The Worm Farmer's Gambit

[Iainuki]

As promised, I've attached the Python script I use to search for beelines to techs.  It does a straightforward depth-first search through the tech tree and isn't particularly optimized, so it can take a little while if you tell it to beeline to a tech that's deep in the tree.  If anyone tests it and finds a bug, please tell me so I can fix it. I had to change the file extension because of some brain-dead bullshit on the part of the message board.

[Iainuki]

Meanwhile, in 2176 I'd popped a pod that caused an earthquake on my southern border.  An earthquake creates a small mountain underneath the pod, raising nearby tiles as necessary.



At this point I still only had 4 mind worms.  This was enough so that I wasn't that concerned about an attack from the Hive, since they could only attack me up through that one square land bridge in the west, but not so many that I wanted to go on the offensive.  (I posted a worm boil over in the base closest to the border, taking it off exploration.)  I was very conscious that a couple of bad rolls could wipe out my entire military.  I'd only gotten the one pod with seven worms, which was part of the problem, but in general I hadn't managed to farm enough worms to feel like I had an adequate military.  Looking back on some of my old save games, the only game where I'd managed more mind worms by this point I'd also found the Manifold Nexus, which gives +1 Planet and thus increases your capture chances, early.  If I wanted more effective worm farming, clearly I needed to have beelined Centauri Empathy and switched to Green as soon as possible.  This definitely would have been easier without tech stagnation, though admittedly I didn't start in on Centauri Empathy even after I got done with Industrial Automation.

I had a lot of rover formers compared to my total former count, because up to this point most of the terraforming I had been doing was building roads and sensors and planting forests.  I would start building more 1-move formers in the upcoming turns.



My bases in 2181 hadn't changed much since I finished the Planetary Transit System.  I was producing virtually the same labs output, 34 instead of 32.  I hadn't added any bases because every base had been building supply crawlers.  Now that I've finished the projects, I've started building Network Nodes in preparation for the next phase of the game, swapping to colony pods in bases that had excess food and would grow into unhappiness at size 4.







I'd kept exploring and made some tentative dotmaps for the north and east of the long winding continent I shared with the Hive.





Speaking of them, remember that earthquake?  Yeah, it turns out that it built another land bridge to the Hive, which I noticed when Yang came to tell me to get off his land.  I would end up parking the two mind worms visible there to keep watch on the new Hive land bridge.



And then I found the Freshwater Sea, the first feature I'd seen with an actual production bonus, +1 food on its water tiles, so 2/0/2 with only a tidal harness before the uncapping techs or 5/0/3 with a kelp farm and tidal harness after them.  Note that tiles of the Sea had been visible to me since 2167, and that if I'd ever just clicked one of them, I could have noticed that they gave 2 food rather than the usual 1.  The earthquake had almost certainly nuked some of them, though I couldn't know for sure because they were outside my vision when it went off.  The Sea is definitely not the best feature in the game, but nutrients are no less important in SMAC than in other Civ games, and the Sea is most useful right after Gene Splicing.  There was a land energy bonus down there that I had already settled so I could borehole it for the extra energy, and the Freshwater Sea further decided it: I would be forward-settling the Hive.

[T-hawk]

I think of the Planetary Transit System as one of the four must-have early projects.  The other three are the Human Genome Project, the Virtual World, and the Weather Paradigm.  "Must-have" is an exaggeration, it's certainly possible to win without any of them given how weak the AI is, but these four projects are the ones with payoffs that far exceed their cost.

This is true, with the caveat that sometimes the Virtual World is unimportant if you're going to get to and enact nerve stapling soon anyway. If you're not the University, it takes a long time until you want to build network nodes over more pods and formers. It's common to let an AI build the VW and then conquer it, particularly from the University.

Yes, to accumulate any significant captured mind worm army, you need Green economics. That's what I was telling Fluffball way back when - it's easy to envision a huge wave of wild worms, but it really doesn't play out that way.

Freshwater Sea tiles are 4 food with kelp, not 5 (kelp adds +2 not +3.)

[Iainuki]

Remember how I said I was recovering when I first posted this? Well, the "recovering" part went less well than I'd hoped. I hope to come back to this when I'm actually healed, but who knows when that will be given the pandemic. For now I'm trying to find games that I can play with very limited use of a mouse (it's possible to play SMAC without a mouse, but too difficult for me).