T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[Dark Savant]

I saw such a writeup a long time ago.  The entire game was completed with artifacts, it was never necessary to grow cities or build things.  Not even to grow to build colony pods - just let a base disband at size 1, then the re-founded base will have a new network node for a new artifact slot.  Every base gets its artifact, sometimes a materials pod to build a new exploring unit, then a materials pod to build that colony pod, and that's literally all you ever need.

I didn't think that would be the case.  You ought to be able to build the Planetary Transit System by about turn 8.

• You need plenty of rivers at your landing site.  It's more critical than having the jungle right next door, or being able to pop multiple nutrients bonuses.
  
• Plant both bases on the river; cash-rush formers off the starting minerals.
  
• Self-research Planetary Networks (3-4 turns, even on huger-than-Huge).
  
• Pop contact with Morgan, get Industrial Base from him.
  
• Cash artifacts for Industrial Economics and Industrial Automation.
  
• Rush PTS with 2 expensive crawlers (worth "only" 100 minerals this early) + Planned/Wealth + enough energy to top it off.  (Though that takes enough energy that it may be better to just use 3 expensive crawlers.)
  
• Off go the colony pods!
  

You can then grow something vaguely resembling "normally", rather than disbanding size-1 bases.  The hockey-stick growth curve arrives much faster under these conditions, though it's not going to be worth it to self-research anything after the first tech for a while.

Most of the game occurred in the water, with 4- and then 6-move ships picking up multiple supply pods per turn.  Exploring across land and fungus didn't matter much compared to that.

In the test games I played, the ability to explore land was still significant even in the mid-game, since the land masses can be so large on huger-than-Huge.  Though yeah, it's still less important than quick cruiser transports backed by the Maritime Control Center.

I didn't do it not because it's a lot of reloading (I did that for Civ 5), but because it doesn't resemble real SMAC gameplay at all.

Yeah, I can see that, but the couple of games I sort-of-tried this suggested it's still best for your core to build up "normally".

I never went all-out for a super-early PTS, which would change things more.

Finally, I believe there's a very small chance (1% or less) that an artifact can yield a technology for which you have only one prerequisite rather than both.  If that's true, then it takes only 15 artifacts to get all the way up to Threshold, if you do a truly absurd amount of reloading, hundreds per pod.

That's news to me; I thought I would have seen that by now if it were possible.  Any chance of a reference?

Though what an artifact gives you doesn't give you even odds of eligible techs, even if that's not the case.  The game rolls a random tech, then iterates through techs, giving you the first eligible tech it finds.  (Civ 1 and 2 also worked this way.)

[T-hawk]

Well, that one old half-remembered writeup isn't necessarily the best approach or perfect, of course.

I seem to remember he restarted until getting a coastal start with a Unity Foil unit.  Which can pop more foils directly from sea pods, which pop more, and so on. I think you can be swarming dozens of units over a water map that way much faster than trying to build anything yourself.

I don't have any reference on the artifact thing, other than some half-remembered Apolyton posts from way back.  I could be wrong.  I think it wasn't a deliberate defined chance, more like a loophole where the game retries techs only a certain amount of times before giving up.  Interesting on how free techs are selected, I hadn't known that.  I bet the same applies for popping a tech directly from a pod (that can happen for, and only for, first-level techs) and that's why that is Industrial Base the vast majority of the time but not quite always.

[Dark Savant]

I seem to remember he restarted until getting a coastal start with a Unity Foil unit.  Which can pop more foils directly from sea pods, which pop more, and so on.  I think you can be swarming dozens of units over a water map that way much faster than trying to build anything yourself.

If you start with a Unity foil, that's because you are on a tiny island.  That's not ideal if you're actually trying to build and grow bases.

Unity foils are sluggish; rovers are faster early on (you did start near a bunch of rivers, right?)  Foils get faster once you build the Maritime Control Center, but even then they're held back by their carrying capacity.

You can pop a foil from a coastal pod, anyway.  The odds are low, but not nonexistent.

Unity rovers backed by the Xenoempathy Dome work reasonably well, since they can scoot down rivers or through fungus at up to 6 tiles/turn.  They're not that great partly because artifacts become impractical to move on land by then.  I don't think you want to beeline the Xenoempathy Dome the way you want to beeline the Maritime Control Center, though.

You'll want to deliver 4-5 artifacts early.  You need two for Industrial Economics and Industrial Automation by turn 7 by the very latest.  You'll want two more for Doctrine: Flexibility and Doctrine: Initiative for cruisers and the Maritime Control Center.  The fifth is for Secrets of the Human Brain, which is not actually just for the free tech; you want it just to put Trance on popped supply crawlers.

Next tech is probably High Energy Chemistry: you can then put plasma steel armor on popped supply crawlers, and it's on the way to Doctrine: Air Power.

Back to the early game plan: you can research a second tech on your own by turn 7 or 8, before tech costs escalate out of control for self-research, but that may be too slow.  You can self-research Planetary Networks by turn 4, have contact with Morgan and two artifacts in place by then to get Industrial Automation that turn, then pop two 100-mineral crawlers to be produced on turn 5.  You then swap to Planned/Wealth (you can't swap to either earlier, since that drives down the mineral cost of the crawlers), and cash them in for the Planetary Transit System on turn 6.

I don't have any reference on the artifact thing, other than some half-remembered Apolyton posts from way back.  I could be wrong.  I think it wasn't a deliberate defined chance, more like a loophole where the game retries techs only a certain amount of times before giving up.  Interesting on how free techs are selected, I hadn't known that.  I bet the same applies for popping a tech directly from a pod (that can happen for, and only for, first-level techs) and that's why that is Industrial Base the vast majority of the time but not quite always.

Hmm, I'll have to check for that.

I've never been able to pop Biogenetics or Doctrine: Mobility or Social Psych directly under these circumstances (odds don't even seem to be low; never at all in hundreds of tries).  Not a big deal; you can pop a contact and trade for any of them.

I tried this out a little yesterday; it was enough to convince me that early rivers are paramount.  And now I'm back to thinking low fungus is better.

[Iainuki]

The simple description: You iterate through the list of bases to filter by faction only when you need to.  You do to display your faction's list of bases.  You don't need to for b-drones with the simple implementation of "id mod N", so you don't.

The missing-techs mechanism actually works the same way.  It's based on the sum of a few factors mod 3, which is simple and deterministic to implement and doesn't require iterating through the list.

Naturally, because I was about half-way through, this is discussed on page 17, in particular on this post: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid678475.

[Echoecho]

I've been planning a new university run on a huge map, mostly to practice my micro and to see how much it lets you build more infrastructure than in Normal or 16x16
The point I'm stuck on is the value of tree farms, because from the looks of it they never really paid off in that Free Drones run, especially considering the alternative of building groups of 256 clean formers to Farm&Bore the whole map.

BTW, did you ever try rolling a Free Drone start until you popped Deidre's contact? Seems like that would save quite a few turns at the start (assuming she was willing to trade away a SP tech--I can never figure out the rules for the AI doing that)

[T-hawk]

I think tree farms are right to do, except on a jungle-covered micro map.  Mostly because forests are so former-efficient thanks to auto-spread, particularly in displacing fungus.  It's easy to say to farm and bore the whole map, but it takes ungodly amounts of former-turns to actually do it, it doesn't finish until past the end of the game.  And remember the goal isn't exactly the highest productivity by endgame - frontloading matters, in speed to the intermediate breakpoints like fusion engineers, satellites, and Cybernetic.  Boreholes are very back-loaded; the minerals are big but don't actually do anything until they cash in to completing the next build item, which itself takes time to pay back.

I actually think you'll develop less infrastructure on a huge map -- your number of bases will escalate more than does the tech cost, so you actually do less tech per base by the time you finish.  Assuming you go all the way on base count rather than self-restricting against ICS somehow.  If you want infrastructure to be optimal, you really need to limit base count somehow; more colony pods and formers are pretty much just always better value than infrastructure.

I never tried save-scumming for contacts.  I would in a pure speed run, and in that last University game it happened without really trying.  All the other writeups were meant to be illustrative of typical conditions rather than artificially cooked setups.

[Echoecho]

I'm trying to wrap my head around the value and opportunity cost of a tree farm. 
The ~4 nut you end up with at size 9 is 12 former-turns of work, which on its own is a lower payoff than just building more formers to F&B (especially with the 256 overflow upgrade exploit). And the nuts from farming+condensers+enrichers don't have to come all at once, but just to keep pace with the boom. So early boreholes could help each base finish a hab complex & fusion lab, plus energy for rushing food sats.
The +50% econ really pays off once engineers come along, but it's pretty limited when the pop only gets to size 9 with only 4 specialists. 
(BTW, do you know why the bonus econ at this base in your drone game was 14 rather than 18?)

Really tempted to just try playing the same map several ways, but that's a several month job with the amount of time I have for gaming these days...

[T-hawk]

Yeah same here, I would compare on replaying the same map too but don't want to sink that amount of time into it.

I think it's probably not more than a turn or two difference either way if you build tree farms or not. Once the boom starts, you're mostly locked in in terms of speed. My time from booming until finishing across the various games was almost entirely a function of base count and faction/SE multipliers, rather than anything going on at any particular bases. As you say, the value per mineral for tree farms is pretty much similar to the other options of more (possibly clean) formers and science multipliers.

The lost bonus econ is from the unbalanced slider penalty, I was still at only +2 Efficiency and not yet +4 before Cybernetic.

[Modo]

Wanted to revisit the Hive playthrough but when I click the link on your site nothing happens. From clicking around a bit it seems this is the only broken link, if indeed that's the case.

[Modo]

Ignore me, just realized that one points to this thread