A civ vet explores Alpha Centauri (SMAC)

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the comments, Fluffball and v8mark!

I am still learning where everything is in the tech tree and how it all works together. I am sure that I am not doing things in anything even close to an optimal order. That will take more time and experience to get a proper understanding so that I set my priorities correctly. But I am having fun just experimenting with things, listening to the quotes, reading the Datalinks, and trying stuff to see if it works.

On the map, I seem to be close to the northern edge; I did not realize this at first, so I will need to shift my exploration units back south. Oh well, not too much lost, just some time.

From the options I see when talking to Zakharov, I can demand he remove units from my territory. How is the AI about complying with such demands, and how offended do they get when you ask? These are not the "hard" borders of Civ IV, where entering without an agreement is an act of war. But I am not sure how seriously the AI takes such trespassing.

I need to get another colony pod out and secure my border region with the University, but that area is just thick with xenofungus so I had been ignoring it. Need a couple more units before I send a colony pod wading into that stuff, I think.

[Fluffball]

The AI will warn you to remove your units from their territory and if you don't comply they may you give you an ultimatum to return them to the nearest base or go to war.

As for the reverse, it depends on their mood above their portrait when you talk to them. If they want to be friends with you, they'll usually comply. If not, I'd probably just ignore the units lest you start an war too early.

You can also use the faction leader's personally to guess what they might do. Morgan or Lal (you) will be much more reasonable about keeping the peace. Zak seems to go either way if I remember right.

[T-hawk]

I don't think Unity pods can yield a colony pod.  Starting with two is common though.

If your sliders for economy and labs differ by more than 10%, yes, you get efficiency penalties.  The magnitude depends on your faction's Efficiency rating, and disappears at +4 or better.  The psych slider does not incur any penalty.

Treaty of Friendship gives you a bit of commerce, like Civ 4's automatic trade routes.  The value depends on the base size, its energy production, and number of economic techs you possess; so it can be a while before the yield reaches even +1 for it to be visible.

I don't think I've ever demanded an AI to withdraw.  There's no real reason to - they're not smart enough to be setting up for a sneak attack.  Mostly any demand just angers them into war.  If they demand you withdraw, not complying risks war too, so just say yes.

The map sizes (and many other things) are defined in a file alpha.txt which you can look at in the game directory.

Press X a few times to zoom all the way out and you can see the entire outline of Planet and where you are on it. This works from the first turn. Press Z to zoom back in. (Turn on the map grid in the preferences if it's off.)

Use supply crawlers, once you have the tech.  Otherwise, as Yang says, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

No need to wade a colony pod into fungus.  Ignore the area and go somewhere else.  It's not like Civs 4 and 5 where most land is positive and a pink dot projects power over a large area.  Bad land in SMAC is bad.

[Fluffball]

I don't think I've ever demanded an AI to withdraw.  There's no real reason to - they're not smart enough to be setting up for a sneak attack.  Mostly any demand just angers them into war.  If they demand you withdraw, not complying risks war too, so just say yes.

In my experience it's extremely common for them to set up "sneak attacks". Sneak attack in quotations because if you pledge blood truce, they'll cram dozens of units into your territory and then attack at the first opportunity.

Basically if the AI doesn't like you, they're going to move their units as if there at war anyway. If they do like you, there is nothing to worry about, they probably don't have many units in your stuff, and they'll comply anyway.

Not using crawlers is not needlessly crippling yourself, it's making the game fun instead of just exploiting it into uselessness. It's along the same lines as just using cheat commands; the AI can't use them and they're ludicrously overpowered. Of course if it's fun, use them, the same with cheat commands, but -- especially for a new players -- I'd say just pretend they don't exist at all.


Edit: Another benefit of asking AIs to remove their units is to get things 'out in the open'. If a hostile AI I'm at peace with is flooding my territory with units, I'm fine with keeping the peace by having them remove their units. And if they won't remove them, I want to be in war so I can use my tiles and roads again, and eliminate threats like probes.

[Mardoc]

Use supply crawlers, once you have the tech.  Otherwise, as Yang says, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

Not using crawlers is not needlessly crippling yourself, it's making the game fun instead of just exploiting it into uselessness. It's along the same lines as just using cheat commands; the AI can't use them and they're ludicrously overpowered. Of course if it's fun, use them, the same with cheat commands, but -- especially for a new players -- I'd say just pretend they don't exist at all.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

[Fluffball]

Use supply crawlers, once you have the tech.  Otherwise, as Yang says, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

Not using crawlers is not needlessly crippling yourself, it's making the game fun instead of just exploiting it into uselessness. It's along the same lines as just using cheat commands; the AI can't use them and they're ludicrously overpowered. Of course if it's fun, use them, the same with cheat commands, but -- especially for a new players -- I'd say just pretend they don't exist at all.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Yes absolutely, I didn't mean that to be calling T-Hawk a cheater or something  . But using something that even the people that advocate for them label as "exploiting" should at least be made known to a new player, especially on a website with a sort of "honor code" style of play like this one has. Play with them at your own risk.

[T-hawk]

I advocate supply crawlers because the opposition to them is so overblown.  They're not ludicrous or broken or cheating.  They're merely a good payback ratio.  30 minerals plus terraformer time (that also cost minerals to build and support) to pay back 2/turn crawling from forest.  Later you can crawl 4 nutrients from a condenser and then 6 from a soil enricher.  That's good, but entirely functioning as designed and doesn't meet any plausible definition of broken.  Population-booming is more extreme in terms of good payback, but everybody says to do that.

I really think most of the people howling about crawlers haven't actually played with them at scale. The logistics are more involved and limiting than you realize, including the opportunity cost of not working the tile with a normal laborer, and the danger of defending them from getting killed by mind worms and replacing the ones that do.

Most of the opposition adds up to "but the AI doesn't use crawlers".  By that standard, you're going to throw away half the game that the AI doesn't use either.  All the advanced terraforming options including raise-terrain and mirrored energy parks, pop-booming, half the unit special abilities, nerve stapling. What's the point of playing SMAC if you're going to refuse what differentiates it from Civ?

I can see more of an argument against upgrading crawlers to rush SPs and flipping SE settings to get more minerals. That's arguably broken, unintended emergent behavior from those design elements. But don't throw out the reasonable uses of crawling resources and unmodified SP rushing for fear of those. There is middle ground.

[Brian Shanahan]

This thread has reignited my love for SMAC as I fired up a game and re-thought about why it was and still is one of the best games of all time, regardless of category. 

I thought some vets might enjoy this guy's writing on the legendary narrative of SMAC. He's a fantastic writer and has puts into words exactly why the quotes are so powerful. If you're not familiar with the "lore" of the game, you might want to skip it, as it could be seen as spoiler-y I suppose.

https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time-here/

"It is occasionally claimed that SMAC has one of the best stories ever presented in a video game.  This is an especially impressive achievement given that it is a strategy game where the action takes place at civilization-wide scales.  How is it possible to craft a compelling narrative in an impersonal god-game?  After all, the game design does not allow the player to interact with any recognizable characters directly.  In the game, the player spends his time setting empire-wide policies, controlling city production, and moving abstracted, sizable military formations.  So if there aren’t any characters, and if the plot (as defined by what happens when) is largely determined by the player, where is the grist for narrative?"

Reading through the blog and the faction descriptions, I'm struck by the similarities to some of the cultures in Gordon Dickson's Childe Cycle, for example the Spartans could very well be Dorsai, the Lord's Believers are pretty much the Friendlies, Morganites the Cetans, University the Newtonians and so on.

I wonder was Reynolds a fan?

[Fluffball]

@Brian, I haven't read the books you're talking about, but I feel like there would be a lot of similarities between any sci-fi work that tries to distill humans into various ideological camps. You're always going to people trying to deal with a survival situation using logic, weapons, or religion. A lot of Stephen King books highlight stuff like that. Any game that can talk about that in an interesting way is off to a good start!


@T-Hawk, I consider 3 things broken about the crawlers. 
1) the upgrade "exploit" you are agreeing with me on. 
2) It allows you to get ALL the good secret projects versus if you build them "normally" and the AI gets its fair share. Because the AI can't use them you can build every SP on the turn you discover the tech. It gives the game a lot more flavor if various AIs have SP bonuses.
3) The fact that you can make an infinitely powerful city (you could if you were bored enough make a single city that used every single land tile in the entire game). That just stacks bonuses to silly levels even on a practical scale. Crawl 20 tiles for your super-city with all the research bonus secret projects and the AI is just completely unable to even mimic a functioning opponent. 

Let's not pretend the AI is phenomenal, but let's not intentionally kick its teeth out before the game starts either. 

There is no downside to using crawlers, unlike the trade-offs you make in the civics menu to enjoy things like pop booms, unlimited free support of units, bonus energy, etc.

I have no moral problems with crawlers and they're an awesome concept for when you are enjoying the sandbox of a game, but if you want to give the AI a chance, I'd skip it.

[T-hawk]

If the argument is to cripple yourself until the AI is equal, why not mandate that you automate all units and formers and city governors? That should level your playing field.  Isn't anything else an exploit since the AI won't do it?

Less sarcastically put: the player is always going to be better than the AIs.  There's no reason to draw a line at supply crawlers.  Pop-booming and boreholes and energy parks are equally missing from the AI and at the same power level discrepancy over them.

I can understand wanting the AIs to get some SPs to have something interesting to play against.  But if you want that, just let them do it outright (or even give them in the editor), rather than pretending that they won it when you easily could have.

3) The fact that you can make an infinitely powerful city (you could if you were bored enough make a single city that used every single land tile in the entire game).

Any Civ game (even any 4X game) lets you take over the map and go to silly extremes if you deliberately stop short of a win condition.  That's got nothing to do with crawlers.

But to take the argument seriously anyway: this is exactly what I meant about overlooking the logistics.  You realize it would take 3200 city-turns to build 3200 crawlers no matter the mineral count, right?  And ~40 turns to move into position?  And however long to terraform the tiles to something useful?  And the opportunity cost of whatever you're not building instead of the crawlers?  Like 3200 military units to just go win instead?

It's the same idea as the loophole that merging colony pods into a base lets you exceed the hab limit.  Sure, it can go infinite in a silly way... but it doesn't play out as a problem in an actual game since the reward for the cost (direct and opportunity) really isn't worth it compared to everything else you could be doing.

Yes, crawlers let you reach outside the city radius.  Doing things beyond the normal boundaries of Civ is the whole point of SMAC.

(Hey haphazard, get to playing more to distract us from these arguments )