Some questions about exploiting massive intact ruins

[blue emu (OP)]

I destroyed a large fleet of Precursors and conquered the planet that they were guarding. My Xeno team found 1,747 xeno-archeological sites on the planet. Started exploiting them, and of course hordes of Giant Killer Robots came swarming out.

I had started a colony on the planet. When the robots attacked, the colony surrendered, even though my combat odds were 99.7 in my favor, since I had a large stack of ground units there. Bug?

I've removed all the colonists to a neighbouring world... will this prevent the "surrender" bug from recurring, or do I have to disband the colony?

Is thre any way to speed up the process of recovering the goodies? Will a big stack of Engineers speed it up? At a rate of five or six discoveries per year, it's going to take centuries to clear this site.

[Brian Neumann]

The surrender bug is a problem.  The best I have found to deal with it is to make sure you are using the most recent update (5.42).  Have lots of troops available and make frequent database saves so when it does go wrong you can restore from a recent point.

Each engineer has a chance to recover 1 site.  So 10 engineers will recover 10 times as many sites in the same time frame.  Make sure you give the engineer brigades the colonel's with the highest xeno skills as this will help them in the recovery process.  In general I find that 1 division of heavy assault with a 3-4 replacement battalions along will be enough.  If not the heavy assault then 2 divisions of assault infantry and mobile infantry will be plenty.  When a robot garrision is uncovered make sure you do not use anything more than 5 day cycles so that the combat is over before another site gets opened up.  A general rule of thumb is the tech level listed on the colony summary page (f2) will be the number of battalions that emerge when you do disturb them.  If you have more than 30 engineers you might want to add an additional division of troops and some extra replacement battalions to help if you do have two uncovered at the same time.

Brian

[blue emu (OP)]

Thanks.

How do you actuall USE the Replacement Battalions? Does a certain menu option open up when theu atr present in the stack?

[ZimRathbone]

Thanks.

How do you actuall USE the Replacement Battalions? Does a certain menu option open up when theu atr present in the stack?

As long as the replacement battallions are in the same location as a unit that has suffrered losses, some of the personell of the rep battalion will be transferred to the injured battalion (ie the replacement readiness level will drop & the injured battalion will rise) No other action needs to be taken.  They do not have to be in the same Brigade or Division.

[Brian Neumann]

I try to keep an average of 1 replacement battalion for each brigade, sometimes 1 for 2 brigades.  Because of the way combat works that 1 battalion can almost double the effectivness of an entire brigade for a couple of combat cycles.  The combat capability of a unit is based on its readiness, as this goes down the total combat points also go down.  By having the replacement batt replace those losses your combat points don't go down, while you are doing damage to the enemy units and thier combat points are dropping.  So on the second combat cycle you have effectivly more points even though you didn't bring in any reinforcements.  A couple of heavy combat cycles and you may very well have used up that replacement batt. but your combat units are still going strong.  This is why I like having the replacement batt's around for any decent sized combat.  A lot of the time I build my troop transports with 6 troop bays.  5 for the brigade and 1 for either the division hq, or a replacement battalion.  This gives a full division loadout of 4 combat brigades, 1 division hq and 3 replacement battalions.

Brian

[Sheb]

Well, you could have taken a few more heavy assault battaillons instead of those replacement battaillons, thus having more points from the start. Of course, replacement are much cheaper...

[Brian Neumann]

Well, you could have taken a few more heavy assault battaillons instead of those replacement battaillons, thus having more points from the start. Of course, replacement are much cheaper...

Not only are the replacement battalions cheaper and faster to build, but to get the most out of the combat units they really do need to be in brigade and division sized units.  My standard division lift does not have that much extra capacity.  Unless I go for an entire extra division of troops I can't really bring along an extra brigade easily.  If I made my transports larger then I could get away with it, but this way each transport is fairly heavily armored and has multiple ciws systems (armor 10 and 4-5 ciws).  This makes it hard to kill them and they are small enough that I can get them up to a decent speed using strictly civilian systems.  I can keep them with the combat group and I only need to cross-load them into the assault landers when they are within a few hours of landing, thus keeping the morale loss down.  Each transport has a couple of cargo handling facilities and each of the carriers loaded with fac sized assault landers also has a couple.  It doesn't take long to load them and then they can get moving for the landing.

Brian