Obviously, their uses can be easily separated into two main catagories: attacking and defending. I've found two key uses, one for attacking, one for defending, but I'd like to expand my knowledge of them
.
Attacking: The Plug
I find the Mark 1 FF you get at the beginning if extremely useful for maybe like, 5 minutes, then I have enough defenses to hold down the fort. After that I felt that deleting it (and using the energy it was consuming to make ships) was the best course, but not so now. I like playing on stringy maps, where the planets are mostly linear. Because of this, I find it highly effective to just have my FF follow my units through the wormhole, and just stop. Right there. On the wormhole. This frees up most (if not all) of my units to attack rather then keep the enemy from running in and counter-attacking, and does a better job of it then an assortment of ships.
Defending: The Electric Socket
Imagine the situation: I'm on my home planet, and hundreds of AI ships are ready to fly through my, MY, wormhole, and I can do nothing about it. I normally threw 1 FF somewhere around it to manipulate the ships that came through. But then I thought about it. If you have a single point where you know something will happen (AI ships will come through), hundreds of them, and you have a weapon that will hit all of them (Electric Turret), and they all stay in that place, they will die
. Some ships are immune to tractor beams though, and will simply fly awayyyyyy before my turrets can kill them. Others get caught, but kill the turrets before they die. SOLUTION! Create 3 (or 4) forcefields around the wormhole, in such a way that when the enemy warps through, they are stuck between the forcefields. Place the tractor beams and electric turrets as close to the FF's as possible, and if you're exceedingly rich, place mines where the shields overlap (as that is where they'll shrink first). Result? Dead stuff. While this is really, really expensive, and probably (definitely
) not the most cost-effective way to secure a wormhole, it's also the best that I've seen thus far (although, I will concede that I've not seen a lot
). But hey, I'm sorry, but I find it very fun to watch as the AI sends 300 ships at me, only to be trapped, tractor beamed, and zapped to death is arguably the funnest thing I've ever seen.
Anybody else seen some epic, ground-breaking uses for these wonders of technology?
-Pandemic
