Unit Design

[McLovin']

Any tips of gearing up units (I'm playing Vaulters atm)? Is it best to gear them all with Tier 3 vanilla apart from using a strategic resource to boost their main function (e.g. tank gets adamantium armor, dps get adamantium weapon)?

[Boneyard Bob]

Sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on it. I pretty much stick to vanilla gear for units, but go balls out for the heroes when I can afford it. Late game I might make specialist units where needed, but that can get pretty pricey.

When playing the Vaulters, I usually stick to equiping them with whatever resource I have the most of for the +50% bonus that comes with activating it as a Holy Resource.

[McLovin']

Originally posted by Boneyard Bob:

When playing the Vaulters, I usually stick to equiping them with whatever resource I have the most of for the +50% bonus that comes with activating it as a Holy Resource.

Ah yes, overlooked this bonus. Do you find that the Holy Res will run dry though, so will need to refit the weapons each time you get a surplus?

[Boneyard Bob]

Originally posted by McLovin':

Ah yes, overlooked this bonus. Do you find that the Holy Res will run dry though, so will need to refit the weapons each time you get a surplus?

It depends on how much of that resource you're generating, I suppose. It also helps to diversify with them, that is design different units equipped with different resource items.

[Gilmoy]

Yes, for all of your default troops, just give them the best iron/dust tier 3. You can equip combat heroes with full strategics, because you'll have only a few generals. Rarely, you can make special unit designs, e.g. archers with Ad 2 bows, and just build a couple of them.

Technolover bonus persists even after the holy resource booster expires. If you declare Titanium as your holy resource, then after its 10 turn duration expires, you no longer get the science bonus (and you can't teleport), but it's still your holy resource, until you finally activate something else. Yes, you're supposed to milk that for advantage.

In midgame, you'll often find that you (re)activate a holy resource just to enable teleportation, far more than to switch Technolover bonus. You'll have so many other demands on your strategics that you can't really afford to do more than equip your heroes, and so your Technolover benefit is relatively miniscule. N.B. always equip all generals with tier 2 (or tier 3) Army Boost accessories.

It can be useful to plan ahead and make 2+ identical unit designs (e.g. Marine and Maroon :), just so their upgrade paths are disjoint. Build a couple of each design early in the game, so that later you'll have high-level survivors of each subtype. Early on, it doesn't matter which ones they are. Later, you can pick one group of survivors and edit their design to give them some strategics, then upgrade only them, without affecting anybody else.

For example, when I assimilate Delvers, I make Dredge, Drudge, and maybe Trudge, and give them identical tier-2 stuff ... but much later on, I can edit Drudge to Glassteel tier 3 (from Exotic Alloys), and instantly upgrade a couple of L6+ survivors. It's very fun to have a Stun guy with 90+ Init (heh!), so that on average you firststrike half the enemy line into a daze. Rumblers and Silics are not quite as good for this gimmick because their Init starts so low that it never gets very high, but it's still possible to get them up to Init 30-50 and reliably set up Beam attacks against even slower guys ... like Taskols ^_^

[Daynen Drakeson]

I tend to only upgrade support and ranged units' weapons, keeping them cheap and effective for firepower and healing. Melee units get shield and armor upgrades first, enabling them to block effectively. Early on, this can keep your production costs low and still let you get sizable armies out so you have more presence on the map without breaking your income. Say what you want about squishiness, but when a wild walker comes at your fully-equipped 6-man army with twenty T2 archers, you just might see things differently. Having strong all-round stats and levels is great, but even an elite force CAN lose to sheer action economy through numbers. Once you're more flush with resources, you can fill in the gaps in their equipment to get them up to speed with more advanced foes.

Positioning becomes more critical than ever if you use this philosophy; you MUST try to fight on good ground and place your ranged units in hard to reach spots. check the terrain before you engage so you can leave an infantry unit blocking a choke point while your achers rain death and your supports keep him alive.

The reason this strategy works is because producing units takes time; retrofitting them does not. If you manage to get a huge, cheap army out and keep it alive, the sudden stat boost from retrofitting twenty units at once is expensive, but sudden and most importatly, DEVASTATING.