So, since my last competition was pretty much a discussion, I'll now close that and move over to this general colony discussion (the others are all specific)
TALK ABOUT ANYTHING RELATED TO COLONY (and beef burgers)
Monarchy is, i feel, only good if you have a partner that can back you up and hold off the other team.
I'm uploading a monarchy guide. It's kind of short though.
Now, there are many ways to play Monarchy: Normal or Special Ops. Normal is obvious (You play air/ground) with the boost of influence units. Special Ops is what DMon is thinking: Building the Ops, and making the expensive units plus missiles.
I keep running into Monarchy Pride rushes >.> SO not fair, since Prides own my build.
I seriously think the only way to win currently is to use the Monarchy Pride rush yourself. Normal units just can't match the power that is the Pride so early on. Only Chronite Tanks and Phantoms can come close to dealing enough damage, and they get owned until you reach a critical mass (unless you go for an all-in double Forge/Outpost rush). By then, they'll have 2 Prides, 3 Medics, 3 S-Marines...
MAYBE if you manage to get a Sphynx, you'll survive. However, they generally beat you before then.
I think part of the reason why Monarchy is so good is the toughness of the units. Granted, they're more expensive than other, more fragile troops, which tends to balance things out, but that changes when you put a squad of meditecs behind them.
Take the Pride, f'r instance; I can stick one of them out in front of my army with ten or so meditecs behind him, and suddenly the main bulk of my force is impervious to missiles. One strikes, knocks off maybe a half of his health, and even if you hammer the launch button the medics'll have him back up to full health before the next one hits. An equivalent number of weaker units would simply be so much bolognese, dead too quickly for the medics to have any effects.
Granted, this is in part due to the Pride's missile resistance (and missiles are quite an extreme example of enemy fire), but the principle is the same for other units. Whilst there are other government types that have heavily armoured troops -- hover tanks and medics give me a real headache -- the fact that you get access to such units so early in the game with a Monarchy does, to my mind, give you an advantage.
