T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[T-hawk]

No game update today, but I'll poll the audience as to my next tech path.  I've got three possibilities:

A. Fusion Power, where the beeline goes Cyberethics - Advanced Military Algorithms - Superconductor - Pre-Sentient Algorithms - Fusion Power.  That enables the next labs multiplier building, plus the fusion reactor for units (double health) that will make short work of the University if I haven't already done so by then.  I would then continue to Adv Ecological Engineering which enables the special ability for double speed terraforming.

B. Retroviral Engineering, where the beeline goes Advanced Military Algorithms - Neural Grafting - Bio-Engineering - Retroviral Engineering.  This goes through clean reactors and leads to Genejack Factories.  I would upgrade all the police to clean reactors, use those minerals and the Genejacks to build hab complexes and tree farms, and target the Cloning Vats next to boom up to the higher cap.

C. Orbital Spaceflight for food satellites, where the prerequisites include High Energy Chemistry that I'm hoping to steal instead so I can't precisely plan out the beeline without that yet.  The prerequisite line is a bit longer here, and it doesn't lead to anything else good immediately following; I'd go to Fusion Power next and then Adv Spaceflight for energy satellites.

[LKendter]

The kind of game that best exhibits this is Euro-style board games.  I play a lot of those, with a few different meetup groups in real life.  The nature of a board game needs to fit within a few hours and the rules within manual execution.  That naturally results in that short time horizon of a few tens of turns rather than the hundreds of computer games.  Good Eurogames give that weaving-threads-together feeling, where all your resources come together to buy some important building one turn ahead of someone else, and that one turn represents a significant differential in the game's short time horizon.  I was basically playing Civ 5 like a Euro board game.

I didn't realize there were other euro-game players RB.
I love getting to play those type of games. ;-)

[TheHumanHydra]

B. We've got to stay on theme!

[darrelljs]

Since I almost always do A and I've never done B (and THH is right on the flavor), I'll vote B.

Darrell

[Modo]

B also.
Just for curiousity, if you'd go C what else would you do while setting it up or to set it up?

[haphazard1]

I will also vote for B: Yang needs his genejack factories!

[timmy827]

 I don't ever need Doctrine Mobility now, I already have what it enables and both techs for which it is a prerequisite: started with Doctrine Loyalty and traded for Doctrine Flexibility. 

Whoa, mechanics question now - I thought the SMAC tech tree was all "and" prereqs?  (If a tech lists A and B as prereqs, you need both A and B to be able to research it).
Get that Yang gets a special loophole starting with a 2nd level tech, but are you allowed to trade for techs you don't have all the prereqs for?

EDIT: Vote for C. I'm curious if the satellite spam works well for a high-level playthough. They look real strong, but might also be pretty close to the end by the time you reach all three types?

[darrelljs]

Vote for C.  I'm curious if the satellite spam works well for a high-level playthough.

I'm guessing lots of Engineers.

Darrell

[TheHumanHydra]

Whoa, mechanics question now - I thought the SMAC tech tree was all "and" prereqs?  (If a tech lists A and B as prereqs, you need both A and B to be able to research it).
Get that Yang gets a special loophole starting with a 2nd level tech, but are you allowed to trade for techs you don't have all the prereqs for?

Yes, you can trade for techs you lack the prereqs for, unlike in Civ IV. For research, yes, they're all 'and' prereqs.

[T-hawk]

I should have known you bags of particles would all give the same deterministic reactions.  Genejacks it is.  Although you guys do know you're sending me into a hellhole of eco-damage.  Well, I get to back up my claim that eco-damage is good if you know what you're doing to harvest the worms.  I do think this path is slightly worse in terms of expected finish date than going directly to fusion labs, but I've got no particular need to optimize for finish date here.

THH is right, research is "and" gates but you can trade or steal techs without the prereqs.

Food satellites definitely come soon enough to matter.  Using the food does require hab complexes, but despite how much I slammed those, there is a right time to build them, that time is just after you've exhausted other productivity-increasing options rather then when you first reach the hab cap.  Energy satellites do help too; they're not big compared to boreholes but still worth building, particularly if I'll have Genejack minerals to burn.  Mineral satellites are the ones that come too late to help, only about 10 techs from the end which is like 5 turns.

The food-per-mineral payout for satellites is considerably better than tree farms and hybrid forests.  They work well in general as long as you have access to booming (you don't want to be paying regular slow growth costs of 100+ food.)  But that is a particular problem for the Hive.  Even if I held off on settling more bases so I could GA-boom with satellite food, I wouldn't want to, since the psych slider turns off labs and that's now a huge cost.  Food satellites will only work with the Cloning Vats, but that's some distance away on the tech tree (Orbital Spaceflight and Biomachinery share one prerequisite path through Doctrine Air Power, but otherwise they each have about five separate prerequisites from where I am now.)  Food satellites are often a good path, and most so if you're still expanding to new bases, but that plan doesn't fit well here. And yes, what you do with the population is hire specialists.