Prisoners

Holding prisoners is a powerful way of hurting an enemy's economic power. If you can grab more than 3% of an enemy’s population and hold them on a base you will inflict a minus 10 point happiness decrease on all the enemy's bases 30% of the time. If you can grab more than 20% of an enemy’s population and hold them on a base you will inflict a minus 50 point happiness decrease on all the enemy's bases 30% of the time and this will grind your enemy into to an economic meltdown. The best way of capturing enemy prisoners is the use a force made up of mostly high guard and weak ground assault units. Use enough troops to soften the enemy but have enough high guard as a backup force to force the enemy into giving up. Or you could just grab any enemy life pod that you happen to see flying by. Sometimes you will run across and enemy base that has just colonists, not troops or assault craft this is an easy target for just a few troops to land on a capture the whole base. Cyborg is the only race that is immune to this happiness drop. Be careful when holding enemy prisoners, the enemy will find out where you are keeping them and will try to mount a raid to get them back any way possible.

 Happiness loss done to the enemy when holding a percentage of them prisoners

More than 0.1%	-1 Happiness 30% of enemy bases
1% to 2.99%	-2 Happiness 30% of  enemy bases
3.00% to 19.99%	-10 Happiness 30% of  enemy bases
20% to 34.99%	-50 Happiness 30% of  enemy bases
35% or more Prisoners	-60 Happiness 30% of  enemy bases

The math behind the art of taking prisoners

After ground combat is all over the strength of the two remaining side is measured and the side that can best the other side by at least a factor of 300% captures the other side. This is how the strength points are calculated:

Colonist	0.0001 Combat Rating
Crew	0.01 Combat Rating
Troop	1 Combat Rating
High Guard	1 Combat Rating
Ground Assault Unit	100 Each

Given the above numbers a single trooper with a combat rating of 10 can capture 333332 enemy colonists with a combat rating of 1, if he survives the battle.

Even cheap and otherwise useless ground assault units can be very useful in forcing surrender.

Enforces need only have more strength than the enemy to force a surrender, this is their special combat bonus.

You can only hold prisoners belonging to races that you are at war with, the moment you become friendly with a race you are holding prisoners of all the prisoners will be released at once.

If your prison base falls victim to a blockade from ANY enemy race the prisoners will all escape and from an enemy base.

Lizards sell all the prisoners that that capture at the asking price of .66mc for colonists, 2.4mc each for crew, 3.6mc each for troops and 7.5mc each for high guard. Lizards are so good at hand to hand combat they tend to smash the enemy so badly that there are few survivors if they use too large of an attacking force. The Metron Cannon is a useful tool for the Lizards to use in capturing enemy prisoners. It will hopefully not kill too many enemy colonists before forcing them to give up. Cyborg, Robot and Empire prisoners sell for far less then all other races prisoners.

Robots use prisoners as food for their insectoid nests to grow more insectoid natives.

The Enforcers have a ground assault unit that can arrest enemy colonists inside bases on the same planet and make them prisoners.

Dec 20, 2005
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