A strategy guide from Happypuppy / Reprinted by Saboteur (Home)
The Porcupine player is a base-defense specialist. A Porcupine doesn't send out much in the way of early attack or scouting parties and is less concerned with defeating his opposition than with becoming invulnerable to attack. The idea is that if you are invulnerable, sooner or later the enemy will make a mistake that allows you to get into their base and ruin their whole day.
The best player on our team is a Porcupine and wins about 90 percent of our office battles. However, there are good points and bad points to pulling a Porcupine, and you need to know them well before you start. First, Porcupines tend to have to build a fairly compact base in order to get complete defensive coverage. This makes them more vulnerable to long-range artillery fire, such as from the Arm Big Bertha, than some other players.
The next problem the Porcupine has to deal with, and probably the biggest hassle of them all, is the 500 unit limit. You can only have 500 units, including buildings, defensive structures, mobile units and missiles. Now that seems like a lot if you are used to just playing the missions. But start playing multiplayer against real operators and that 500-unit limit hits like a wall. A really serious Porcupine defensive system for a good sized base can tie up 200 units just in the base itself. That only gives you 300 units to go out and take the war to the opposition. And if they, heaven forbid, are Porcupines themselves, then those units will need a special dispensation from the pope in order to punch through your opposition's defensive perimeter.
The major good point of the Porcupine is that it takes one seriously hardcore attack to even think about getting into your base if you don't make a blunder. In one particularly notable case, our favorite Porcupine player took three back-to-back waves of 60 units and remained standing with enough defenses to win the game.
Another good point to the Porcupine is that while the base structure tends to be somewhat vulnerable to long-range artillery fire, odds are that the Porcupine player will get his Bertha up first. Since the Porc isn't worrying much about sending out forays or building unnecessary mobile units, they tend to get their Bertha up quicker, which, as we shall discuss later, is pretty much a sure win on smaller maps.
Overall, thinking Porcupine is a great option for the beginning player and a solid option for even the most advanced TA general.
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Basically, look at all of the details under the Defensive and Production sections to come and use them liberally. Don't let your base get any bigger than you can fully ring in defensive structures and don't start building anything to send out on an attack until you have about 160 units in your base defenses, construction units and production facilities.
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