T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[darrelljs]

Another very cool read...if you nerve staple as an atrocity can you get VW faster and spend more time in FM?  That's seems the only possible optimization left available.

Edit: also highly amusing the drones started rioting on the cusp of Transcendence .

Darrell

[T-hawk]

That wouldn't speed up VW, in fact the Planned industry might have speeded the crawlers for VW by a turn.  What stapling as an atrocity would open up is a tech beeline to somewhere other than Adv Military Algorithms, but I can't think of anything else on the path to Biomachinery that would matter.

The optimization I know is possible is to hold out to find a start with two rocky mineral tiles, one for each of the first two bases, and just work those and don't bother growing to put out pods at all before the PTS.  I did that with a partial start on a standard size map, and got about three turns ahead of the pace of the other University report, but didn't feel like playing it out all the way. Finding such a start is a major pain though, hundreds of map rolls for each, more if you also want a river and early AI contact, in fact that one partial one I tried only found the second rocky mineral a few tiles away and reloaded to walk one of the starting pods there.

[Echoecho]

Tried this the other day (but forgot to change the fungus settings to regular after some practice runs). Transcendence should have been in 2191, but I messed up on the number of disbanded formers needed to build Voice of Planet, and couldn't be bothered to redo it for what wasn't a very well optimized run. 
~94 bases, many started too late with too little terraforming to be much use. Labs on the last turn were 19150. I ended up having to go through the entire quantum tree, despite vaguely remembering that it should be possible to skip?




The run was generally just poorly optimized. Not enough crawlers to get PTS and VW at the same time meant 40% psych for several turns, which combined with nutrient-heavy terraforming and poor energy management put me 10 turns behind on Cloning Vats. 
Built too many formers early, which ended up over-terraforming my core rather than making the arid south-east frontier habitable. The 256 unit integer overflow exploit is funny, but it's not worth slowing down colony production for; the only real advantage is an early switch to Democracy, and that's useless when you're still expanding horizontally anyway. At least it gave me a ton of boreholes to work. 
I'm conflicted about the wars. I ended up wiping out Miriam and Lal for Lebensraum, followed by Morgan because he was being pushy and I already had veteran missile rovers. Captured bases are a pain to deal with until nerve stapling, are useless unless you send formers to improve them, and many (all?) seem not to get the free network node. 
Could improve this run significantly with such a great map, but don't have the time to invest in improving my grasp of the mechanics. 

Thanks to T-hawk for inspiring me to pull out the game once again. I must have read his original micro-map speedrun a hundred times several years ago, but never managed to get a sub 2200 run on a normal map with that strategy. Was overjoyed to see him updating his site again. 
How did everyone else's runs go?

[T-hawk]

PTS several turns before VW, with psych slider in the interim, is fine.  You want the PTS as soon as possible so the size-3 bases can start putting out colony pods, which travel while you build the crawlers for Virtual World.

You didn't have too many formers, you just didn't get them moving outwards from the core, which is important.  It happens naturally if you're pushing hard on roads; doing roads to speed colony pods is more important than actual improvement terraforming.  Rehome formers to outer (and conquered) bases whenever possible, and have the core bases rebuild new ones to fill the support slots.

Yes, all the Quantum techs are not needed for transcendence.  I'd guess you hit some chokepoints with only one or two possible choices to progress towards Threshold but they fell into a missing tech hole at that moment.  Use this to see the whole tech tree (though it doesn't help tell you what will be missing): http://dos486.com/alpha/horz-tech.png

Well, glad you enjoyed it and happy to have inspired you! 2191 is pretty darn good, shows you're hitting the major strategy points, and it's just tweaking and micromanagement from there.

[Echoecho]

Oh, no wonder you mentioned a double rocky-mineral being a good start. Virtually all my minerals were going into colony pods because my bases were growing every few turns--my HQ didn't even get its second former built for some time. Rolling-rainy nutrient tiles aren't as important as I thought they were. 

And yeah, when I try a redo I'll learn the missing tech mechanics and use your spreadsheet to organize my research better, not to mention be smarter about tech trading. 
Do you know who wrote a good explanation of crawler upgrades? I remember it getting very confusing when you got into adding armor vs abilities, and I'm still iffy on reactor mechanics. 

Funnily enough in that game Gaia got a double nutrient, double rocky-mineral start... and completely wasted it.

[T-hawk]

I don't know of any particular reference on crawler upgrades offhand, but it's not that complicated. Just experiment with designs in the workshop and you can see what comes out as far as mineral value. The upgrade cost is the entire mineral cost of the resulting unit (the pre-upgrade unit's cost doesn't matter) plus 10 per added point of weapon or armor. Reactor only matters in one way: once you have fusion power, design a base model with rover chassis and fusion reactor, and upgrade that to models with a fission reactor (more expensive, which is what you want,)

[Echoecho]

Thanks, I looked into it and picked up the basics. This one game taught me a ton about how to rush correctly.
One thing you noted is the possibility of nerve stapling without repealing the charter. From everything I can find digging through archived apolyton pages, it sounds like nerve stapling your own bases is a mini(?) atrocity that can never add up to a major one, no matter how often you do it (whereas stapling someone else's base is a minor atrocity that becomes a major one after 20). That should mean the only downside is losing commerce income, but I'm not sure how to judge the importance of that.
I'd do a test run, but since AMA is a prereq for fusion and spaceflight anyway, it doesn't really seem like it'd change the tech beeline at all. So the only window of use I can see is to save on the psych slider for those few turns between PTS and VW.

[T-hawk]

Other leaders do get mad in diplomacy about self-atrocities. I tested that at one point, they will say you're a monster for your atrocities against your people. They don't cut off comms forever like they do if it's against their people, but it does worsen their attitude. If they stop talking, then you lose the ability to sell and trade for techs, which is significant.

What I'm not sure about is eco-damage. Many guides claim such minor atrocities count against eco-damage, but the tests I did didn't seem to back that up.

I came to the same conclusion, stapling as an atrocity only matters between PTS and VW, which is a short time period with small economic numbers, so the psych slider is little enough loss that it's not really worth messing with. Maybe on a micro map with only one opponent you can come out ahead against the loss of commerce and potentially diplomacy, but on any normal map with a full set of AIs, the commerce is probably more than the saved psych slider.

It's actually other factions who don't get the University's solve-everything Virtual World who might want to staple as an atrocity. Of course we're not talking a maximum speed-run then, but if you were inclined to do it per faction, it could be a factor.

[Dark Savant]

I've been thinking about a SMAC game with maximum luck abuse (i.e. save and reload ... lots of save and reload) and Unity pod scattering.

Overview:

• Play as the University, for the free Network Nodes, which are needed to cash all the artifacts you are save-scumming for.
  
• To get the needed number of pods, even with save/reload you need a map size larger than Huge.  Maximum size is not needed.  I'm not sure just what huger-than-Huge size works best.
  
• For that matter, I'm also not sure what native life level is best.  Fungus everywhere is bad early, but good later.  I suspect you want the highest level, since save-scummed forest spreads from early forest pods can clear much of the fungus near your start location.
  
• You want two landmarks: the Monsoon Jungle and the Manifold Nexus.  (+1 Planet gives you a chance to capture mind worms, for more exploring units.)
  
• A Unity pod on non-fungal land can give you a tile bonus plus something else.  You want all of exploring units; energy; tech; contacts; artifacts; forests, early on; and materials.
  
• Secret Projects are easy to build, with expensive supply crawlers from material pods.
  
• You still should be able to snowball enough to actually research technologies towards the end.
  
• The tech plan still starts Centauri Ecology and Industrial Automation ASAP, but after that I think it best to beeline the technologies for the Maritime Control Center/cruisers and the Xenoempathy Dome, for maximum map exploration speed.
  

I imagine T-hawk doesn't want to do this for the obvious reason (lots of reloading), but I've always wanted to do it myself if I get the time.  (The true limiting factor.  )

This should be faster than 60 turns.

Thoughts?

[T-hawk]

I saw such a writeup a long time ago.  The entire game was completed with artifacts, it was never necessary to grow cities or build things.  Not even to grow to build colony pods - just let a base disband at size 1, then the re-founded base will have a new network node for a new artifact slot.  Every base gets its artifact, sometimes a materials pod to build a new exploring unit, then a materials pod to build that colony pod, and that's literally all you ever need.

Most of the game occurred in the water, with 4- and then 6-move ships picking up multiple supply pods per turn.  Exploring across land and fungus didn't matter much compared to that.  Needlejet colony pods then expand the speed more, they can plant sea bases, and the cost is moot with a materials pod.

I didn't do it not because it's a lot of reloading (I did that for Civ 5), but because it doesn't resemble real SMAC gameplay at all. Finally, I believe there's a very small chance (1% or less) that an artifact can yield a technology for which you have only one prerequisite rather than both. If that's true, then it takes only 15 artifacts to get all the way up to Threshold, if you do a truly absurd amount of reloading, hundreds per pod.