Freighter Side: Both Type: Vehicle Movement Type: Wheeled Ground Weapon: None Anti-Air Weapon: None Range: N/A Damage: N/A Hit Points: 750 Sight Range: 9 Movement Speed: Average Cost: 1000 Requirements: Assembly Plant Built At: Assembly Plant

Hover Freighter Side: Both Type: Vehicle Movement Type: Hover Ground Weapon: Laser Rifle Anti-Air Weapon: None Range: 4 Damage: 11 Hit Points: 500 Sight Range: 9 Movement Speed: Very Fast Cost: 1500 Requirements: Advanced Assembly Plant Built At: Assembly Plant

An often ignored but vital aspect of any military is the lowly supply transport vehicle. Although not terribly useful for offense, no extended campaign would be successful without them.

Harvesting

Freighters can haul two resources: fresh water and Taelon. A particular Freighter can only be carrying one or the other at a time, so if you are going to switch a Freighter from one to the other, try to drop off its cargo first if possible. Otherwise, whatever remains in its hold when it begins harvesting from the other type of resource is lost.

To direct a Freighter to harvest a resource, select the Freighter and click on the resource. (This works even while it is under the fog of war although you will not see the special cursor in this case.) The Freighter will begin moving back and forth between that resource and one of your structures that it can return the resource to. Note that you cannot gather Taelon if you do not have at least one Power Generator, and you cannot gather water if you do not have at least one Water Launch Pad.

When you build a Water Launch Pad or a Taelon Power Generator, the building “comes” with a “free” Freighter. When such a building is completed, the Freighter will automatically begin harvesting the resource that structure represents if there is an available node within the line of sight of one of your units. There is no distance check done on this, so you may need to ensure that your Freighters don’t wander into dangerous territory seeking water or Taelon. You can also construct additional Freighters at an Assembly Plant.

When a pure water spring is brimming with water, you may want two Freighters harvesting from it, or perhaps even more than two depending on the distance from the water to the Water Launch Pad. However, as the amount of available water runs low, your Freighters will begin to pile up at the water and will not be accomplishing much; at this point, it may be useful to move some of the Freighters elsewhere. Even so, placing two Freighters on water early can jump-start your economy.

Sometimes it’s helpful to have multiple Freighters harvesting fresh water.

Freighters are amazingly durable and can take a large amount of damage before being destroyed. Even so, they are relatively vulnerable and valuable so you may wish to build turrets or station units around the paths where they travel. Also, keep in mind that a Freighter that is busily harvesting a resource will never go automatically for repairs regardless of its Damage Tolerance setting. (An idle one, however, will.) You may need to manually check your Freighters and repair them as necessary.

Hover Freighters operate like a regular Freighter but come with additional options. They are hovering vehicles, so they can travel over most terrain much faster than the regular Freighter. (They can even cross water.) Also, they are armed with the same weapon that Raiders and Guardians use. They trade some of their defense for the ability to retaliate against attackers. This does not really turn them into combat units (for the same amount of credits, one of the various tanks would generally serve better for that), but it can help them to survive a bit better, and they can even dispatch lone infantry that wander across their mining routes or shoot that enemy Freighter off the resource node they want to harvest from.

Remember to set up the behaviors of your Hover Freighters before you send them to mine. By default, they will not deviate from their prescribed routes. If you set a Hover Freighter’s Independence to HIGH or MED, then it will shoot at enemies as it goes along (with HIGH causing it to stop as necessary, just as with other units).

Countering

One of the tried and true methods of defeating an opponent is to deny him his resources. This generally means destroying his Freighters. Since they leave themselves most vulnerable when sitting on the water or Taelon node during their harvesting operation, it is usually best to go after these nodes. (As an added bonus, if you can successfully defend such a node, you can send your own Freighters to harvest from it as well.)

For this reason such nodes are usually heavily guarded. So another possibility is to find a resource that is some distance from the enemy’s base and harass his Freighters as they move to and from that resource. Hitting moving targets is a bit less effective than striking stationary ones, but you could, for example, use the Attack command to pound the ground where the Freighters pass to continually peck away at them. Just be careful that your units do not chase the Freighter into a heavily-defended base; lowering Pursuit Range can be helpful for this.

Note that the automatic unit AI targets Freighters with higher priority than almost any other unit in the game. This means Freighters, with their high defense, can be used as excellent bait. If you have already mined out your resources and have spare Freighters sitting around, try grouping them together with some offensive units and sending them into combat. The enemies will become so occupied chasing the heavily-armored Freighters around that they won’t even notice they are being mauled by the rest of your forces.