[spoilers] Centauri alpha female

[Mist]

How about flamethrowers? They should be around for some time.

Get obsoleted by Hyperions at Biofuel. While you might not necessarily need Autarky ( though it's comparable, if not better to Planned ) Bioreactors are to good to pass over.

So I take it that this strange native life cap applies only to captured natives and you can spam more in your bases to your heart's contents?

It applies to both, but it's ridiculously easy to make that number huge to the point of irrelevancy if you're not aggroing the planet.

I do like the sound of the 'washing' part What is it?

The whole idea is to exploit good terrain to the full while using marginal one to dupe planet into loving you. You tech and adopt Voice of the Planet. Then you consider two types of a city - Powerhouse and a Fungus Hippie Camp.

Whenever you see a very good location for a city, you grow it to a Powerhouse - big, improved with edens and boreholes, and condensers and mirrors and whatnot. All the fungus in sight of a powerhouse ( BFC + 1 range ) gets chopped, burned and salted.

All the other locations are FHC, you leave the fungus alone around those, even plant some more when possible, maybe build some greenhouses and windmills around. FHC needs to be only as big as many empath slots you it run, only things it has to ever produce is latest building that adds planet rating, Research and Stockpile Energy. Any Transcends that get born in FHC get settled in FHC. You probably want to run biodomed not to have to worry about food here.

Now, why all that?

Global planet attitude is an average for all turns played of all your cities added together in a turn.
Psi limit is raised if all your cities added together this turn come up green.

Get enough FHCs, and you can run all the heavy industry you'd ever want in the good spots, while not loosing access to worms and free culture. You also get an instant use of all those marginal locations that would be otherwise hard to make productive.

Deidre is slightly better at this because she needs less FHCs for the same effect, but you on the other hand can do big cities much better than her.

[Serdoa]

Madness...? [SIZE="4"]THIS IS[/SIZE] [SIZE="7"]SPARTA![/SIZE]

[Iskender]

Madness...? [SIZE="4"]THIS IS[/SIZE] [SIZE="7"]SPARTA![/SIZE]

Yes, this pretty much sums up the diplo.

Now back to the greenwashing plan. If I understand it correctly it bases on two assumtions. I think we should agree on those first.

1. Having positive planet attitude is a huge benefit.

The biggest advantage of going green is the access to native units. I made some WB tests to see how good worms and isles are in combat.

At first sight they seem to be pretty awful. Worms cost 40 hammers but they get slaughtered by flamethrowers, bunkers and units with Empath Song. They are one movers, the only way they could approach a base is if there were a lot of fungus around it which is not likely. The same goes for Isles - they are 40 hammers vs Sub's 26 but an Isle loses to any Sub with Empath Song and is 1 move slower (which alone would make a Isles pretty awful even if they had good odds on naval units).

Is there something I'm missing, i.e. native life getting combat bonuses proportional to planet rating - how good is it? I reckon somewhere between +50-100% would make Worms and Isles combat-worthy, otherwise they're situational.

2. Big cities are good.

There are only a few multiplier buildings. At best a big city would get +25% to hammers, coins and beakers, +1 energy/tile with Bioreactor. IMO that's not worth training military police and having paying its maintenance. I'd rather have 2 cities near the 'natural' happy cap and use the troops to strenghten the army.

Speaking of which, I'm more and more convinced that Bioenhanced will be prerequisite for any successfull offensive. This his how I imagine combat in Planetfall:

One guy (the attacker) moves his stack towards whatever the objective is at the pace of 1 or 2 tiles/turn. The defender, having built bunkers in cities and at some strategic spots hits the invading stack with collateral every turn. Now if there are no units with Bio, after a few turns the stack is going to be at 50% = dead. Even with Bio, enough continuous collateral can damage troops more than they heal up - 2 bunkers with Barrage I (30% collateral damage) is enough to keep bleeding out a standard weak-ass Bioenhanced stack with a Healer I (20% heal).

This is where Spartans shine. They both take less collateral and heal more. It'd take at least 4 bunker attacks (or 8 tank attacks) per turn (36%) to offset Spartan healing (30% for a stack with a Healer I (30%). With a 2-move stack (APC) it shouln't be difficult to park the stack so that it's not within range of 4 bunkers at once, which means that Sparta might be the only faction that could launch a successful offensive attack in the bunker era. That's why I like Bio (and Doctor bulbs) so much.

[Iskender]

OK I just got the point with big cities - keep them starving and pay food maintenance. Two points though:

1. Say that we run only big, dirty, anti-planet bases and get millions of negative PR. How badly would the planet react? Would it be on the scale of, say, deity aggressive barbarians or FFH AC100 apocalypse?

2. Still I wonder if it wouldn't be better to run 2 food-starved 10-size cities instead of one at 20, considering the effort to grow extra pop and the cost of military police.

[Mist]

The biggest advantage of going green is the access to native units. At first sight they seem to be pretty awful. Worms cost 40 hammers but they get slaughtered by flamethrowers, bunkers and units with Empath Song.

The same goes for Isles - they are 40 hammers vs Sub's 26 but an Isle loses to any Sub with Empath Song

You're comparing pure hammer units ( flamethrowers, subs ) to foodhammer units ( worms ). Apples and oranges. Only hammer cities can build normal units at reasonable pace, any city can build worms.

Depending on how red your opponent is he gets pretty sizeable strength nerf ( seems to be 4% for each 1 negative planet rating ) when fighting native life. Depending on how green you are, your worm units get free xp. This brings another very strong point of worms, promotions. Have you looked at native life promotions? ( Especially - wild, infest, bloom and swarming )

2. Big cities are good.

Few big cities is easier to keep productive, safe and fungus free. You can draft at will from a big city with proper food surplus. And since one unit produced per turn limit is not present, few very high hammer/foodhammer queues is as good as many moderate capacity ones ( you only have to build few copies of military and other infrastructure ). You also get a lot of very big disposable crumple zones in form of cities that are not essential.

TL;DR;

I'm not saying Greenwashing is better than standard Terraforming/Biodomed approach, I'm saying it's as viable and probably not something that people expect of you.

[Mist]

1. Say that we run only big, dirty, anti-planet bases and get millions of negative PR. How badly would the planet react? Would it be on the scale of, say, deity aggressive barbarians or FFH AC100 apocalypse?

Cities have a chance of % fungal bloom equal to their negative planet rating as long as there's a fungus tile next to a tile in their BFC. The lower your planet rating, the more do the worms target you. There's also an AI side that autodeclares on a side with lowest planet rating.

[Iskender]

You're comparing pure hammer units ( flamethrowers, subs ) to foodhammer units ( worms ). Apples and oranges. Only hammer cities can build normal units at reasonable pace, any city can build worms.

Here a lot depends on the map. If it's abundant in mineral-poor and food-rich areas then it might be the way to go. I'm ready to play against the planet, but I'd rather not play against the map.

Depending on how red your opponent is he gets pretty sizeable strength nerf ( seems to be 4% for each 1 negative planet rating ) when fighting native life.

This could get nasty. If, say, Mardoc decided for hybrid-powered fungus-friendly ICS (thus devolving from a pirate to an algae eater) and we dropped our planet rating to -15 or lower, his isles would be invincible even vs Empath Subs. In my tests games I haven't gone below -1, but I haven't played for too long either, gotta check how bad it can get.

Depending on how green you are, your worm units get free xp. This brings another very strong point of worms, promotions. Have you looked at native life promotions? ( Especially - wild, infest, bloom and swarming )

I don't have PF at hand, but I think these are equivalents of FFH Hidden Nationality and Marksman and there's one that spawns a new worm for each successful attack. Marksman and spawning would be good if worms had a chance to launch an attack but I believe that's not going to happen versus a semi-competent player, who'll just use bunkers and flamethrowers to turn the worms into spaghetti.

[Bobchillingworth]

One thing to keep in mind regrading Native units is that they are much better on the attack than defense. Lots of units meant to fight Native life only have attack bonuses against them, and Psi combat gives the attacker 3 strength vs 2 for the defender, before modifiers. So Isles and Subs for instance both should do well attacking each other, and poorly defending. Native life is slower, except in areas where there is a lot of fungus. It's situational. Native life also doesn't get your leader bonuses, like the ability for all combat units to bombard.

[Iskender]

If, say, Mardoc decided for hybrid-powered fungus-friendly ICS (thus devolving from a pirate to an algae eater) and we dropped our planet rating to -15 or lower, his isles would be invincible even vs Empath Subs. In my tests games I haven't gone below -1, but I haven't played for too long either, gotta check how bad it can get.

I've made some WB tests and it seems that at high negative planet rating fighting native sea life can get bothersome. Around -10 Subs with Empath Song lose to Isles on a regular basis. It might be necessary to take some steps to keep planet rating at bay, but it depends on how fast planet rating will dive (it should go down substantially faster compared to Arrival starts).

[Iskender]

So here's the first turn. I settled the first colony pod in place - a no-brainer with 4 resources in starting BFC and none outside it

Sent the rover and the other colony pod SW, there's a flash of promising river out there. The starting former will remove fungus and build a mine on the silver. I upgraded one supply pod into a former and another into a unity rover (Morale IV is nice).

Started building infirmary - gotta keep the citizens healthy.

I seem to have contact with Yang already, not sure if it is a problem. I can refrain from approaching him until we make actual contact in the game.