Dag Stålhandske. Last updated August 28, 1999.

Let’s begin by defining the terms: I am trying to determine what combinations of units are good for what purpose. An important term here is the "expeditionary force" by which I mean a group of units used in conjunction with each other. They may or may not be a "stack". They may or may not actually move together and all units might not be used when the stack attacks. You might also add other locally available forces when attacking, but unless these forces are meant to be used for several turns with the expeditionary force, they are not considered part of the expeditionary force (I refer to them as "temporary auxiliaries" or just "auxiliaries"). I do, however, recommend that in the vicinity of the enemy your should end your turn with all units in one stack lest the enemy take you out piecemeal.

In my opinion an expeditionary force should contain a good normal fighting capacity (called "main element"), extra units for air defence if needed, a Noble or an Officer for better morale and one extra unit for scouting (scouting and air defence are called "supplementary elements") if the main elements of the expeditionary force do not already have this. The scouting units typically have some extra movement points as compared to the main element. These should be used to have a look at what is happening outside the immediate vicinity of the expeditionary force stack. A good scouting unit might see three hexes away, but the enemy will have at least four movement points. Also, with a good scouting unit, the enemy is less likely to have the "unspotted units" advantage.

Another important term is FDS (Firepower/Defence Specialisation). This is a generalisation of CFLFK (Cannon Fodder and Late Fire Killers). FDS only means that some units have low rank and are good for defence while others have high rank and are good for attacking. In CFLFK the high firepower units also have late fire type.

Now over to my recommended expeditionary forces:

Main elements: Patriot Horde and/or Militia plus Close Assault Tank.

Supplementary elements: One good spotting unit/high mobility unit like Scout Tank, Special Forces, Tracker Legion, etc. An Officer or Noble/Blademaster for better morale. One or more good air defence units, probably SP Anti-Air. However, if this expeditionary force is used against rebels (which is a role I recommend it for, see below) the air defence element might not be needed. Militia and Close Assault Tank already have some air defence, albeit poor, and rebels normally do not have very much air force or they use it ineffectively (they typically attack with the air force without having any units close by to capture routed forces).

Advantages: The Militia or Patriots plus Close Assault Tank make a very good FDS. The Close Assault Tank is not very much slowed by the infantry since it has only six movement points as opposed to the eight points most tanks have. Losses will typically be among the Militia and Patriot Hordes, and since these can be built anywhere in one turn it is easy to replace losses. You can even build them in the very city you just conquered so the replacement unit appears just where you need it without long delay for transport. Really useful. So this force may be slow, but it can be relentless. I.e. it does not have to wait for repairs and reinforcements.

Disadvantages: Close Assault Tank is relatively late technology, so there may be some time before you can build these units. The expeditionary force will be slow, so an intelligent enemy can stay out of range and gather troops to counterattack if he is willing to give up cities and emplaced units in the meantime. If attacked by an enemy with more indirect or direct fire units than the expeditionary force has Militia and Patriots, the Close Assault Tanks will be targeted too. With poor defence and the main firepower as close fire, this might mean that the Close Assault Tanks are destroyed before they have the chance to use their extremely good close fire. Also this force must be transported over sea (though you can let it suffice to transport the Close Assault Tanks and build the cannon fodder units locally).

Best used: Close Assault Tank Expeditionary Force is best used as a cheap way to conquer a planet controlled by rebels, especially a planet with all cities on one continent. You just take or build a city and a farm and bring in the Close Assault Tanks. If you want Patriots you have to bring in chemicals too. The Patriots or Militia are built locally using only local resources. This way the planet can be conquered using few resources, few expensive units and only a little of your precious space transportation ability (since only the Close Assault Tanks need to be brought in).

Variants: You can replace or complement the Close Assault Tanks with almost any high firepower/low defence unit, such as any artillery or Chemical Martyr Brigade. Close Assault Tank and Chemical Martyr Brigade are the best units for this role however. You might also want to use the Genetic Warrior in Nova 2.3 as cannon fodder instead of Patriot Horde or militia. They have the advantage of six movement points so they will not slow down the Close Assault Tanks. Genetic Warrior in Nova 2.3 has a high armour and can be built in one turn. The disadvantage is that they are built in labs and require biochems so you probably cannot build them locally, they must be transported to the battle area.

Main elements: Kestrel Hover Tank.

Supplementary units: Eagle Hover Scout Tank, Peregrine Hover Anti-Air.

Advantages: The only advantage with this stack is the high and amphibious mobility, but that is a big one. Hover units have high movement and can walk on water very fast, only one MP/hex. This means that on a world with much water, you can surprise your opponent by appearing where your opponent expects it the least. Since hover can be hit by AA fire, you can use aircraft as auxiliaries (normally it is not wise to use a few aircraft to supplement a ground stack). You can also use it to attack sea units, but hover units are a lot less cost-efficient than sea units in this matter. Still, merely by having hover units, you force your opponent to escort his transports. Another important thing with this amphibious ability is that you can use it to evade a counterattack. End your turn on land to avoid the enemy's naval units. End your turn on water to avoid his land units.

Disadvantages: Hover units are expensive for their fighting ability. You cannot bring an Officer or Noble/Blademaster along with the expeditionary force. There is no FDS possible with hover units. Since AA can hit hover units too, the enemy gets to use more firepower against you. Hover is a relatively late technology. All hover units require a good bit of monopols. Unless you have plenty of these and some factories, it will be hard to replace losses. Also, land units on Naval Transports can do two things that hover units cannot. First, if it begins its turn on a Naval Transport, a land unit can be transported, dropped and make its own full movement in one turn. Second, several Naval Transports can "relay" a transported unit a long way indeed.

Best used: All-Hover Expeditionary Force is best used on a world with much sea, of course. It is especially useful where land movement is difficult due to lack of roads or the world consisting of many small continents. The ability to appear in an unexpected place and stay out of the way for a counterattack is most useful against a thinking (i.e. human) opponent. Also note that one-hex islands and offshore wells can only be conquered by hover units.

Main element: Any tank except Close Assault Tank (only 6 movement points, will delay the entire stack) and any mobile artillery except Violator Assault Gun.

Supplementary forces: SP Anti-Air, any good spotting unit with at least eight movement points, Officer or Noble/Blademaster. An Engineer to build roads for units can greatly speed up their movement when they are forced off-road.

Advantages: Good movement on road. Since there are many different types of units that can fit into this expeditionary force, you can build what you can locally. Build Pestulator Artillery if you have much biochem, build SP Artillery or Wolfen Medium Tank if you have only metal, build Howler Rocket Artillery if you have plenty of chemicals. To save space transport capacity when conquering a new planet from rebels, you can send only the more expensive tank and artillery units while building the cheaper ones locally. This type of expeditionary force has some FDS ability.

Disadvantages: You are sacrificing quite a few things to get those eight movement points. Using tanks as "cannon fodder units" is a waste of their good firepower. (Use Patriots and Militia if they are locally available, but do not let these units slow down force.) Tanks typically have poor AA capacity, so SP Anti-Air is strongly recommended. Tanks have poor off-road movement capability. Also, this expeditionary force must be transported across sea.

Best use: Use them on planets with one or a few main continents, or where you can transport them safely (less than eight hexes between continents), or where you already have a fleet to defend them when being transported by sea. They are also best on planets with good roads.

Variants: If you are willing to slow your force to six movement points (Intermediate Mech Expeditionary Force) you can use Violator Assault Gun, Close Assault Tank and many infantry units. You can also use Genetic Warrior in Nova 2.3 as cannon fodder. If you are willing to slow your force to four movement points (Slow Mech Expeditionary Force) you can use almost any unit in this expeditionary force. In that case I recommend Militia and Patriots as cannon fodder, so you end up with a variant of the Close Assault Tank.

Main element: Banshee and Morph Divebomber, Strategic Bomber.

Supplementary forces: A good spotting unit (ASW Gunship or, better, Seer Spy Plane), Gryphon and Wyvern Fighters for air protection. Vau Fighters and Symbiot Spitters also make excellent additions if you can capture them. You also need a really fast, preferably amphibious, ground unit that can capture the cities and units that the expeditionary force routs. Eagle Hover Scout (move 16) is ideal for this and can also serve as a scout (spot 7). A low-tech alternative to that might be a SEAL unit. That is comparatively slow (move 8), however. Sometimes you might increase this by transporting it part of the way by Naval Transport.

One or several Naval Carriers might also be a useful supplement to your Air Expeditionary Force.

Advantages: The main advantage of the hover units, high and amphibious mobility, is even more true for air units since they only pay one movement point for each hex, even land hexes. More importantly, an Air Expeditionary Force can be hit only by anti-air fire. This is a significant advantage.

Disadvantages: Air units have a very high maintenance cost. Polymorphonic Carbon, which is needed for the better fighter and divebomber, is likely to be forbidden by the Church. Your great mobility is somewhat limited by having to end every second turn in a city or on a carrier. It takes at least three turns to build an aircraft in a factory and requires many different resources, so it will not be easy to replace losses. Your opponent, on the other hand, might improve his air defence by building Anti-Aircraft Guns that can be built in any city in one turn at little cost. An Air Expeditionary Force is also vulnerable to enemy fighters but it is not likely that your enemy will have enough of these.

Best use: With their high mobility, Air Expeditionary Forces are best used against a thinking opponent (preferably one who has neglected air defence). With their very high upkeep cost, it is strongly recommended that they be used when you have plenty of money and know you will face plenty of war. It is also recommended that you use them quite a lot, once you start using them against a thinking opponent, since your opponent can build anti-air units so fast. This means that you might have to keep attacking new cities even if that means you cannot take time to repair damaged units. For the same reason, it is wise to keep the existence of your Air Expeditionary Force as secret as possible until it is time to strike, lest your opponent counters by improving his anti-air and fighter capacity.

Variants: A Strategic Bomber Only Expeditionary Force gives you even more range, but is more vulnerable to enemy fighters and has trouble hitting high agility units. Morph Fighter and Morph divebomber have 15 movement points, so when you get access to these (requires Polymorphonic Carbon) you might want to avoid using the old 12 movement point aircraft in your stack to avoid slowing it down.

Main element: Space Carrier, Battle Carrier, Seraphim Space Fighter, Archangel Cyber Fighter, Prophet Torpedo Bomber and Martyr Torpedo Bomber.

Supplementary forces: Raider Stealth Ship as a scout, or a Freighter or any other jump-capable ship you feel you can afford to sacrifice to be used for scouting.

Advantages: By being transported, the space planes can attack the same turn as they have jumped (or rather been jumped). It is better if the opponent jumps into your system. In that case you can attack with carriers and space planes. Place the space planes in the carriers prior to attack for the "unspotted units" advantage. (Since your opponent can only see how many cargo you have and not what type, it might occasionally be a useful bluff to fill a carrier with harmless units like resources. Space planes can also use their movement to land after a jump. This allows you to bring in more than 20 units (=full stack) to one system in one move, but you cannot have more than 20 units in space.

Space planes gives you more space fighting power for their cost than other space ships. With the fighters as low ranking high-defence units and the torpedo bombers as the killing units, you have a good FDS situation.

Disadvantages: While space planes are cost-effective space superiority fighters they do not have that much fighting power per unit. Also once you have space superiority, this expeditionary force includes no unit with ranged space fire, so you cannot bombard your enemy from space, which makes your space superiority less useful. If you build Cruisers and Dreadnoughts to bombard your opponents, why build space planes in the first place?

Another problem is that the very useful Archangel Space Fighter requires Cyberpilot, which in turn requires many forbidden technologies.

Best use: Move your scout one jump from the main force. If you see your opponent there, judge if you feel you can defeat him with your space planes only. If so, pack them in the carriers, jump them to your opponent's location, and let them attack. For optimum FDS bring a number of fighters equal to your opponent’s number of fighting ships, possibly one or two more if he has powerful ships. The rest of the space planes should be torpedo bombers, preferably Martyr Torpedo Bombers. You can attack him three times and then let your ships return to the carriers, so they will be unspotted if your opponent attacks back.

If your opponent looks impressive, you simply do not move to his system. Maybe you feel you can attack him if he is coming to your system. If the scout unit you were using was not a stealth ship, you will, in all likelihood, lose it, but avoiding a fight at a great disadvantage is probably more valuable than a cheap ship.

Variants: You might use Bulk Haulers instead of carriers. They are cheaper, have no fighting ability, but are useful for moving other things when you do not need them to transport space planes. Carriers have a movement of only 1, and will be a lot less useful for this purpose.

Main element: Space and Foot Marauders in the first stages. Add Patriot Hordes later.

Supplementary Forces: One or preferably several good recon units, you might have to choose recon units that do not eat food. An officer or a noble. Space ships to protect the ships that transported the marauders and to support the invasion by bombardment. Bulk Hauler to bring in reinforcements. Just about any transportable land or air unit you can bring in.

Advantages: The marauder units are very special. The Foot Marauder work like any land infantry, roughly equivalent in fighting ability to an Assault Legion, but slower and more expensive. The Space Marauder works roughly like a space plane, but has high armour low agility (most space planes have high agility and low armour) and only two movement points (space planes have three). It is more costly and less efficient than a Space Torpedo Bomber. Normally neither the Space Marauder nor the Foot Marauder would be worth building. Their usefulness, however lies in the fact that the Space Marauder has the Foot Marauder as the prerequisite. You can transform the Foot Marauder to a Space Marauder in a starport in one turn at the cost of 20 chems. (The marauder is adding an ablative shield for atmospheric launch/re-entry.) Also, you can disband the Space Marauder anywhere on land and get a Foot Marauder plus 10 chems immediately. (The marauder is removing his ablative shield.) You also get the Foot Marauders full movement allowance that turn, 4 movement points, even if you have moved it as a Space Marauder in the same turn. Herein lies the usefulness of the Space Marauder.

Normally it is quite hard to invade a well-defended enemy-held planet without first defeating all space forces in the system. If you do not do so, the opponent can attack your troop-carrying ships. Of course you can guard it with your space forces, but that is not easy due to the stacking limit. You have only 20 space in which to fit your invasion invasion troops, the space ships that carry them and their escort. The opponent has 20 space in which to fit his space forces only. Also note that the defender can choose to land with his space forces so that they cannot easily be attacked (the invader does not know where they are). Thus he can choose when to fight or not. Typically he will wait to attack the invasion space forces until the invader is bringing in transports and landers to land land forces with. After such a counter-attack he can land his space forces in a city and allow them to regenerate damage quickly. The invader can counter this "waiting" strategy by blockading and bombarding. Neither is very effective against a well-developed planet. Such a planet is normally rather self-sufficient and if you bombard it, you risk PTS fire. Also the defender can put his most valuable units, i.e. the space force, under a shield. On top of all this, even if you do manage to bring in land troops and the opponent fails to take them out, a carrier, transport or lander carrying troops is very vulnerable to PTS fire. And if the troop carrying-ship is taken out, the troops carried all die. The Invasion Lander is less vulnerable to PTS, but it is not totally immune and rather expensive.

The marauder units changes all this. You can bring in the marauders in carriers, landers or ordinary transports. Like space planes they can attack the same turn they are brought to a system. They attack only once, use the movement point left to land on the enemy planet. During landing, they are only moderately vulnerable to PTS fire. They have high armour and must be attack one by one. You cannot kill all by destroying their transporter, since they are not transported. Like terran ants after swarming they shed their wings (disband the unit get a Foot Marauder and 10 chems) once they have landed. Now they have four movement points and can attack and capture a city. Let me once again emphasise that they can do all this in one turn, before the opponent can move; being brought in from another system, attacking once in space, landing on enemy planet and moving and attacking with four movement points. Attacking a farm or an arborium might be a good idea. The marauders themselves do not need food (they can carry a lot in their big heavy armour), but they are probably only meant to be a first wave of invading forces. Of course, you might not know what cities are farm or arboria, but the surrounding terrain normally allows you to make a good guess.

So, the advantage of the marauder invasion force is that they can do something that no other unit can: invade without risking being counter-attacked in space. This is a most valuable ability when attacking a well-defended planet. Also note that the Foot Marauders do not require food which means that you are not forced to capture a farm or arborium the first thing you do. I strongly recommend you do, though. Also note that the Foot Marauder has a good AA fire, which means that it is not too vulnerable to a counter-attack from the air. The Foot Marauder combines very well with Patriot Hordes as described below.

Disadvantages: While the marauder units can do things that no other unit can, they are neither a cost-efficient as land units, nor cost-efficient space planes. Their camouflage ability is non-existent and have very low spotting abilities. Their opponents are likely to have the "unspotted units"-advantage, while they themselves are highly visible. When attacking on their own Space Marauders risk being shot up before being able to use it’s close space fire since they have low agility and moderate armour. Space fighters could be used in the same stack to divert fire from the more vulnerable Space Marauders. However, in that case the fact that the space fighter has three movement points while the Space Marauder only has two is a disadvantage. Another problem with the marauder units is that when you turn your Foot Marauder into a Space Marauder you heal the unit, but you also lose experience and the unit becomes green again. If disbanding a Space Marauder to a Foot Marauder you do not heal or lose experience but you get full (4) movement points.

Best used: These units are best used as the first wave of an invasion against a well-developed, well-defended enemy planet as described above. Also, given that you are invading unfamiliar territory, you need to complement the slow-moving, low-spot marauders with a few good-spotting units as soon as possible. Rangers, Special Forces, Cybercorps, Tracker Legion are good, especially if you do not plan to capture a farm or arborium the first thing you do. Vau Fighter, Vau Jet-bike, Symbiot Spitter and Symbiot Reaver are even better but hard to get your hands on. If you do plan to attack a farm or an arboria immediately, Eagle Hover Scout Tank, Seer Spy Plane, ASW gunship (any aircraft is useful for reconnaissance), Xyll Warbeast or Greyhound Scout Tank are good too. Given that you want to recon large areas quickly, high movement rate is essential, unfortunately, unless you get your hands on a good Symbiot or Vau unit, really fast-moving units do eat food and should thus only be brought in after you have conquered a farm or an arborium. Of course, there is also the option of bringing in food from another planet.

As soon as a farm or an arborium is conquered you will probably want to build Patriot Hordes. Since you already have chemical from turning the Space Marauders into Foot Marauders you only need food to build Patriot Hordes. When capturing a farm or an arborium, you will probably have surplus food. Patriot Hordes require only 10 chem and 10 food and take only one turn to build and can be built anywhere, so you get them quickly, where you need them and without having to transport them. The Patriot Horde and the Foot Marauder complement each other very well. They both have four movement points (so no one is slowing the other down) and both have lousy camo (so none is spoiling the others good camo). The Patriot Hordes have low rank and will protect the more powerful and more expensive Foot Marauders from damage. While the Patriot Horde has no air defence, the Foot Marauder has air defence enough for both of them.

As soon as the invasion is in progress you will probably want to bring in reinforcements lest the Space Marauders and locally-built Patriot Hordes have to do all the ground fighting. Bringing in a noble or an officer to the Foot Marauder and Patriot Horde stack is probably also a good idea.

Given the low maintenance cost of the Foot Marauder as compared to a space unit, it might be a way to save maintenance cost to have some Foot Marauders in space ports so that you can turn them into Space Marauders at a pace of one per turn and at a cost of 20 chem when you need them. That way they might be used as a low-readiness, low-maintenance-cost space garrison on a planet with good chemical production.