posted 05-27-99 03:10 PM ET            

I play at either the Thinker or Empath level, and uniformly shred the AI, unless I start the game out in a hopeless position.

My upgrade rules are:

1. Always manually design units, and turn "auto-prune" off in the preferences settings - its better to have control over which units are declared obsolete.

2. I use a lot of formers and if playing with iron man rules, cheap expendible scout rovers, since weapons and armor have no function in fighting with mind worms. Remember that when you discover techs for better reactors - they decrease the cost of high powered weapons like tachyon and shard weapons, but the increase the cost of cheap weapons or non-weapon systems. So better reactors on formers are a negative - they don't work any faster.

Sea formers are a different story - I armor mine, since they are favorite targets for enemy factions and are more expensive to build. So the strenght modifier effect of better reactors is useful.

3. Since formers are something that you keep forever, I build an upgrade with a clean reactor and the super-formers ability.

4. You rarely have enough energy lying around to upgrade an entire class of units, so I upgrade them individually depending on the greatest need and usefulness at the time.

5. It costs more to upgrade in several steps - if you go from a laser unit to a missile unit to chaos to plasma, it costs you two to three times as much as if you did the upgrade in one step. So only ugprade critical units until you have enough of a difference to bother.

6. With this cost difference effect, where it's cheaper to upgrade in one step, you can rapidly build up forces later in the game, when you are more developed - design a cheap unit with the high moral special ability, to get one more morale level. Build that, and then upgrade the completed unit to the best tech that you have. This works real nicely with air units, and building units on your frontiers and in newly conquered bases - they don't have the resources to build anything fancy in a short enough period of time, but you don't want to build a bunch of useless garbage units.

I always have a set of unit designs that are hand weapons and no armor, fission reactors and the trained special ability, and build those, then pay money for the upgrade. So for example I can quickly build a trained scout hovertank 1/1/3 - trained, then for 240 energy I can instantly turn it into a 13/8/3 -deep radar & cloaked killing machine.

7. Also keep in mind that the cost of a unit with a given chassis type is mostly driven by the weapon/reactor combo - differences in armor level are not expensive - it costs a lot more to go from a impact to chaos weapon (4 to 8) attack than it does to go for silksteel to neutronium armor, so go for the best armor you can get, but you don't always need the best weapon.