Hello folks, I am back with another build I've had success with in the past. Of course the time I take screen shots to show others things don't play out ideally, but whatever, I have enough material to share the concept. This base is another firepower and logistics base, with enough fortification to make it difficult to get into, but not built specifically for the sake of fortifying the ground it is on. First up, a look at the map: From this location, the OS can be used efficiently on either of The NC Arsenal or Lithcorp Fortress as required, and you also gain air superiority in the area. I generally don't add the vehicle pad to this base, as the terrain limits the number of vehicles you can honestly benefit from, and vehicle pads are always at risk of being hacked and used to produce offensive sunderers. The gate shields at Lithcorp Fortress greatly limit the potential for vehicle attacks from the north, and while vehicles can in theory shoot down from the road above you, the minimum depression angle of their guns means they have to drive far enough over the edge to shoot down that they are at risk of falling. Once enemy vehicles are over the edge, they are on a clock to get damage done, as they tend to be easy pickings for...well...anything, to kill them. Here's one angle of the base: -I start with that vehicle gate beside the road, then put the silo behind it. The idea I'm going for here is that this base is meant to be just off to the side of the road so that friendly traffic can still pass. This also makes for easy cortium drop off. -I then put the garage beside the gate and put the guts in there. The garage won't seal up tight to the gate, meaning infantry can get through that gap, but vehicles can't, and infantry can pass through the vehicle gate anyways, so the slight gap isn't that big of a deal. After that I start cludging the northern wall together going up the hill. [insert rant about building on slopes here] On the south side I place my pillbox beside the vehicle gate, and then a rampart beside that, and once again start cludging wall components up the hill. -I find a total of 3 sky shields are needed for effective coverage of this base, 1 in the garage, 1 in or beside the pillbox, and 1 by the OS uplink, which is in an upcoming screen shot. Once you have those, your walls going up the hill will start coming into contact with the shields, meaning any infantry trying to go up and over this way will lose their shields. Next view of the base: Now I'm standing on top of the garage, looking east. This shows that I have the air pad close to the garage for convenience, as the spawn tube is in the garage, and the OS uplink is up the hill a bit. I put it up there because this is considerably more than 200 meters away from The NC Arsenal, so minimum range is not an issue, and the closer it is the more frequently it can fire. Additionally, if somehow enemies are able to destroy the uplink, it goes off with quite a boom, so keeping it away from everything else isn't a bad idea. And some final notes before I finish off with a couple more screen shots. This iteration definitely has more buildings than are part of the plan, I was intending to run a small construction training squad that ballooned into a platoon. When doing that (which you'll have to if you want multiple sky shields for example) I pretty much end up chained to my base. Between needing to delete problematic buildings, and chasing off cortium bombers, I can't leave. This makes delegation of tasks important. For example, don't deploy your own routing spire, get others to do that. If you run up to the console of the OS uplink (very close range to do this for some reason) and hold Q on it, you can unlock access to your squad. If you let your enthusiastic green horn builders play with the death star beam, they will be more likely to come back in the future. No, they aren't efficient with it, they're learning, let them learn and have fun. New builders also often don't have certed ants. You aren't spending your nanite on much anyways, draw ants from nearby bases, and use page down to hand them off. The other thing I'm finding about leading construction is that it pairs well with air squads. Any slack time for the builders can be filled by adding more silos around with spawn tubes and air pads so the pilots never run out of ESFs. Additionally, in those moments when you need defenders, having a dozen ESFs on call is really handy. Ok, here's the final few screen shots:
