A civ vet explores Alpha Centauri (SMAC)

[T-hawk]

Ignore fungus for now, work around it and use better tiles instead.  It's a waste of terraformer turns to clear until you run out of other tiles.  Midgame, you get the Fungicidal special to put on formers, make a few of those to clear it.  It comes pretty late (about 3/4 of the way through the tech tree) that fungus tiles get enough bonuses to be worth working.

Forest tiles are king for terraforming in the early game before you get to condensors and boreholes.  Not least because they can automatically spread.

In the midgame, the priority becomes to clear fungus tiles adjacent to your cities, since that's where mind worms can spawn to be really dangerous. Where there is space between fungus and your city, you always have a turn to react and counterattack the worms first.

[Fluffball]

Forests are really easy and powerful. I prefer to tear the planet to shreds with tons of terraforming because it gives me more to do. :D

[haphazard1]

Thanks, Mardoc and T-hawk. For the near future I expect to have far more work for my formers than available turns, so working around the xenofungus sounds good. And self-spreading tile improvements sounds like a really good thing.

[haphazard1]

Played a bit further, exploring my immediate area and growing UN Headquarters a bit. No signs of hostile native life yet. I got Industrial Base from the Unity pod at the start, and have researched Centauri Ecology to allow me to build formers. I have also built a colony pod to expand, which brings me to my first major decision: where to send it?

I found a region off-shore with geothermals, but I have not been able to find out what exactly that does from the manual or help. Good, bad, neutral?
I have found a few bonus tiles, but all except one also have xenofungus so not immediately all that useful.
There is a river valley to my west, some of which is actually rainy (most of my area is fairly dry), but it is thick with xenofungus.

Just south of one of my scouts could get the geothermal area, two energy bonus tiles, a nutrient bonus, and a mineral bonus tile. It might not have much food until I could clear some fungus, though, so I am not sure if that is a good location or not. I could shift towards the other nutrient bonus which does not have xenofungus and still get geothermals and the energy bonus tiles, but that area is mostly arid.

Thoughts and comments appreciated!

[T-hawk]

The geothermal is +1 energy per square, I think I remember. It's not helpful until you can get some sea formers to plant kelp there.

No great spots for the colony pod. I think I'd send it to the closest spot that can reach the east nutrient bonus. Then build a former first from the new base and plant forest on the nutrients. Also start building at least two formers at University Base to plant forest there too, then make roads to speed more colony pods.

In general you want University Base to pop out colony pods as fast as it can. Ideally it will produce each pod at size 2 when it has 2 of the 3 food rows full, so it will grow back to size 2 right away without wasting food. Don't grow from size 2->3 because that wastes food (costs 50% more) compared to growing 1->2.

[haphazard1]

Thanks, T-hawk. The city-shrinks-when-building-colony-pod mechanic brings back memories of the early Civs; I am going to have to factor that into my planning. Fortunately UN Headquarters has pretty good food and grows steadily.

Do I have any way to control my economy/energy at this stage of the game? By default it is split 50/50 for stockpiling energy and labs, and I did not find any way to modify that. But it may be tucked away somewhere I am not aware of yet.

I am also still getting familiar with the information available to me on my base and units. How many units the base can support, max population, etc. is still a bit of a mystery. Need to go back and re-read that part of the manual again, I think.

At a general level, I am enjoying the atmosphere of the game. The graphics are no longer modern, of course, but the sounds and overall appearance fit well with the futuristic setting. And the voice acting for the various quotes and story bits has been very good.

[naufragar]

Do I have any way to control my economy/energy at this stage of the game? By default it is split 50/50 for stockpiling energy and labs, and I did not find any way to modify that. But it may be tucked away somewhere I am not aware of yet.

I am also still getting familiar with the information available to me on my base and units. How many units the base can support, max population, etc. is still a bit of a mystery. Need to go back and re-read that part of the manual again, I think.

If you're seeing the 50/50 breakdown where I think you are, there should be arrows to adjust on the side of the bars. Otherwise, you can get this from the social engineering screen. (Shortcut is "e" I think.)

Someone else can remind us of the support defaults. I'm blanking. Pop limit is 7 before a facility called the Hab Complex, which raises the limit to 14. The cap is lifted completely by a facility called the Habitation Dome. (Speaking of facilities, they too have voice acting! Only for the first time you build them, so don't exit that pop up too quickly, but I've always found that cool.) The Peacekeepers have a special ability where their pop can be two higher than other factions' limits (so 9 instead of 7).

Any of the above might be wrong. If somebody else corrects me, go with that.

[Fluffball]

Yes, E, is your civics and economy shortcut. 

SMAC will not give you popups about a lot of things like new civics available, so be sure to pay attention to your techs.

I recommend going through the HQ menu as well as preferences before you get too far into the game. I like to have the game pause after every single thing a base builds as well as at the end of the turn, both of which I believe are not default.

You can also take a look at the datalinks, tech tree, unit workshop and so on.

I personally like to have a base dedicated to colony production throughout stages of the game, getting progressively closer to your front lines. I disagree with T-Hawk slightly in that I would use your 3rd city or so to do that rather than the capital (after capital pops out a few pods of course). That AI is VERY aggressive about getting secret projects, and some of them are way too good to pass up at least trying for, so I like to have a powerful capital early on. SP (wonders) in SMAC are much more powerful than Civ4, and for good reason. Civ4 balanced them. 

[T-hawk]

naufragar is right about everything.  The sliders are on the social engineering screen, press E.  That screen also shows what your current support level allows.

To get your economy going, build more bases; energy production comes from the base square plus 1-2 population working forest.

Crossposted with fluffball: yeah University Base will want to start secret projects (Weather Paradigm) sometime soon, but not until at least 4 or so more colony pods.  Also building SPs is considerably more efficient by upgrading supply crawlers instead of with straight minerals, if you're willing to exploit that.  Build the crawlers ahead of time, crawl forest for minerals to build more, then find some expensive design to upgrade them into to cash back into the SP.

[Fluffball]

One other note on the E screen, check out the right hand side where it lists the bonuses and negatives for how your choices impact things (if I'm remembering this right.) You can start to fantasize about the type of economy you'll want.

If you go strong into any particular area, you get some incredible bonuses. For example heavy on growth civics (which includes building modifiers on a per-base level) and you can put your cities into a "pop-boom" which allows them to grow 1 per turn. A decent amount into the econ route and you get +1 energy per square.

Early on you'll probably want growth and industry, later on you can mess with efficiency, morale, etc. IIRC you can make yourself immune to inefficiency. Everything comes with a penalty to something else of course.

Edit: The supply crawler thing T-Hawk is talking about is one of those things I was hinting at in my first post when I said the game can easily be broken. You'll have to figure out how much you want to use them, if at all. Crawlers can make the highest difficulty level a complete joke, so I don't use them at all, or limit them to crawler wasted tiles between bases.