A strategy guide from Happypuppy / Reprinted by Saboteur (Home)
While defense is fine stuff, winning is done by attacking your enemy and making them scream for mommy. Here are some of our favorite attacking tricks.
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Take your slowest unit and set all other units in an attack wave to guard that unit. Then just move that one unit where you want to go. In order to keep control easily, especially with planes, make sure that you already have your guide unit in a separate hotkey group before setting everything else to follow.
Depending on what you are throwing your units into, you might still get chewed up, but at least your units will die together.
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The most common problem with getting units into a base is that they keep stopping to fight things on the perimeter of the enemy base. This results in a long series of battles where you send in a group, it is detroyed by enemy units and you and the enemy both build back up as quickly as possible and do it all again. Not fun.
A frequent solution to this is to avoid combat by simply taking the abuse from the outer ring of defensive units and keep moving toward the center of the base. Setting your units to Hold Fire will help. You take a lot of pain, and small or weak groups will often die, but the number of times you can take out a critical instillation, such as a Big Bertha that is giving you fits or a Fusion Reactor, is quite high once you master the tactic.
Another variation that works frequently is to build many weaker ground units, such as Level 1 artillery Kbots, and a few more-powerful Level 2 units such as Cans or Fidos. Keep them in separate groups. and have the Level 1 units guard the Level 2s until you reach the perimeter of the enemy's base. Assign the Level 1 units to hold their position, taking fire from the enemy defenses, and move the Level 2 units toward the target.
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Well, if you are using a large number of planes, you can add some zest and higher penetration percentages to the previous tactic by using planes once your ground forces break into the enemy base. Send in your ground units and, with your planes at a reasonably close distance, have the aircraft attack when critical installations are sighted.
This has one major good effect: the ground units will tend to tie up a lot of the base defensive gear that would otherwise be shooting at your planes.
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As a rule of thumb, you are looking for two things in your targeting. First, your target should be important to the enemy, and second, the target should take lots of time to rebuild. The best targets in general are Fusion Reactors, artillery and anti-missile defense systems.
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Radar jammers are the difference between winning and going home crying to mommy. First, if long-range weapons can't see you, they can't target you. Second, your incoming waves will meet with much less of a reception if the enemy doesn't know you are coming.
Build jammers in large numbers and spread them liberally throughout your base. To see the coverage a jammer provides, click on it and take a look at the circle drawn in the minimap. This will tell you how much of the map is blacked out.
With stealth planes, you don't have to worry about jamming -- they can't be seen on radar. But the rest of your planes show up on a radar. To counter this, build a few air transports and put jammers on them, then surround the transports with other aircraft. Kind of tricky with large forces, but useful.
For securing your base, using the mobile radar jammers is pretty tedious, as they have a poor range of coverage. I'm sure the UTASP alien radar jammer - although it doesn't fit very well with the theme of TA (alien? come on) - was designed with this in mind. If you can spare the power, use one or two of those to secure your base, and use mobile radar jammers to conceal the presence of your attack forces while circling out to the less-defended rear of your opponent.
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Well, nukes are mainly used to hammer your enemy's base, and we will talk a bit more about that in our short intro to multiplayer mayhem. But an underused application for nukes is to lay them on incoming enemy swarms. When you see a large group of enemy units rushing for your base, hammer them with a nuke aimed just slightly in front of the pack on large maps -- right at the leading edge if they are closer. Getting your lead right is difficult, but if you pull it off, it takes the wind right out of the opponent's sails.
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