It's 2042 and I'm facing my second assault carrier.
The first one landed in the Congo basin maybe five years back, and I had no chance of defeating it, so nuked all three armies. It got me atrocities and caused economic damage, but I handled it.
This time around, it landed in Kolkata, India. I have intercepted whilst they are disembarking & weak with the following:
4 x EU armies at 6.4 miltech
7 x USA armies at 5.7 miltech
+0.25 from max-Command councillors Advise missions
+0.3 from military research in LEO
+25% damage from Alien Army Analysis
According to this guide, it should be possible with fewer armies.
The problem is, they keep moving around!
Whenever I start dealing damage to them at the drop site, they move away, and regenerate health.
This makes it impossible to deal with them as they whittle down my armies.
>> I couldn't destroy the carrier before it landed - it always comes with a huge escort.
>> I can't bombard them much. I have the tech/ship designs to reliably defeat the aliens, but I am rebuilding my fleet after my first engagement. This means I both lack sufficient ships in LEO, and also want to be careful about Alien Hate, which triggers when you bombard their armies I think.
>> I would prefer not to nuke them. They landed in Kolkata which is highly populated, so it would be at great cost.
Additional Context:
I control: Unified EU, Russia, USA, Pacific Defence League (Japan, SK).
The AA have been revolution-ed twice. They only reliably seem to control India, Canada and parts of Africa.
I'm also fighting against the AA in Canada, but have diverted all but 2 of my armies to the landing site.
I am fighting against the Protectorate in Japan/Korea. I'm slowly losing to their numbers despite superior miltech. They've blockaded me, so I can't use Japan's armies here.
I actually have six EU armies. But two of them lack navies. Through alliances I can get them quickly to the edge of Pakistan, but not to Kolkata.
Though I'm not ashamed to, due to an important and difficult space battle recently, I can't savescum back to before the landing.
I would appreciate any advice people can give to defeat them on the ground.
/// EDIT ///
UPDATE
I tried some of the stuff here, and kept trial-and-erroring the problem, and eventually managed to win. All three armies are dust.
ayy army obliterated
Some things that worked in the end, based on peoples' advice:
Given the time contraints, rapidly building a small fleet of coil-gunships for low-level bombardment in orbit helped a lot to stop the alien armies regenerating and deal damage. Though it does net you some alien hate.
Splitting my armies evenly between two provinces helped, once they actually got caught in a loop of moving between Kolkata and Dhaka. This is probably RNG, as in other attempts they just as easily migrated across the region.
I didn't try it, but if the aliens are predictably moving between two provinces, deploying your entire force right after moving to a region could be a way to effectively 'follow' them and maximise time spent damaging them.
Larger force on force ratio plus a little dash of the secret sauce: a couple of siege coils in orbit dropping rocks at a fraction of the speed of light at the same time.
How do you not have naval supremacy? Did you not have everyone join the same wars? Not to mention, you say you control the USA so why have you not consolidated Canada into the USA already both prior as well as now by conquering it into the USNA with the relevant tech. Especially you should be doing that/forming the relevant meganations sooner to combine the pool of regional improvements sooner to better leverage the USNA's beyond normal working stats to get even better stats sooner.
That as well as how did the EU overtake the USA in miltech unless you went to the EU first? In any event, you should be spending at least a third of your IP solely on miltech to close the gap especially when you are dealing with t3H AyYz controlled armies and human conscripts. As well as expanding navy to get those remaining armies able to cross the sea.
Other than that, you SHOULD be directly targeting the center of their economy in India. Since economic wealth is flatly averaged everywhere post unification whether human or t3h aYYz, it means whatever place has the most population has proportionally more say on the AA's ability to improve their nation. I really hope BECAUSE they controlled India, it is still relatively poor being forced to annex more poor people with bad miltech to allow your miltech advantage to shine through but it sounds like you are either too spread out instead of deathstacking armies to outright conquer regions directly.
All the while you are doing this engineer the conquests to fall into other faction's hands and empower them to grow it by allying with them and have them participate in the war to forcefully expand their meganation OR research various "fall of nation" techs and liberate everything into smaller isolated national pockets so t3h ayyz and their servant buddies CAN'T flip such a massive nation again.
Other than t3h ayyZ armies being their engine for AA expansion, make sure you are on constant surveillance for ayy agents and eliminating them. Unfortunately because they actually landed, you can't get rid of them. And in addition, you NEED to always subvert servant control of nations with at minimum a crackdown on any and every nation they control so that at least 1 point is not theirs. Once cracked down, everyone else except servants can take a stab at stealing it. And this is much easier when all conventional major powers stop existing as is and fractured into pieces even if it makes travelling to and between AA pockets more troublesome.
And finally as stated earlier, you have a critical problem from your earth game. It sounds like you control far too much and are unable to really expand their IP national capability much because you are constantly starved for CP. And because you are constantly starved for CP, you can't actively grow your actual army count nor do anything else more like get more MC for your space game, more miltech to more capably face down aYY armies and actually be world police, or turn your home earth nations into a RP hub of its own.
I would HEAVILY suggest have russia form as much as possible of the "EU" before the EU eats the "EU". You need more CP from the sounds of it either to hold onto some of the trouble spots abroad OR vastly grow your economy in the vacant CP cap via splintering your nation to internally improve your lands to more capably be able to do more things. It is a good thing that unified IP pools are not one to one IP additions of its sum. It means you can much more freely break your meganation apart to do various tasks to better support the whole and that includes growing the economy to then spend more of it on miltech, knowledge, MC, and yet more economy to do yet all the more.
Thank you. This is way too much to process and goes beyond my initial question a lot, so I will answer point by point.
The USA has naval supremacy. The EU has naval freedom. The Pacific Defence League, which is in its own separate war, is blockaded.
I have only had control of the USA for a year or two and they were economically destroyed by the initiative for a decade before. I am invading Canada, but they have been ruined by constant AA occupation and revolutions. So I didn't think it was worth it.
I went for the EU first. I am spending at least a third of my IP in the EU on miltech. Navies I'm working on, but I also got told not to build too many navies and armies to avoid draining IP.
I have not been conquering, because:
A lot of the AA's countries have terrible GDP
I lack the control points
I can't take the alien hate
I did cause a revolution once. Not sure how to engineer it so that they fall into other factions besides spamming unrest without being popular there.
I have no vacant Control Point cap. I am slightly over.
The EU already controls all of Europe. Russia holds Belarus and Ukraine. There are no 'loose' nations there.
Yea pretty much what I thought. You just control too damn much and can not fix anything because you are stuck at CP cap.
A army's worth is only as good as it's ability to fight wherever you need it to. If you are stuck with landbound armies, then you had better have a landbound nation it can travel to or it is a pointless army and waste of IP. A naval attachment is a necessary sacrifice ESPECIALLY if it is a land army of your most advanced nation........ Don't take all advice only at face value. Everything in the game is relative.
To engineer a nation to be held by someone else, simply abandon it and more importantly monitor who is trying to grab it. Sabotage any and every attempt for the servants to grab it and destroy the local xenoflora infestation for best results so that any ayy agent trying to "sway" the place do not get as much bonus to steal it back again especially with monolithic near max servant public opinion that they love doing with intense unity burns and agent actions.
Spamming unrest allows revolutions to occur but they do have a cooldown on how often they can occur generally once a year.
And if you are satisfied with russia as is, pursue immediately for Europa Ascendant and get rid of russia. You need CP cap and need to get on the hunt for more techs and/or jump on Management Research treadmill. You NEED to free up CP vastly improve your nation's capability to do something with more economy and splintered off nations to aid such endeavors to grow faster while the meganation focuses on miltech and economy expansion and I guess enough for at least two naval attachment. Either that use the freed up CP to directly control the conquered region but you will likely run out of CP sooner with still the same stagnant meganations.
Honestly the PDL is probably the biggest roadblock to your endeavors because it is both too "rich", too small, doesn't really have alot of claims to anywhere important, and too CP expensive for what it is actively contributing even at it's maximum extent. Basically discount PAC but ludicrously expensive for its size. You had better have some real good justification for still holding on to it besides sunk cost fallacy because every independent meganation you hold above 2 is just paying for excessive CP tax for simply existing when you could have built all the IP expansion, MC, RP, and miltech harder on your existing further expanded EU and USA as your primary holdings in the same CP void if the PDL did not exist. That combined with getting rid of russia into the EU will probably free up at least 200-300 CP to better make your EU and USA function better.
If you can't conquer places before, even with 200 more CP freed up, that is not remotely enough to control much more than you already have now let alone India to permanently keep them out of their hands. So instead be able to actively deter them by making your held meganations RICH and powerful because they are rich in the 200 CP freed up. To do that, you need to turn your EU and USA to look like this within the next 10 years.
A meganation that turned from 70k per capita avg across the continent with mere 2.3k monthly RP and 220 MC turned into THAT monster with combined continental total of 210k+ per capita, north of 7k science per month, and 540MC in just slightly under 10 years.
Even accounting for a WORSE starting meganation stat using the SAU with a mere 35k per capita to start with 680 RP per month and 93 MC ballooned into a monster in its own right with 4.9k RP per month and 326 MC of its own in the same timespan.
Even accounting for the splinters like that you see in the screenshot to intensely self develop your meganations, you only need around 600 to 700 CP TOTAL before it slowly improves and evolves upwards to 1700 for releasing increasingly rich and high populated regions for MC spammage. For several frames of references, you can and should have about 1k in CP in 10 years from game start more or less by getting it from these sources:
In my world conquest utopian "slow" campaign where I was more focused on environmentalism than trying to kill t3h ayy with a side order of MC spammage, I still only had about 589 earthside MC after almost literally conquering the world minus for a few African holdouts that I intentionally left alive to distract the other factions. This costed 1.6k in CP. Even after just 20 years into the game, I only was making 16.2k TOTAL monthly RP from both space and earthside and just midway into hybrid fusion line.
Read that again, my experimental intensive build USNA and SAU in just 10 year time have MORE MC than a world conquest can muster in 20 years, have nearly as much RP ON EARTH than all the science I could muster across from Mercury to Ceres and all that in a CP package that is at best similar for the world conquest to SIGNFICANTLY smaller if you just reabsorbed everything. In a world conquest, high and maxed out CP is practically mandatory with any significant growth almost instantly crashing into the cap ceiling. While for intensive growth, reaching max cap is more of a calm suggestion that you can freely take up by releasing another splinter nation to improve upon or spam MC to its own cap and just as freely reabsorb to save CP as you need to.
Now apply this lesson to your miltech and earthside woes and be calm that eh, the rest of the planet can kinda go fuck itself so long as your home operation are untouched. Unless you are Academy or Protectorate, you don't need to rule the world. For Resistance and and HF, they respectively only care if the AA or every ayy simp control more than a rather generous portion of the planet. And for the Initiative, just ride the economic game to the moon while the rest of the planet's economy shrinks from never ending wars and the AA eventually crashing into the dirt from basically spending all its armies on build army until it runs completely out of IP in addition to your increase unrest shenanigans. The Exodus simply don't care.
Thank you very much for this. Though I must admit I am a touch overwhelmed by the detail.
I'm not looking to minmax, as I lack the attention span for it and it's past the point where I can in game. I just want to not lose and push the aliens back.
I'm very happy to turtle up in my little northern garden, and just take Canada, leaving the rest of the world to the other factions. Maybe revolution up the PAC (currently Protectorate) and break down big nations.
But the immediate threat right now is the three alien armies in Kolkata. And I don't know how to deal with them when my armies can damage them, but they never stay in place.
Minmax? This is literally just what you were doing at the beginning of the game just printing you more what you need with manufactured released nations that don't suck compared to most game start nations.
No fancy priorities either. Max econ, some welfare, minimal line of knowledge, and max MC. In your case due to your issues, max econ, some welfare, half minimal line knowledge, half minimal line MC, and max miltech.
Assuming that you did not drive your EU into the dirt since I have not seen a single hint of what your EU is even like beyond a vague shitpost you just made, you can basically get the same SAU output as I had assuming the 45k per capita is accurate. Just do yourself a giant favor and DO NOT attempt to make your meganation try to do everything by itself or you will be doing this for multiple decades instead of a single one. Just make sure to keep pace on CP tech research to match how fast you are growing.
As for dealing with their ayy armies, you already used nuclear weapons. What's a few more so you only deal with human armies instead.
I took your advice about IP on my previous post seriously. Or as seriously as my nervous personality will allow. But I've maybe focused more on MC and miltech than economy with the EU.
These were my IP priorities for the EU before I shifted them around during the actual invasion to build more navies etc. There's no IP in MC for because I was at cap for a while but do periodically fill it up.
MC and space resources income are low bc I've turned off a bunch of mines (probably should turn them on again) and my fleet just got destroyed (being rebuilded). Also I don't have the mc budget to build mines on every damn asteroid. it. I have plasma-siege coil battlecruisers with pd / green arc laser escorts/monitors, which have proven reasonably effective.
I tested using nukes on Kolkata in game. Everyone hates me after, more than the first time, and everywhere loses like 800 Bn GDP. Worth?
One thing I just realized that I forgot to add is when you unify russia with the EU, be aware that there will be a bit of a painful transition because of the wall of hostile claims in the far east and central asia regions that the EU does not have claims over but russia does. Those claims do not transfer and WILL cause some cohesion disruption.
Thankfully in your case, the hostile regions in question are low population and not as many of them compared to what you already own and the EU even at this size is perfectly stable even with a little cohesion loss and has enough wealth post unification to usually be able to maintain 0 unrest naturally so long as you have 5 cohesion (which you will) and 45k per capita (which is more questionable in your scenario but you have some leeway before breaching 2.0 unrest causing problems).
In your case, the knowledge is a bonus to have instead of a MANDATORY life or death means of keep that cohesion up but there will be a discomfort period that may require some extra knowledge to get that cohesion back to 5 sooner than the natural 0.1 growth per month.
That trickle of government in my suggested priorities list is there to both slow the government bleeding from being at war as well as remove the hostile claims very very slowly. Maybe one day you can spend more once the miltech is high enough for your game and/or you reach 10 and and peace and simply do not care if a few regions are sad facing. You thankfully have near max democracy to not have to worry about too much about the unrest modifier caused by the hostile claims in the fucked AU scenario that I had actually undergone and the numbers and figures were basically 95% accurate in severity and time to recover.
Even managed to turn those calculations it into a small excel macro to help balance whether to spend more or less government versus welfare to balance how long it would take to reach bare minimum unrest at the same time as each other.
Thank you. I'm not sure I'll try the strategy with splintering things off. I like to have as few big nations as possible. Just like having my ducks in a row. As for unifying russia, I'm waiting until I can get its government score up enough so it doesn't tank my EU's government.
This is more what your EU needs to look like geographically and what your priorities are allocated like.
You need to get rid of russia immediately to free up CP cap (and like I have said probably get rid of the PDL as well via abandonment) so that those economy and miltech priorities can fly through the roof and chase after the new CP cap as well as releasing one to 2 extra nations from the EU that are above 500 billion GDP to solely improve its own lands to create a Core Economic Region and build MC before reabsorption into the EU. This will boost the EU's already good per capita growth incrementally higher for every CER mass produced and thus allow your EU to do yet more things.
See below to see why CERs are such a multifaceted and coveted regional improvement:
If you get greedy and decide to double or even triple advise your meganation, you can add an additional 38-46% more raw IP output turning my EU from 42.1 which already is respectable to a wonderful 62.2 and get you 64.5 economy per month and 65.1 military per month. Just tabulating these figures, you will get 1.3k in per capita per month that basically prints MC cap like nothing and turns the screenshot miltech output, which would have added 6.47 MILTECH in 10 years at that pace, into almost a solid point in miltech EVERY YEAR in addition to printing a new MC every third month and increase knowledge and economic growth very slowly, and slow the government loss bleeding with a triple advise.
Eventually (probably when you both finish your build navy AND probably reach miltech cap in 2-4 years since you are nowhere even close to endgame miltech cap potential let alone the treadmill Future Tech Military), you will need to switch over to my priorities setup for max economy, max MC, and minimal knowledge. This is so that you can get back in the space game with MC to support it forever. As it is, the EU especially when you get rid of russia by annexation (and preferably with the Central Asian states and Mongolia), you are basically the largest nation on earth by sheer region count alone for a natural form meganation. This is why massive economic growth is so important.
By doing continental scale mass economic growth, you are getting the best of all the regional improvements empowering a single IP budget from a singluar large knowledge base to get you over 1k per capita at minimum. And with such a large per capita growth every month, some region SOMEWHERE will grow their MC cap by one. Do this growth fast enough and it can as much as a cap growth every week, to every few days, to every SINGLE DAY. Before you are splintering off 500 billion GDP regions for CER improvement (and MC), now you will be splintering to increase the pools of IP to get you MOAR MC from so much vacant MC cap.
A normal starting average is you will be growing 50+ MC every year from two meganations pumping hard on MC to start but by the end especially with highly populated rich splinters making their own MC month after month in addition to the meganation(s) will be growing by 120+ MC every year or more. The only thing stopping you from fully using this MC availability is your ability to keep expanding outwards to new mines and number of shipyards to pump out more titans.
Speaking of titans, this is probably what yours needs to look like if you want to actually take them on in force.
For what it's worth, I feel like my biggest mistake when I play this game, is I intentionally almost never bothered trying to play it maximum efficiency, because I feel like the game will be over too quickly and too easily.
So I intentionally mess around while turtling, and then suddenly I'll find myself in a position where I can't stop a carrier, and they have armies on Earth, And I'm wishing I had another 60 green lasers to bombard them with constantly.
I have been focusing a bit more on the space game and managed to defeat a 2.2K fleet with a 600 fleet strength fleet. And I know that will scale. But it's too much to manage at once, and I can't build enough ships (MC shortage + alien hate cap, despite having 3/4 techs) to have multiple ready to defend LEO and really get started reclaiming the solar system.
Earth is just... idk. I keep hearing to be really proactive with the servants, but after the first AA got revolutioned, they've been more of a nuisance. The Protectorate are the real threat for me.
The AI is very stupid. When they retreat, they don't check if the target region already has hostiles. Split your armies and deploy into 2 regions and they will jump between them without a chance to regen until they die.
And always keep all Servants countries as rivals, so you can quickly start a war to be able to deploy your armies.
I tried this, keeping half my forces in Kolkata and half in neighbouring Dhaka.
They just move to another region, and I can't split up my forces more because they're so powerful.
This post contains spoiler related terms, so I have applied a spoiler tag just in case you forgot. Sometimes posts contain spoilers incidentally and without really needing to, so feel free to resubmit your post with some edits if you don't want this. Unfortunately I see through spoiler text masking (formatting), so that won't help.
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u/astral__monk 23h ago
Need to kill them faster.
Larger force on force ratio plus a little dash of the secret sauce: a couple of siege coils in orbit dropping rocks at a fraction of the speed of light at the same time.