SMAC PBEM

[Gavagai]

Would prefer to play with Crossfire.

[Dark Savant]

SMAX it is, then.

So we've got three players?  That's good for a PBEM.   Do we have anyone we can draft as a mapmaker?

How do we want to distribute factions?  I'm thinking snake draft where we pick both a faction and a fat cross starting position.  (Insert handwaving justification that we have a little control over where we make Planetfall.)  For AIs we can pick randomly among the remaining human factions.

As far as the map goes:

Thinker difficulty is fine; size should be standard; and I'd prefer to avoid the high-native-life setting.

I don't think we should restrict probe actions, except for ones that violate the UN charter.  (And I'd play that if we vote to repeal the charter in-game, you can now commit atrocities.)  If you want to ban building the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm specifically, that's fine too.  (I'm going to assume that capturing it from an AI is fine.)

How do you want to contact human-to-human diplomacy?  Full diplo, AI diplo, or something else?

[Dark Savant]

Okay, more options:

We should also turn on Look First (HQ not automatically planted), No Unity Survey (no landmass map at the start), and Bell Curve (no random events), in addition to turning off Blind Research (can select research, with 1/3 of techs not an option) and turning on No Unity Scattering (pods only near start -- we should do this even with manual pod deletion, since you can raise sunken pods above land).

For the map: since we can customize it, we might want to replace the starting scout patrol with a scout rover, and make sure all humans have a 1-colony-pod start in exchange for more bonuses at the start.  (If we start with 2 colony pods, that encourages guessing on where to move the colony pod.)  Actually, we should probably erase pods from human starts entirely and just guarantee 2-3 bonuses (with at least 1 monolith).  What do you think?

Another thing we should prohibit: combat terraforming -- you can't "save up" terraformer turns and then complete the terraform in or near hostile territory.  If you want to perform hostile terraforming, like sinking land into the ocean, you must do so entirely onsite, to give your opponent a chance to respond.  Saving up terraformer turns Civ 1/2-style is okay if done within your own territory.

If an in-game vote is held we should probably follow rule 13 in http://alphacentauri.us/pbemrules.html ... we don't need to e-mail since we can post vote information to the forums.

[Commodore]

Okay, is that a pretty standard thing? Three people is normally considered a bit unstable, and I'm not familiar with the norms for having AIs in the mix too. I'm not against it, really...

...if someone could point me to a patch that actually allows SMAX to run on my Win7 laptop. Still crashing.

[Dark Savant]

Okay, is that a pretty standard thing? Three people is normally considered a bit unstable, and I'm not familiar with the norms for having AIs in the mix too. I'm not against it, really...

...if someone could point me to a patch that actually allows SMAX to run on my Win7 laptop. Still crashing.

Did you install the SMAX v2 patch?  You don't need the XP compatibility patch; that's only needed for vanilla SMAC.  You should, however, try to get vanilla SMAC running first, since that doesn't have copy protection issues -- just install both the vanilla SMAC v4 patch and the XP compatibility patch and try to run that first.  (It helps to install it outside of \Program Files or \Program Files (x86).)
 
On a Windows 7/8/10 computer, Windows wants to install security patches that disable the ability to run copy protected CDs.  I use the crack from this site, instead of disabling the security fix in Windows (which might be better if you run a lot of old games).

Yes, you pretty much want no-CD cracks to run copy-protected CD games on modern Windows.  The games usually run fine otherwise.

Anyway, 3 players is indeed rather unstable, but if we don't get a 4th player, what can you do?

[shallow_thought]

I gave up trying to get my old disks working and just bought the GoG version. That simply worked. It's been fun to revisit, and I'm looking forward to lurking this if you can get it off the ground. I'm afraid that I'm in no position to be a fourth player though - too busy, too lazy (I turn governors on to prevent drone riots) and simply not good enough.

[Dark Savant]

I gave up trying to get my old disks working and just bought the GoG version. That simply worked. It's been fun to revisit, and I'm looking forward to lurking this if you can get it off the ground. I'm afraid that I'm in no position to be a fourth player though - too busy, too lazy (I turn governors on to prevent drone riots) and simply not good enough.

I would personally spend more time as probably rational trying to get things to work, but I both have the experience and there's always that "it's the principle of the thing".

You can certainly beat Transcend playing lazily if you overall strategy is good and you do micromanage hard in the early game (where it's most important), but yeah, Civ 1/Civ 2/SMAC/Civ 3 are just very micromanagement-heavy compared to Civ 4/5.