Kinda, but these games I'm just comparing out of light curiosity. I already did the heavy analytical optimization years ago in SMAC, and the result was that one old speed-transcend writeup. I know the optimal parameters, nothing comes close to the University on the smallest map full of jungle. Anything else is just for experimentation and fun. I might do a couple more for SMAC but it's not going to be anywhere near the depth of Civ 5. That first Hive walkthrough showed 90% of what there is to see, and the Morgan game covered what that omitted in the PTS and nerve stapling. SMAC isn't like Civ 5 with macroscopically diverging policy paths; it's more like FTL in that the variety is in what you start with but then they all converge to the same optimal stuff later on.
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T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri
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So even in such peculiar variant scenarios tall doesn't get to use all the city's tiles, I was wondering if it's worth sparring the former turns to plant and harvest forests. From what I'm seeing it's not but I don't know if there are any multipliers or ways to amplify this to make it work.
Also, do the forests work like in Civ4 where you get varying amounts of hammers depending on distance or cultural control? Can you even plant them outside your culture in SMAC? And an unrelated question because Christmas is coming, is it possible to implement a indexing / searching feature on your site for either the whole thing or sections of it? I'm sure I'm not the only one using it as a reference and if I remember you doing something but not sure in which particular game I have to go search on a game by game basis. Don't know if maybe there's already a tool or a way that we can use on the site as it is or if it's something easy for you to implement but it would be great to have.
Forest harvesting doesn't work. It's a flat 5 minerals which get no multipliers. It takes more than 5 former-turns (of support minerals) to plant and replace a forest (there's no direct command to chop a forest, it only happens as a consequence of replacing the forest with something else.) You can do any terraforming outside your territory; rival factions get mad only if you try to raise/lower their land.
I don't have any index or search, yeah there's a big mess of what's where but I don't have any easy solution to it. Google accepts a parameter like "site:dos486.com" which may work. And funny you should mention using all of a city's tiles, just as I have another writeup that visits that subject more: http://dos486.com/alpha/gaia
Hey, it's always the simplest solutions...the Google switch is useful, thank you for pointing it out, Google is nice enough to make it available almost all the time so it's easy to forget you can actually use it yourself. Hyper caffeinated attention span comes to mind.
Is it me or are you trying to find excuses to showcase all the factions? Not that I'm complaining but it will be somewhat of a challenge for Sparta I guess.
"This is a little bit suboptimal overall: as I always say, hab complexes don't do anything until you have the food to boom to max size. Tree farms should come first because they do something in the meantime: the +50% economy, and also the food indirectly provides minerals by switching food crawlers to that instead. But my tech path just had so many other priorities that we didn't get around to Environmental Economics for quite some time, so the best way to fill that time was to build the hab complexes a bit sooner. The complexes would be idle for a few turns while we then also built the tree farms, but that's still the fastest path to getting them both up and running."
Let's assume we think of strategy as an ecosystem where the whole advances with the speed of it's slowest component. So we provide for it until it's not the slowest then provide for the next and so on. A little bit more involved than this but this is the general gist of it. Now, when some components are just too fast at some point and we can't translate slowing them down in speeding the slower ones we should still go with it; a bit earlier you were also showing this as a side effect of booming on unimproved tiles because formers didn't have time to catch up but this is still the better play as more pop still is a net plus even on unimproved tiles until they get improved. Now the question: given all this and the fact that you still call the hab complex play a bit suboptimal I gather that the only solution is to arrange the different threads of your strategy so that you get to the tree farms faster? How would you change things in retrospect?
Your ecosystem description is quite accurate for pop-booming: it requires many components (growth modifiers, food, drone control, net-positive jobs for the added citizens), and each of those components doesn't really give benefit until all of them are in place. The one that does is food, though not directly (non-boom growth beyond size 3 is far too costly), but through opportunity advantage by freeing up food workers and crawlers to other jobs instead.
More pop on unimproved tiles is *not* a net plus; any marginal laborer is a net minus if he is producing less than his 2 food plus a mineral to support his police unit or 2 energy to support his psych. It's just that it's less of a net-negative to have the laborer slightly too early than to be switching in and out of a pop-boom configuration. This game never had that question because Gaia stayed permanently in the pop-boom configuration; I never boomed onto weak tiles here. Similarly, having a hab complex 5 turns too early was much less of a negative (only small maintenance and opportunity cost) than having it 5 turns too late (5 missed turns of booming.) What I would change in retrospect is skip Intellectual Integrity. I didn't really need the police units just yet, it was only one per base unlike the Hive game in Police State. That would get me to tree farms two techs sooner (maybe more like 1.6 techs if I needed some psych slider without the police), which would have synced up the timing to go network node - tree farm - hab complex instead of switching those last two. I'm really still arguing against LKendter's mistakes with Morgan: a hab complex is not your ticket to further growth once capped, it yields nothing so it is the last piece you put in place after all the others.
This spawns two more basic questions:
1) Is there a scenario where you would produce food to go negative food input at some point for whatever reason and still not lose a citizen? 2) Can you still accrue food once at the hab cap? Let's say in anticipation of increasing it but was actually curious what would happen if you accidentally go over the hab cap? Does the new citizen get killed and the food box reset?
1) Yes. The common case is when a city will soon get a borehole but working it will cause negative food. Eco-damage can also destroy a food tile. I will often keep about 4 food in the box as a buffer against that. More than that isn't necessary since by that time I'll fix the food problem with formers or a crawler or maybe recycling tanks.
2) The new citizen never happens and yes the food box does get reset. Bad idea, so don't do that.
Got to the end of the report so thank you for a very instructional run and followup.
Off course I have one last question triggered by your Eudaimonic Future Society play. It' s not the first time I see you going for rarely used features in your reports so I was curious how much is this an effect of the variant or it's something that you actively target? I mean the whole point of the variant runs is to explore new gameplay but I'm assuming there are even more ideas that never make it because there's not enough variety to justify them so wanted to find how much you map out the game before you decide going for it and discovering the rest.
That report was shorter, only 3 pages, but reading it still took two days? Ok maybe I need to tighten up the writing even more
 Eudaimonic wasn't deliberately part of the variant at all. It was just the best choice. I knew from prior experience that it would likely happen for Gaia; Eudaimonic is their only way to reach +2 Economy, but everyone else gets more out of Cybernetic. Same went for the UN game building Hologram Theaters, not intentionally part of the variant, just happened to have the right emergent conditions. I set out the intentional variantism at the start of each writeup. Everything else follows from that, like terraforming choices, city count and density and build order, tech path, SE policies. If the emergent behavior happens to make something unusual be optimal, I'll do it and call it out. I generally haven't gone for anything I didn't think was best under current conditions just to show it off. If there's something I want to show but that doesn't arise from emergent behavior, then I'll deliberately make a variant around it. Faction choice is the direct example of that; every one of these games would have been more optimally faster with the University so yes I've been deliberately picking others. |
