[starbase ogg]

Netrek Strategies

by Jim (FillInTheBlank)

These pages are maintained by Frank Niessink.
Last updated on 26 feb 1996.
Contents Strategy Basics, Convoy Ho!, Scouts Ho!, Passive Space Control, Active Space Control.

Strategy Basics Core objectives
  1. The most basic of these is the winning condition. To win you must have more planets than the other team when the game ends. Note the emphasis on when, as it will pop up in one of the later strategies. Although this idea is rather obvious, that it's important to have planets, it's vital to understand that the only winning condition is who has more planets at the end of the game. Army-hoarding strategies revolve around this.
  2. Another basic, though in my opinion the most important and equally overlooked objective. Armies are everything. Armies protect your planets from being taken over. Armies help you take other planets. It doesn't matter how many kills your team has, if you don't have armies. Several of the popular strategies have used this as their basic tenet, whether focusing on saving their own, or destroying the enemy's. Some of the more successful strategists determine in their own minds who is winning by the number of armies on each team, not the number of planets.
  3. Conversely, if your team can't keep kills, you can't use the armies. It's as simple as that. Kill control can negate a serious army advantage, and give your bombers time to even the score. Kill control usually has two approaches: passively refusing to give kills, or aggressively taking them away when they are given. Both have been used, though the former is more successful due to its reliability. The latter is easy to screw up.

Basics

  • If you control the space, you control the planets. Instead of sitting at a planet to defend it, move in front of it and control the area that the enemy will have to go through to get to the planet. Gives you room to maneuver and retreat.
  • Butt-torping is a good way of controlling space. Just don't run away. Butt-torp in circles, to fight without giving up too much ground.
  • Controlling armies is easier than controlling kills, but controlling kills is more effective if you can do it. A team without kills can't ferry armies or take planets. Make sure your bombers know not to give away kills, when you're working on kill control. Be patient: those armies aren't going anywhere, without a carrier.
  • A base can control a big section of space, if you give support to it. All of the space control strategies usually have an excellent base at their heart. Put him on the front-line, and the first thing you do when you die is enter the game and fly to the base. From there, go to wherever you're needed most. This ensures that the base always has a couple people in the area, ready to intercept oggers.

Convoy Ho! Hey, we all know how easy it is to take planets when you have 4-5 escorts. This was a pretty simple plan. If most of your team stays bunched up, it's pretty easy to control the flow of the game. Hard to scum kills off of 5 ferocious CA's. Easy to plan a base ogg, when you're all together. Escorts are even easier. Unfortunately, it relied more on objective #3, mostly ignoring #1 and #2. The basic philosophy was "stay together, don't give kills, and keep a 100% drop-rate on our armies". One passive (no acc) bomber was used, and 1-2 carriers kept up the anti-bombing and planet-taking.

Both Scouts ho! and Convoy ho! would occasionally fall back to army-hoarding, when the other team had no kills, and there were a few friendly planets with armies. Grab the armies, get 'em to your home planet, and organize a set of simultaneous takes. Or just hold the hoard and escort to planets one at a time, while one or two people guard the hoard. As long as the other team doesn't have kills, you're not losing ground. Last minute come-from-behind strategies sometimes use this. Personally, I'd rather have those people dropping in 1's and 2's as soon as they pick up the armies, instead of giving oggers more time to pick 'em off. But that's just me.

Scouts Ho! Believe it or not, at one point there was much hue and cry over how powerful the scout was. Numerous advocates of reducing scout speed and agility whined on r.g.n. about how unbalanced scouts were. This whining has all but disappeared with the advent of space control and heavy-ship bombing, but it should not be overlooked at all. For a couple years, the teams with the best core of scouts were the most successful. The Golden Bears flew between 3 and 6 scouts at any one time, using them for all purposes. A simple game-plan based on this would be:
  • 2-3 fulltime scout bombers. The direct approach to objective #2.
  • 2 fulltime scout droppers. Use those armies. Drop them anywhere (except agris). Every army you drop is one less the enemy has. These scout droppers usually served as anti-bombers also, though they preferred to let the person bomb and scum the kill, then use the kill to drop other armies.
  • 2-4 very aggressive ships, trying to keep planets clear for the scout droppers and continually harass the enemy back into their core. Aggressive kill control was practiced quite well, with the scout bombers readily jumping in to finish any crippled ships.
Again, this approach was relatively successful, as it addressed all three objectives fairly well, with most of the emphasis on army control.

Passive Space Control I'm addressing Space Control twice, because there are two different approaches, imo. The passive approach is attributed to Team With No Name (TWNN), mostly due to MUCUS PIG. Most of the plan centered on the fact that we had better dogfighters than any other team. Whenever you died, you'd come back as a maxwarp CA, fly to the front, continue forward for another 1/3 to 1/2 of a tactical, then try to hold your position there. This gave you some room to retreat without giving up anything important. Dropping armies was easy, since you always had a wall of CA's in front of you. Anti-bombing was ignored for all but the front-six planets. The philosophy was essentially "move the front-line forward inch-by-inch, and never lose control of it". If someone entered your tactical, throw a couple torps in their direction to slow them down. If they ogg, butt-torp a little and scum the kill. Mutualling was looked down on, though occasionally one or two people would be assigned as raw oggers in coordination with the front-line control. 

   F1             F2            F3                 F4



        ---              ---                ---
       |Cap|            |Ind|              |Reg|
       | R |            | R |              | R |
        ---    /\        ---                ---
               ||        __
               F5       |F7|
                         --         /\
        ---              ---        ||      ---
       |Rig|            |Can|       F6     |Org|
       | F |            | F |              | F |
        ---              ---                ---

So with those six 'circles' representing the middle six planets of a two-race war, the Feds have established the front-line in ROM space. They have room to retreat without giving up control of Cap/Ind/Reg. F5 and F6 are rushing back to the front. If any of these people gets a kill, they'll immediately try to pick up from one of these six planets, if there are armies there, or pick from the base (F7) if it has armies. If the other team doesn't have kills, a ship might be sent back to pick up armies, but usually the emphasis was on controlling the front and only picking up armies in that area.

In short, this addresses the points as:

  1. 11-8-1 is a minimal win. 13-7 is a reliable position to be in to secure that win. Anything more than 13 planets is icing on the cake, and unnecessary.
  2. Holding 13-7 is more important than protecting our back 7 planets from bombers. Use armies from the front six to reinforce what we have and take planets. Their armies aren't as important because...
  3. ... getting kills from a wall of CA torpers is tough. Using them is even tougher. Bombing was mostly ignored, in favor of keeping that steel curtain intact.
One important note. TWNN lost because they encountered a team with less-lagged and marginally better dogfighters (Looney Tunes). They didn't have a backup plan for getting their pants whipped.

Active Space Control The previous strategy was labelled passive, even though it was based on controlling part of enemy space. Another form of space control relies on controlling all of it :-). Stick 3-4 roaming CA's in their space that handle the bombing and make it generally dangerous to be flying around with kills. The CA's should not be mutualling with 0-kill enemies. Butt-torp them, and look for juicier targets. Focus on people limping back to their homeworld with a kill. This tactic is complemented by having lots of light-weight carriers that look to use their CA buddies as escorts. Drop those armies wherever you can, then head back for more.

I'm not posting much about this last one because I haven't really used it. Basically it focuses on staying alive in enemy space, so you're always a threat. Keep the enemy worried about those CA's, and they'll end up cowering in their core, while your carriers have a relatively easy time of dropping armies on planets.