Poaching with crawlers

RedFred · September 12, 2000, 14:11

By now just about everyone is making extensive use of land and sea crawlers to ferry additional resources. Sometimes my own crawler production reaches such a high rate that I run out of good places to put them in my territory.

No doubt many of you have hit upon the same solution as me. Put your excess crawlers on neutral or foreign territory.

The bonus tiles in neutral sea areas are usually my first target. Especially if Svensgaard isn't around. Playing SP double blind I seem to get one of the "3" armors quickly and don't progress beyond it for a long time. So I will add 3 armor to the sea crawlers and that seems to discourage the AI from attacking it. Somewhat.

You will notice that if the neutral territory becomes controlled by another faction you will continue to get the resource from that crawler. Even better, you can send crawlers into foreign territory and still get the resource. If you are outside of a foreign city's radius you will always get the resource. If inside it, just use your infiltrator status to ensure that the tile you go to is not in active use. This works on all land or sea tiles.

In terms of crawler survivorability, this seems to work best with factions that have surrendered to you. In a pinch other pacted factions' or treatied factions' territory will do.

I'm curious. Assuming no self-imposed "no crawler" rule, does everyone else use this strategy?

Simpson II · September 12, 2000, 16:10

I do this to some extent, when playing with bases closely stacked. Usually I use trawlers to bring in nutrients so I can reach the 50% fusion engineer population that I crave!

However, they would tend to be within my 'perimeter,' established by deep-radar probe-foils and needlejets; that way nothing is likely to kill them off, armour or no. I have never used enemy territory. I find it's best not to put a temptation to attack into the AI's way, especially since it can't resist it.

Thantos · September 15, 2000, 16:12

I use it a lot for sea crawlers not so much though for land crawlers. Mostly I like to use excess naval crawlers with deepspace radar in critical geographical points to keep an eye on enemy movement.