T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[T-hawk]

Another short update; again, five turns took two evenings with this many formers and bases to micromanage.

One thing I didn't mention about the Genejacks is that they also supercharge the Stockpile Energy bug.  The Genejack itself contributes to the Stockpiled minerals on that very same turn.  Each Genejack resulted in an extra 10-20 energy credits from the bug, over 400 nationwide.  That will continue to happen as I keep completing every round of new facilities: the tree farms, hab complexes, fusion labs.  With that plus the eco-damage worm harvesting, I'm making several hundred extra credits per turn.  I don't even need the money coming in from the economy slider.  Wish I could tilt the slider more towards labs, and I did go to 60% or 70% for a turn or two, but almost all of that just got lost to the unbalancing inefficiency penalty.



Yikes.  Yeah, that eco-damage.  The first rise was 66 meters, now Planet is threatening me with 600!  Well, 20 turns from now is more than enough time to reach Advanced Spaceflight to launch a solar shade.  I just have to remember not to call the council for anything else before that, since it's a 10-turn delay between any proposals can be made.



And sea levels just rose for the first time.  Looks like the poor Believers weren't prepared for that; they lost this base and also one other.  (I guess their God couldn't walk on water after all.)  But I lost nothing significant (a few forest tiles and one former), since I'd prepared.



Here's how to save land imperiled by a sea level rise.  Don't do the obvious thing of raising the tile that says endangered.  Instead, raise a bunch of endangered tiles indirectly.  In this picture, each of the circled tiles is at low enough altitude to be threatened, including The Hive base itself.  But I can save all of those tiles simultaneously by applying former effort the right way.  When a tile is raised, it also forces upwards as much surrounding land as necessary to make sure that no adjacent tiles ever differ by more than one altitude category (1-999m, 1000-1999m, etc.)  By raising the tile where all those formers are to over 3000m, each tile adjacent to that goes to over 2000m, and each tile adjacent to those, including all the circled tiles, is forced to be pulled up to over 1000m and therefore safe.



Here's another peculiar effect of eco-damage.  After that sea level rise, look at that strip of tiles that suddenly lost all their terrain improvements.  This is a phenomenon described as "washing".  What happened was that the game wanted to sink these tiles below sea level... but each of them was adjacent to another tile over 1000m.  It's never allowed (no loopholes) for adjacent tiles to differ by more than one altitude category; a sea tile below 0m can never be adjacent to a tile over 1000m.  Each of these tiles instantaneously sank below sea level but then was restored above 0m to comply with that adjacency rule.  Although the tiles are never visibly water, they do invisibly sink just long enough to wipe the improvements and any units sitting on them.  This happened to these tiles even though they were never listed as Endangered; that happens sometimes but I don't know exactly how.



But then... all that eco-damage abruptly halted.  This base that was making a crazy 190 eco-damage a few turns ago is now all the way down to 6.  I'd been using the extra worm-harvest and stockpile-bug energy to buy tree farms in newer bases.  As mentioned, each incident of eco-damage and each ecological facility you build increases your global damage tolerance by 1.  I've now had over 20 of each, which increased the threshold from the default 16 up to somewhere over 60.  It'll be quite some time if ever until my bases substantially exceed 60 minerals per turn; there are no good mineral multipliers beyond the Genejacks, they're all expensive (200+ mineral cost) and come late enough to never pay back their cost before the end.  I still have to deal with the coming sea level rise already triggered, but it seems I've stopped incurring more now.  Although that also means no more juicy eco-damage worms.

All that happened over a sequence of these five turns, rearranged for the narrative.  Back to domestic development.

2197: Doctrine Air Power discovered, start Mind-Machine Interface.

I built one missile needlejet to get that prototype out of the way for both items, then a few more to try to pick off some Spartan units, although they kept getting lucky and winning even when my jets had the combat advantage.  I'm not sure exactly if or when or how I intend to conquer Sparta.  Probably not worth it with current units, but it'll be a great opportunity to show off fusion copters.

With Doctrine Air Power, I also order up several Aerospace Complexes.  These went in bases that could fit that build order between their tree farm and the hab complex that they will need by the time of the Cloning Vats.  An Aerospace Complex is required to build orbital food satellites, which are coming soon.



2198: Mind-Machine Interface discovered.  Unfortunately (and I knew this was coming) Biomachinery falls into the missing-tech hole at this moment, so I have to pick something else before we can get to the Cloning Vats, which is Centauri Empathy.

But I have a plan with that.  Now the Hive will take a new surprisingly un-Hive-like turn.  First I switch out of Police State into FRONTIER (default) politics.  Then next turn when Centauri Empathy completes, I also switch out of Planned, to GREEN economics.



That +3 Efficiency is what I need to finally get that labs slider up.  That jumps from 600 labs/turn to over 900.  More than two-thirds of a tech per turn, or equivalently under 1.5 turns/tech.  I did still have to stop at 80% labs for the moment, to have money to upgrade crawlers for the Cloning Vats.  That apparent -96 income will be basically offset by the Stockpile bug each turn.

I expected to overhaul my SE like this sometime, but it came sooner than I'd anticipated.  It's actually quite okay to give up Police State and Planned now.   Genejacks and forests and boreholes will overwhelm the support and industry concerns.  They also overwhelm the low economy slider via the Stockpile bug.  The growth bonus of Planned and penalty of Green are both irrelevant.  (They were anyway ever since the last Golden Age population-boom since I was never slow-growing; but soon entirely so with the Cloning Vats.)

I don't really care about the +Planet rating, although it's convenient; adopting Green is really for the +Efficiency rating to get that labs slider up.  Any other faction that could would be running Democratic/Free Market at this point, with some psych slider to handle drones.  Both of those are barred or useless for the Hive, and the negatives of Police State, Fundamentalism, and Planned each outweigh the positives.  So the best large-scale setup now is Frontier/Green, with the efficiency from Knowledge also mattering.

The piece that came into place sooner than I expected was drone control after giving up Police State.  Largely thanks to capturing the Virtual World, and also I'd forgotten about the Longevity Vaccine until it showed up when you guys pointed my tech path through Bio-Engineering.  Here's a detailed look at drone control now that it's not all just police.



Every size-9 base is handling its drones exactly this way.  I need to subdue 9 drones in total, like this:

- Facilities: 2 from the free Hologram Theater from the Virtual World, plus the Research Hospital, minus the Genejack drone.
- Police: 4 from two police infantry units, still at +1 Police SE rating from the Ascetic Virtues.
- Secret Projects: 1 from Longevity Vaccine, 1 talent from Human Genome Project.

And the 9th drone is handled by making him a specialist instead.  That funky-looking guy on the end is a Thinker specialist enabled by Mind-Machine Interface, who yields +1 psych along with +3 labs.  That +1 psych picks up a lot of multipliers (tree farm, hologram theater, research hospital), but notice that it doesn't actually help anything; it goes into negating one superdrone, which is irrelevant because everything else directly handles superdrones.

Each base will now need a Recreation Commons to handle drones once it starts booming again, with the upcoming Cloning Vats and a hab complex.  That will allow up to 10 non-specialists in each base.  Any beyond that will have to be specialists.  That's fine, we don't have any more land tiles to work anyway; but what it does mean is that I gotta hurry up to orbital satellite food in order to boom all the way up to the max size 16.  It would be fun to get the UN charter repealed and nerve staple everything; but calling that council would lock me out for 10 turns from calling the solar shade which is what I'll need sooner.

No overview screenshot needed again, no real change from last time, but next time after the pop-boom we'll see it.

[Modo]

I take it that the Solar Shade can be done via the UN only. Given how the AI gets impacted by the eco damage more than you isn't the Shade something they go for anyway?
And in more general terms is the UN in this game behaving like the Civ4 UN when in the hands of the AI? By that I mean usually useless.

[T-hawk]

Yes, the shade is only a UN proposal.  The AIs pretty much always vote for the shade if they're facing any danger from sea levels, which they all are now (almost every Morgan base is building a pressure dome right now.)  The faction proposing the shade requires Advanced Spaceflight, but the AIs won't ever get there before I win.

I think the AIs are generally pretty good at voting for things that help them, like factions at peace will vote for the global trade pact that I did earlier.  I'm less sure that they know how to propose anything that will help them, though it's fairly uncommon in the first place for them to reach a relevant tech for a proposal that I haven't made already. But it's not like Civ 4/5 where they'll make useless proposals (helped by the fact that this game doesn't really have any useless ones like the Ban Luxury nonsense); they most often just don't ever propose anything.

[TheHumanHydra]

I think I vaguely remember that having too many units supported costs minerals from accumulated production, like starvation.

[T-hawk]

Tech path: Biomachinery is due in 2 turns. Then it will go Pre-Sentient Algorithms - Superconductor - Fusion Power - Orbital Spaceflight - Adv. Ecological Engineering.

I think I do want food satellites for booming more than Fusion Power, and Orbital Spaceflight could come right after PSA on that list; but if it does, then both Fusion Power and Adv Eco Eng fall into missing-tech holes which delays the latter by two steps. At any rate, it's small difference since these techs are coming in just 1.5 turns each.

The one area that I'm significantly delaying on the tech tree is Applied Relativity - Unified Field Theory. Those each give a project that doubles a base's labs, and that doubling is fully multiplicative with other facilities including each other: (base × 150% for network node) × 2 × 2, not (base × 350%). But it's not so important here to to multiply up one base with a wide array of 30+. And I don't need the other prerequisites in that area like Adv Subatomic Theory and Superstring Theory.

[T-hawk]

Got through 12 turns in two nights this time.  Trying to play faster, mostly by speeding up former micromanagement, just sending each to the first useful job I see rather than trying to optimize them in concert.

2202: I got another popup about sea levels rising, though I didn't notice any tiles that got lost or washed.

2204: I got yet another popup.  I think I remember now how it works for the timing of sea level rises.  When you get that popup of "X meters in 20 years", the X is amortized over the 20 years at a constant rate.  The game keeps an internal counter of the pending rise that increments fractionally each turn.  It applies the results on the map each time the counter passes a particular threshold, which I think is either 33 or 66 meters.  This is all guesswork on my part; I've never seen an official formula or detailed writeup, but this theory is consistent with my own observations.

The practical upshot is that seemingly-endangered tiles can be automatically saved (although "washed") over and over again.  If an endangered square is next to a 1500m square, the endangered square will keep dropping 33m or 66m at a time, but each time it goes below 0 it gets saved by its adjacency to the 1500m square to recalibrate it above 0, until the 1500m adjacent tile finally goes below 1000.



Here I noticed and caught something that I never did before.  I blew up the minimap screenshot to show this: notice those cracks in my land that I circled.  Those cracks were then not there at the start of my next turn, those tiles were land.  These are tiles getting "washed", dipping below sea level but then instantaneously restored by adjacency to a tile over 1000m.  First time I ever caught this happening in the UI.  The minimap only showed this effect at the precise moment while this specific dialog was on-screen.  I reloaded to get the screenshot and experimented a few times: it turned out that whenever the Spartan base didn't get destroyed (there's a random chance for a submerging base to automatically get a free pressure dome and survive) and that dialog didn't occur, the washing effect was never visible on the minimap.



Nothing to do with the rest of the narrative at the moment, but I'll give a look here.  I built a few missile needlejets to fly sorties towards Sparta.  Conquering the bases will wait until I can build some good fusion-reactor aircraft, but for the moment it's still useful to look for vulnerable units to pick off.  Including this sea colony pod, a nice headache averted by denying Sparta a sea base somewhere off my shore.  Right now I can't build boats to deal with a sea base, since none of my bases are coastal, because I've been raising land around them.  BTW, that needlejet has the Deep Radar special ability for a 2-square visibility radius which is free for air units.

Also by the way, what's with the name Needlejet?  As depicted graphically in the game, they're the opposite of needles, all wide and flat, not needley at all.  This design is correct according to the physical description of Planet, with gravity and atmospheric density each greater than Earth, which would demand greater wing surface area.

In other news, in year 2203 Morgan asked me for vendetta on the Believers, and when I declined, he cancelled our Pact.  The lost commerce is regrettable, but oh well.  Then in 2204, Morgan convened the council to elect a new governor.  He makes a valiant attempt with his 33 votes, but of course I easily win it by voting my 250 votes for myself.

That made me realize that this game might already be won.  I think I have enough votes by myself (might need the Empath Guild) to win a Supreme Leader election (75% planetary votes for diplomatic victory); SMAC has no restriction like Civ 4 where the vote is barred if you have enough to do it all by yourself.  I'll just toss this to the audience as to whether you want to see me exit that way or carry it through to transcendence.



Anyway, here goes the main event of this session, the Cloning Vats.  In 2202, I discovered Biomachinery to enable it.  Here's my approach to the secret project, the last time I'll illustrate crawler upgrading.  The Cloning Vats costs 500 minerals base, 450 after the Hive's industry discount (remember I gave up Planned and Wealth.)  The Hive's HQ base will produce about 25 minerals of natural production, so I need to add 425 to the project.



This is the most expensive crawler I could possibly design: a 0-3-2 Drop Trance rover model at a cost of 27 mineral rows, which says here 243 minerals which becomes 297 after temporarily flipping SE to Power's industry penalty.  I decided that the most efficient method was to use one such crawler, plus two more nonupgraded rover crawlers for 66 minerals each.  (I'd built a couple extra of those for future projects and they could crawl in the meantime.)  That comes to 429 minerals total, just about exactly what I need in addition to the base's normal production.  This is less costly than upgrading two separate crawlers, because this way makes use of the mineral value of the original crawler, which upgrading doesn't.  (The upgrade price depends on the cost of the resulting unit but NOT on the precursor unit's cost or the difference.)



Trying to depict this visually.  The one crawler upgrade cost 290 credits to add a differential of 231 minerals, a ratio of 1.25:1.  But then I only needed 132 more minerals, so a second crawler upgrade only had headroom to gain 66 more above its base value of 66.  That upgrade would have cost 130 for the differential of 66, the same 2:1 ratio as rushing anything else.

The other reason I wanted to upgrade only one crawler for the Vats was to leave enough money to upgrade another to do the Cyborg Factory this turn too.  This is most efficient to do right now, because the Cloning Vats has a secondary effect: it eliminates the negative effect of the Power SE choice.  But that negative helps me - eliminating it means no more SE flipping to Power to inflate crawler value!  So this was my last shot to do that.  I used another of that same 297-value crawler model, in my best base (Leader's Horde) with enough natural production to make up the rest of the Cyborg Factory's 360 cost in one turn.

And I arranged the projects correctly to take advantage of the turn processing sequence.  I made sure to put Cloning Vats in my first base, so that it would kick in for every base downstream to pop-boom this same turn.  The placement of the Cyborg Factory didn't matter, since I wasn't building any units this turn.  I also made sure that each base at maximum size completed its Hab Complex before or on the same turn as the Cloning Vats to immediately boom.



As with every iteration of pop-booming, every turn I laboriously scrolled through every base and made sure it had +2 food to boom and enough drone control not to riot after growing.  After a few turns of the Cloning Vats, a typical base looked like this.  Doing well, but starting to get cramped on food and drone control.  Even if I shuffle tiles from other cities to put those specialists back to work on forests, there won't be enough drone control for them.

I now finally built Recycling Tanks in most bases.  The +1 food has the biggest leverage when it makes the difference between booming or not.  Rec-tanks are inferior to crawlers as long as there are tiles to crawl, but now I have no more land.  Also every facility invokes the Stockpile bug for what's now often an extra 20 credits payback, making the rec-tanks even more worthwhile.

I also went to 10% psych slider to help out with drone management.  I said recently how psych wouldn't help, but it actually does turn out to work now.  The key is the higher Efficiency rating, which means I'm no longer over 5x the bureaucracy limit.  At +3 Efficiency the limit is 10 bases, so with 32 total, I'm only just over 3x.  Most of my bases have only one superdrone and a few have two, a small enough total that psych can indeed handle them and make talents as you see here.  The psych made a significant difference that I could keep more citizens working tree-farmed forests for food to keep booming.

The easy solution to second-tier booming (past hab complexes, when you run out of land) that the guides all say is to add Hybrid Forests for more food.  This works, but is costly: those facilities at 240 minerals are expensive, minerals that need to go into fusion labs and food satellites instead.  32 food factionwide from a satellite for 120 minerals is a much better deal than ~8 from a hybrid forest for 240.

Year 2205: Superconductor discovered.



2206: Fusion Power finished.  I'd forgotten what happens here.  You get a million of these popups before production upkeep can continue.  The game automatically redesigns everything in your unit workshop with a fusion reactor, and gives you a popup for every single one asking if you want to pay to upgrade them.  No thank you.  I take a while sorting that back out in the workshop for the models I still want (cheap police and formers and crawlers.)

With Fusion Power, every mature base starts a Fusion Lab.  I have to be careful with energy this turn: with each base starting that facility but none finishing it, I will get little from the Stockpile bug, so for this one turn I have to back off the labs slider down to 70% to stay solvent the honest way.

But then next turn, as soon as the fusion labs start to complete both to kick in the Stockpile bug and their own +50% economy, I can jack the labs slider all the way up to 90%.  And it will stay there for the foreseeable future.  The other piece is the Engineer specialists enabled by Fusion Power, which yield +3 economy and +2 labs.  They are well worth running over Thinkers (+1 psych +3 labs) as much as possible.  As with my economic analyses in Civ 4, hiring money specialists allows pushing the research slider higher.



2208: Orbital Spaceflight discovered.  Here I have an opportunity to take careful advantage of the production processing order.  Notice that we are close to discovering the tech; at 140 labs away from the tech currently, the first few bases in production order will add up to enough to discover the tech.



It's set up so that base 03 will complete its Fusion Lab for a big shot of energy (about 80) both from its own production (engineer specialists multiplied by the fusion lab) and the stockpile bug.  While zoomed-to-base 03, I can press F4 and click on the next base 04.  I change its build order to a food satellite, and use that energy to rush it (partially, as usual, just so the base's normal production will complete it.)  This lets me get that first food satellite up as soon as possible, just a fractional production step after completing the tech itself.  This means that all bases downstream from 04 get that one extra food this same turn to use for booming, and many of them needed it and couldn't boom otherwise.  Of course I anticipated this and set up each base with +1 food surplus knowing that the one more was coming.

Next turn, I also rush two food satellites early in the production order so that all bases downstream will get that food too.  Satellite bonuses are halved (rounded up) for bases without an Aerospace Complex, so two more satellites ensure that each base gets one more food this turn.

After Orbital Spaceflight, I adjust my previous planned tech path a bit.  Instead of Adv Ecological Engineering right away, I'll go Organic Superlubricant - Advanced Spaceflight - Adv Eco Eng.  Problem is that if I do Adv Eco Eng first, then Adv Spaceflight falls into a missing-tech hole.  But I do want Adv Spaceflight sooner anyway, for both the solar shade and energy satellites.

2209: Organic Superlubricant discovered.  This also enables the Fusion Laser 10-power weapon that I'll make use of shortly.

2210: Advanced Spaceflight discovered.



As I predicted, everyone votes for the Solar Shade proposal.  Now no tiles anywhere show as endangered, not even as low as 3m altitude.  I think the eco-damage and solar shade happened to come out exactly balanced (Thanos would be proud) - there was 300m left to go on the big rise, plus 33m on the previous rise, and now also a 333m drop.

This tech also enables Orbital Power Transmitters, which each yield 1 energy per base, up to the base size.  I start building lots of these.  I had previously launched 9 food satellites, which seemed like about enough (9 food with an aerospace complex, 5 without) to boom everything to max size, so now switched over to building all energy satellites instead.

2211: Advanced Ecological Engineering discovered.



But I'm not sure the Super Former ability is even worth it.  I don't have 3240 credits to upgrade 108 formers.  On a per-former basis, is the upgrade worth it?  It costs 30 credits per former.  I'm looking at roughly 20 turns left in the game.  One regular former can drill roughly one borehole before the end.  A super former could drill a second for a difference of 6 energy/turn.  30 credits for a difference of 6/turn income that kicks in after 16 turns of former labor... that payback horizon seems barely worth it, but I think I can find better uses of money.  Adv Eco Eng is more worthwhile when it comes earlier on the tech path (instead of my diversion to Genejacks and Cloning Vats and Adv Spaceflight) while you're still building new formers.  I had previously found this same conclusion in my tiny-map speed-transcend runs; upgrading to super formers wasn't worth it with too short a time horizon remaining.  (If you aren't deeply optimized with dozens of bases and boreholes and boomed specialists and labs multipliers like I am, then you do have a long enough time horizon for super formers to be worthwhile.)

Adv Ecological Engineering is the last tech goal that I'd characterize as midgame.  There's nothing important left that ramps up any snowball.  The beeline that kicks off the end-game is to Digital Sentience to enable Cybernetic Future Society.  Fortunately, I have a straight shot all the way to that where no prerequisite falls into any missing-tech hole.

Superstring Theory
Advanced Subatomic Theory
Applied Relativity
Silksteel Alloys
Monopole Magnets
Nanominiaturization
Industrial Nanorobotics
Digital Sentience



2212: Both Superstring Theory and Advanced Subatomic Theory discovered.  Now that my bases are boomed up to max size (16) with orbital food supporting specialists, my science rate has smashed past one turn per tech and will keep on going.  And I have the labs slider at 90%, with the 0% economy supported entirely by a hundred Engineer specialists.  For a while I was running -100 net income and relying on the Stockpile bug to make up for that each turn, but now the specialists have surpassed that too.

More to come shortly that I'll break out into another post.

[T-hawk]

This chapter chronicles my war with Sparta.  Don't blink again.



It starts here, where Mind-Machine Interface, the fusion reactor, and fusion laser from Organic Superlubricant all combine together into this unit design.  Because it has a fusion reactor and fusion weapon, the game gives it that wonderful name.  Moon Moon would be proud.  I start by building one in order to prototype both the copter chassis and fusion weapon.



That first copter emerges as Sparta just happens to lands an invasion force.  Copters, as readers probably know, can make unlimited attacks per turn as long as their movement lasts.  This one copter was able to kill all three of those units (10 weapon vs 1 defense on all of them) and then fly back in to the nearest base.

Notice the next build order in Society Grid is a Trained Fusion Chopper.  By adding that, I could directly produce elite copter units.  Two morale levels from the Aerospace Complex, plus two more from the Bioenhancement Center by way of the Cyborg Factory, plus the Trained modifier, with no SE morale penalty (no Wealth), add up to elite.  The extra cost of the Trained modifier is no problem, since with the genejack and all the boreholes, this base can still produce this 54-mineral unit in one turn.  In fact I ordered up a total of four of those units in the closest bases.



This is the other piece that will drive this conquest.  Copters can kill plenty of defending units, but cannot capture a base.  The quickest way to get a land unit in place to capture a now-empty base is a rover with the Drop Pods ability.  I designed that here, and was able to add in the 3-armor and Trance special as well with no increase to cost.  (The Fusion reactor does weird things to the cost of a unit.  It divides the unit's entire cost by 2, but applies a minimum price of 4 mineral rows.  You can very commonly stick on quite a bit of extra stuff on such a unit before you exceed that minimum.  The cost of the Drop special is applied after and on top of that minimum.)  Anyway, I built one of this rover, upgraded a couple old worm-duty rovers to this model as well, and also designed and built one cheaper 1-2-2 drop rover that Plex Anthill could afford in one turn.



Here we begin.  My first attacking copter killed the one unit in Hommel's Citadel (this copter was built and traveled from farther away, so could only reach this base and no other for more attacks.)  The next move is that drop rover.  The parachute cursor indicates where the rover can drop, conveniently there is a Spartan road exactly eight tiles away (the maximum drop range) from its starting point.  So my rover drops there and moves in to capture the now-empty base.



The second copter is not pictured here.  It killed two units in Sparta Command, including this first one where Sparta managed to get a unit with the AAA Tracking counterability, although my unit's sheer force overwhelmed that.  It had exactly enough movement remaining to continue and kill the single defending unit in Survival Base.  It then crashed and died, having wound up under 30% health, but that sacrifice was entirely acceptable.

The third copter is the one you see north of Sparta Command, which came in to kill the last unit there.  Both Sparta Command and Survival Base are empty of defending units, and notice that first same drop rover still has enough movement along the roads to reach and capture both of those bases!

The third copter continued to kill the one unit in Hawk of Chiron, the fourth emptied Commander's Keep, and my fifth had exactly enough movement (thanks to the elite bonus) to reach and make one attack on Fort Liberty to kill the only defender.  With all of these bases emptied of defenders, I sent in three more drop rovers to claim them all, and all still on the same turn that my invasion started.



When it's all over, this is what it looks like.  I couldn't get any drop rover in range to reach War Outpost, since there are two infantry units blocking the road from Fort Liberty.  But my unit in Fort Liberty is a 3-armor fusion rover behind a perimeter defense, so the Spartan units are no threat to it.  Next turn my copters would clean that up, plus the one other remaining Spartan base on the next island over to the west.



Faction eradicated.

The next challenge is to develop the Spartan bases to be useful.  The Cloning Vats immediately applies to all of them, as do the food satellites and drone-control secret projects.  What they don't have is any terraforming improvements; seriously Sparta, how do you build just four formers for an entire continent in 110 turns?



So I visit the unit workshop to cook up this interesting dish.  Super formers on a rover chassis with the drop ability.  Airdropping is the fastest way to get any formers over here from my home bases.  The rover chassis makes them significantly faster too, able to move onto a new square and build a road or forest on the same turn.  The cost of 54 minerals is affordable just like the trained copters from the same bases, so now I have the three closest bases to Sparta each building one of these drop formers every turn.

I also upgraded a few surplus police infantry (a few bases still had three of them from the days when I had +3 SE Police) with drop pods too to jump over to ex-Sparta.  The Spartan bases themselves started by building more police units, since that is the most useful thing they could do with their shabby starting production of just a few minerals until the formers get going.

This whole subthread isn't really relevant to the overall game picture.  Conquering Sparta wasn't really necessary and most likely won't make any difference on my finish date.  But it was fun and an opportunity to show off chop-and-drop war.  Now I'm basically playing a minigame for myself as to how fast I can build up these bases to be useful.

[T-hawk]

Crazy-go-nuts big overview, click to expand out of the screenshot tag.




The graph says I've doubled my faction's dominance again even in just the ten turns of the Cloning Vats.

Also happens to show Morgan's difficulties over there.  He lost about half his jungle to sinking or washing, and he's still stuck building Pressure Domes even though the sea level threat is over (but he doesn't know that.)

[haphazard1]

Entertaining stuff, T-hawk. Loved the 'blink and you'll miss it' conquest of Sparta.

Did you explain the missing tech hole in detail at some point earlier? (Maybe it was in your initial tech beeline discussion? Need to go back and reread.) I am still a bit confused about how that works.

So poor Morgan got mostly drowned by the rising seas. The washing effect is pretty rough, even if the tiles do not get permanently submerged.

[T-hawk]

I haven't talked about the missing-tech mechanism in detail, because I don't know how to explain it any less confusingly than anyone else already has.  The "hole" is my terminology, not something that I've seen anyone else use.

Short version: Every tech belongs to one of three groups.  At all times, one group is unavailable to choose as your next research target.  That designation deterministically rotates every time you get a tech.

Medium version: For each tech, if (P + N + F) mod 3 == 0, that tech is unavailable.  P is the tech's position in the list as defined in the data file alpha.txt, N is your number of known techs except your starting techs, F varies by player slot (1 for Gaia, 2 for Hive, etc in the order listed at game start in SMAC.  In SMAX, any of the 14 factions can be assigned to any slot.)

On top of that, there's one "joker" or "wildcard" designation that overrides the unavailability hole.  It is the first Explore-weighted tech for which you have the prerequisites, so it'll usually be one of the Centauri techs.  This mechanism is to ensure you always have at least one choice to research.  Finally, on your very first pick of a game, all choices are always available.

Long version: https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/a...automation

I've been using the spreadsheet linked in post #82.  It's been accurate at every step.

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Morgan didn't actually drown, no base of his ever got submerged.  He's lost his food production from the jungle, and like all the AIs doesn't have enough formers to do anything about it.