T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[darrelljs]

Is rec commons a stupid build? I don't recall you mentioning them at all...actually just your view on "good", "ok", and "bad" buildings at some point would be great!

Darrell

[T-hawk]

There really aren't any secret or wild improvement combos to get excited about.  Really the only useful combos are the obvious ones of farm + condensor or solar or mirror.  Forest + condensor or mirror when it happens by autogrowth is cute, but rare since you should have built the farm anyway, and nothing really special for yield.  The configuration everyone loves to see is the stripes of solar collectors and echelon mirrors for energy production; but I think that's overrated for the effort it takes; if you have the land for that you may as well just build more bases and boreholes on it.

I haven't played any of the Colonizations, no.

Rec commons are important if you're in Free Market.  When you're the Hive with access to double-police units that cost 10 minerals, 40 minerals for the rec commons is silly.  No, the support for the police unit doesn't outweigh the facility's cost, because the difference goes into a supply crawler to pay that.  I can go over buildings in more detail later.  The problem with almost every building is that they're just worse than formers and crawlers for quite a long time. I've built none so far except the Creches.

[T-hawk]

2163: My exploring skimship bumped into an Isle of the Deep in a fungus square, which attacked me; my boat won but at low health and needs to wait for repairs.  Also I built a second boat, at my base on the northeastern coast, because there's still a swath of fog to explore that direction to find the missing Believers.



This border was visible before but I'll point it out now.  There's a Peacekeeper base over there.  This is the second time it's sent a probe team towards me, which I've easily killed each time.  The forest next to Manufacturing Warren always ends the probe's movement so I can always counterattack and kill it from the base.

2164: Time for the Weather Paradigm.  I made sure to have 40 credits to temporarily swap out of Wealth's industry discount (couldn't get 135 to also swap out of Planned.)  I cashed in five supply crawlers for 24 minerals each, then reenabled Wealth, and the base's regular production finished the rest.

With no more immediate secret project goals, I can finally get back to building more formers in the core bases.  Planetary Transit System (new bases start at size 3) is a possibility but I think I won't really need it.  Merchant Exchange is somewhat tempting, although 140 minerals for 7 energy/turn is still a long payback period and equivalent to only one borehole.  Meanwhile the University builds the Command Nexus, and begins the Merchant Exchange.

2165: And the Weather Paradigm both enables condensors and cuts their build time from 12 turns to 8, so we start constructing them everywhere.



I had four formers near The Hive ready to team up on the first condensor, so here it is, under that highlighted supply crawler.  This one tile improvement adds six food in all: changes from moist to rainy its own square plus the two farms below it and two empty squares above it, plus one more food from its own x1.5 yield.  This one item fixes all the food problems that both of those bases have.

That message looks weird; Manufacturing Warrens is far away, my northernmost base.  What happened is that one tile there dried out from moist to arid.  This sometimes happens with condensors, that they draw moisture from somewhere oddly far away, though nobody knows the details of how or why.



And here's one on a nutrient bonus.  2 for rainy + 1 for farm + 2 for the bonus × 1.5 for the condensor = 7 food.  This is almost enough by itself to get the city to boom to size 7 with all the other population working forest.  I pasted in the Forces Supported window to show what it looks like.  This base has been constantly building formers and crawlers since the pop-boom.  It's now supporting four mineral-consuming units, but we're overwhelming that cost with three forest crawlers plus the borehole.

I discovered Ecological Engineering at the end of turn 2166, which lifts the mineral production cap.  I tweaked things on this turn (labs slider to 60% and hire one scientist specialist) so that the tech would be discovered by my base #8 in the production order, since bases #9 and #10 worked all three of the borehole cluster to get the full uncapped mineral production this same turn.  Next research set to Environmental Economics, due in 6 turns, which lifts the energy production cap as well.



Also in year 2166, I founded the first of my next wave of bases, those six colony pods under construction in the previous overview.  As each of these will do, it starts first on its Children's Creche, while nearby bases send it police and former and crawler support, which each get rehomed to the new base.  Each of these bases would be planted by 2168.



That Peacekeeper base over there has done nothing but send probe teams at me over and over.  Thanks to the infiltration, I always knew the base was building those and never anything else.  I just kept killing them with scout patrols when they got near my base.  This is like the seventh one.  This is what I was telling Fluffball in Haphazard's thread: you really don't need probe teams to defend against AI ones, the AI just always walks its probes up where you can easily counterattack with regular military.



Presently I finally got rid of this headache.  Lal had this 2-2-1 Laser Infantry unit parked next to my base ever since he redeclared vendetta, almost 20 turns ago now.  It just sat there forever because it could never heal fully (healing to 20% damaged is the cap unless in a friendly base), never had the advantage attacking my base (a 1-1-1 behind a perimeter defense and also in range of that sensor to the south), and never got reinforcements (so many probes instead.)  But it blocked me from getting any terraformers out to improve that area.  I couldn't attack it either, definitely not with my piddly 1-power hand weapons, but even if I got the tech for a 2-power laser, it would still have a big disadvantage attacking into the strong defensive terrain of fungus.  So we were at a standoff here forever.  The best way out of that was to bribe the unit with a probe.  85 credits is expensive, but I decided it was worth it to eliminate that thorn.

But hey, that also means the unit comes over to my side, and I can do things with it.  First, it gives me access to 2-power laser weapons.  The 2-2-1 shows up in the unit workshop, which allows redesigning a new unit with the laser, even without the tech!  This is not considered a bug at all, the manual mentions and encourages reverse-engineering captured units.  So I designed a 2-1-1 (cheaper than 2-2-1) and built one in my base.



I brought the two laser infantry plus one scout patrol for backup over to Lal's base.  It had on defense only one 1-2-1 unit, thanks to the eleventeen probes he'd been building to suicide at me instead.  I attacked first with the stolen unit (better odds despite the damage because of morale), which died, but the second laser infantry cleaned up and the scout captured the base.

Once I realized I could capture it, I really wanted this base.  It's very good terrain, multiple bonuses and a river.  But most importantly, it is my strategic bulwark outpost against the still-hostile University.  Any attack the University makes will come here and I can be ready for it.  It will also be the staging point to send probes to steal techs.

This of course makes one more base than I'd planned, my 19th, one past the third bureaucracy limit.  I actually made use of what I outlined before about the b-drone cycle.  When I founded my 13th base, I noted where bureaucracy superdrones appeared; it was in three bases, 02 and 05 and 08.  The 19th base would be one past the fourth bureaucracy limit and would create a second superdrone in those same bases.  As I described above, a second superdrone makes Golden Age pop-booming impossible.  So for the moment, I held off on planting one of my own bases to stay at 18 total, that colony pod to the south.  Eventually after pop-booming I'll plant it somewhere, but not quite yet.



One critical downside: this base slotted in the global base order here, between my second and third bases.  I can't have the numbering scheme screwed up with that, but neither do I want to go through and renumber 16 bases, also since I've gotten to know the bases by their numbers.



Well, here's a solution!



The other big news this turn was my skimship finally finding the Believers.  (Man, this could have happened a lot sooner.  It previously sailed through that channel going east; just missed them by one tile.  It looped around the whole world back to the same spot.  It also got delayed about six turns repairing from that Isle of the Deep attack.)

Miriam knows (and has a vendetta against) Sparta, so I perhaps could have traded for the comm frequency.  Miriam signs a treaty with me, though she doesn't sound happy about my godless police state.



That's all the contacts, which allows calling a Planetary Governor election.  I did, and easily won the vote 64 to 25 over the University with everyone else abstaining.  I thought I should get some votes, with treaties still with Gaia and Morgan and Miriam, but guess not.  At least nobody supports my current and likely permanent enemy (although philosophical ally) Zakharov.



The Governor gets +1 energy per base; this is not commerce, this shows up on each base center square.  It may make a significant difference towards Golden Ages for more pop booms.

But mostly I wanted the infiltration on everybody.  I just couldn't get it the normal way, couldn't get any probe teams through the Peacekeeper war zone to anyone else.  The infiltration reveals that the University has 5 techs that I lack, so I order up several probe teams to go get stealing.



And here's a look at that University base that keeps swiping secret projects.  Virtual World, Command Nexus, and soon Merchant Exchange.  Yeah, this is about the strongest AI base I've ever seen, with the Garland Crawler minerals and a bunch of rainy tiles.  There's also a silly amount of solar collectors in the neighboring bases - but no farms - the University lacks Gene Splicing so couldn't gain food by farming the rainy tiles.

Also notice the production boxes - only 4 columns of nutrients and 6 of minerals (10 is normal for each.)  Those are discounts the player can't reach.  That's the Transcend difficulty discount to 70%, plus the AI gets at least 10% more when you are on top of the dominance ranking.




Big enough now that I need to stitch together multiple screenshots to show everything without zooming down to unreadability (click it to expand out of the screenshot forum tag.)  I also realized that the way I'm taking screenshots actually captures it with the 256-color palette intact, so I can edit one palette color to bring the dark blue text into readability.  I'm not going to bother doing that for every shot, but the important overviews will warrant it.

Up to 69 labs/turn at 60% slider thanks to the governor energy and the new batch of bases.

You can see the condensors going up everywhere, and I've started to use landmark tags (BH) to map out my borehole grid.  I'm going to use The Leader's Horde as my major science multiplier city (starting the network node now and will get first choice of boreholes), because it's better positioned to have a maximum 6-borehole grid within its city radius, and the inefficiency modifier compared to the HQ will be negligible.

Looking at about six or so turns until the next round of pop-booming, once the new batch of bases get up to size 3 with a creche.  Will finish off the needed condensors by then, and then make some boreholes as well, since the 6 energy from one will make sure of the golden age in each base.  Environmental Economics is due in 3 turns to lift the energy production cap.

[Modo]

There's a thing in this game that allows new bases to start with 3 pop? I think I get why you're not rushing it but still...three new pop in each new base, how come it's not a priority?
Also, what's the rationale behind displaying the eco damage in a base screen? From my limited reading eco damage is not a local thing, can it be influenced somehow on a per base basis?
And finally, the determining factor behind each b-limit is the impending appearance of a second superdrone? Is the second one always the cap or do you get more leeway as the game goes one? Or less?

EDIT: Forgot to mention the reverse engineering to get new tech, this is indeed not a singular game that does it and it's another useful way to aquire tech via conquest if other ways are off or less feasible. Glad to see they have it in SMAC too.

[T-hawk]

The Planetary Transit System isn't a priority because I'm not building more bases at the moment. Any more would start to make Golden Age and pop-booming impossible in my existing bases. The new bases would never get to boom either until the Cloning Vats, and then that automatic boom makes the PTS unnecessary anyway. It would have been nice to have the PTS for those few recently-founded bases, but not 300 minerals worth of nice compared to the competing options of yet more formers and crawlers. (Also it's two more pop in each base, not three, since they start at size one by default.)

Eco damage is local per base; what is global is a value that is subtracted from each base's damage. I'll cover that in detail when it happens.

A superdrone just represents one-more bureaucracy drone that the game wants to give you but can't because every citizen is already a drone. Each time you pass the b-limit, you start a new round of drones in each base, which each become superdrones if everybody was already a drone. I need to stop with only one superdrone in each base because a second makes Golden Age impossible and thus pop-booming for the Hive.

[T-hawk]

This chapter: population booming fully completed.

2171: Chat with Morgan, who trades me a map of Believer territory for a tech, and Polymorphic Software for another, and Secrets of the Human Brain for another!  And he re-swears Pact with me.  (Because I flipped to Free Market before talking to him.)



2172: First eco-damage fungal bloom.  This would continue to happen several times, now that my bases are starting to approach and exceed the threshold.  Other sources cover eco-damage in more detail.  The short version: there is a global tolerance value which begins at 16.  For each base, add up its mineral production and the "bad" terraforming improvements within its radius (basically everything except forest), subtract forests, and subtract that global tolerance.  The result is that base's eco-damage value, which is a percentage chance each turn to trigger a fungal bloom.  That global threshold increases by 1 each time you experience a fungal bloom or build an ecological facility (tree farms, etc) anywhere.  Tree farms and hybrid forests also each reduce the terraforming component of eco-damage for that base (but not globally).



I got several more fungal blooms over this session.  I had been telling Haphazard that mind worms start to spawn on your third fungal pop, but either I misremembered or it's random; here that first happened on my fifth fungal incident.  The interesting part is the Locust of Chiron, that's the airborne mind worm unit!  I could counterattack the one worm on land, but not that.  I wasn't quite sure how the Locust would behave, but my guess was that if I cleared away all the units next to it, it would attack my base.



It did, and even got the 3:2 psi advantage (that happens if the defender is a land unit, not the attacker).  But my defender still won, thanks to the bonuses from the base itself, the sensor, and the "Green (++) +25%".  That last is the Children's Creche working to negate negative morale modifiers, which it does in a very weird way; I don't even understand the details, but basically it can overcompensate and actually add more pluses than you had minuses.



The University has a rover in a position where I can bribe it with a probe.  Like with the laser weapon, this unit shows up in the workshop, a rover-chassis unit which I can modify to other designs still without the tech.  I don't ever need Doctrine Mobility now, I already have what it enables and both techs for which it is a prerequisite: started with Doctrine Loyalty and traded for Doctrine Flexibility.  With access to rovers now, I order up a few builds in or near bases that are producing a lot of eco-damage, to be prepared for the mind worm spawns.  Rovers are better than infantry for counter-worm duty, because they can move along a road and attack without incurring a Hasty penalty.

2173: Discovered Environmental Economics, which lifts the tile cap on energy production.  Next research is Planetary Economics, due in 7 years now, and would ultimately drop to 5 total as labs production increased from more boreholes.



Leader's Horde, my science city, completed its network node and now I also rush its research hospital.  The most efficient use of credits overall is the multiplier facilities in the city that will be getting the most input from boreholes and the first priority to build them.  I also decided that a tree farm would be enough use to be worth building at this base; it didn't need much food, but the +50% economy will add up quite a bit with all those boreholes as input, plus the eco-damage cut also matters.

I also ordered up tree farms in a few outlying cities to prepare for the upcoming population boom.  These would be cities with a lot of forest, but not a nutrient bonus or multiple condensors.  All the guides tell you to build tree farms.  They are the easy one-stop-shop for pop-booming, both for the food and the +50% psych.  The psych makes it much easier to enable Golden Age for the factions that need it to boom, and also contributes significantly to happiness if you're a faction that can't do it all with police as I am here.  Tree farms are good, but 120 minerals is a lot and they're not an automatic build everywhere unless you really have terraformed with nothing but forest.

My core cities don't need tree farms, with some farms that were built for the first pop-boom and now upgraded to condensors as well.  The core cities start building more supply crawlers, in preparation to cash in to the Ascetic Virtues secret project that comes at Planetary Economics.

My formers are now aggressively building boreholes, starting at that science city and moving outwards.  I have gangs of 6 to 8 formers drilling each one.  The "Borehole Brigade" proceeds like this: while a gang is drilling each one, I make sure there's a former building a road to the next borehole site two tiles away, so that the brigade can immediately move there (road movement is 3 spaces) and start drilling the next one right away with no turns lost to movement.  Boreholes can't be built adjacent to each other, so I planned out a grid at maximum 2x2 density and the formers are now enacting that.

The same principle applies in areas where I'm still building condensors and forests, and sometimes removing fungus or rocks to enable that.  Often the most important move is to get one former onto a tile 1-3 turns ahead of time, so it can build a road for all the rest to swarm into when there's a group looking for work.

I now have over 70 formers total, more than four per base -- and still barely feel like I'm keeping up with the demand for improvements.



I have several probe teams near the University now -- but I don't really want to steal any techs.  After Morgan traded me two, the only techs the Uni has that I lack are Applied Physics, Doctrine Mobility, and Optical Computers.  I don't need the first two at all, and the last not for a while yet.  What else can I do with the probes?  Drain Energy Reserves is an option.  Thanks to that river and how I connected a road to it, my probes can move all the way in a single turn from that captured UN base to the Uni base.  So I repeatedly hammered that base every turn with as many as five probes to steal energy.

Each instance isn't a lot, typically 10 to 15 credits.  But every bit helps, and perhaps more importantly it makes sure the Uni doesn't have energy on hand to do nasty probe actions of their own.  Some probes do die; the chance of survival starts around 50% and goes up with higher morale; but successful probes promote a morale level each time, and eventually I even had one elite probe which gets extra movement.

2176: The last of my new bases are growing to size 3 this turn.  I could start the next pop-boom now.  But I decide to wait two turns until Planetary Economics completes, because then I'll have the Ascetic Virtues secret project, which raises all population limits by two.

That wait was actually slightly strategically incorrect.  There would be no loss in booming now to size 7 with the psych slider, then pausing for long enough to finish Planetary Economics, then restarting the slider again to boom the additional two sizes.  But doing the boom continuously saves me all the micromanagement of setting up doctors and nutrient surplus twice instead of once.

2178: Planetary Economics completed and I build the Ascetic Virtues.  Same procedure as before: swap out of the Planned + Wealth industry discounts and add supply crawlers until it's completed.  It takes 8 crawlers at 27 minerals each to reach its cost of 210 after the discounts are reapplied.



I hadn't realized this, but the Ascetic Virtues is Yang's iconic quote on the faction-selection screen.  Besides philosophically, it fits perfectly mechanically for the faction too.  The hab limit boost works the same for anyone, but the +1 Police has a particular synergy with Police State which only the Hive tends to run this far along.  That raises the total Police rating to +3, which doubles the police effect of all units.  This is additive not multiplicative with the Police special ability; such a unit quells 3 drones, not 4.  But that still means that three police units each quelling three drones will exactly cover the total population of 9 per base.



With that in place, it's time to restart the psych slider and Golden Ages for more pop-booming.  I can do most bases at only 80% psych slider this turn, with a few filling in with doctors.  Basically any base with either a borehole (6 energy) or a tree farm (+50% psych) could easily make enough psych for the golden age (6 at size 3, 10 if growing to size 5 or 6, 14 if growing to size 7-8.)  One piece was to maximally reassign boreholes to different cities instead of all to Leader's Horde, so they could each separately get the 6 psych energy.  I was also planning ahead with terraformer movements, to get one borehole done at each of the newest bases as soon as I could.

2179: As always, there's a one-turn delay between starting the Golden Age and the actual boom growth.

2180: Most of my core cities started this at size 5 and now boomed to size 6.  They will grow to size 7 at the end of this turn, which requires 14 psych to maintain the Golden Age, by way of quelling the one superdrone then 12 psych to make 3 talents.  To do that, now the psych slider had to go all the way to 100% again.  One constraint is cash income: at 0% economy slider, now I'm at -25 income/turn worth of maintenance; those tree farms cost a lot, 3/turn each.  I have 160 credits on hand, but that won't last forever; in fact the energy still being stolen from the University would keep me from going bankrupt.  The penalty for bankruptcy in SMAC is that whichever base fails to pay its maintenance will automatically sell a facility to raise money.  That can happen to as many bases as it needs to on each turn.  This is actually quite fair and not exploitable unlike Civs 3 and 4 that will only strike one unit each turn.



A typical base looked like this during the pop-booming.  One condensor on a nutrient bonus is enough food.  One borehole is enough energy to maintain the 14 psych.  Almost: notice the one crawler crawling one energy to get to that 14 total psych.  I laboriously did a ton of micromanagement like that at every base, double-checking every supply crawler on forest to get one food or one energy if necessary, or if not then the two minerals instead.  Man, why did I let you guys talk me into this micromanagement, playing the Hive.  Gaia or anyone else could just stay in the right civics to pop-boom automatically without needing the psych.



A few bases started a size ahead of some others, and thus also hit the limit of size 9 a turn ahead.  With these bases, I skimmed a colony pod off the top, since they could immediately re-boom right back to maximum size.  Once I finish this round of pop-booming, I no longer care about more bureaucracy drones (police units handle superdrones the same as regular drones) and can plant as many bases as I want.  I don't have a lot of room for more, but there is some space up north of the University and Peacekeepers.  These bases will never boom until the Cloning Vats, but they might be worthwhile anyway since the cost to build them is so low: literally just the 21 minerals for the pod; there's effectively no cost in food/population or b-drones.

In year 2183, most of my bases have reached size 8.  Remembering the Golden Age boom delay, I can drop psych back to 0% on this turn and they will still boom this turn up to the limit at 9.  Not every base quite made it to the limit in time; a few had a hitch here and there for lack of food or psych energy; but it's not worth keeping the entire psych slider up at the expense of labs for these few stragglers.  The goals of the collective are paramount.



And here's a typical base after the population boom has completed.  Like before, working one condensor and one borehole (more as the formers build them) and the rest forest.

This is a steady state that will be maintained for quite some time.  Probably until orbital satellite food, at which time it may be worthwhile to build hab complexes.  Presently, a tree farm plus a hab complex here could result in four or so more city sizes.  That's OK, but that costs 200 minerals which is a lot; I'd rather put that into a Network Node and Research Hospital which each give +50% labs, SMAC's equivalent to Civ's library/university.  Most bases built their network node during the population boom (adjusting that build order around those extra colony pods, missing police units, and counter-worm units), and will continue to build the research hospital next.

The guy on the far right is a scientist specialist for +3 labs.  This isn't super great, equivalent to an 0-0-3 land tile; specialists in SMAC have no additional benefits like Great Person points or adders like Civ 4's Representation.  But there's nothing left to work with all the remaining tiles fungus or rocky, and that's the next best option.  The "+9 Bonus" on this screen includes both the specialist's +3 and the multiplication from the network node.

But in a way, that 0-0-3 is equivalent in lab production to six units of produced energy.  That's because my sliders are now glued to 50/50.  Three input energy would only go 50% into labs, but three from the specialist goes all into labs.  What causes the 50/50 lock is the specialists themselves.  Earlier on, tilting the slider to 60% or 70% could get more labs from the increased allocation than lost to the unbalancing penalty.  That doesn't happen now because the unbalancing penalty also reduces specialist production but doesn't allocate more input.

The economy slider staying at 50% does mean I'm now making over 100 credits/turn to spend on whatever looks fun.  The zero efficiency of the Hive can actually make for a fun game this way, since you have money to spend, while factions with better inherent or SE efficiency would rather set the slider higher all into labs.

As for lab production, how is that doing?



348 labs/turn.  That was up from 70 last session, quintupled in 14 turns.  I doubled my population; roughly doubled my income per population considering the boreholes and specialists amortized over the group; and about half of the income is going through network node multipliers.  That total is more than half the cost of a tech - I'm now researching at better than 2 turns per tech.  This will continue to increase rapidly with more nodes and hospitals and boreholes.

My next tech goal is probably Fusion Power which enables another labs multiplier, though I haven't yet exactly planned out the path around the missing-tech constraints, plus I may be about to steal some techs which will also influence my path.

That's all to report on the population booming and domestic development, so let's cover a few foreign happenings too.



Whoa, looks like AI Gaia captured some mind worms to use for conquering.  I guess she must have a gargantuan free military ranked better than mine.



Sparta contacted me, and I'm not sure I ever saw a demand that crazy before, a bonkers sum of 375 energy credits.  I've only got 100.  Not that I would pay anyway.  I know she'll declare war if I refuse, but I have no choice and she does.



Sparta has this loaded transport heading my way.  This is what I was telling Haphazard: don't worry about AI intercontinental invasions, just one transport is all they manage far more often than otherwise.  These units will not threaten any base of mine; they won't get past multiple 1-2-1s behind a perimeter defense, and even if they kill any I can replace them faster.

But I expected this war to come soon anyway, because I was up to my own schemes myself.  Yes, I have my own loaded transport on the right over there.



My transport is full of probes.  Sparta actually has quite a few techs I lack, more even than the University.  Problem is what I forgot about was that restriction shown in yellow text.  I wanted to use these probes to hit each of Hommel's Citadel and Survival Base off the boat, but that's not possible.

What I can do is unload the two probes on the two squares adjacent to Hommel's Citadel.  There is only one unit in that base.  It can counterattack to kill one of my probes (and it did so), but my other probe would get through for a steal.



Good score.  Well, Optical Computers actually does literally nothing by itself, but it's a prerequisite on the path to Fusion Power.  Anyway, I also have a second transport full of probes heading towards the east side of Sparta's island which will do the same thing in another turn or two.

What comes next?  I plan to settle a few more bases with those extra colony pods, in the space north of UN Criminal Tribunal.  But after that, my next feasible path to expansion goes through the University.  Stay tuned for that.

[T-hawk]

Big huge overview with edited blue color, click to expand.  I love how SMAC's isometric display makes it possible to perfectly seamlessly stitch together multiple screenshots.  So can Civ 3; Civ 4 doesn't need to since the flying camera can zoom out as far as you need; but it's impossible to stitch together anything in Civ 5 or 6.

More generally, I've been loving SMAC's surprisingly not dated interface.  There are keyboard commands for just about everything, including navigating around the map (press V for the cursor then arrow keys to move it) and zooming to bases (press space in view mode.)  The graphics are flat rectangles that cut perfectly into screenshots, not like Civs 5/6 with circular progress meters and fancy gradients and overlays all over the place.  The one thing that's wrong with SMAC's look is the fake-analog-scanline effect on everything; it's pretty amazing that SMAC postulates so far into future technology but didn't see digital LCDs replacing analog CRTs which happened like twenty minutes after the game came out.  

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the update and info, T-hawk. This continues to be both entertaining and information-rich.

Flying mind worms - ick! Have not encountered those yet. Can you attack them at all with non-flying units, or do you just have to defend as best you can? Artillery, maybe?

I was wondering about the amphibious pods; just what exactly do they allow a unit to do?

[Modo]

Man, why did I let you guys talk me into this micromanagement, playing the Hive.  Gaia or anyone else could just stay in the right civics to pop-boom automatically without needing the psych.

Before we learn the easy way we must understand the hard way, your're doing it for us so that should cheer you :D

And I thought Civ4's 1.5 workers per city ratio is a lot, four times the formers...oh man.
But I have to say, every time I see a game where the player builds more spies than actual military and that on the highest difficulty too...not good
I still very much enjoy the planning involved in tile improvments, SMAC almost feels lilke a city builder in that regard.

[T-hawk]

You can attack a Locust with land units if it's on a land square.  I couldn't here because it was on a sea square.  A ship could have.  Artillery does help against worms in general.

Amphibious pods: the main purpose is to attack a city directly from a transport, which is otherwise disallowed.  I had forgotten that applied to probes too.  There are a few other details; one is that the pods are required to move between a sea base and an adjacent land tile, unless a transport is present.  That detail notably hurts the Pirates faction in the expansion; they have to build a transport just to get terraformers onto land.

I've built a somewhat-reasonable amount of actual military; just haven't mentioned it.  There's a couple 1-2-2 rovers defending around the University war zone.  I'm lucky that the University hasn't gotten to the tech (Nonlinear Mathematics) for impact weapons.  Mostly, though, military defense is handled by either upgrading 1-1-1 police units or simply just-in-time building whatever you need to defend or counterattack. And the Hive's free Perimeter Defenses make defense easy.  Military offense is a different matter and we will soon see that around the University war zone too.