T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[LKendter]

Interface question - probably just spacing out, but where can I see a view of the whole tech tree?

[T-hawk]

This chapter brings me to the verge of pop-booming, but the climax will come in the next session.



Lal makes a surprise attack!  Looks like that early stab continues to make the game interesting.  Lal has a rover up in the north there which kills my terraformer.  The rover is no threat to my base, since it has a 1-1-1 unit behind the free perimeter defense and is just about to build a second.



The other cool news was that pact brother Morgan immediately joined the vendetta on my side.

A couple turns later, that rover did attack my base to kill one scout patrol.  The loss of the police unit would make the base riot.  I used an interface trick during production upkeep to avoid that.  When a base earlier in the list builds something, press F4 to see the list of bases, and from there you can click onto the troubled base to assign a doctor or change the build order to a replacement police unit.



Then the University also declared vendetta!  That was after I refused to hand over a demanded tech.  And the University has a probe that attacks mine!  But mine wins the coin flip battle.  Although my probe gets redlined on health, such that it drops to 1 movement, where it can't reach the Uni base to infiltrate.  I backed it up into PK territory to try to heal it, but it got killed by a PK unit.



Hey, check that out, my skimship found a Unity Pod.  That means we must be near a faction start.  I alertly decide NOT to pop the pod yet, lest something bad happen to the ship.



And yes, after a couple turns of navigating around that pod, my boat contacts Sparta.  She offers me 30 credits for Gaia's comm frequency.  Keeping Sparta isolated is tempting, but the money is compelling enough to accept.  Sparta is Seething and demands my tech on Doctrine Loyalty; I decide to pay up for the moment.  I then decide I can risk popping the unity pod, and get 25 credits from that too.



Gaia later traded me a map of Spartan territory, so that worked out to my favor after all.  Sparta is isolated on a midsize island.  That island happens to be Mount Planet, which is like Garland Crater with extra minerals, plus the slope is usually rainy, plus in this case there are also several mineral and nutrient bonuses.  Thanks to all that, Sparta has been starting very well for an isolated AI, although they're already out of room already.



Got an interesting terraform to show for the first time.  It's been all forests and a few farms so far, but here's a special one.  This is a mineral bonus on a rocky tile.  Rocky mines produce 4 minerals -- but that is limited by the production cap to 2, and since the restriction lifts with the same tech that enables boreholes, mines hardly ever get used.  This is the one and only case where you do, since the mineral bonus lifts that cap for the rocky mine.  Also a mine on a mineral bonus adds an extra (undocumented) +1 mineral on top of the mine itself and the bonus, coming to a total of 7.  Of course then I parked a supply crawler on it to harvest the 7 minerals.

2154: University completes the Virtual World.  Wow, holy crap, that is the fastest I ever saw the AI do that, thanks to the Garland Crater minerals.  (I'll resist the urge to needle Fluffball about how the supply crawlers obviously made it brain dead trivial for me to beat that. )



Domestically, my bases are all now building Children's Creches.  Here's a detail involved with that.  While building the Creche, a base should stop accumulating food once it has enough to grow after the creche shrinks the food box.  With a total of +5 growth from the Hive, Planned, and the creche, that means 15 food.  So this base can stop here and work all forest; the same turn the creche completes, the food box will shrink to match that 15 food and the base will immediately grow.  This is SMAC's equivalent to building a granary right before growth in Civs 1-3 and halfway to growth in Civ 4.

Most bases grew to size 3 immediately upon completing the Creche, which meant needing a third police unit.  This is starting to strain support costs yet again, but paying a mineral to police a drone is still better than making him a doctor.

Building the Children's Creches also means I start inadvertently taking advantage of the Stockpile Energy bug.  I'll mention this more in a followup post.  For now, the energy meant I had some extra to rush the creches in the newest bases, particularly the last two that also used the growth discount from size 1->2 as well as 2->3.



2156: Intellectual Integrity finishes.  Now I have access to the most important unit in the game: the 1-1-1 Police Infantry with double police powers.  I visit the unit workshop to design it, and upgrade a few of the existing patrols to that model in bases that have hit size 3 and need the police now.

This unit still only costs 10 minerals (7 with the industry discount), because of how costing for special abilities works.  When the workshop shows a cost of 1, that doesn't mean 1 mineral row.  Each such "cost" is instead 25% of the unit's base price.  So in this case 1 mineral row × 1.25 still rounds down to 1 row, so the special ability ends up being free.  (This is why clean reactors aren't as good as you think.  The stated cost is 2, but that doesn't mean 2 mineral rows, it means +50% of the unit's base price.)

My next research is Gene Splicing.  But then:



I happen to chat with Gaia, and amazingly she's got Gene Splicing and offers to trade it to me!!  I guessed right that this tech is an AI favorite, and tradeable because it doesn't have any secret projects.  That's a great boost, saves another eight or ten turns on my beeline to the restriction-lifting techs.



Next up is Ecological Engineering, to lift the mineral production cap and enable the almighty boreholes.  I've been showing the select-tech dialog in particular for the important techs because it's the only screen that actually shows every effect.  The in-game Datalinks page for Eco Eng does not mention lifting the restriction to allow 3+ minerals per square, so it's very easy to not know where that is.

2157: Here we go, here goes the main show.  The last of the twelve Creches just completed and we're ready to boom.



The Hive begins the Human Genome Project, and will complete it this same turn.  Here's how.  First, I have five supply crawlers within movement range of that base; three that had been harvesting forest minerals, and two that were newly completed this turn in the first two bases.



Then I temporarily switch out of both Planned and Wealth SE choices, to get rid of the industry discounts.  Now each crawler is worth 27 minerals instead of the 21 they actually cost to produce.



I add each of the five crawlers to the secret project.  27 × 5 comes to 135 minerals towards the project.



Then flip back to Planned and Wealth SE (the 135 credits gets refunded) so that the industry discounts are back on, and now the discounted cost of the HGP is 140 minerals and the base's normal production can finish it this turn.

With the Human Genome Project completing in my first base, every base will immediately receive the talent on this same turn.  And with all the Creches in place, that means it's time to set up the Golden Ages.



This is what it looks like.  A size-3 base needs 4 psych, to convert the first drone to a talent.  Then police handle the rest of the drones.  The Human Genome Project will then apply after the police to add a second talent to cause the Golden Age.

Getting that much psych requires 80% on the psych slider, and actually that's not even enough in two of the most energy-poor bases, so they also need to hire a doctor.  Of course 80% psych almost completely halts tech and economy for the moment.  But it's worth it as we'll soon see.



Who says Yang's Human Hive is not a utopia!

I'm leaving off here, to play out the population boom in the next session.  That's going to take enormous crunchy amounts of micromanagement to perfectly manage the psych and food and crawlers and police at every base, and it'll need my full fresh attention.

[T-hawk]

Overviews of my area and the world.  Now that I remembered how to do this for game reports - put these overviews in a separate post so they don't make the text-report posts super wide.

[T-hawk]

Interface question - probably just spacing out, but where can I see a view of the whole tech tree?

No such view exists in-game.  It was actually a significant advance when Civ 3 invented that.

I made this view a while back: http://dos486.com/alpha/horz-tech.png

Not perfect, but it's the best visualization I could manage with such a highly interconnected graph.

[Modo]

Are the secret projects the only criteria by which AI's trade techs or not or are there any other like holding onto a military edge or something?
Oh, and you really managed to not fluff his balls .

EDIT: is it feasible or even worth trying to maitain a constant golden age?

[T-hawk]

I'm not entirely sure. A secret project is the only explicit denial they will say. They'll often say things like "I cannot trust you with that tech", but it's unknown whether there's any particular reason for the denial or just generally because they don't like you.

It's possible to maintain a Golden Age as long as you want, but it's not really worth it unless needed for pop-booming. The GA gives the base +2 Growth and +1 Economy. The growth isn't needed once you've already boomed to the max. The economy is useful in one narrow case, if you're running Wealth but not Free Market, then it gets you to the magic +2. But that generally costs as much in psych as you get back out of it.

[Modo]

Thanks, T-hawk. By the way, does this game has a world builder of sorts?
I've seen many things that can be configured, was interested in changing an AI's stance; that would for example allow to test the alternative reasons why an AI would refuse to trade a tech, if any.
EDIT: I don't suppose this game has a WFYABTA mechanic or something similar, does it?

[T-hawk]

It does, it's called the scenario editor, somewhere in the menus. Not sure if it can edit an AI's diplomatic attitude.

It doesn't have a strict WFYABTA limit like Civ 4, but the AIs do grow increasingly hostile while you're in the top three of the faction power rankings. Random events also skew worse against the top-ranked factions, and there are some like a meteor strike that occur only against the faction in the lead.

[T-hawk]

On the Stockpile Energy bug, here's how it happens.  Stockpile Energy is SMAC's version of Civ's Wealth, a build order that converts production to money.  After a base completes a facility or secret project, if there is nothing else in the build queue, Stockpile Energy is automatically set as the current build.  But that energy is credited this same turn, essentially using your production twice, because energy processing comes after minerals processing and by that time the Stockpile order has been enacted.

It's possible to avoid that by intentionally inserting something else into the build queue before you complete each building.  But most of the community thinks that's a silly amount of micromanagement and just accepts the benefit.  This doesn't happen with units, because the build order stays on another copy of that unit instead of defaulting back to Stockpile.  But you can intentionally invoke the behavior by manually adding Stockpile to the build queue before completing each unit.

And I want to bring up a similar significant behavior while on the topic.  Another loophole is that it's possible to double-work the same tile with multiple bases.  One base can work a tile, and if it finishes a build to let you jump into the base screen, then you can assign that base off that tile, press F4 to go to another base, and make that base work that same tile on that same turn.  (Civ 3 permits this too, and I made a lot of noise about such tricks when Realms Beyond started up the Epics, which led to Sirian and Sullla diligently making sure Civ 4's interface would permit no such shenanigans.)  This is very important for population booming to double-work nutrient tiles between multiple bases.

This all came to mind because of a similar trick I never thought of before but just realized and discovered.  It's possible to skip paying the support cost for a unit.  Suppose you have a unit supported by Base 2 that currently sits in Base 1.  Base 1 produces some item to let you go to its screen.  While in that screen, you can tell Base 2's unit to "Support from here".  That means that neither Base 1 pays support for it (because its mineral calculations already passed) nor Base 2 (because it won't be supporting the unit at the time of its mineral calculations.)  It's possible to systematically shuffle units back and forth between bases to make use of this constantly.

One more UI loophole: If you click on a terraformer in the middle of it working, it loses its invested turns.  However, if you activate it from the screen of its home base, that doesn't happen, and you can move the former to a new tile with its invested turns still stored up.

I'll ask the audience: do you want to see me make use of these behaviors?  (Intentionally using that neutral term instead of loaded language like bug or exploit.)  I haven't so far, both because I think they would make this demonstration less relevant for what players typically do, and because I feel the micromanagement isn't necessary for a noncompetitive exhibition.  But I'll open it up to thoughts.

[Mardoc]

I'll ask the audience: do you want to see me make use of these behaviors?  (Intentionally using that neutral term instead of loaded language like bug or exploit.)

Would rather not. It takes me out of the story. And there's no strategy to the decision about using it or not - it's a tradeoff of boredom/cheesiness for production, not trading anything inside the game for the extra production.