T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[Modo]

Cool, thank you for clarifying. I'm still at the "pod is a settler, former is a worker" stage )

[haphazard1]

Thansk for another informative update. Understanding the bit about bases processing and the effects of techs starting immediately on the same turn is useful to know.

You mentioned the sensor array; you do seem to have a fair bit of xenofungus around. Have you had any issues with worms? What do your garrisons look like?

[T-hawk]

The garrison is a 1-1-1 scout unit at each base, both for its police value and counterattacking worms.  I will add more when the bases need it for police purposes, which will start to happen as more bases cause bureaucracy drones.

If you're not running Free Market, that's basically enough.  You might have to move formers out of the way of a worm, but all you have to do is wait until it moves next to your base and counterattack it with the 3:2 psi advantage.  Even if you lose the fight, you can probably cover that base for a turn by moving a unit over from another base (your bases are all within 3 squares and connected by road, right?), or even in a pinch move in a former to defend for a turn while the base swaps its build order to build a replacement patrol.

Free Market is when worm defense becomes complicated, both thanks to the -30% psi combat penalty and because you won't be building and keeping police units around.  That's when you want a handful of rovers to play "zone defense" and with the Empath special to make up for the penalty.

I don't have a lot of fungus, by and large; actually I think I have somewhat less than average, it's only that one area by Fellowship City that has a lot.

[Modo]

On 2127 you talk about losing some output due to inefficiency (the Morgan pact consequence) and I see on the Social screen a -8% labs and -16% eco. Is there a way to determine how these procents will impact you or it's easier to fiddle with the "sliders" and see the result?
Also, is the upheavel cost something that can be a problem or a necessity at times or it's easy to manage / ignore?

[T-hawk]

Just fiddle with the sliders. The game does weird things about rounding small amounts of energy into the 10% allocations.

The -8% / -16% is a penalty that applies if your economy and labs (not psych) sliders differ by 20% or more. The higher slider incurs the smaller penalty, the lower slider incurs the larger one. The penalty applies cumulatively for each difference of 20% (a difference of 40% is twice as worse.) The magnitude of the penalty depends on your faction's Efficiency rating, and goes to 0 at +4 Efficiency or better. I really like this mechanic, by the way; it makes the money slider relevant and carries a significant tradeoff for going max science instead of Civs 3 and 4 where that's basically what you always do.

The upheaval cost is always 40 credits to switch one policy, or 135 to switch two on the same turn (so don't do that, do it on two separate turns instead.) It's easy to manage, just anticipate it for a few turns and save cash instead of spending. It's most relevant very super early, you probably can't get 40 credits from anywhere before turn 10 or so.

[Modo]

I think I've read on the wiki somewhere that the upheaval cost scales with difficulty so I assume your 40 comes from always playing on the highest one and not lower
By the way, have you considered doing a fastest run on the lower difficulties like you did the settler runs in Civ5? Getting the baseline average and then going from that to both extremes, as it were.

[TheHumanHydra]

Are the social engineering screen slider penalties reflected on the base screens?

The thing about building colony pods at size two with two-thirds of the bars full has been really helpful to me (in the same way as building granaries with the bar half-full in Civ IV). Love stuff like this; I just never think about it.

[Modo]

As far as I can see with my puny novice eyes they are not. But then again, why would they since in SMAC you don't control bases individually in terms of sliders?

[T-hawk]

Yes, but not discretely. When you see "4 labs, -1 bonus, 3 total", the minus is the slider penalty. But the "bonus" value also includes what comes from multiplier buildings and specialists, so eventually those end up overwhelming and hiding any slider penalty.

Yeah, it's been about 18 years since I played anything other than Transcend difficulty. My motivation was always that whatever works on that also generalizes to anything lower, but not vice versa. Winning on the highest difficulty doesn't require any specially skewed play like Deity in the later Civ games, and it's the only way to maybe get a little bit of competition from the AI once you know what you're doing. What got me doing the low difficulty in Civ 5 was comparing approaches between different civilizations and social policy paths and city builds; but that's not interesting in SMAC since the answers are indisputably University, Free Market, and wide.

[T-hawk]

Short session last night.



Something I meant to note in the previous update: With Planned economics and Wealth values, I now have my industry costs at -30%, the best possible in the game before future society.  Only the Hive can do this, because of the faction bonus of course; but also because only the Hive and Gaia tend to run Planned while most factions are more productive in Free Market.  As always, reducing costs to 7/10 means an effective 10/7 multiplier to production, which is more than 30%, really 43%!  Of course this is very noticeable in pushing lots of things through the build queues.

2140: Fellowship City builds colony pod, I decide to start a second probe team, may need that.  Rush supply crawler at The Hive; supply crawlers are a particularly good target for rushing, since the minerals they harvest constitutes direct and fast turn advantage.  Buying minerals to finish a crawler a turn sooner is like getting a discount of 2 minerals on the purchase.  Also, my faction is starting to make significant money (15/turn) to use towards this rushing.  Despite the negative economy rating, a well-played Hive does get up some decent money income, because the sliders can't go far from 50/50 so some has to go into energy.

My probe team reaches Lal's base.  I decide it's prudent just to infiltrate to see what he's got.  That turns out to be Biogenetics, Applied Physics, and Doctrine Mobility over me.  I would really like to steal Biogenetics, since nobody is willing to trade it, which is typical since they all want the Human Genome Project.  He's also currently researching Ethical Calculus which I'd like too.  Unfortunately the probe team was lost after infiltration.

2141: Forest growth.

2142: University researchers discover Secrets of the Human Brain (free tech for first researcher), actually that's pretty late, often happens in the 2110s.

From 2142 to 2144, I founded my 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th bases.  This resulted in a lot of extra bureaucracy-drones, seven throughout the empire.  I handled them all by switching build orders to more scout patrols for police, and dispersed the support costs as best I could.  Although the police units were a drag mostly for delaying supply crawler build orders.  Each of these new bases built a police unit and a former (former first if it didn't have a b-drone at size 1).

2143: Two forest growths, nice.  Not sure if it's worth continuing to report these.  I feel like I got lucky in this area with a lot, although it's also possible my point of reference is skewed by fast transcend games compared to this more relaxed schedule with more time for growth.



Chat with the University and get a key tech trade, Ethical Calculus!

Chat with Morgan and he offers 20 credits to buy Lal's comm frequency.  I take it.  Odd that he wanted that now but never asked for it before; he always had plenty of energy to offer (pact status is equivalent to infiltration, which shows his energy total with everything else on the faction profile.)

Deirdre gets mad about my scout that's just trying to leave her territory, but she demands I withdraw it now.  No sense provoking that vendetta so I comply.  At least I can use it for police, plus it also got bounced back to a base that had a support slot to rehome it.  My skimship will have to do the exploring; now it's halfway across the southern hemisphere but still hasn't found the Believers or Sparta yet.

2144: Even though The Hive is going to finish its second supply crawler this turn, I rush it anyway.  Reason is to get it past 10 minerals on its next build sooner, which is yet another supply crawler, so I can rush that too.  There's plenty of auto-grown forest around here to harvest with them.  Actually I rehome one crawler to Leader's Horde to get out the last colony pod from there faster.

2146: My second probe team (the first one died) reaches the Peacekeeper base.  I want to steal Biogenetics... but misremembered how it worked.  I thought there was an option to steal a specific tech at a lower chance of success, but it's not there.  This is true for a sabotage operation, you can have it target a random base facility, or aim for a specific one at lower odds.  I have a 1/3 shot for the steal to be Biogenetics, but I decide not to risk that, since either of the other possibilities (Applied Physics and Doctrine Mobility) are off my beeline and mess up the required sequencing.  So instead, I keep the probe going to go get infiltration on the University.

2147: So I did end up researching Biogenetics myself, though I did still get to advance one step on my beeline thanks to the Ethical Calculus trade.  I said it was going to be Gene Splicing - Ecological Engineering, but actually I'm going to divert one tech aside to Intellectual Integrity instead first, for the special ability that gives units double police effect.  The reason is again the tech sequencing: Int Int - Gene Splicing - Eco Eng will be available in that order, but not Gene Splicing - Eco Eng - Int Int.  Also Gene Splicing doesn't really help at the moment, I have hardly any rainy tiles I'd want to farm to add a 3rd food.  Finally Gene Splicing is often favored by the AI (seems like particularly the University) and might come available in trade but Int Int tends not to be.




Updated overview of my area with the new bases; the world map hasn't changed since last time.

The colony pod on the move to the southeast is my 12th.  So I doubled my base count in these few turns.  And there is no limitation except available land that prevents doing that again every eight or so turns.  Once any base gets to size 2 with some terraforming in place, it can produce colony pods forever at that rate in steady state if that's what you want.  I'm up to 28 labs/turn, which also almost doubled in this session, and again could continue doubling indefinitely limited only by land.

But for the moment, this 12th base will be my last for a while.  That puts me at twice the bureaucracy limit (6 bases on standard map size at 0 efficiency), which means every base has one bureaucracy drone.  More b-drones aren't an existential problem (police units handle them), but would prevent my next plan: to population-boom by way of Golden Ages.  Most bases have ordered up Children's Creches to get the pop-boom going, with a few still finishing up supply crawlers before that.