[starbase ogg]

Last Planet Stand

These pages are maintained by Frank Niessink.
Last updated on 26 feb 1996.
Contents LPS Tactics, What to do during LPS?, Bomb during LPS?, Ogg their planet(s).

LPS Tactics Yesterday I have played in a quite frustrating LPS (last planet stand) on fisher. We were killed by a team member that did not read messages. But that's another story. What astonished me was the fact that there seems to be no knowledge about what to do in an LPS. Additionally, players seem to think an LPS-situation is hopeless and boring. That's wrong, at least for the defenders :-). They get lots of dooshes and nice offense and bombing stats.

Tactics:

  • one/two (depending on the number of players) BB stay at last planet and point-defend the planet.
  • the rest of the team just stupid oggs any enemy passing the own front-planets. If you don't kill them with the first ship do it with the second. It's that simple. Reason: your way is shorter, and kills are meaningless for you.
  • hoard armies on last planet until you have enough to take the core-agri (incl. AS-bombing, etc.). Any other planet is not interesting.
  • one of the team bombs all or all the near (if not a full 8-8 game) planets.
-little helper.

What to do during LPS When I'm attacking an LPS, I generally look to do one of two things:
  1. Get a bunch of teammates all carrying, then charge the enemy planet at the same time and try to sneak one of us through (this tends to be the best plan)
  2. Quickly get a kill and armies, get very close to the enemy planet (like almost on the same tactical), then sneak in when the enemy seems to be distracted.
Both of these tactics work best when they run as fast as possible, since that means I can get in multiple attacks between defending pops, which increases my chances of getting a successful drop.

Given this, the best things to do as a defender are:

  1. Try to clear out a zone around your last planet(s), so that you can see enemy carriers coming, react to them, and intercept them before they are actually at the planet. You don't want to be stuck having to phaser lock a cloaked taker right at the planet, and you want to be able to look away for 3 seconds without losing the planet. This is probably the most important thing to do.
  2. Keep the number of carriers down... if they get more than 2 you are in trouble if they synchronize. It's good to try to keep enemies from getting away with their kills. Giving someone a second kill usually isn't that big a deal, since it's unlikely that they will be able to drop more than 1-2 armies anyway (exception: when you have your core agri). In contrast, giving a second person a kill is very bad.
  3. Without sacrificing the above two points, try to slow down the enemy attack by bombing armies, finishing off crippled enemies with kills (make sure you mutual!) and generally anything obnoxious you can do which keeps them from getting quick carries.
You can't stop the enemy from carrying armies, but if they have to fly all the way to your space, get a kill, fight their way out, fly back into their space for armies, pick up, fly back, and then struggle just to get to your last planet, then you have good odds of holding off the enemy long enough to get some armies (and save them).

Conversely, if an enemy kills you at the homeworld, refits to an AS, gets three armies, and flies all the way into your space without being intercepted, then you're awfully close to getting genocided, since that means the enemy is getting frequent, high probability attacks, and eventually one is going to sneak through.

Grey Elf

Bomb during LPS? It is never bad to bomb.

As an avid SC bomber, I have to agree with this. One bomber can usually keep things pretty flat even with 4 agris unless there's some ASW. The more ASW they allocate, the more bombers you can have. The attacking team in an LPS will feel the smaller number of ships more than the defenders.

If you're bombing and avoiding the ASW, remember to keep the ASW ships away from the real action. If the enemy can stop you bombing and still help take planets you're not helping your team much. In an LPS, the more people you take away doing ASW, and the more bombing you get done, greatly reduces offensive team coordination.

How passively you bomb depends on the situation. If there are plenty of enemy armies but no enemy has kills then don't get killed at any cost. If they have plenty of kills but are army flat, bomb any pops ASAP and don't worry too much about being killed in the act. It's also not too bad to give kills to other players who already have two kills, SCs who already have one kill or a base. Always check their kills so you know whether they're trying to pick up and leave or defend armies with a view to killing you.

Passive bombing often just involves being more patient than the ASW. Just hang out at the edge of his tactical as far from your home space as possible. See if you can coax him into chasing you into third space for a few butt torps. Watch out for alternative planets to bomb and use your SC speed to run them into etemp trouble. If their shields are down, even a single SC torp can take a warp or two off their top speed and SC torps are often fast enough to beat them to raising shields.

James Ashton

Ogg their planet(s) I read one message to the Team board that pointed out something we might all have realized sooner on: we need to treat their core planets as starbases and OGG them. When we got 4-8 ship waves together is when we succeeded in clearing the planet for our carrier.

Hmm. Sorta thought this was common knowledge, but then this isn't 2 years ago... clue is more dilute these days than it used to be; that's for sure. (And there are also generous LPS timers to end things because everyone hates playing the winning side in static LPS. These make the game more fun exactly because they remove LPS play.)

Probably most of you guys don't face many genos, because these days it hardly takes more than about a clue or two to make a team geno-proof.

Anyway, the way to geno a team is to form ogg waves consisting of one or two carriers and everyone else ogging/detting. The idea of the escorts is to kill all enemies within long phaser range of the planet, and after that, det (if close) or uncloak and draw fire (if far). The main hope of the carrier is that his '??' gets overlaid by someone else's letters at the key moment when he makes the move and drops. The backup dream is that all the enemies hosing the planet whiff, which is pretty rare but which does happen on occasion. And of course, the backup backup is that there are still three or four friends detting between him and the streams of torps. Yeah, right.

And all of this has to be tightly synced, else the enemy will have time to mutual and get back in phaser range of the planet. Needless to say, even one or two good players rewling in BBs makes it very hard to clear the planet. An additional player or two who know how to stupid ogg will make geno pretty much impossible.

Leonard aka Wreck