                            Empire : Expert Advice

                       Defense Against Nuclear Attacks
                      Through the Denial of Information
                                by Tom Tedrick

A very good defense against nukes is to make it as difficult as  possible  for
other players to find out where your country is, and thus to make maps of it.

Here are some simple steps that you can follow:

 1)  Shoot down all planes that fly over your  airspace.   (Berkeley-type  SAM
     missiles don't work too well for this purpose since the enemy can send in
     a few planes as SAM bait, and once all your SAM's have been fired off you
     have to rely on interceptors.  I've had as many as a hundred SAM's wasted
     on a few such SAM-baiting planes.  So you might as well build  relatively
     few  SAM's  and  concentrate  on  building  large numbers of interceptors
     instead).

                            Empire : Expert Advice

     It helps to have numerous airfields, say one airfield for every  25  sec-
     tors  or  so.   Every  airfield should be within interception distance of
     several other airfields, so that it is more difficult  for  an  enemy  to
     destroy  or  capture it.  If an airfield is detected and nuked, you still
     have backup airfields.  Every important sector should be within intercep-
     tion distance of several airfields.

 2)  Seal off all entrances to your inland seas by building bridges and laying
     mines (so no enemy ships can penetrate the area for mapping purposes).

     You can quickly clear an inland sea of  enemy  ships  once  you  have  it
     sealed off by systematically nuking the sea sectors.  This is easier than
     hunting all over the place for subs.

 3)  Sink all surface vessels and submarines near your coastline.  Have  large
     fleets of destroyers posted around exposed coastal areas covering all sea
     sectors where enemy subs might try to  sneak  in  for  mapping  purposes.
     Usually  two fleets of 30 destroyers each are enough.  Navigate the whole
     fleet one sector, stop and look for subs, navigate one more sector,  stop
     and  look  for  subs, and so on, until the fleet has made a circle and is

                            Empire : Expert Advice

     back in its starting position.  Sink any subs you find, of course.

     There is a maximum number of around 30 ships that can be in  a  fleet  if
     you want to maneuver the whole fleet by fleet name (see info fleetadd).

 4)  Establish alliances under the condition that secrecy is  maintained  with
     respect  to  map information.  Thus other allied countries can serve as a
     buffer zone against enemy countries.  Many players are willing to be good
     allies.

 5)  Destroy or capture nearby radar stations.

 6)  Destroy or capture enemy air bases within range of your  country.   Until
     enemy  technology  gets  high  enough to launch against any target world-
     wide, they will often try to get someone to let them have an airbase hid-
     den near your country and launch nuclear strikes from there.  I've always
     been able to find these if I worked at it.

                            Empire : Expert Advice

 7)  Use psychological warfare.  Nukers get tired of nuking you if it seems to
     have no effect.  For example, have numerous false capitals, so that when,
     after great efforts, they manage to find what they think is your capital,
     and  nuke  it,  only  to  discover  that  it  was  a  fake, they will get
     discouraged.  These fake capitals are also very useful as backups in case
     your real capital is discovered and destroyed.

     When an enemy gets close to doing real harm, a  counterattack  can  often
     divert  attention away from the current attack.  Psychologically, attack-
     ers seem to underestimate the harm they are doing to  you  if  you  don't
     give  out any information about how you are being affected, and they seem
     to overestimate the danger to themselves from your counterattack.

                         Ship Networks and the Art of
                            Transferring Supplies
                                by Tom Tedrick

Build large quantities of ships.  When they're 100% efficient, load them  with
military  and  food  (and civilians) if possible.  Load guns and shells if you
have them, but since they tend to be scarce, only a few ships will have  them.

                            Empire : Expert Advice

Navigate them one by one as far as they will go.  Leave only one ship in  each
sector (this makes it difficult for an enemy to sink very many of them, due to
mobility restrictions and the problem of locating and identifying them one  by
one).  On your maps, mark the ship number in the appropriate sector.  Each sea
sector thus has at most one ship number.

Unless there is something in particular you want to do with a particular ship,
leave it sitting in its sector indefinitely.

As you build more and more ships, move them out one by one.  If you leave ship
X  in  a sector that already contains ship Y, ship Y should have full mobility
by then.  Navigate ship Y as far as it will go, then leave it sitting until  a
new ship comes along.

Every ship in the network is now likely to be within range of some other ships
in  the network.  If a ship requires any supplies, you can load them on a ship
in a harbor, navigate it out, transfer the cargo via tend, navigate the tended
ship,  transfer its cargo, and so on, until you reach the any ship in the net-
work.  If you need military for assaulting or boarding, guns  and  shells  for
firing, torpedoing or laying mines, or if you simply want to move stuff into a

                            Empire : Expert Advice

distant harbor, you can do it using several tend and navigate operations.

This has been particularly useful for sinking subs.  I don't have enough  guns
and  shells to keep all of my 100 or more destroyers fully armed, but when one
of the unarmed destroyers spots a sub, I can  arrange  to  transfer  guns  and
shells to it from a loaded ship (or from a harbor).

It's a very simple system from the player's standpoint, because all the player
has to do is build the ship, navigate it, mark its number on the map, and for-
get about it until a use for it arises.  As more ships are built, the  network
automatically  expands without requiring any planning.  You don't have to keep
anything in memory, except the ship number on your map.  If any enemy  surface
ship  gets  trapped in the network, it's quite likely you can capture it, even
if all you have is cargo ships (battleships, landing craft, and carriers could
take  some  work  though).  If an enemy sub is spotted by your destroyers, you
can almost always sink it.  If a convenient target for an assault appears, you
can get the necessary military there.

                            Empire : Expert Advice

                       Some Tricks to Use When Fighting
                              by Various People
                               (Mostly by Tom)

The trick for boarding destroyers: you need a bunch of cargo  ships,  both  to
make  several boarding attempts and to tend military.  When you try to board a
ship, both the attacker and defender lose the same amount of mobility.   First
you  have  to get the destroyer's mobility to be negative.  Then you just keep
trying to board it from one ship after another until you win.  That's where my
ship network method comes in handy.  I usually have swarms of ships I can sur-
round enemy ships with.

If I have planes, my normal method is to take a sector I can see,  put  enough
military to hold it, designate it e if it has lots of food, or maybe something
else if there is a reason.  Then get information about  the  adjacent  sectors
and  take  the  most  promising  one.  Without planes it's more of a struggle.
Anyway, I kind of zig-zag into the country taking the  most  interesting  sec-
tors,  ignoring  the  others.   This really seems to freak people out, when an
enemy takes a path right through the heartland.

                            Empire : Expert Advice

I would use planes (so having numerous airports each with  a  fair  supply  of
fighters, spread around your country, would be the best countermeasure), ships
(having forts loaded with guns and shells covering all coastlines helps a lot;
also  having destroyers and subs spread around your coastal waters in order to
spot and counterattack enemy ships, also have bombers to bomb enemy ships, and
radar stations to spot them is useful).

I would invade by land, firing from forts, (mainly you need  to  counterattack
actively  when  the enemy takes any sectors in your area, also forts with guns
and shells help a lot).  I would capture islands and build bridges to get into
your country (so watch all offshore islands with bridge span range).

Have a lot of shells in warehouses ready to be moved to  the  front  (you  can
move four for no mobility cost).

Bombing enemy ships spotted by radar seems to work pretty well  for  the  most
part.  If he has an aircraft carrier you can torpedo it.

                            Empire : Expert Advice

You never know exactly what may happen, sometimes you get lucky when you think
it's  hopeless.   Even if a plan has only a small chance of working, sometimes
it's worth a try, especially if the enemy has to actively do something to stop
it.

See also : introduction, novice

