T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[T-hawk]

What happens in an OCC is the energy-park with stripes of solar collectors and mirrors collected by crawlers. The limiting factor becomes the bottleneck of one build item per turn no matter how well you're doing; it becomes quite a headache to fit in all the formers and crawlers and prototypes and defensive units and probes and projects.

Yes, an OCC is the most natural contrast to this playthrough if I want to do anything else with SMAC. I don't know yet where I want to go next. I don't have any desire for Civs 1-5. I'll probably go for Civ 6 eventually but not right now.

Yeah, I've thought about rewriting the strategy from those 20+ Civ 5 reports into a coherent guide. As you say, there is no overview, you have to read through them all in order. But it'd be a lot of work that I don't really feel like taking on, particularly for a game that's mostly becoming eclipsed by Civ 6 now.

[Modo]

Thank you.

[Kofiman]

Your Civ V reports always felt to me as if you were fighting like a cornered rat to find something, anything, that Civ V let you do for yourself, instead of shoving you back down on the path of the standard controlled experience, where the player is pushing a great many buttons that do nothing. SMAC always felt different to me, sure you're going to get there, but it happens because of stuff you did, not because X turns have passed.

[haphazard1]

That is quite a hockey stick vertical take off for the research.

[Fluffball]

I want to stress that this endgame is normal for SMAC.

This is something later Civs -- even Civ4 -- failed miserably at. Once you're ahead in SMAC, you just obliterate everything in any fashion you want. And it's fun; hell you'll often want to continue playing game you've clearly won just because the new techs and special projects are just so much fun.

Once you're ahead in Civ4, you wait painfully for a culture or spaceship victory because domination would be an even bigger hassle. Or more likely you just stop playing that game.

[T-hawk]

SMAC can only get away with that because the AI is so lousy.  A faction can go from air power or fusion copters to a decisive advantage anywhere on Planet in about 15 turns.  That wouldn't be quite so fun if the AI was the one ahead by those 15 turns and good enough to execute it.  Civ 4 doesn't fail miserably, it deliberately disincludes mechanics to leverage an advantage into obliteration, because the AI is good enough to put the human on the wrong end of it.

Your Civ V reports always felt to me as if you were fighting like a cornered rat to find something, anything, that Civ V let you do for yourself, instead of shoving you back down on the path of the standard controlled experience, where the player is pushing a great many buttons that do nothing.  SMAC always felt different to me, sure you're going to get there, but it happens because of stuff you did, not because X turns have passed.

Heh, I did get that feeling... and the interesting part was how much it went away on the lowest difficulty when the happy cap lifted and the social policy paths were more open.  Although I think the effect is quantitative not qualitative... I'd describe it that the difference in productivity between average farting-around and expert optimization in Civ 5 is a factor of maybe 3x, in Civ 4 something like 10x, while in SMAC it could be as high as 100x.  I got to 10,000 labs in 120 turns, when Haphazard and LKendter might have reached around 100.

In fact, now that I think of it in those terms, that's the difference betwen HOMM 2 and HOMM 3. HOMM 2 has more of a gap between average farting-around and what experts will exploit, while HOMM 3's tighter numerical balance lessens the headroom for its skill ceiling.

[TheHumanHydra]

My other problem playing either HOMM was save-scumming.  Like every single battle, I'd realize halfway through a better way to do it, and reload to start it over.  Not luck abuse, the RNG in HOMM is pretty low impact, but just realizing how I could take fewer losses if I engaged and handled enemy stacks in a different order, ways that were deterministic enough to see at the start if I'd projected ahead that far.  If I tried to stick to a no-reloading rule, what I'd end up doing was restart an entire scenario or even campaign for one flawed battle.  I just couldn't ever break myself of the "I should have seen that" save-scumming habit; even now I do it quite a bit more in Civ/SMAC than the reports convey.  (That's why I love FTL so much, no save-scumming, copying the file around out-of-game is cheaty enough that I don't.)

Oh, man, I have such a problem with this in Civ IV (and SMAC). Like, I really don't want to do micro ahead of time, but I do want it to be perfect.

[Kofiman]

In fact, now that I think of it in those terms, that's the difference betwen HOMM 2 and HOMM 3.  HOMM 2 has more of a gap between average farting-around and what experts will exploit, while HOMM 3's tighter numerical balance lessens the headroom for its skill ceiling.

I also felt that when playing HoMM 2, it is okay to reload a bunch of times.  Generally when I'm playing it I'll restart a scenario maybe a dozen or more times, but after I've got a start I like, I'll only reload it maybe four or five times total after the first few dozen turns.

If you do decide to play through it, I don't think a zero-reloads rule is necessary.  Maybe a limited number, say one reload a turn, with up to a dozen or fifteen restarts.

For me it was that HoMM 3 felt slow and a little bit souless.  The factions felt more similar, the troop types seemed to matter less, getting small edges seemed mostly pointless, and different runs of the same scenario felt largely the same.

Plus the graphics seemed a lot less distinct, with everything blending into the map, rather than the lower-res stuff having more punch from there being less on the screen.

[haphazard1]

I got to 10,000 labs in 120 turns, when Haphazard and LKendter might have reached around 100.

This made me go check my current save. 2235, so more turns than T-hawk took to get to 10K labs. I am at...127 labs/turn. Pretty good estimate.

A check of the AIs shows they are mostly in the 20-30 labs/turn range at that point. The difference in possible skill level really is amazing. I feel I am not doing badly for my first game of SMAC; a lot of experience with the Civ franchise helps, even if I am rusty on the mechanics of the older versions that are more similar to SMAC.

[Modo]

the difference in productivity between average farting-around and expert optimization in Civ 5 is a factor of maybe 3x, in Civ 4 something like 10x, while in SMAC it could be as high as 100x.  I got to 10,000 labs in 120 turns, when Haphazard and LKendter might have reached around 100.

Not making the obvious joke about Haphazard and LKendter farting-around but somewhow I remembered about this jewel


"Pasargadae starts building an obelisk... then five turns later its borders automatically expand thanks to the Creative civ trait. Riiight."

T-Hawk, Civ4 Adventure 6 (first Civ4 game of yours I think....outside the beta testing stuff)


After that, it all started to multiplicatively multiply away as per usual.