I tried something for fun that ended up being surprisingly successful. I played medium difficulty, normal resources where I was the Empire and I was facing the computer as Naboo.

In the middle of Tech 1, I sent a worker just outside the line of sight of the enemy base next to an ore deposit.

Right at the beginning of Tech 2, I had the worker build a laser turret right next to the ore deposit. By this time, the Naboo had already constructed most of a wall surrounding their base, and the tower was just inside their wall.

Well that single tower started taking out the workers that came near it. Troops came to kill the tower but since Naboo troops aren't great, the light tower took them all out.

I ignored the lone tower and went on upgrading my base-defending towers with the research center. I went back every so often to check on my lone tower. By now it was upgraded to Medium and was supercharged. It had smoke pouring from it but it still had half its hit points and there were plenty of dead workers and troops surrounding it.

I won the game without a fight. The Computer never invaded my base and by the time I had built up a nice Tech 4 invasion army, the computer surrendered due to "overwhelming forces". What? I never even got to fire a shot.

My guess? The computer kept spending it's resources to build troops that would march against the tower and get toasted. It would also keep building workers that would try to mine the crystal or repair the wall that was getting blasted by the tower (when it was bored with no bad guys to shoot at) and the tower would waste the workers, too.

Next game, I'm going to try setting up 2 - 3 of these sniper towers and see what happens.

Yours truly,
SirKai

Yup. This is the so-called "tower rush."

I've never done it myself. I usually set the map to Large and by the time I find my opponent(s) it's well into TL 2, so I never have time to do it. But one day I might make the map smaller and try it. Sounds like fun.