Biremes & Efficiently Defending your Harbor

Biremes are you best friend. Whether it be defending your own city from an LS attack, or by holding a siege on an enemy cites, or drowning the enemies GOU's, biremes are the most useful. But please note: biremes are NOT meant for attacking. You will kill virtually nothing and give the enemy nothing but free bp's. Definitely something you want if you are on the receiving end of someone attacking with biremes. :P The only downside to biremes is that compared to an equal population of LS, they are weaker and will die (if on equal terms of luck and boosts)

To give you a good idea of the imbalance between an LS nuke and a BR nuke on equal bonuses, I ran a few figures through the simulator and came up with this. 250 LS hitting 313 BR will kill each other off. That is 2500 population from the attacker and 2504 population from the defender. Generally, this is the average size for LS and BR nukes that you will see ingame. Some smaller, and some noticeably larger.

Because of this imbalance, I highly discourage you not to stick a BR nuke of 300 in-front of a LS nuke (which could be from 250 - 320 LS). It is more probably that you will lose your BR at a bad bp ratio compared to the number of LS lost. Now, not only do you have to spend lots of time moving resources so that you can rebuild it quickly, but the enemy knows that you are now short a BR nuke. Besides getting a poor bp return.

Another important use of biremes is defending your land troops from sea-born  attacks. Due to the majority of a GOU nuke being consumed in the land troops and the transports for them, the LS escort size suffers. Generally, they range from 20-50 LS thus making it easy to sink them with a BR nuke.

For example, if there are multiple incoming to the same city, try dodging the first 2 attacks and then drop a BR nuke in behind. It is more likely that these following attacks are GOU (ground offensive units) and will only have a small escort. This will give you tons of practically free bp's as their troops won't even get to shore, and there is nothing more annoying than seeing your huge GOU nukes drown without doing a thing. (it also helps if you keep track of what each of your enemies cities have built in then so that you know which are LS nukes which you should dodge and which are GOU nukes which you shouldn't dodge thus using your resources, time and resources to the fullest extent)

Personal Tip - When facing many incoming attacks with a suspected CS in the mix and you have a handful of BR to play with, try this. Before every attack, land 1 BR as support. Some attackers miss the landing time they are aiming for, and for the sake of having another GOU nuke hitting the city, they send the GOU nuke without the LS escort (assuming the GOU are carried on FT (fast transports) which are faster than LS) If they do happen to do this, your 1 BR will sink ALL un-escorted transports and drown all the troops without letting them hit the beach. Sure, those that have LS escorts will kill your 1 BR, but hey, that isn't that great of a loss for the chance that you could sink everything, right?