Scratch at BUGs and see what we can see.

Here's a candidate. The RNG gave something decentish, I think.

Attached Files

  CandidateBeta.zip (Size: 10.36 KB / Downloads: 3)

This is it. The moment i win my first pitboss out of like 20 played already.

How? idk. Lets see where i am on the snake pick. Probably last.

I have recently found myself laid up and with only an ancient underpowered Linux laptop for company. While looking for something to do, I found T-Hawk's SMAC thread here and recalled that SMAC runs on Linux courtesy of the sadly-defunct Loki Games. Thus, I dug out the game, found a neatly-packaged form of the ancient glibc libraries required to run it, and after some adventures with ffmpeg decided to explore some variants. Like T-Hawk, I've spent my fair share of time folding, spindling, and mutilating the game, but our approaches are definitely a bit different, and so I'm kind of hoping that someone will find the contrast between our styles interesting.

I was curious if my memory of having an adequate army from only captured mind worms was at all accurate, and thus was born this variant. The variant rules:

* No normal military units with better than 1/1 attack/defense. I'm allowing psi attack and defense but they come so late in the tech tree I don't expect them to matter much. All noncombat units are allowed but must have no better than 1 armor (or psi defense).

* All native life forms can be built as well as captured.

* No founding bases within 3 squares, or 2 diagonally, of another base.

* No asking AIs for tech trades.

I ran a couple of test games before the game I'm reporting, to shake off the rust and to make sure that the variant would be playable. I quickly established in the test runs that banning all combat units (even 1/1 garrisons and police) was not practical, and that allowing 1/1 units to try to get the worm snowball going works better. In one test game I only ever saw a single capture, so allowing building mind worms provides an escape valve so I don't have to start over if things go really poorly. The limit on base spacing isn't to make the game hard (nothing could do that, short of rewriting the AI to not suck), it's to limit the amount of micro I have to do. While formers probably account for a majority of the micro in SMAC, there's still a lot of base micro to do: for instance, SMAC doesn't warn you if a base is about to grow and go into drone riots, so if you want to avoid losing turns of production for your bases, you have to periodically go through and look for bases that are about to grow and micro them to avoid riots. I also don't ever want to have to mind-staple 180 bases repeatedly. Meanwhile, more bases can also work more tiles requiring more formers to improve them, which also adds to the micro. Taking maximal ICS off the table to limit the micro will make things more fun for me. Finally, making it so I'm not allowed to trade techs takes off the table one of the standard strategies for judoing AIs on high difficulty in Civ-like games, using diplomacy to turn their production advantages against them. Again, it won't make the game hard, but it will make the early game research choices more interesting.

The Gaians are an interesting faction, and arguably (IMO) the second-strongest faction in the game after the University. They get two social engineering advantages, +1 planet and +2 efficiency, and two disadvantages, -1 morale and police. This variant is built around of the first of those. +1 planet means they capture a mind worm the first time they attack one and otherwise have a 25% chance of capturing mind worms. (I have read that mind worms have a reduced chance to capture other mind worms, which I could believe, but I don't know if this is true.) It also gives a +10% bonus to psi combat, which there will be a lot of in this variant. IMO, efficiency is the strongest social engineering bonus in SMAC except for the special effects you get from +6 growth and +2 economy. It reduces the number of drones you get from founding lots of bases when the low happy cap is one of the biggest limits on production in the early game, lets you speed up research by unbalancing the sliders without crippling energy losses, and increases the energy per base by limiting the losses to inefficiency. Meanwhile, the only thing -1 police does is prevent you from using nerve-stapling, which you don't really want to do anyways until you repeal the UN charter at which point you can arrange to increase your police rating if you want. -1 morale does actually hurt some because it makes all your units worse at psi combat, only morale doesn't affect mind worms. The Gaians also get +1 food from xenofungus, which doesn't sound like much, but 2 food tiles are rare in the early game without terraforming, and as T-Hawk illustrated, having an effectively infinite source of 2 food tiles for supply crawlers is an underrated bonus. Their starting tech is everyone else's first research target, Centauri Ecology, because it gives access to formers, meaning they can start building formers on the first turn. The Gaians do have one further hidden disadvantage that I'll explain in a bit.

I want to explore what it's possible to do with mind worms under optimal conditions (because if I can't build a sufficient mind worm army from captures under optimal conditions, I surely won't be able to under others), which means I'm playing with different settings from T-Hawk. First, I'm playing with abundant native life. This means xenofungus everywhere and more mind worm attacks, which in my case means more chances to capture mind worms. This also tends to serve as a break on expansion, which hurts the AI but oh well, but it does make it harder to reach truly ridiculous research rates early. Second, I left pod scattering on. Pod scattering leads to a very different and IMO more interesting game even though some of the pod results are ridiculously swing-y. Pods end up being responsible for revealing most of the nutrients/energy/minerals bonuses and add monoliths, which as 2/2/2 tiles are the best non-bonus tiles you can work until the uncapping techs, which makes base placement more interesting because it breaks up the pinwheel resource pattern SMAC inherited from Civ2. More relevantly for this variant, popping pods can result in one or up to eight mind worms appearing next to your unit. While these are technically "bad" results, if you're trying to capture mind worms, they give you a lot more opportunities. If you manage to pop a full eight worms, you expect on average to capture two worms if you can set up to attack the worms. Mind worms will sometimes not attack human-controlled mind worms and just move away, which makes it easier to capture the worms if you're popping pods with your own mind worms. Third, I'm playing on a huge map. This means my opponents will be farther away (this is not relevant for this variant, without a variant rule, this helps me avoid the temptation to add bases with impact rovers rather than colony pods), but also gives more fungus to explore which means more mind worms. The huge map also increases tech costs without a compensating increase in tech production until you can actually fill up all that land. Fourth, I'm playing with tech stagnation enabled, which AFAIK as I know just increases tech costs by a linear 1.5 factor. This might only bring the late game down to 2-3 techs per turn, but I find it interesting mostly because it extends the more interesting early and midgame without unduly lengthening the mechanical endgame.

One of the things that I learned from reading T-Hawk's thread was the reverse engineering of the missing tech mechanic. I wrote up a Python program that finds beelines that avoid the tech holes, or establishes that no such beeline exists. I tested two beelines for this variant, the usual Industrial Automation and going to Centauri Empathy for the ability to build roads in fungus. With abundant alien life and Unity pod scattering, there is a lot of fungus around, and a good military road network is helpful for dealing with mind worms. It also gives the Empath Song unit ability for +50% attack against psi defense and the Green economy model (which I won't be using immediately but will eventually). Sadly, my testing confirmed that the bog-standard Industrial Automation was the right play here even though Centauri Empathy is net three techs versus five for Industrial Automation (Secrets of the Human Brain is required for Centauri Empathy and gives a free tech). It was smarter to just build more formers and clear fungus the hard way places where I need to build roads. For the Gaians, that hidden disadvantage I mentioned earlier is that it's not possible to go straight to Industrial Automation, you have to pick up one tech off the beeline before reaching the goal tech. (The same is true of Centauri Empathy, which is another reason why that beeline doesn't make sense.) Assuming I slot in another tech, there are two allowed paths to Industrial Automation: Information Networks, Industrial Base, Industrial Economics, Planetary Networks, and Industrial Automation; or Information Networks, Planetary Networks, Industrial Base, Industrial Economics, and Industrial Automation. Since the Gaians can run Planned but not Free Market, the latter, which gets Planetary Networks first, is better.

Well, it was funny in my head.

Players, as always, begone!!

I read somewhere that dropbox is no longer good for pics.  Where do people place pics these days?

Welcome to my spoiler thread.

I've never actually played normal Civ4 with Bug, but I have plaed a number of other mods that incorporate it, mainly various Rhys and Fall modmods.

We're having a Snake pick fortunately, and with so few players I should be able to get a leader/civ combo that I want. Now I just have to figure out what I want.

I want to try something really aggressive, like protective.

What is this game about again?

Seceond round of our duel.

First round went to me. Next up Medieval.

1st duel between TheArchduke and me has concluded and we seek now kind mapmaker who draft map for another duel game between us.
Medieval start this time.