More Awesome Than You!

The key to success in the Civ stage is purpose-built vehicles. While most vehicles are just randomly distributed between health/power/speed, often biased towards health because installing structural parts for aesthetic mounting will skew your vehicle massively towards health, I design special, purpose-build vehicles. When starting the Civ stage, *ALWAYS* use a vehicle that is 100% speed! This will give you a mostly unarmed, easily destroyed vehicle capable of a speed of 45, allowing you to zip across the continent and claim all the spice resources before your opponents know what hit them. Afterwards, you can speed your vehicles over to the enemy base and convert them to a health/power only vehicle, a Siege Brick, and pummel the hell out of them with guns/armor only unit (that cannot really move, but who cares, you're already there). All vehicles switched convert retroactively to the new vehicle at no cost.

What makes this MORE interesting is that the AI never switches its vehicle, so if your game, like mine, is full of specialty vehicles, the game's willful desire to show you your own creations combined with the fact that your own creations are utter crap when used as a general-purpose vehicle will basically cause the AI to footbullet himself as he tries to invade you with flaggers and gets mowed down in 5 seconds by a single turret without causing any damage, or simply cannot reach your city at all because he's trying to invade you with siegebricks that move at a pitiful snail's pace, taking literally 10 minutes to reach you, by which time you've taken his city out from under him.

On request, I can include a sampling of these sabotage/specialty vehicles, but mostly, they're not designed to look cool.

Yes please, I've just been opting for Maxis vehicles with high hit points. I'm not into designing vehicles and I certainly don't care what they look like.

The early snatch is definitely worthwhile.  I typically go for 40% health / 40% attack / 20% speed for my post-grab units.  Having some speed is of value because you may want to add reinforcements to an ongoing assault.

For Econ vehicles, the post-snatch vehicle's value is a product of its strength x speed.  So you really want something more like 20% / 40% / 40%.  Or even more extreme for boats or planes, which don't need to worry about getting snagged by wildlife.

If you can, you want to go all-naval.  Naval units are stronger and have longer range than either air or land, and you get the same number of unit slots regardless of type.

The relationship between stats and percentages is not linear.  Compare these two military land vehicles:
Name         HP%  ATK% Speed%   HP  ATK Speed   HP/%  ATK/%  Speed/%
Spy Hunter   15%    5%   80%   240  12  37      16      2.4   0.46
Pkzw V       53%   29%   18%   467  21  12      8.8     0.7   0.67
At some point I may try reverse-engineering the equations converting percentages to real values, but I suspect that there's a lot of slop in them, because Maxis had to know there would be a lot of people playing vehicles more for looks than stats.

 - Gus

If you want to add reinforcements to an ongoing assault, just retrofit to something that can move again. Otherwise, remain in siegebrick form.

I have begun to have uncertainty that the strength of an econ vehicle even matters, because I was able to take a city nearly as quickly with scoutwagons. However, the econ strength may improve the actual money earned by a traderoute...but possibly not the buyout time. More experimentation is required to confirm this.

Naval is limiting because A: You can't reliably start with them, and B: By the time you get access to them, it may lack relevance to the situation.

Actually, the relationship *IS* linear.

Compare the following: (Military Land)

Speed%	SpeedAbsolute
0%	5
15%	11
30%	17
45%	23
60%	29
75%	35
90%	41
100%	45

As we can, see, for a vehicle (all vehicles respond the same to speed%), speed of the resulting vehicle is equal to 0.4X + 5, where X = Speed%. This is indeed a linear equation.

Each point of Health (all vehicles also respond the same to Health) is likewise:

Health%	HP
0%	150
15%	240
30%	330
75%	600
100%	750

From this, we determine that health is 6X + 150, also a linear equation.

Designing a vehicle for 100% power is impossible, as no hull component offers a null adjustment to health/speed, meaning anything you can add will force hull/speed%, so 100% power can only be approached asymptotically. However this table:

Power%	PowerAbs
0%	10
15%	16
30%	22
60%	34
90%	46

..makes it clear we are dealing with a linear equation again, which appears to be 0.4X + 10. All vehicles respond likewise. Military vehicles inflict Power damage per shot. The relationship is unclear for religious and economic vehicles. Rate of fire is constant regardless of power.

Therefore, here is our results

Vehicle Type	HealthEquation	PowerEquation	SpeedEquation	COST
LAND	6X + 150	0.4X + 10	0.4X + 5	$1000
SEA	8X + 200	0.6X + 15	0.4X + 5	$1500
AIR	6X + 150	0.4X + 10	0.8X + 10	$3000

As we can see from above, a sea vehicle is, cost-benefitwise, roughly equal or inferior to a land vehicle (We figure that sea vehicles are roughly 2/3 as fast when dealing with initial expansion, as a sea vehicle must traverse the a 180-degree arc of your landmass, while a land vehicle traverses only the diameter) when used for initial expansion, if you start with a coastal city. In addition, for your starting money, you may purchase 3 land vehicles, but only 2 sea vehicles. While sea vehicles have greater range than land vehicles (the exact numbers are unknown) and can outrange city defense turrets, thus enabling them to bombard with impunity, their AI is quite stupid and they tend not to effectively use this ability. Furthermore, two sea vehicles does not constitute an invasion force, and is definitely not worth the price of giving up all the land-based spice wells because sea vehicles cannot capture any of them! Choosing to split your investment is a poor deal as well, as your starting $3000, if split, buys you two vehicles only: A single boat, and a single additional ground unit, with an unspendable $500 left in your pocket.

Air vehicles are, of course, completely cost-inferior in all respects, costing 3x as much as a land vehicle and 2x as much as a sea vehicle, and are unable to capture anything. However, they are faster and able to fight in all terrains, and furthermore, their requirement of 4 cities to even build one necessitates the domination of your starting continent first anyway (It would be foolish to antagonize enemies on an entirely different continent before having finished mopping up yours!). By the time you can build them, you have probably exhausted the utility of land vehicles anyway (there are no transports, so you cannot move land vehicles over the sea, and should therefore disband them all and switch to sea or air vehicles, but then sea vehicles again lose their utility once you take all the enemy's coastal cities), and can easily afford their cost-inefficiencies.

Lots of fancy math I don't have time for can now be used to determine the perfect ratio of health to power in a military vehicle for all combat situations.

tankrush and planerush are fun again. With speciality bombers, you can have a bzzzzt -> boom effect

Tried last run-through with my second predatorial race that will be eating away at the Grox. My initial vehicles were at about 90% speed. Fantastically fast. As soon as I was done grabbing geysers, redesigned to about 70% power and something atrocious for speed...18%? Eh. Whatever. They made pretty quick work of conquests and I didn't lose a single vehicle. After the continent was taken, I sold all land units (as per usual) and flooded all cities with planes. I think I had 12 to start. Middling on both power and speed. Health was not and never is an issue with planes. I then ganged all 12 up on opposing cities. Takeovers were less than 20 seconds. That's really what makes planes the best...they are untouchable.


Personally, I never bother with sea vehicles unless I have a coastal takeover very early on. Then I build one, maxed for speed. I quickly take available geysers and then sell back the unit. If I don't get a coastal city first or second takeover, it's not worth the few seconds. I have plenty of money coming in.

I have not yet been able to make a vehicle with either 100% speed with no speed at all--even when removing all forms of locomotion (8%). I've gotten it up to 85% for speed (I think) but after that adding new speed parts didn't seem to make a difference. How did you manage this?

There are hull parts that you can start with that add only speed, like "Wimp" or "Macho". Other vehicle parts are +Health and +Speed, so if you start with one of those, you can only asymptotically approach 100% speed. Achieving 100% speed will allow you to flag geysers faster than any AI player that is not using a similar vehicle, likely claiming nearly all the land-based spice before they can move. ADDITIONALLY, the mere existence of such vehicles will inspire the AI to choose them for its own, thus footbulleting itself because the AI, unlike you, will not discard them in favor of vehicles that are useful after the flag rush, meaning he will subsequently attack you with vehicles that have 150 HP and do 10 points of damage, so they die instantly.

That explains a whole lot about some of the problems I've had in Civ -- I haven't started with weak, fast units and then get pummeled later on by other cities.  This tip alone will make a world of difference in my play style.

If you cannot flag geysers fast, you are choking yourself of resources at the point in the game when it is most critical. Like in the Civilization games, how you START ultimately will decide how well you do: if you have a poor start, you will pretty much always be behind, because a weak start will permanently put you behind in the growth race: the more you have, the faster you can expand. Since you can retroactively retrofit all vehicles without cost or penalty, there is no reason why you should not choose a starting vehicle that is more appropriate for your needs. Even if vehicles were NOT retroactively transformed, the benefit of a flagging vehicle pays for itself within a minute, as seizing a fresh spice mine yields $900/m for the cost of a $1000 vehicle, PLUS it denies the use of the spice mine to your enemies, forestalling an early war and strangling them of resources they would need to oppose you. Since the vehicle can subsequently be refitted to a more suitable vehicle for your later purposes at No Additional Cost, there is simply no reason not to do it.

To compound matters, the AI seems to just randomly pick a vehicle to use, with a clear bias towards vehicles that YOU have designed, particularly recently. This characteristic makes it more vulnerable because it will likely choose to use one of the crippled vehicles you have designed that has only specialist utility, and then attempt to use them as generalist vehicles, a task for which they are completely unsuitable, thus footbulleting itself.