psi defense.

[Black Sunrise]

I Love love love these guys.
I have one base crank out 1-1-1 scouts. I always have a base, even early on, that can produce 10 minerals a turn.
That base produces a unit, who upgrades to clean police. Last turns unit then goes to base #2, 2-3 squares away. That bases unit goes to the next base, 2-3 squares away. That bases unit goes to the next base....
Basically, my unit appears at my central base, then pretty much teleports to the outermost base. Sorta a poor mans monopole magnets.
Now the really nice thing here is a) they can be pretty handy little guys against mindworms and such and b) they are great at police and c) you can station them at the edges of your empire, cause they are cheaper than building sensor arrays out there, and d) they are cannon fodder. A turn your enemy spends killing one of them is a turn he isn't moving into your base. A LOT of these guys can be produced, quickly, cheaply. Often they can be produced faster than they can be killed.
e) they can be upgraded. When war starts, upgrade 1 in each base to your best defence. BOOM! Instant army!
f) they can be used to destroy enemy terrain. LOTS of them, moving all over, just trashing the enemies carefully produced lands, while your main rover units play tag with the enemy forces. BIG hassle.
g) see e) again. BIG suprise, especially since your power graph has to do with military might. People who watch the graph for how you are doing will be in for a big suprise when they realize that you were so low because you had no military, and NOW YOU DO. hahahahhahahhhahah!

I love nasty suprises.

[Ned]

BlackSunrise, Good plan! But instead of building scouts, build 1-1-1 Trained Infrantry. Upgrade these to 1-1-1 Clean Police. You might then have the convoy visit a local Alien artifact for a further morale boost before heading for their final destination.

Ned

[GeneralTacticus]

e) they can be upgraded. When war starts, upgrade 1 in each base to your best defence. BOOM! Instant army!

That's exactly what I did. Once they were no longer useful and I was at war with Domai (he was the 'strongest' of the AI, but I was still 50+ times ahead of him), I upraded all 22 of 'em. I had 4 good military guys before, which could have beaten him but very slowly, but with this many guys my problem was just actually finding them all! It took me about 5 goes to take all his bases except for 2.

[johndmuller]

Do you save that much money doing this? Can't you build a AAA max armor cop with just a couple of turns production? Maybe you want to have a specialist or two instead?

I can relate to building a trained shell and upgrading to something else to get the benefit of trained in addition to a extra special ability or two. Sometimes (like when the unit needs to move arouond a bit before settling down) a drop trained shell is expecially nice that way, giving you the benefit of 4 separate abilities in all.

So how much do you save this way if you never upgrade them and how much do you lose if you do upgrade them compared to just building a full dressed cop in the first place.

If you are going to have a defender anyway, maybe it is more efficient to have a Trance Cop, or an ECM Cop or a AAA cop (or maybe one of each). If nothing else, it requires less supervision, although you certainly get more flexibility and are likely to have fewer units with obsolete armor to deal with down the road.

My biggest problem with shell units is that I don't know how it calculates the upgrade cost - it certainly isn't the same logic as it uses to figure the cost of building units. While it might cost the same to initially build a Photon garrison with or without 1 or two levels of weapon, it will very likely cost much more to upgrade to a Photon garrison with a light weapon than one with hand weapons only. This can affect the way you design units in the first place, unless you want to use up a lot of DW slot with multiple variations of the same unit-role - in addition to several variations of shell designs for a half dozen or more different types of forces.

Another gripe I have about upgrade costs is that it doesn't, IMhO, equitably recognize the previous investment in many cases. This is particularly noticable in the really expensive units like the combined offensive/defensive ones, which are always outrageously expensive to upgrade, no matter how little the improvement. Sometimes a reasonable spectrum of upgrade costs can be seen ascending smoothly with the power of the units, but it is often the case that a jump of 3 levels of weapon is not much, if at all, more expensive than a jump of just one, likewise with armor. There could be an RL reason for this, but it doesn't feel right.

[Sikander]

Somewhere here someone posted a solution to the upgrade cost cunundrum. IIRC it was fairly complex, which is why I never really got a handle on it. One thing to keep in mind is that the costs are changing as rapidly as your tech advances. Keep an eye out for freebies, like adding a laser (or whatever) to your defenders for no charge once your weapons tech is sufficiently advanced.

I build trained shells almost exclusively, but I don't tend to use non-lethal methods much, probably because in SP I can usually grab enough of the drone reduction SPs to make it a waste of time. I do use Clean Drop Cops to occupy recently captured enemy bases.

My tendency is to build only offensive or defensive weapons, almost never Best / Best types. It is almost always better to have two units than one once you have clean reactors. Once my mineral counts are high enough I build 1-1-1 clean trained scouts, as it saves a little money even if I immediately upgrade, and my bases produce enough minerals to make it a waste not to build a better unit. These can be stored indefinitely to be upgraded as necessary.

[MariOne]

My impression is that many many posters have a lot of impressive nice tactics, which are effective only because they have been tested against the AI where you can fiddle around and bide your time waiting for your brilliant plan requiring only 50 turns and 50,000 to be put in practice while no one else is disturbing you or racing for the resources you need.

Conceptually the ideas expresed here are brilliant. As jdm pointed out, are they also actually effective when applied against an equally skilled and imaginative opponent?
Maybe yes, but that should be worth being playtested soundly (i.e. NOT against the AI).

Apart this, I am surprised!
I would have said that if some of the posters here should know the upgrade cost formula, those should have been the frequent and insightful jdm, and even more one of the wisemen of these boards, the Sikander himself!

Figure that I *learned* about it right here at Apolyton, so I'm just bringing back something I took from here.

So, get your notepads ready:

Upgrade Cost
=
(
#ROWS of the NEW unit
+
Weapon levels increase
+
Armor levels increase
)
*
10 ec

Elements worth being pointed out.

• The Upgrade Cost is INDIFFERENT to your SE Industry setting
• The Upgrade Cost is INDIFFERENT to the "cost" of the unit you are upgrading from
• The only elements of the starting unit influencing the Upgrade Cost are Weapon & Armor

That is, upgrading from Synth to Plasma is less expensive than upgrading from scout to plasma not because you already paid more for the Synth, but because you need to provide a smaller armor increase (btw, remeber that HandWeapons or no armo are anyway to be ****ed as level 1)

So, GIVEN a desired "goal" unit, if you have to plan to build a unit which will cost less to be upgraded being also cheap to build, you should start with the highest W&A you can cope with your mineral production, and NO abilities added which make it more expensive to build.

Example:
you want to upgrade to a 1^-<3>-1
you will pay the same starting either from a 1-1-1 or a 1^-1-1 (but the drop scout will cost more to build)
you will pay less starting from a 1-3-1 than from a 1-1-1, or a 1^-1-1
you will pay the same starting from a 1-3-1 as from a 1^-3-1 or a 1-<3>-1

Of course you should know that some feature can't be discarded or acquired during the upgrade

- chassis must remain the same
- non weapon equipment must remain the same (i.e. you can't "upgrade" a former to a crawler or to a weponed unit)
- artillery (or lack thereof) must remain the same
- SAM *on air units* (or lack thereof) must remain the same (while it can be changed on sea/land chassis)
- you can't upgrade to a unit with a lower Weapon and/or Armor level

and also the quirk you already know:
- the benefit of Trained sticks to the unit even if you upgrade to a non-trained design (and viceversa you don't gain morale upgrading to a trained design: Trained ability is only ac****ed for at production time)

Thus, upgrading from a 1-1-x shell to a best-best-x is usually the most expensive upgrade you can organise.

Consider also this:
IIRC offhand, *producing* a 6-3-1*2 costs the same minerals as a 4-3-1*2 due to the reactor effect.
BUT
*upgrading TO* a 6-3-1*2 will always cost 20ec more than
*upgrading TO* a 4-3-1*2, from any equal starting unit whichever, not because of the higer goal production cost which is the same, but because of the higher Weapon level of the goal unit
(if the considered units don't actually cost the same forgive me, there are for sure some similar ones which the concept correctly applies to)

What I mean is that, especially after Fusion, the resource-effectiveness of a particular design is also in good part determined depending on whether you intend to *produce* it or to *upgrade* to it.


In conclusion:
specialised Scouts are still useful in many ways, for their cannonfodder/swarm/minefield "features".

But in an upgrade perspective, they should be used in small groups for highly specifc tasks, not for a mass approach.
They can constitute your special forces, not your whole army.

all this imho of course

[vitamin j]

I'm surprised to hear that upgrading a trained unit doesn't lose you the morale bonus. I could've sworn the only time I tried that the bonus was lost if the new design wasn't also trained... I'll have to try it out again.

[Deimos]

Were you running wealth at the time? IIRC, when I have upgraded trained units under wealth, they tend to forget their training. Everything seems fine while running other SE settings.

I guess the raise that comes with being promoted gets spent at the local pub, and the resulting hangover causes them to forget what their DI taught them.

[big_canuk]

Trained units remember their training if upgraded in the field, using up their turn. If upgraded using the DW, they forget their training. (I've never heard about, and know nothing about forgetting under wealth. I can't comment on that one way or the other).

bc

[GeneralTacticus]

Do you save that much money doing this? Can't you build a AAA max armor cop with just a couple of turns production? Maybe you want to have a specialist or two instead?

What I was saying about upgrading wasn't that it neccesarily saved you money, but time and minerals. I had money to burn, and I just wanted to kill Domai fast. I've never actually tried building troops solely to upgrade them, so I don't know how effective it is to do so relative to just building them at full power in the first place.

I do use Clean Drop Cops to occupy recently captured enemy bases.

That's not possible. The absolute maximum number of specials a unit can have is 2, and you're talking about using 3. (are you using a custom faction that gives you one of those specials for free?)

[Black Sunrise]

I'm a builder.
I build roads and forests, and tree farms and hybrid forests, and then I pop boom with 100% economy and get all my bases to have hybrid forests, then slap down lots of bases and get them up and running, and when everything is ready, and I have a huge industrial machine running, then I go out and play.
Till then, my goal is to keep my nation running, so the cheapest easiest garrison is crucial, and I never upgrade any unit I don't have to. Every bit of effort goes infrastructure till the day I roll out the troops. At that point, cash is no longer an issue.
So, for me, scout police ROCK. Cheap cheap cheap, they keep my nation under control, and can become a strong defender if I get a turns warning.
Hah. Beat that!

[MariOne]

Thanks bc.
And I catch this occasion to stress that what you reported is one more motive against the luddites opposing to upgrades in the DW!
(in the sense that the move benefit you get in upgrading a whole design rather than a single unit, is balanced by some other downsides including this one)

[Black Sunrise]

Also remember that when you upgrade the defenders in a base being attacked, there are dozens and dozens of units in other bases whom you _didn't_ upgrade, because they weren't being attacked.
In that sense, building cheap units for upgrade as needed is MUCH cheaper.
Plus, scouts are as good as 16-16-1 units against native life, and MUCH more replacable. Just watch out for choppers, those multiple attacks can be a MAJOR pain.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by GeneralTacticus
=That's not possible. The absolute maximum number of specials a unit can have is 2, and you're talking about using 3. (are you using a custom faction that gives you one of those specials for free?)

Good point. I use drop transports (Infantry Transport, clean / drop) to get these guys (clean / non-lethal) into the captured base. That provides two armored defenders to hold the base, plus whatever fighters I can fly in to help defend it. This is unnecessary in most cases, but if the AI faction has a really high population and I don't want to starve them all down by making most or all of them specialists I will use cops to keep the lid on the drone riots. Most of the time as I said there is no point.

[johndmuller]

Regarding trained units devolving when upgraded, there may be some other factors responsible for the lowering of morale which may or may not involve the trained attribute at all. I think that units may lose morale if they are rehomed, say from a base with a creche to one without a creche (this may also require some other thing - such as running wealth - to come into play as well). I sometimes rehome units in conjunction with upgrading them and in that instance, one could easily blame (perhaps in error) the retrograde on the trained attribute.

I recently gave a pactmate a unit which I had built under wealth in a base with a CCreche, CmdCenter and BioEnhCenter and it went down one morale level; he was running wealth at this point too, IIRC and the differences I could see were the lack of those facilites in the base of transfer (previously, while he was running power, or at least not wealth, units I gave him [not necessarily in that base] went up in morale). This unit was not Trained.

I was not previously aware of the possibililty of losing training if upgrading with the DW, but I generally refrain from upgrading with the DW unless I want to clear the Design itself to maintain free slots (I am convinced that using all the slots can trigger some bugs - such as mysteriously losing units), although I do (I guess it may be "did" from now on) try to upgrade the last unit of its type with the DW way to save a step,

[Enigma]

I use clean cops in the late game just because they are so cheap, but I think you guys worry too much about making your units clean. Lets admit it, we are all (except MariOne) talking about SP games here, and in these games battles are usually short. It is good to make your garrisons clean, and EXTREMELY good to make your formers clean (20 EC per former to go from a basic former to a clean former)- but losing some minerals for supporting a military unit doesnt matter.

Sikander I usually just rush in trained inf to a base and then upgrade it to whatever, I find infantry droppers to be a waste of minerals- they are usually expensive, more of a luxury than a necessity.

MariOne I really wanted to play MP games but they usually fell apart for one reason or another... I remember starting a 7 player game at ACOL but it disintegrated- I was really looking forward to that.

If I have caught your ear could I request that you give us a few tales of fun games you have had, or possibly some .SAV files?

[Sikander]

Enigma,

On the contrary, I find clean to be a very worthwhile investment anywhere beyond the early game, and drop infantry transports are pretty cheap really, and you don't need many of them. The reason that clean units make sense is that I tend to lose very few units in combat. This is because I usually have a lot of units, and tend to vaporize any enemy units which could react to my movements by attacking on a broad front and in depth. The reason I can afford to have a lot of units is because they are (almost) all clean. This pays off in the long run, though if I am pressed I'm not above building really cheap disposable units to suicide themselves against an enemy horde.