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[Zwischy]

It also sounds to me like you're having trouble getting good construction drops. Let me dialogue on that a bit (I haven't shut up yet, why stop now? :P).

The key to a construction drop, as mentioned before, is making sure you have enough space and time to create a landing pad and actually get your warriors to push away from it towards the enemy so you aren't reduced to fighting just to save your landing pad.

Again, feints are key to moving enemy units away from your desired drop quadrant. Drop in your feint, command individually each of your cohorts to move to the corner of the city (A1, A20, T1, or T20) furthest away from your drop quadrant. When the enemy has left a decent amount of space in your desired area, send the construction drop. Timing is of course crucial here, and having your troopships in Low orbit is vital to making this work (from High orbit it takes 40 game minutes to land troops, whereas a Low orbit requires about 20).

Once your construction drop has landed, set one unit to start building immediately! your next task should be to build a defensive perimeter at least two squares away from your landing pad construction. Why two squares? Two reasons: 1) to give yourself more space between your dropship and the enemy so when your Warriors land they can move away from the landing pad to attack, and 2) if a shock troop cohort gets killed off, the enemy unit won't be able to move immediately adjacent to your dropship landing pad, which makes it difficult to comfortably land all your warrior cohorts.

Where you build the landing pad is important, as well. If it's possible, a starport is the best place to build because it cuts the time to build in half, if not more. Usually the pad will be built well before a drop ship can land, even if auto-reinforce immediately sends it. However, don't expect this to happen too often because the enemy usually has plenty of defense near starports, but occasionally a far-flung port can be had.

More often, you want to set your landing pad to build in the corner of the map, but no closer than 2 squares from any edge (so if you're in the NW quadrant of the city, don't build any closer to the edge than square C3). The reason for this is 1) to give your warriors somewhere to go once they've unloaded from a drop ships and 2) to make it possible for only 4-5 shock troop cohorts to completely cutoff all direct apporach to your landing pad. Remember that a unit controls all the squares adjacent to it. Therefore, putting your shock troop cordon directly in the path of the oncoming enemy forces them to either punch through your shock troops or move verrrry slowly around them. Understand, however, that if you do not tell your shock troops to actually attack the enemy unit trying to break through (using individual mouse commands), that enemy unit WILL continue to move closer to your drop ship pad. consider this poorly-drawn text graph.

...1..2..3..4..5..6..7
A....................E...
B................S..E...
C........P...............
D................S..E...
E.....S.....S......E...
F..E.....E......E.......

S = Shock Troop
P = Landing Pad construction
E = Enemy unit

Notice how the 'S' troops cut off the entire corner of the map to enemy units and do not crowd the landing pad unit. Granted, those units probably won't last too long, but then ideally the landing pad should be almost done, and the warrior cohorts will deal with the enemies whom destroy your shock troop cordon...

Last point: you've got your landing pad, your warriors have offloaded, and your shock troops are mostly dead or withdrawing/withdrawn. Now you need to tell your warriors to move so they don't get in the way of warriors coming in behind them. Hopefully your cordon lasted long enough that you can move a few units around the 'wings' of the enemy's attack. In the above example, warrior cohorts should spread out from A5-C5 and E1-E5, and not bunch up in the middle of the attack.

The wings become very important when you're attacking from the corner, because the enemy is going to grind on your units in the center of the fighting. The only way you're going to gain local superiority anywhere is by squeezing the center with a 'pincer' like movement. Here it becomes VITAL you direct your warrior cohorts to attack common enemies. Myself, I like to pair two warrior cohorts against a single enemy unit, starting from the edges and working my way toward the center. The militia units tend to attack one-on-one, so this is how you begin to gain an edge - and you can't be surrounded because you're attacking from the corner, so you're only fighting on two fronts rather than four.

Again, remember not to keep giving the same command to the same warrior cohort or it will never actually attack its assigned target, and that target will even be able to move closer to your dropship pad!