Overall strategy for each faction?

[sadoeconomist]

I've finally gotten around to playing every faction in single player Battle for Arrakis at least once after the 1.0 update, and I wanted to talk about each faction's general strategy for winning in combat and achieving victory, to see if you guys could point out if there's anything major I'm missing or wrong about. I played early on when the game first launched in Early Access and I'm just coming back to it now - there have been a lot of good changes!

Atreides - in combat they prefer to be defending their territory next to their militia. For win conditions I think they're geared almost entirely for taking the governorship as quickly as possible and then attempting to hold out against all the other players attacking and trying to assassinate them.

Harkonnen - they'll be overproducing manpower for Oppression and they benefit from their units dying so what they like doing is trading armies in combat, if everybody dies Harkonnen still comes out ahead. I feel like Harkonnen is especially good at assassinations but isn't necessarily attracted to any specific global wincon, so what they should plan to do is assassinate anyone threatening to win too quickly before they can take control of the game and decide how to close it out from there.

Smugglers - I'm not too sure about how to play them yet. They have a strong set of stealth units and benefit greatly from pillaging and their underworld HQs, I think they actually want most of their combat to involve them raiding undefended enemy villages and ambushing and they'd rather use operations than fight enemy armies on the defense. I think they can't rocket to any global victory conditions like Atreides but they have excellent tools for undermining or boosting other factions and controlling the balance of power in the game so that they can set themselves up to win in the end. They have a main base underworld HQ upgrade that deletes the base's armor, which sets them up to be particularly good at surprise main base kills.

Fremen - the other stealth raider faction, with more of an emphasis on liberating than pillaging, and supporting neutral units attacking other factions (sietch raiders/rebels). The Warrior's debuff doesn't stack so they're good in small combats but grouping up a lot of them doesn't help you much. Infiltrators are too fragile for mass combat but really shine when sneaking up and stabbing enemy units in the back while they're fighting somebody else. The Fedaykin's buff means they can handle attacking small village militias by themselves but it's more or less blanked out if they're fighting in a big army next to a lot of other units. They're also the only faction with stealth demo units so they can also go for surprise main base kills. Having sandworms instead of airfields means they can easily move troops deep into enemy territory (which they can resupply at allied sietches) but struggle to defend their own villages against enemies who can fly around. So where Harkonnen can win army trades, the Fremen can win territory trades by counterattacking in multiple places when they get attacked and liberating any villages they don't have the authority to conquer. They should probably plan to win through Hegemony, and keep others from winning by turning their part of the map gray if they try.

Corrino - they've got a similar situation to Atreides, they're encouraged to play nice and force others to attack them/betray truces by threatening victory. In addition to rapidly gaining Landsraad standing which makes them a contender for the governorship they have a solid head start on CHOAM shares. I think you definitely want to go for some kind of global victory with Corrino because having two bases your opponents need to take down to kill you is a major defensive advantage. In combat they want to spread damage around to enemy units to help trigger the Sardaukar's execution ability as much as possible, so they benefit particularly well from missile support and fighting near their bases.

Ecaz - unlike the Fremen who want their units to fight mostly alone, the Ecaz want to keep their armies in a deathball around their Champion. Their big money unique operation allows you to catch enemy armies and keep them from retreating. I feel like the strategy with them is pretty bizarre - you plan out a Garden Resort surrounded by provinces that you can turn into sanctuaries, and you fill those villages with masterpieces and then abandon them. Then you can pull the same trick with villages on your borders - take them over, fill them with masterpieces, and abandon them to get some authority back/keep your village count down. Then if your opponents want to make those villages useful again, they need to destroy your masterpieces, damaging their Authority and Landsraad standing in the process. They can't break truces and they gain Hegemony from killing units with their Champion, so they want to be very picky about who they make peace with and always be fighting somebody, but they don't necessarily have a great kit for killing main bases as far as I can tell and they don't want to lose Champions attacking them either. They start with 220 Landsraad standing so they're a pretty strong potential governor candidate as well if they focus on that. Not really sure what their strategy for closing out the game should necessarily be - they might be able to rush a Hegemony victory pretty fast if they get to do everything they want to do.

[Soho]

Well done, a lot of good information here

There's hardly anything I would disagree with here

I would add though, in my experience I have been able to get Hegemony victory with any faction, also Domination with any faction - Hegemony is like what you do if there is a stand-off and you can't quite beat their military/base defense, so you out-expand them and out-produce hegemony on them (take more special tiles and build more craft workshops)

CHOAM I almost never go for that victory condition (CHOAM victory... economy victory)... if you have that much solari you can just spend it on wave after wave of military and get the Domination or Hegemony instead. As far as AI, Smugglers and Corrino very often go for this one (but Fremen always going for Hegemony... and Atreides always going for Governor... like you said). I think the only faction that without a doubt has an advantage with trying to get CHOAM victory is Smugglers (because they can just put their underground networks literally everywhere, and build main base undergrounds everywhere, point it all toward economy) though I've heard too (I haven't tried it myself) that actually the Development Investment thing that Corrino does is actually OP for going for this (something about because it buffs you as much as the opponent you put it on (?), so having many of these going everywhere with lots of truces can build you to being a money powerhouse)

Assassination- it is always a lot easier if you are already strong military-wise, because of the way the mechanics are now. You want to have military-lockdown on at least one of the enemy villages, so they can't discover all the cells. And you need a lot of intel/information, stocked up and coming in. For as much effort as it takes to pull off Assassination it is almost always just as easy (at least for me) to just change composition of my regular army to more armor-reducers and just go for their main base

Ecaz, you are right- they play weird. But they are very well suited to going heavy blue-tech-tree and then going either Governorship, or Hegemony. Because you are going to be winning lots of Landsraad stuff, they can increase their Landsraad standing very fast and so they get eligibility first.

Or go heavy red-tree... Ecaz military, if you are going Domination with them (Hegemony too, for an extent, because you need to take territories, and their Champions generate Hegemony the more they kill), they can be very strong with massed up Musketeers and War Banners (the War Banner is their armor-reducer so you need them for taking down bases... and they can be equipped so they are pretty tanky - Musketeers suck against main bases but they melt infantry much like Snipers or Rangers can). Fencers are excellent at chasing down weakened units but they aren't much useful for anything else, they take a lot of micro (pretty much the Ecaz version of the Cerberus or Infiltrator... they will be a throw-away unit if you are not very very careful with them)

This leads me to want to try some of the challenging combinations then, e.g. Go for a CHOAM victory with Atreides (against Smugglers, Corrino and Harkonnen)... hard to envision how exactly I would try to do it, but I think it's doable somehow

[sadoeconomist]

Yeah, you can win in any way with any faction, but IMO someone eventually limping to 30k Hegemony or smashing their last opponent's base probably means there wasn't enough focus on getting to the wincon.

I actually lost to an AI going for CHOAM in my first game since release with the Smugglers, I assassinated two of them and wasn't paying attention to the CHOAM share screen at all, Corrino was just chugging along being the only player buying shares and made it to 50% before I got to level 3 info on him. It feels like something you can easily do opportunistically if you're unopposed but it gets very difficult if you have other people competing with you.

Atreides can get quite a lot of Solari production bonuses from winning positive Landsraad resolutions and the Atreides Foremen harvester boost, if they wanted to skip the governorship and go hard into spice harvesting I think they could stack CHOAM shares pretty hard. I'm going to try to win that way and get that peaceful annexations only achievement and report back.

[Soho]

That's cool- I'd be interested in hearing how it goes

Yeah I think the opportunistic approach (take whatever seems like the best condition given multiple random events/circumstances) seems like the most prudent way given there's a lot of RNG with so many things - you *could* concentrate on a certain condition but things end up so stacked against that it can become a slog

I like doing it anyway just for the challenge

Its good to know what your options are regardless

[sadoeconomist]

Originally posted by sadoeconomist:

I'm going to try to win that way and get that peaceful annexations only achievement and report back.

Well, I got both the Magnate and No Offense achievements at once - I won with Atreides using Thufir and Lady Jessica, by CHOAM shares, without ever taking a province except through peaceful annexation. Almost my most peaceful game of Spice Wars ever, aside from my last Atreides game where everybody had a truce with me the entire game until I won by governorship.

The Smugglers assassinated the Baron, and both they and Ecaz broke their truces with me and attacked toward the end, but I was able to hold by using Cease Fire to move my troops into place and fight with my militia. 100% selling from 4 refineries buffed as much as possible with as many spice price buffs as I could get to raise my price from 2.7 to 4.5 meant that I was pulling in over 2k solari and buying 20 shares per day at the end.

There was only one governor vote around a month before the end, with another one scheduled when the game ended, so it didn't slow down the Atreides win clock all that much, maybe by about one Landsraad vote cycle? I probably could have won earlier but they had managed to hit me with Controlled Spice Market for -1 spice price while I was voting myself into the Judge position (probably the smartest thing I've ever seen the AI do in the Landsraad) so I was sitting at 90% spice stockpiling for the second to last cycle. Only Harkonnen was buying shares and he got murdered so the price stayed down pretty low all game, until I jumped from about 30% to 50% shares very quickly.

I thought I might struggle to get anywhere near a CHOAM victory without breaking 30k Hegemony anyway first but I was around 21k at the end - not very close at all. Also, I went pretty heavy into the blue techs early on because I needed to scramble to generate influence to expand in the beginning, a heavier focus on quickly hitting the last yellow techs might give you even faster results if you're not trying to get the No Offense achievement.