Thoughts on hideout planning

[Rubber Cannonball]

In my first game of Piratez I started out with all my hideouts being fairly similar which worked well until mid game.  In my next game in version K2 or later I want to start out with a plan for specializing my hideouts.  Right now, I'm leaning towards having my first hideout probably in China transitioning to full research and light production.  My second hideout in South America (for early global coverage capability) will transition probably to a full training and recovery hideout plus light research and manufacturing.  My Arctic and Antarctic strike hideouts will be heavily hangered and be the main mission and intercept hideouts.  I plan on having a second training & recovery base very similar to the South America one.  The other 3 hideouts will be majorly production focused on either the printer or factory with at least one of them focused on generating cash.  These 3 will be single empty hanger hideouts for producing craft or tanks.  I probably will have 2 factory hideouts and 1 printer hideout.  The red tower will go in one training hideout and the biotech lab in the other.  Along with the old earth lab, these 3 facilities are irreplaceable and are the only true labs.  I don't want to risk having them all in one research hideout and then lose them on a failed base defense.  I'm planning on keeping 2 hangers each on the research and training hideouts if I can and may go as high as 6 on the strike hideouts.  Any significantly injured gals or those with that "not so fresh feeling" will be sent to the training & recovery hideouts for quadruple-R, Recuperation, Rest, Relaxation, and Retraining.

This plan is based mostly on my knowledge from version J8.  I'm sure it will have to be tweaked for the latest version, and I'm interested in people's opinions on it.

[legionof1]

2 points.

1: Facilities that provide recovery have significant crossover with other functions. Particularly the ones that are gates on tech and production, for example surgery or mess hall. The overlap means dedicating to recovery as a primary goal will leave you with isolated single digit brainers, and you will have to dupe the gating facilities in the tech and production bases. It's more cost and tile efficient to make one production base and one tech base your recovery centers and accept a marginally reduced recovery rate by omitting say just the spa. Also having your ground mission bases separated from production and tech facilities means more transfer shipping which gets expensive. Also alot more micro work.

2. Too many hangers in the plan. Hangers are expensive and you don't need that many interceptors. 5 per hemisphere suffices to engage anything in a rapid manner. And you probably dont even need that many. Most enemy ships loiter sufficiently long that you have time to amass air units from multiple locations. Unless your losing pilots and ships left and right you can easily manage most air combat with singular craft.

At most you need 1 tank aircraft and 3 interceptors per hemisphere, but mostly only one tank and 2 of the interceptors will handle most of the load. Like wise with ground teams you need at most, one ground environment, one underwater, one space, and one infiltration. And for significant portions of the game the craft that serve the restrictions will overlap with your primary air combat units. It's pretty deep into the tech tree when you start to see pure single role transports. And if your fortunate to build up some STC orbs in the late game the shadowtech ships and menace class can easily become all purpose ships.

[Galwail]

In my current game I have:

• 2 training/research bases
• 3 interceptor bases with 6 hangars
• 3 production bases, 2 with printers

Looking back I probably should have one less interceptor and one more production base. Interceptors are fast and they can easily cover entire hemisphere. And I have huge backlog of stuff that I want to manufacture...

[Rubber Cannonball]

Ok, my research base will have a little over 40  lab spaces for brainers.  It could be increased to about 60 by eliminating hangers.  My 2 training bases are the most general purpose bases I would have.  They support around 15-20 brainers each and each one would be capable of easily being converted into a main research base in the event I lose my research base.  All 3 bases have the facilities to research any topic not accounting for any new facility services that might be needed in a later game version.  These 3 bases also can support 90 runts each and are capable of producing most things.  The polar strike bases won't have any brainer spots and only 60 runt spots and limited to workshop based production.  The printer base will be able to produce whatever the other bases couldn't and in volume. It is limited by barracks capacity not shop capacity but at any rate will have over 200 runts.  The factory bases will have around 340 runts each.  The 3 production bases have a combined total of 12 lab spots but can only do some research topics.  All base plans use about 34 facility spaces right now.

I expect to have more hangers than I'll need.  But this provides room for craft under repair, storage for a rarely used craft, manual shipping by craft to save transfer costs, and flexibility in the event of losing a base.  If I lose a strike base, the research and training bases will have to pick up the slack for awhile.  If I need more printer capacity, I could replace a hanger in the research or recovery bases.

As for the spa, it could be put in the place of the still, mess, dojo, and sickbay with only losing alcohol production, 2 brainer slots, and sickbay+mess recovery.  Or to keep sickbay and mess, the extractor and refinery can be pulled instead.  It seems to be a fair tradeoff.  Unless things have changed in the later game versions of course.

[legionof1]

snip
As for the spa, it could be put in the place of the still, mess, dojo, and sickbay with only losing alcohol production, 2 brainer slots, and sickbay+mess recovery.  Or to keep sickbay and mess, the extractor and refinery can be pulled instead.  It seems to be a fair tradeoff.
snip

yeah tradeoffs have to be made but with the advent of freshness, particularly if your employing voodoo heavily, favors the spa.

[Rubber Cannonball]

I was planning on only 2  bases with spas and rotating the troops through as needed.  Am I going to need more with the freshness system?

[Eddie]

Two bases with spas? Is that really needed?
Once you have troop transports with sufficient speeds, you should be able to do everything out of just one main troop base - at least that's how I'm currently playing. Troop base is in europe, which gives the least flight time if you want to go everywhere. My starting base (in north america) still has the A team, but they are doing less and less missions these days so don't need a spa there. If they get really exhausted from a mission, I can always send them to the spa base for a few days for quick regeneration. As soon as you hit the transfer button they count as beeing in the spa base.

My troop base in europe is currently at: 4 hangars, spa, onsen, medbay, library, surgery, two prisons, large barracks, small barracks, vault, beast den, hyperwave decoder, workshop.
Thats 145 living quarters and 75 workshop space. Currently only at 65 runts, the rest is filled with troops (and the few brainers to fill the lab space). In the hangars I have a jetbike, a fuego, a turtle and a convoy. Occasionally I swap the convoy out for a shadowbat (put 4 guys in convoy, send it to patrol just beside the base, transfer it to a hangar in another base. The convoy has so much fuel it can stay next to the base for days, and you can switch it back in an instant when you need it, or just for an hour to refuel.) Once I have a STC fusion drive for the turtle it's probably fast enough that I don't need to do the shadowbat/convoy switcheroo anymore. For space missions I do the switcheroo with a pachyderm.

Long term plan is to change to advanced living quarters and cryo prison (just one needed), which will free up at least one tile. Last addition will then be a cloning facility, and the vault can also be replaced by something else. More barracks, love clinic or voodo lab for example. So I will have close to max possible (only mess is missing) health regen in that base.

So far I've been quite happy with that base and haven't found anything lacking. I find it very convenient to have the active teams all in one place, to switch soldiers, armors and equipment around as I need it for each mission. The other bases have garrisons of ~10 gals that don't/rarely do missions. These off duty gals have around 12 missions done, so they have decent tu/stamina/brav/str but mostly shit accuracy. Perfect to spend long hours practising in the dojo. If I see a base assault coming, I will swap over gals from the troop base of course.

[Greep]

Freshness honestly almost goes away when you even have a single base with an onsen.  Once you get any refreshing buildings like that freshness mostly is just about during the mission as opposed to after the mission. 

For reference:

barracks: 5 freshness recov/day (usually takes 3 days per average mission to fully recover, and you can send gals out if they are still not fully recovered)

mess hall: 6 recovery

Large barracks: 8 recovery

onsen: 15 recovery

^ pretty danged big upgrade.

[Rubber Cannonball]

Large barracks: 8 recovery

onsen: 15 recovery

^ pretty danged big upgrade.

Greep, are those K3 numbers?  I only have K2 with luxury barracks at 8, onsen at 9, and spa at 15.

Two bases with spas? Is that really needed?

Eddie, I don't know.  But part of the plan was to have some redundancy so that a base loss wasn't crippling.  I was looking at the spa mainly for training efficiency which got boosted from 30 to 40.  The 15 freshness for the spa is compelling too.  I wanted to move all the interception and A-team troops to the strike bases since they don't really need any services besides the hangers.  The troops themselves do but they can be easily moved around as needed.  Also the shootdowns will draw some crackdowns to the strike bases.  Perhaps it would be better to have only 1 training and recovery base and have a second printer base.

The research, production, and recovery services and their interactions are complex enough that I may not have much hanger room anywhere else.  Gambling and casino services are also something I'll need to address.  I see the study room is probably required for something as it now provides a service.  Then again the personal lab seems to make the study room obsolete.  The metagarden appears to make the power plant obsolete.  I should probably ask:  Are any facilities codex choice dependent?

It would probably take over 3 game years to complete the bases to the plan.  Earlier on the bases might look a lot more similar as many facilities won't be unlocked yet.  Crafts are slower too, so might use 3 bases for mission duty early on.  Europe would probably be my third base.

[Greep]

K2, haven't found K3 and was just going to wait.

That said, with 15 freshness, I found the onsen alone was good enough, so if k3's spa is 15, sounds like there's still no need for more really.  TBH I found a mess hall good enough, but I play super sloppy and generally wounds are more of an issue than freshness, so I have a huge garrison with lots of training. 

2 spas sounds pretty overkill for training, too, though.  1 spa = 5 dojos, I found that was sufficient even for when I'm training hands for defense garrisons.  Then again, I guess at a certain point you have enough money to spend on anything.  I guess if you wanted to plan for disaster you might want more, but it's probably easier to just build a large barracks and shove excess trained gals into it.

[Eddie]

Greep, you have the numbers wrong (for K2).
For recovery, mess hall is 6, large barracks 6, onsen 9 and spa 15. Look in Piratez.rul, the parameter is manaRecoveryPerDay.

As for having a second spa for redundancy: My troop base with the one spa has 65+ soldiers. That is the best defended base I have. If I loose a base assault in that base, I need to play a lower difficulty...

Regarding codex exclusive buildings: Yes, love clinic and metagarden are codex buildings. Metagarden is green (and something?), loveclinic is green and gold.

Having an interceptor base to draw retaliation crackdowns to that base is not guaranteed. When you shoot something down, the crackdown randomly chooses the origin of the attacker as target OR the location of the shootdown.
By the way, the craft switcheroo I described can also be done with interceptors for exactly that reason. You have 4 hangars, you can temporarily park your transporters next to the base and switch in the interceptors participating in the attack. I already have a jetbike and the fuego stationed in that base, which can handle most things by themselves (jetbike as a high evasion tank, fuego with naval guns for damage). If I need more firepower, I just park the turtle and the convoy next to the base and switch in my other attack craft. So yeah, I have the interceptor base concept covered too.

[Greep]

Well, mine shows onsen at 15 and 9 in game, so I'm pretty confused haha.  That said, my xpedia.html in the zip file is incorrect for a lot of things, so wouldn't be surprised if somehow the .html is from k1 or something somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Or maybe the .html is just not up to date, I noticed you said to look directly in .rul

Regarding retaliation:  That's interesting, so if you have, say, a starting base in europe, and never shoot down anything from that base or over europe, is it immune to retaliations (aside from the hardcoded ones)

[legionof1]

snip
Regarding retaliation:  That's interesting, so if you have, say, a starting base in europe, and never shoot down anything from that base or over europe, is it immune to retaliations (aside from the hardcoded ones)

Not as a first base, since the academy nurse bus and ambulance runs are pseudo crackdowns(they do base detection) and are always aimed at your first region. There isn't anyway for the first base to go unmolested aside from all the runs failing there detection chance.

Later bases you can minimize the chances with the strategy but even then lots of enemy missions that do detection, ratmen bandit swarms, armored cars, boogyeman swarms, ect. Something is gonna find every base eventually. Just a matter of when and how often.

[Rubber Cannonball]

I was hoping once the spa was up I could eliminate all the dojos.  I wouldn't need the onsen either except for the recovery.  I'm trying to get away from the every base needs a particular facility mindset where possible.  The goal of the base plan was to have a guide while upgrading bases.  I want to avoid getting caught not being able to research or produce something which could cause significant base restructuring and time delays.

And I have huge backlog of stuff that I want to manufacture...

I also want to avoid Galwail's issue.  I experienced this my first game and I'm not sure if it was because I priortized research too much or if I spent too many runt hours on slave production or manufacturing for profit or not having the right facility combination in place in order to start production right away.  Near the end of year 3 I was at 84% research complete and bottlenecked on something, probably some vip interrogations.

[legionof1]

Well backlogs of stuff are normal, there just arn't the runt hours to have everything you unlock. The mod design of many parallel branches means the is intentionaly to many options to utilize, without scarcity choice is meaningless.