A civ vet explores Alpha Centauri (SMAC)

[Bacchus]

You can't build boreholes on slopes, and you can't build them adjacent to each other, that's about it.

[T-hawk]

Yet another good reason to not ruin the fun of the game with them. 

Using a game mechanic in exactly the way it's meant to be, with no bugs or mechanical abuses at all, constitutes ruining the game now?  Man, did a supply crawler kill your parents or something?  You're more scared of them than Planet's citizens are of the mind worms.  

   Cost +10 minerals if both weapon and armor greater than one
   Cost +10 minerals if land unit’s weapon, armor, speed all greater than one

So I guess I kind of misremembered. There's no explicit increase like there is for armor on air units, but armor still gets pricey on a rover/hovertank chassis.

The explicit increase is in that last line.  Both of those will apply to a rover chassis.  It's not a big multiplier but it's still enough that you may as well build two separate weapon and armor units instead.

If Santiago shows up with 50 units, you'll want 5-1 rovers instead of 5-3.

She won't.  The AI rarely if ever manages more than one transport full for a continental invasion.  Miriam's famous stacks of 20 laser infantry all come by walking overland.

Also, even if she does surprise you with enough to take a base, it's not fatal at all.  Bases are expendable and change hands readily, and reconquering it with newly rushed/upgraded units is easy.  It's not like Civ 4/5/6 where losing a city cripples a significant chunk of your core.

BTW, not mentioned yet: Rovers aren't limited to one attack per turn like Civ horse units; they can keep attacking as long as they have movement left.  A rover can often kill two units in a turn.  Ships and needlejets expend their remaining movement when attacking, but rovers don't.  Note that a unit's movement is modified by damage, so if a rover takes 50% or more damage, its movement divides down to 1 and it won't have any remaining moves.

[T-hawk]

You can't build boreholes on slopes, and you can't build them adjacent to each other, that's about it.

Also not in fungus or a monolith.  A slope is defined as a tile where any adjacent tile is at a lower elevation (in intervals of 1000m); although a coastal tile next to ocean is okay.  Since boreholes can't be adjacent, plan out a 2x2 grid pattern to fit as many as you can.  If there's a spot where a borehole would fit your grid but runs afoul of the slope rule, terraform DOWN that tile to allow it (much easier than terraforming up adjacent tiles.)  Also note that a borehole terminates a river flowing into the tile, so don't do that.




Is this a screenshot for ants?  imgur.com is a much better image hosting site that doesn't screw with the resolution.

- Artillery gets a special form of combat, apparently. How does that work?

Artillery units (including all sea units with a weapon) have a Fire command.  The range is two spaces and is never obstructed.  What happens next depends on what's in the target square:

- If it contains no artillery unit, your arty fires one round that damages all enemy units.

- If it contains an artillery unit of the same domain as the attacker (land or sea), an Artillery Duel occurs, where both artillery units fight with their weapon values until one dies.  There is no collateral damage.  Note that the game does NOT give you the Confirm-Odds popup; the duel begins immediately.

- If it contains an artillery unit of the opposite domain, an Artillery Exchange occurs, where both artillery units fire one round at each other.  The land unit gets a 50% bonus for Land Based Guns.  There is no collateral damage.

The artillery duel is also part of why armor on sea units is bad.  Any sea combat unit can force another into an artillery duel, which uses the weapon value for both and ignores the armor.  The AI does know to do this.

[haphazard1]

You're more scared of them than Planet's citizens are of the mind worms.  

Heh. I loved the quote when I built my first Holo Theater. "No one wants to hear the true story of how he died screaming, clawing his own eyes out."

The explicit increase is in that last line.  Both of those will apply to a rover chassis.  It's not a big multiplier but it's still enough that you may as well build two separate weapon and armor units instead.

Two units does mean more unit support costs. Although I guess some socieal engineering choices could make a big difference there. Or boosted production from boreholes.

Seems that I could use a mix of glass cannons and minimal offense armored tanks. At least if I am building stacks of units. Units intended for remote duty by themselves may still want both.

BTW, not mentioned yet: Rovers aren't limited to one attack per turn like Civ horse units; they can keep attacking as long as they have movement left.  A rover can often kill two units in a turn.  Ships and needlejets expend their remaining movement when attacking, but rovers don't.  Note that a unit's movement is modified by damage, so if a rover takes 50% or more damage, its movement divides down to 1 and it won't have any remaining moves.

Very useful info -- thanks T-hawk!

[v8mark]

BTW, not mentioned yet: Rovers aren't limited to one attack per turn like Civ horse units; they can keep attacking as long as they have movement left. A rover can often kill two units in a turn. Ships and needlejets expend their remaining movement when attacking, but rovers don't. Note that a unit's movement is modified by damage, so if a rover takes 50% or more damage, its movement divides down to 1 and it won't have any remaining moves.

Also, choppers* don't.

* Choppers are approximately as OP as supply crawlers, so should definitely not be used ever, lest you ruin the game.

[Fluffball]

As I said I have no moral problem with supply crawlers, but they make winning on the hardest difficulty brain dead trivial so i don't use them. You could nerve gas chopper the entire world into oblivion every game but that doesn't sound fun to me either. The clearly broken mechanics should be pointed out to new players and they can decide to use them or not.

[T-hawk]

As I said I have no moral problem with supply crawlers, but they make winning on the hardest difficulty brain dead trivial so i don't use them.

Prove it.  Show us a game where supply crawlers made winning on the hardest difficulty brain dead trivial, where it wouldn't already have been so without them.  Until then, you're making all of this up.  Sorry for the hostility, but you are doing haphazard and any other readers a real disservice by lobotomizing off a part of the game without even letting them consider it.  The burden of proof to support your claims is on you.

Supply crawlers add a few minerals and nutrients by crawling.  They don't do anything different than growing a base or building facilities like recycling tanks, or exploit any bugs or unintended design behavior.  They just do it with good and strategically interesting efficiency for the cost.  None of this is anything remotely like anything that can be described as brain dead trivial or broken.

I will grant the specific concern that they do make winning secret projects trivial.  I can understand an argument to avoid that, even without the abuses around upgrading them and flipping the industry SE, which could qualify as broken.  But no SP makes winning the whole game trivial (well, except, tautologically, the Ascent.)  Don't crucify an entire game subsystem and the completely reasonable uses like rushing a prototype for this one sin.

[Fluffball]

It's not me that views half a dozen or more things about smac broken, the smac community does. T hawk you're literally the only person in twenty years of taking about the game I've ever run into that doesn't think crawlers are broken. . I don't find you hostile I find you confusing. Use these things if you want but no one in theit right mind is going to argue this game isn't exploitable.

Also you and I have very different play styles. I never abuse things like city state food in civ 5 our sensor ships in gc3. It's fun to find those things but I find it pointless to abuse them. i know you enjoying exploring holes in various game designs and that's totally fine with me. Have fun.

[T-hawk]

Because everyone else does what you're doing, repeating the hive-mind dogma without ever actually trying it for yourself.  Despite being the one defending Yang's philosophies, I'm the one being an independent thinker on this issue.

SMAC has exploitable and broken things, sure, but supply crawlers apart from secret projects just aren't one of them.  They are entirely comparable to many other things in terms of cost and yield.  "The AI doesn't do it" isn't a valid reason unless you're also throwing away dozens of other things the AI doesn't do.  The community doesn't want to use supply crawlers because they take tedious micromanagement and are subjectively less fun than growing bases and building facilities. But they lazily and thoughtlessly use the "broken" excuse to externalize the blame onto the developers instead of internalizing that it's their own ill-defined reluctance at fault.  (Now I sound like Yang again.)

I find it pointless to pretend that the AI is any sort of real opponent or that the player should make concessions to enable them.  I look for an objective standard instead, like the turn clock or Civ 4's score formula, and use all available tools toward that end.

[Fluffball]

I look for an objective standard instead, like the turn clock or Civ 4's score formula, and use all available tools toward that end.

I know. I fully understand how you play and am fine with it. As a matter of fact I sometimes play game that way too (and I HAVE built hundreds of crawlers in some games). You just don't seem to understand why people play other ways.

It doesn't matter how much you argue various mechanics like the ones I've listed are valuable tools that should be exploited, I'm always going to find them unacceptable as part of the "real" game. I'm not trying to get you to start playing a 20 year old video game a different way, or stop using city states in Civ5 or whatever the heck else, T-Hawk, just relax.