Imperium Ten: Megafrost's rain of missiles

[TheArchduke]

Scatter Pack Rockets? What an awesome pull of the Artifact planet.

This makes your early bases nearly impregnable giving you quite the edge in the early game. And a rich Sssla, you were quite lucky.

But it seems you didn´t grow lazy and settled the game by conquest and that quickly. A good game!

[timoteob]

I'm not worried about losing technology. It can be annoying, sure, but if they need my technology in order to compete with me, then I've already won. The AI needs a huge technology advantage to militarily beat a player that knows what they're doing. An AI playing catch-up will not be much of a threat.

Most of my thinking is based on the Impossible difficulty. The AIs there research computers like crazy, and that usually means security spending is not going to help much.

You make some good points. Now that I think about, my use of security spending was more base on an irrational desire to protect what is "mine" rather than preventing real harm. Also, security spending is expensive; maxed out it will take 20% of your production right off the top.

I am curious if others use the same strategy?

[dathon]

I think you'll find that most long-term players don't use security spending. Megafrost is right; on higher difficulties, your opponents will either have high computer tech levels, rendering security all but useless, or not, in which case you probably don't need protection from them AI ship re-design is random, so the odds of a race stealing just the tech they need and applying it at precisely the right moment is probably almost non-existent. And either way, I'd STILL want that money going to upping my own computer tech level. Security spending nets you nothing; increasing your computer tech nets you the benefit of the techs themselves. And allows for your own counter-espionage

dathon

[Doug.Lefelhocz]

I use 2% security spending. I really don't know what to do with it myself. I've read the spying chapter in the strategy guide, but still... maybe I need to study it more thoroughly. AIs stealing tech doesn't come as the only problem. They can also destroy missile bases and/or incite a planet to revolt through propoganda.

[Maniac Marshall]

Never use security spending? I don't leave it on, but I do try to get rid of spies that are causing problems. I've seen more than 20 bases and close to 100 factories go bye bye in ONE TURN when I've ignored spy nests before. And this was NOT well late into a game when I could replace those quickly.

Clearly that wouldn't happen on this size map on average, but when a race hits me a couple times within a few turns, I'll run a max security sweep to clear the nests out. I ran one such sweep this game after the "humans" stole from me.

[Maniac Marshall]

Good, solid, well written up warmongering game.

It sure seems like most people's AI's built better designs than mine did.

I guess it would be because none of my AI had more than 5 planets... Maybe because none of them warred with each other and because I just let them retreat for the most part without trying to shoot them out of the sky... This left them with fleets of useless ships which probably were a drag on their econ and slowed their research even further.