I think probes can't affect a needlejet in flight, though don't remember for sure.
Note that AAA (Tracking) and SAM (Air Superiority) are separate abilities and functionalities. The first is a defense modifier (+100% vs an air attacker), the second allows counterattacking an air unit.
(June 24th, 2018, 20:40)Fluffball Wrote: T-Hawks energy bank stuff is part of the reason I self-limit ICS. The most effective strategies are just forgettable blobs of identical tiny colonies vomited over every inch of the map.
I think this isn't quite so true as often advertised. I didn't do that in my Hive game, and I'm playing at what I think is optimal overall effectiveness. I did build densely, but not degenerately so. There does come a turning point where multiplier facilities outweigh more colony pods and formers. That turning point is enough condensor/tree-farm food to boom to size 7, and roughly two boreholes per base, which give both the minerals to build multiplier facilities and the energy to be worth multiplying.
I have the observational evidence to back that up objectively. I got to this through experimentation. The speed-transcend writeup on my site came as a result of about 15 attempts, through which I tried all sorts of different densities and tech and build paths. What worked best (fastest) was the plan I've been following with the Hive, enough space per base to boom to size 7 with multiple boreholes. It's true that the tiny-map setup somewhat skewed that experimentation, but the same feel has been holding through every step of the Hive game. The determining factor isn't the quantity of bases, it's the quantity of worked boreholes, which doesn't require the cities to be at maximum density. Pop-booming from sizes 3 to 7 adds the same land tiles and productivity for cheaper than building another colony pod to grow to size 3.
What I think happens is that most players never get to that turning point where vertical outpaces ICS. Because they don't build the swarms of formers to do it, don't make boreholes because they feel complicated or morally mean to Planet, and don't analyze pop-booming to bend an entire game plan to it like I do. Or else players simply don't play out a game long enough to see that turning point, either quitting once decisively ahead long before actually playing it out to transcendence, or exiting with an easy military or supreme-leader victory.
It is true that ICS is a perfectly effective way
to get decisively ahead of the AI. It's definitely easier to execute than the intricate balance of booming and boreholes that I do. But it actually doesn't get to transcendence the fastest; the multiplier facilities are important and make for the multiplicative mania we're about to see in the next update over in my game.
It's also still true that the bases tend to be forgettably identical. But that's not a function of density, that's a function of nothing really existing to distinguish them; the terrain in SMAC is so uniformly mediocre before terraforming (except for the jungle) and so uniformly good after boreholes/condensors/tree-farms. Civ 5 has the same problem of undistinguishedness but not of density.
It's also entirely true that the most effective strategies are
more ICS and labor than most every player _wants_ to do, particularly since Civ 5 drastically lowered the bar on the amount of micromanagement. But I really think that most-effective point in SMAC is 8-10 land tiles per base, mostly because that's enough to get maximum boreholes going. That's still a far cry from the 18-20 tiles per base that players intuitively
want to do, but it's also far from the absolute degenerate minimum of 3.
(The exception to all of the above is Morgan, who really does need to go maximum ICS, thanks to all of the extra per-base energy, support penalty, and hab limitation. It's also true that players lean towards playing Morgan because feeling rich looks fun, even if his mechanics are actually weak and a headache.)
(June 24th, 2018, 20:40)Fluffball Wrote: It's a shame this beautiful game is stuck in rights limbo with no one really caring about it or a successor game; a modernized version that fixed the gameplay to be more in line with later civs would be amazing. With no 1UPT. 
It's probably not possible for most/all developers to touch the game without totally ruining it though... time to add manually controlling the garbage collection of every colony or something.
Yeah, if I win the lottery, buying back the AC rights from EA would be somewhere on the list of things to do.
Beyond Earth of course deliberately wasn't that successor. There is Planetfall for Civ 4, though I haven't tried it myself, really because I see it hitting the uncanny valley of not quite being SMAC and will just make me want to play real SMAC instead. I'll also even venture to say that 1UPT would be more good than bad in getting the amount of micromanagement down to what today's gamers will accept.
