General Category > AI War

Does anyone use a "Beachhead" Strategy?

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Wingflier:
It seems that certain units and defenses in the game would make this (in theory) possible, but I'm not convinced of its practicality.

The anti-sniper and anti-missile turrets could make building a forcefield and small base on a contested enemy planet a reality, but is there any point in doing this when (in most cases) you can simply take fleet ships in and accomplish the same thing with much less hassle?

I'm just curious if anyone uses or has ever used a beachhead strategy, or if its just more of a pipe dream on higher difficulties.

TechSY730:
Are you talking about a beachead as in a remote planet you capture for yourself but don't capture surrounding planets to make it a new "cluster"?
Or are you talking about setting up a base of operations while the AI command station is still there.

If it is the former, I use this strategy all the time, especially in the late game when I need to prepare my armies for homeworld assualts.

If it is the latter,

There was a big discussion a while back about defense, and the viability of beacheads were a part of this (see http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10143.0.html). Basically, the inability for turrets and forcefields to work outside of supply really hurts this. However, no one has thought of a way to allow this without it becoming abusable, annoying, or too complicated (a few ideas were tossed around the previous thread, you can read up on those)
Also, many good players do not let the AI's defenses build up enough such that you need a beachead. That, and the AI has a tendency to focus almost all of its reinforcements on alerted planets, leaving non-alerted, non-core, non-homeworld planets pretty pathetic and thus easy to "park" a fleet there without a beachead.
And finally, a single chokepoint defense model is so attractive that it can be hard to convince players to dedicate a few turrets and forcefields to use on an offensive beachead.

So yea, beacheads work, but in the current balance, it is rarely needed until the late game.

If you consider bringing along and occasionally parking in hostile territory a neinzul encalve starship + mobile repairers + cloaker starships to be a beachead, well, I use that all the time too. ;)

x4000:
It's something that used to be extraordinarily common, and I myself used to do it all the time.  Back in the 1.0 to 2.0 days that was one of the mainstays of the game.

But as things have developed, personally I've found much less need to do that.  Even so, with the warp gates for players it is something that is more viable now than it was in the 4.0 timeframe, for instance.

I'm not sure how many people use this strategy now (I don't anymore), but I thought I'd mention its history.

Wingflier:
Chris!  I haven't seen you post on the AI War forum for weeks ;p

I wasn't really around much in the 1.0/2.0 days, so I can't comment much on that.

I guess I mean that currently, I rarely (if ever) see a reason to do it anymore.  By the time you've got your "base of operations" built, you could have practically taken the planet by simply blobbing your fleet around. 

If necessary, you can accomplish a similar thing, much more safely, by stirring up the enemy forces (or if you need the planet, taking the home command station), then forcing them to come to your territory instead.

Just wanted to see if other people had thought of something I hadn't.

I'm not sure if I have any creative solutions to make this viable though.  Maybe something in the next expansion could make it worthwhile again.

x4000:
Cheers!  I've been absolutely crushed with work since the AVWW release, but it's at least normalizing some these days.  New version about to drop in just a few minutes for AI War, too. :)

With 5.0 one of the things I really was trying to do was to get the "mini battlefields within battlefields" going again with the changes to the fortresses and force fields.  But, ah, that proved less than popular. ;)

In a lot of respects, as the game has evolved I think each planet has become more like a single square on a chess board: it's hard for two sides to occupy that for any substantial stretch of time without one side obliterating the other.

With the more recent Neinzul starship changes, though, you could make a more mobile beachhead plus force fields, etc.  Then there's not the time/expense of setup and teardown.

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