Zed's KAGG TAR #2

[Zed-F]

Vientiane, Laos -- KAGG version 1.07.4139

Laos is pretty far away from Island X, but not far enough to be safe from Kaiju! This is the last city I can hit in May, and indeed I hit it with only one day left in the month so I won't get back to drop my loot off until after month-end. That's ok, though, I have a bunch of projects to start in June but the key thing is that the pair of soylent centers I started building in April are now ready, so I should have plenty of food available now. I also built a pair of research centers and a quantum storage facility this month, but I definitely need more labs and a lot more power, so those are my targets for construction in June.





Vientiane does not have a lot of good buildings for loot drops. Almost all the money in the city is housed in just two buildings, the That Dam and the Pha That Luang; I planned to target those first to ensure I got them before the city flipped. I took out the That Dam first as I started out near it, and a bunch of nearby warehouses, then hit the Governor's mansion and the adjacent Patuxay as they on the way across town. The Clock tower, on the other hand, was not conveniently located, so I skipped it.



A funny thing happened as I was about to knock over the Pha That Luang, though; Defcon 3 hit. Already? I haven't been in the city that long, I think to myself. I couldn't recall from the start what the alert state of the city as I hit it was; I thought it was 'on alert' which I've seen quite a bit of recently and not had Defcon 3 drop so soon. Could it have really been 'is prepared' instead? Regardless, things could get a bit interesting as I am still quite a ways from flipping Vientiane at this point; really I've only just gotten started!



I haven't even killed all the priority target buildings in the city yet, and there aren't that many of them! The last one is the college down in the corner, though I also want to kill a handful of nearby warehouses; really these warehouses and gas stations are the only reliable source of power on the map. That, and the warehouses provide a bit of extra cash to help pad out the sums I got from the unique buildings.

But when I try to take out that college, a nasty little firefight develops. A trio of T2 tanks shows up, along with a couple T3 units.





I'd noticed earlier that armoured vehicles were taking less damage from my attacks than I remembered, but this was the first map where it really struck me -- most especially when I hit a heavy tank head-on with a full burst of death stare and it didn't die. Eye beams and probably a lot of the stuff in the breath weapons tree are pretty much soft-targets-only weapons now, too. I guess all the armoured vehicles and ships got their armour beefed up.

Not to mention, I am also being harassed by a trio of T3 jet fighters. I try to fight for control of the area around the college, and knock down the jets as well as taking out the melter and a handful of tanks, but it's clear I can't stick around forever. Finally I get a window of opportunity to knock down the college and grab the loot. I take it, then split, heading down the map edge, trying to keep ahead of a new pack that's developing to chase me. There's a river not too far off, with another small batch of warehouses nearby, where I figure I can ditch pursuit temporarily.



After crossing the river, Defcon 2 hits, but by this point I think I have enough of a lead on my pursuers that I'm not in too much danger of being caught. I continue on my circuit about the map, stepping on houses and civilians alike, and crushing the occasional warehouse as I come across them, until the city finally gives in.





Hey, not too shabby, all things considered! And I wound up taking less than 100 damage through the shield, too, which is nice given the opposition I was facing. I definitely want to beef up on defenses before I take on T3 units on a more regular basis, though.

[Zed-F]

Planning for T4 -- KAGG version 1.07.4139

Let's do some math!

So as June 1 rolls around, I have a lot of resources stockpiled up. The reason for this is that after mid-May, there wasn't any point in building anything else because nothing more would complete in May, and I was still short on food because my soylents were still under construction. Now that June 1 has hit, though, my soylents are pulling their weight, so I'm no longer food-limited. Accordingly, it's time to consider what I'm going to build this month, toward the goal of hopefully starting construction on my T4 trainer on the first of July.





So, here's what I have to work with right now. I need to figure out two things before I proceed any further. First, can I get my T4 trainer under construction on July 1, and what do I need in order to do that. Second, what T4 abilities do I want to be able to train when my T4 trainer is complete, how much time do I need to spend training more T2 and T3 abilities in order to do so, and what additional T3 abilities do I also need in order to tackle T3 and T4 cities? Certainly I want to be in a position to resume conquest of the world as soon as possible after I've finished training my must-have T4 abilities, so these questions will all figure into my planning.



Let's answer the second question first. In order to have the longevity I want in T3-T4 cities, I figure I either need forced priority or repair cycle. However, forced priority is limiting to my build, and I don't think it will play nicely if I use a second active defense power like deflectors, so that seems to indicate repair cycle is the better choice. EM jammers is an inexpensive way to cut missile damage by a third so it seems like an obvious pick. It also opens the way to distortion field and PD array, should I decide I need either of those. Offensively, blasters seems the clear best choice to deal with enemy vehicles, and leads to turboblasters to tackle enemy kaiju-scale defenders.

Including auxiliary reactors and structural reinforcement as precursors to repair cycle, that's 38 days worth of training. I also have several days worth of repairs backlogged, which I will need to catch up on in order to start training abilities. If I want to build my T4 trainer on July 1, I have about 70 days before I can start training T4 abilities. So, I probably have enough time to start looking into some raids on T3/T4 cities, and maybe flip a

couple, before I need to break for T4 training.





The most obvious and glaring hole is power. I've been relying on power raided from cities, because up until now this has been pretty easy and profitable to do; certainly ignoring power buildings (other than a quantum storage, which I built because I had too much power and not enough food) has allowed me to concentrate more on fixing my food and research shortages, although I think there is probably more work to be done on the latter. But the first order of business in this situation needs to be a purpletonium plant, because I don't think I'll get enough power by month-end without one.

I also need more research facilities, but these are expensive to build, not so much in terms of cash but in terms of non-cash resources. Still, I am pretty sure I can afford to build two more and still have enough resources to start my T4 trainer in July, providing I make up the difference with raids; if I can grab a few hundred more knowledge and several hundred more power, I'll be set.

So, what target to hit next? Decisions, decisions...

[Zed-F]

Santiago, Chile -- KAGG version 1.07.4157

I ultimately picked Santiago as my next target. I don't really want to be staring down battleships without having Turboblasters, because I expect the weapons I have right now won't really impress battleship armour very much, and because I want to be able to engage from outside battleship gun battery range. That leaves out maps with a lot of open water. Santiago is in a valley nestled amongst the Andes and doesn't really have any open water, so seems like a good choice.

Of course, there's really not that much to see in Santiago...



Star Arena is the only landmark building in town. It also happened to be near the start point, so it was one of the first buildings I took out, apart from a bunch of warehouses to grab some juice. There were also a couple melters in the area, but eye beams made short work of them.



These universities were my next targets, in order to grab the books and the purple rocks. There is also a college in town (which I would visit later,) a handful of office towers, and a few hospitals and medical centers, but a surprising percentage of the knowledge drops in town aren't actually from large buildings. Santiago has an amazing number of bookstores; individually these don't amount to much, but collectively there's actually quite a bit of knowledge tied up in them.

I'm just not sure there's enough to justify two trips to the town, given the overall lack of cash loot drops available, so my plan is to try to flip the city in one shot. I'd rather do my raiding somewhere else that has a high concentration of office towers, like Sydney.



Of course, I still wanted to take out those high-value knowledge targets, and I needed to cross the city to get at them. I did after all need to beat a track around the city so I would be able to continue to evade pursuit. This stasis tank was in between Gino and those objectives; it had to go. Fortunately, deflectors are somewhat helpful in situations like these; I didn't really want to get slowed down here.



The jump to Defcon 2 came while I was clearing out a hospital and a medical facility in the corner of the map. However, by this point I already had quite a following, so I wasn't too worried that I would be facing a flood of T2 enemies. You can only have so many enemies on a map, after all! I was expecting to see a trickle of T2 units, though...



And here's one of them! This little guy could have been nasty if I had allowed him to get up close and personal, but fortunately I spotted him in time. I wound up having to prematurely detonate a handful of them as I ran my marathon about the map. It did take quite a while to hunt down all those civilians while playing ring around the rosy to evade the city defenders, but I wasn't terribly eager to engage with the pack of foes trying to hunt Gino down.





Every once in a while I would have to kill a defender that took a faster path than its fellows and got too close, which would open up a spot in the rotation for something else to come in a reinforcement wave, such as this gunship. Fortunately, enemies in front of me or planes following me are no trouble to deal with, so long as I only have to deal with one at a time and can keep ahead of the mob following Gino.



After several laps around Santiago, house-hunting and civilian-squashing, the city finally realized their defenders would never catch Gino on their own terms, and gave in.





Nice! That extra power with the key, combined with the loot, should be just enough to secure my T4 trainer build at month's end. Now I just need to get the resources I need for training the precursors required to grab the T4 abilities I want.

[Jkaen]

Started playing this now, I think having re-read some reports the biggest thing I was not naturally doing is raiding and leaving when full on resources, was trying to flip each time which I dont think was the right move

[Zed-F]

You're right, it's not always the best call to flip every time, especially early on in the game. Flipping can require soaking a lot of damage, and before you have any kind of shield it's not always feasible. It's generally better to leave when you are low on health or full of resources, and come back later.

[Zed-F]

Fukuoka, Japan -- KAGG version 1.07.4160

With just a few days left until the end of June, I don't have time for repairs right now if I want to try to flip one more city. I considered hitting Cape Town, but I don't quite have the time to get there by month's end, so I decide upon Fukuoka instead. Fukuoka is on the verge of being a better city for raiding than for flipping; it has a lot of office towers scattered about, but it also takes 2 2/3 days to get there from Island X, which is a bit more than I'd prefer. Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City all seem like better raiding choices based on travel time -- even Hong Kong has a lot more resources for the raiding and is only 1/3 of a day further out.

Still, I'm down a significant amount of health from flipping Santiago. I might not be able to take Fukuoka in a single visit. There are a couple major rivers through town that can act as highways and have enough bridges to probably prevent naval units from spawning there, so I think I can by and large evade pursuit and the flip is worth the attempt, but if things go sour I might have to beat feet early. At least I have the consolation of knowing that if I need to make a second trip, I'll probably be able to get enough loot to make that second trip worthwhile.







The first thing decide to do upon entering Fukuoka and starting near the center of the bay is hunt down and crush the 4 think tanks in town. The path I beat through the city to do so takes the path of least resistance, i.e. fewest buildings crushed. This gives me two sides of a rough square about town and part of a third side I can use for my marathon race track. I still need to work on the other half of one side and all of the fourth side, however.



These are the guys chasing me at this point. Getting 4 melters out of the initial couple batches of armoured vehicles spawning in the city is actually pretty helpful; they can be nasty if they ambush you, but otherwise they are relatively slow, short-ranged, and easy to avoid. Even if one does get the drop on me, I find it's better to potentially take the hit and bypass it rather than kill it, because if I do take it out something more dangerous might get spawned instead.

There are also a couple of heavy tanks in the mix, which is also a relatively good draw for me. If a whole bunch of laser tanks had spawned instead, that could have caused some problems. I did get some air in the draw, but it got knocked out of the sky pretty quickly.





After I took out the air and did my best to drag all the ground vehicles into a stern chase, it was just a matter of running my laps, hitting buildings when the pack is relatively far away to shake loose the civilians, burning up the civilians with plasmoid or squishing them under Gino's feet, and turning on the booster and scooting when the pack got too close. As usual, this took a while, but was easily the safest way to go about flipping the map. Defcon warnings don't mean much when the unit limit count has already hit cap and is just sitting there, with no vehicles being killed to make room for more.





It took a fair number of laps, but the city couldn't hold out forever, and eventually fell.
I'd like to get some abilities to make this go a bit faster, but most of the AoE abilities Gino has access to don't actually hit an area multiple times; instead, they just hit everything that was in the area of effect at the time the attack was initially launched multiple times. So, if something spawns in or moves into the area of effect, it doesn't get hit, and if something moves out of the original area of effect, it still gets hit anyway. As a result, you actually need to use 2 different AoE attacks, or use attacks like Missile Storm that launch multiple AoE projectiles at an area, if you want to rustle out all the civilians in an area and then kill them all.

Gino does have access to a couple AoE abilities that recalculate the affected AoE each time they hit, but Ice Storm and Fire Storm are pretty high in the breath weapons tree. I'm trying to expedite my conquest of the world according to game-time, not real-time; on those terms, I can't justify spending a lot of time climbing a tree I don't really need to visit in order to pick up convenience skills. Once I get Blaster and Turboblaster, I'll be able to use those instead.

[Zed-F]

Cape Town, South Africa -- KAGG version 1.07.4160

If Africa weren't so far away I would definitely consider raiding this city more than once. There are plenty of office towers here, not to mention universities, valuable landmark buildings, a think tank, some medical centers, a fission plant... even just considering purpletonium, there's more than I can carry in one trip, never mind the more plentiful resources. But Cape Town is over 4 days trip each direction; there's no chance I can justify taking two trips just to get resources I can raid from cities closer to Island X.



This time I start near a bunch of universities, so those are my first target. By the time I am done clearing these out I am already full of purple rocks, and I know that there are still several more buildings in town that can drop them. No doubt about it, I will be leaving a lot of loot on the table this time! But, closer raiding targets are better, etc...





These are the guys I am up against at the mission start. My loop around Cape Town map is actually small enough that these guys can catch up with me if I'm not careful. Larger maps that have more maneuvering room make outrunning stuff easier, which is one reason why T4 cities seemed considerably easier than T3 ones in my first playthrough.

I should clarify -- that last melter on the side road will never catch up with me. I don't think it can actually leave that road because it doesn't connect to anything. Anyway, I ignore it and move on, making sure not to get too close.



Here we are around the other side of the map and about to cut back in toward the area where the universities used to be, in order to make my racetrack complete. The Good Hope Center is another building that drops a lot of loot, including purpletonium. I'm low on cash for this run because so far most of what I've hit has been residential areas at the map edges, but I am about to pass through downtown on that fourth leg of my loop, so I expect to pick up some cash there. Probably it will take me several laps to smash enough of the downtown core to fill up, though; the map is small enough that I can only afford to take out a handful of buildings each time, lest the pack of nastiness behind me catch up.



Several laps later, we're at Defcon One, but there's nowhere for boomers and other scary things to threaten me from and enemy Kaiju don't appear on T3 maps.





More buildings that I ignore because sadly I can't use the loot they drop! It's a crying shame, I tell ya.





Here's what I did manage to get out of flipping Cape Town. I believe this will be sufficient to allow me to train all my prereqs for the T4 abilities I want, so that's good enough!

[Zed-F]

Planning for T5 -- KAGG version 1.07.4160

So after flipping Cape Town I start training in preparation for T4 abilities becoming available. August 1st rolls around and I still have 10 more days to go until my T4 trainer completes. I expect to be done training pre-reqs a couple days after that, and to start training my two T4 must-haves. Just two fairly average T4 abilities is going to take me well over a month to train -- yikes.



This is where I start really running into the fact that things take exponentially longer to train, the higher you get in the abilities tree. There's no way I want to consider skipping these powers; I think they will pay for themselves in time saved and then some. Fighting enemy battleships, boomers, kaiju, and super factories without turboblasters sounds pretty masochistic, and keeping up with field repairs means not repairing at the base, which is a huge time-saver in addition to the obvious survivability benefits. But if two T4 powers take well over a month to learn, what are the implications for T5?

Moreover, I've been pretty scrupulous about maximizing my use of resources and drawing in as much income as possible as fast as possible. I'm actually in pretty good shape already to put together a plan to get to T5; even with the very high resource costs the T5 trainer requires, I'm expecting to start construction in October.





I'm not suggesting that date can't be beat; I am still learning the game, after all. Coming up with a perfect build order while the resource buildings are still being balanced is probably not something I should expect of myself, and I now realize I could have been more aggressive about hitting T3 and maybe even T4-T5 cities sooner, rather than sticking to T2. Still, I suspect in that event I would have needed to spend more time on repairs and less time actually raiding and flipping cities. How much more resource income could I have been able to generate and how much faster could I have built my top-end trainers? I'm not sure. And I'm equally unsure which powers I'd have to cut from my already bare-bones training schedule to be able to capitalize on trainers being ready sooner.

So what does a T5 trainer starting construction in early October mean? It means the building itself will be done at the beginning of December. It means that even if I only want one T5 power and have all the pre-reqs lined up beforehand, it'll take me most of December to get that power. And it means I'll probably need to spend all of November just getting those pre-reqs, assuming I go for QPR like I did last time around -- I suspect that's still the best pick for my build.

I'll be done training my two must-have T4 abilities by mid-September. If I discount November as a training month, that leaves me about a month and a half to work on T4 cities before I need to go into training, and it will be near the end of December before I come out again. In short, there's no way I can wrap the game up within 1 year if I go this route. I didn't really set myself a formal target for when I'd like the game wrapped by, but 1 year would be a nice round number. One that's perhaps possible with near-perfect play, but seems a bit out of reach for this game, based simply on the numbers and accounting of how much time it takes to gather resources, build structures, and train abilities.

What's the alternative? Try to flip everything, including all the T5 cities, without any T5 abilities at all. Spend everything after mid-september purely on attacking and flipping cities as fast as possible. Is that possible? I don't know.

If I look at the costs for things I could be building besides the T5 trainer, I'm immediately struck by the fact that satellites and dropships are both expensive and single-use items. Plus, the build times for these things are reflective of their costs. It seems pretty clear that these are meant primarily to be something you can do with your resources after you already have your T5 trainer and are working on or have whatever T5 abilities you want. Using satellites as a replacement for T5 abilities seems like a pretty sketchy proposition based purely on the cost structure, never mind the fact that these are new systems to the game that I haven't used before, and I'm not sure how effective they really are.

Another big question mark is whether one must have T5 abilities to break a T5 city. Certainly there's no question it helps, a lot; just being the largest size Kaiju is a massive increase in your ability to move around in highly built-up cities, and some of the T5 cities are very highly built-up. Oftentimes common buildings in T5 cities will be considerably tougher than in smaller cities, with the expectation that players will be bringing in T5 kaiju with the extra raw power to smash through those buildings. My biggest concern for fighting in T5 cities with a T4 kaiju is that I simply won't have either the physical punching power to take down reinforced buildings fast enough, or the sheer size to blow through enough different kinds of buildings without stopping, such that I won't be able to stay ahead of whatever pack forms. Power is also a potential concern, though at this point I think it's a secondary one to mobility.

Still, I think it's my only shot at being able to finish this game within the first year, no matter how long the odds might be. I think that when Gino comes out of training in mid-September, my best play has to be to first make sure everything is lined up for that T5 trainer build in October, then try to hit a T5 city and see how it goes. If it goes well, a Year 1 finish might yet be possible. If not... then I'll still have my T5 trainer building, I'll still be able to finish in Q1 of Year 2, and that's still a substantial improvement over my first game. And I can always try again later with a tweaked build order, if I so desire.

[Zed-F]

Sydney, Australia -- KAGG version 1.07.4160

I could raid Sydney, but at this point I'm mostly past the need to raid anywhere. I just need to flip one city and raid or flip a second before the end of September and I'm pretty much set for the rest of the game. Despite its proximity, Sydney is a reasonable choice for a flip at this point; between a full load of loot, the monthly income, and the cash bonus that comes with the key, I should have enough to just need one more full load of cash and my T5 trainer will be secured.

So I hit Sydney, and there are 2 cruisers and a battleship practically on top of the spawn point.



This is why I wanted Turboblasters before coming here! Fortunately they do their job. I do lose my shield by the time I've dealt with all three of them, though. And that's why I wanted repair cycle.



I also have to deal with a couple airborne threats while I move in on the opera house, but these are just T3 interceptors and no problem in comparison. Gino just waits for them to approach, then swats them out of the sky.



Next I hit the naval base for the potential loot drops and to stop extra ships from spawning. To be honest I think if I avoided the area entirely the extra ships wouldn't spawn anyway, but I expect to be in the neighborhood fairly regularly as I build a race track around downtown Sydney. Most of the city's loot is in the downtown core, after all!



Defcon 2 hits while I am running my laps around downtown, pausing occasionally to dig my way closer to valuable buildings buried deeper in the core, such as that banking tower. My race track around downtown isn't really that big, so I have to keep moving to avoid the melters chasing me and hoping to get shots in.



Here's another bank building that I'm targeting. At this point I'm full on cash and almost full on books; what I'm really looking for in these buildings is purple rocks. I'm a bit disappointed in Sydney in that regard, however; I only manage to get a handful of them.



Remember how I said I'm still learning the game? Here's an example. If you paid attention you might have noticed none of my screenshots have previously shown a targeting highlight on a unit, of the type you can get by right-clicking on it. That's because I never used to use it, as I didn't get how it worked. It didn't seem to make any difference, because after I right-clicked on something and then aimed at it, I missed just as often as before.

The bit I was missing, which struck me recently as I was watching a video of someone else playing, is that you aren't supposed to aim after you right-click something. You're just supposed to shoot, and Gino will aim automatically. OH, alrighty then! Manual aiming after you've marked a target will override the auto-aiming feature and then it's as if you hadn't marked anything. No wonder I wasn't noticing any improvement when marking targets and then aiming!



Another interesting tidbit -- you can mark targets while paused. Now that's a helpful little feature! Once Defcon 2 hit and again at Defcon 1, I started to suffer fly-bys from stealth bombers. In my last game I would generally just ignore these and try to avoid the bombs. This game I thought I would try shooting the bombers down. I soon discovered that aiming the death stare correctly can be a pain... but if you spot the stealth bomber in time and use pause to get a 'bomber' tooltip you can be confident of being able to right-click and mark it while the game is paused. That makes the aiming part no problem, so it's just a matter of timing your shot for when the bomber is in range. And the latter can be accomplished by spamming death stare as the bomber approaches, without moving the targeting reticule or left-clicking to manually designate a target. Shooting down bombers seems a lot more feasible now!

I did notice one unusual thing about stealth bombers, though -- you have to shoot them down multiple times before they will go away and get replaced by some other reinforcement. I'm not sure how this works exactly but I imagine it's related to the fact that they aren't on the map all the time like most other flying units.



I've been constantly frustrated with Gino firing plasmoids at places that aren't where I targeted using manual aiming, because it wants to display a tooltip for some other building, or the target sampling rate isn't as fast as my aim after coming out of pause, or it's firing at the wrong corner of that city block due to the isometric display, or some such. But right-clicking to pick a civilian out of a cluster of buildings while paused and then automatically targeting it when you come out of pause to shoot seems like a great way to solve those kinds of issues. I had a lot more luck incinerating civilians this way than I have enjoyed in the past, when attacking civilians not running through open areas.





I did wind up doing a lot more fighting on this map than I had previously. Something about having turboblasters to wipe out small groups of units reliably seemed to encourage it! Also, there's only one bridge between the two halves of Sydney on the map, so cutting that bridge meant I only had to deal with half the enemies... but when I moved to the other side of the map to squish civilians, all of a sudden the other half of the enemies were all there and ready to chase me again. I opted to just gun them all down instead. As a result, I had to watch my energy expenditure at some points, especially when I wasn't downtown for quick fill-ups.

[Zed-F]

Buenos Aires, Argentina -- KAGG version 1.07.4160

This is another one of those cities that really doesn't have anything special to recommend it in terms of landmarks. The corner I started in was pretty unremarkable except for having a few oil tanks nearby, which I used to partly fill up on energy. I probably should have just come in with a full bar, as I think I would still have had enough to begin my T5 trainer build next month anyway. Trying to find enough energy to use repair cycle while I was still building my race track about town turned out to be a risk that I didn't really need to take.



For the initial version of the race track I used this highway as a pre-cleared strip through the center of town as one of the edges of my racetrack. I had a lot of armoured infantry to drag into a stern chase this time around, and kept getting pinged. Not really a huge problem, but having to use repair cycle a couple times early on made it tough to keep my energy reserves up... especially since I was also trying to shoot down the stealth bombers that kept doing flybys.



Fortunately there was a coal plant on the opposite side of town that was a good source of energy to power Gino back up. After I snacked on that and a bunch of warehouses, Gino was pretty good for juice from there on out.



Gino was still taking a few pings here and there on a somewhat regular basis, though, mainly because that highway in the middle wasn't quite far enough from the coast to prevent the defenders from taking potshots as I passed them by. I was trying to hit a couple banks and such for the purpletonium, which I eventually did... but it was clear that highway wasn't quite as good an answer as it might have been.



Once I had opened up a bit of a gap on the pack chasing me, I decided the time had come to forge a new path that might work a little better over the long run. So I made my way over to this collection of universities, which allowed me to fill Gino up on books and purpletonium, and then started blazing a trail around the edge of the map from there. It went pretty well; there are some large buildings on the map edges in Buenos Aires but enough houses and other small fry to keep the pace of trailblazing reasonable. And after the trail was blazed, all that was left was just to run a lot of laps.





Overall, not too shabby on the loot drops! Of course I don't really need most of it anymore, but it's the thought that counts, right? Hopefully Rio De Janiero is as straightforward to take out.