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For that last loss condition, is being impeached an auto-loss or is it actually being removed from office? Are they using impeach properly or are they using it to mean being removed from office? I would also be interested to know what wars you start with in the different historical scenarios. I want to know what the game considers a war and what is considered just a military action.
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Jul 1, 2023 01:29
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Cuttlefush posted:i mean yeah that is the case. the aliens are totally evil in xcom2 even though they're humans and are fine in the next game because you uh... did the thing. they're so fine they're actually all just normal regular people. and you had their heads mounted in your lounge The Japanese were the bad guys in WW2 and the US took skull trophies from them and showed them off. Now the US and Japan are best buds. I think there's even dialogue in the game that basically goes "You remember the past? Things were pretty hosed up back then". KomradeX posted:Making the aliens pals in xcom cops might have been a mistake Letting you equip your alien cop pals with incendiary ammo and acid grenades also made the game feel kinda weird. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 23:14 on Jul 20, 2023 |
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Jul 20, 2023 23:12
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gradenko_2000 posted:I like how in Cities Skylines there's no real answer to sewage besides "make sure your pumping stations aren't downstream of the poo poo pipes" It's St. Louis's problem now
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Aug 26, 2023 21:30
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1stGear posted:If we're remembering the same article, I think my favorite part of it was that Soviet doctrine emphasized really simple plans. So the NATO side would be laying out really intricate clockwork of how they're going to advance, when air support will strike, when artillery barrages will start/end, phase lines, the works. And the Soviet team would just say "We're all gonna go forward at once, whichever axis has success will be reinforced" and be done with their planning in like thirty minutes. It was apparently extremely successful at unnerving the NATO players. Why Cold War Warsaw Pact Tactics Work In Wargaming
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Sep 26, 2023 07:36
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Lum_ posted:also, wargaming in general has always had an ahistorical hardon for the SS as "elite troops in cool black uniforms, so let's make sure their counters are BLACK and give them HIGH NUMBERS" I think you could also justify better morale due to their fanaticism/upcoming warcrime executions. For the few wargames that simulate internal politics you could also give them a political power bonus. They also did get priority on non-tank weaponry and equipment as well. The SS were also terrible at the boring bureaucratic parts of war. If I recall correctly, one of the (many) reasons that the the Waffen-SS lost at the Battle of the Bulge was that they didn't have enough traffic cops and their tanks got caught in a terrible traffic snarl. So better equipment, but often worse at actually using it. Edit: There were also vast differences between the "elite" German Waffen-SS units and the foreign ones that were basically Auxilia units that mostly specialized in warcrimes/anti-partisan operations. Probably best to separate those two types in any wargames that feature both. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 19:13 on Oct 28, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2023 19:00
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I've been playing Alpha Centauri again. I'm working on modding the original factions a bit, giving each of them a little bit more diversity and personality and a little more oomph as well. I'm testing them out as I go. Would anyone be interested in my words/pictures as I contemplate the game mechanics, consider the personality of a faction, and ruminate on the game, its mechanics and their connection to the US ideology of 1999. I'm playtesting my changes to Yang and I'll probably do Pravin Lal next, I think I've got some good ideas for both.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:01
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We'll begin with how to start playing Alpha Centauri in the year of Our Lord 2023. The process was almost painless. We'll be adding a bugfix patch and a UI patch. You too can be playing Alpha Centauri in about 10 minutes or so. 1. Buy Alpha Centauri from gog.com. It is $6 at full price. https://www.gog.com/en/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri 3. Download and install the game 2. WAIT! before you install it make sure you copy the install directory you use to notepad in case the patches don't automatically find it. 4. The official patches are already installed, you don't need to do anything there. 5. Install Scient's patch. There are other bugfix patches but I picked this one because a youtuber (Mandelore Gaming) recommended it to me. There are other patches but this seems to fix the most bugs without touching the actual gameplay. Just download and run the executable from this stranger on the internet. Make sure it goes to the correct directory (from step 3). https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch/releases 6. Install the PRACX patch. This is a UI patch that adds things like zooming in and out. It brings the UI to at least semi-modern standards. I wouldn't reccomend playing Alpha Centauri without it. Once again just download the executable from the same stranger from the internet and execute it. And once again double check that the install directory is correct. https://github.com/DrazharLn/pracx/releases 7. Go into your Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri folder and double click terranx.exe file to start it. You may want to make a shortcut somewhere. That should just about do it! Here's the video of the intro to the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=035cpHEowS4 And here's the intro updated for 2020, remember 2020? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY9uZeAjl9I gradenko_2000 posted:Hell yes let's see some Alpha Centauri Pravin Lal is probably the one I gave the biggest buff too, I may have overdone it but I was truly inspired by modern liberalism. I've also buffed Yang and Deidre and made a small change to the rest. Basically everybody no longer takes the penalties from their favored Social Engineering choice as it often seems to be already integrated into the faction. I've now got two questions. Who should I play as? And should any of the original 7 Factions be subbed out for somebody from the expansion, Alien Crossfire. I could play as one my buffed factions to see how they play or play as somebody else to see how they perform as AI. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 07:32 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 07:26
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my dad posted:Yang does not need gameplay buffs, he's by far the strongest faction from my experience. I would disagree, Yang is one of the weaker factions in the game, however his AI is one of the better ones. I suppose this is as good a time as any to introduce Yang, my musings on him, and my modifications.  Yang also has a secret unlisted bonus where his Efficiency cannot go below zero. To me the inspiration for Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang and his Human Hive faction seem very obvious. It is very heavily inspired by the Eastasia from the novel 1984 by beloved author George Orwell, a man who accused Charlie Chaplin of being a Stalinist. Eastasia itself was inspired by the lurid propaganda coming out about Red China and that Orwell had drunk eagerly and deeply from. Let's see what our boy George wrote Eastasia. 1984 posted:None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. 1984 posted:In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Eastasia's advantages are the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants, which are perfectly matched by the +1 GROWTH and +1 INDUSTRY of the Yang's Human Hive. The political philosophy of Eastasia is called the Obliteration of the Self, which also matches Yang's philosophy of the total subsumption of the individual into the group. Finally, Yang's advantages in running a Planned Economy and a Police State also match on to what we know about the politics of Eastasia, which is said to be very similar to how Oceania is run in the novel. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 21:49 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 21:41
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Mister Bates posted:Domai and the Free Drones from the expansion have always been my preferred faction for obvious reasons, but the problem with the expansion factions is that the original faction list is so good that removing any of them feels like a huge omission Typo posted:Morgans have the most interesting play style imo 
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Oct 30, 2023 21:45
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Don't forget about Yang's Efficiency not being able to go below zero. Let's move on to Yang in gameplay, starting with his advantages, roughly from least important to most. He has free perimeter defense in every base, which gives a defensive bonus when being attacked. He has +1 Growth which makes new citizens cost 10% less Nutrients. He has +1 Industry which makes building things cost 10% less Minerals. Finally his Efficiency cannot go below zero. Efficiency is a Society Effect (like Growth and Industry) that determines how efficiently you can run a large empire. Low Efficiency reduces the amount of Energy (Money) you get from your distant bases and increases the amount of Drones (Unhappy workers) you get from having a lot of bases while high Efficiency does the opposite. Yang's Efficiency not being able to go below zero is the key to his faction. It lets him run two Social Engineering choices that normally have Efficiency penalties without suffering from them. He can (and should) run a Planned Economy and a Police State. Planned Economy gives him a bit of extra Growth and Industry which adds to the inherent bonuses the Human Hive already has. Police State gives you extra Police and Support. High Support lets your bases "support" more units without you having to pay extra minerals every turn, the extra Support from Police State lets Yang support a whopping 4 upkeep-free units per base. High Police lets units stationed in your bases turn one Drone (Unhappy worker) into one normal worker. The higher your Police rating, the more units you can use as police in each base. By itself, Police state lets you use 3 units as police neutralizing up to 3 drones. The strategy seem obvious, use your high support and high police to neutralize your drones for free, sparing your crappy economy from the upkeep of anti-drone buildings. You can also use your Industry and Support to build up a large army and conquer your neighbor. If you commit to an aggressive strategy you need to execute it fast, your crappy Economy means you have crappy research and even if you do get a new military research mid-war you have a difficult time scrounging up the Energy to upgrade your units. However, I favor a different strategy with Yang. I have one or two units guarding each base and then I build a 2-3 Formers (terraformers) per base and have them go nuts on terraforming my territory. My high Support means the Formers aren't a drag on my economy and they can do their business on making my cities incredibly productive. Don't worry about Eco-Damage because more Mindworms means you can harvest more pearls from them. The pearls give you Energy, which you desperately need in the early game. I call this strategy "Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature". If you can get the Weather Paradigm then you can add Thermal Boreholes to really juice your economy up. The Weather Paradigm secret project is great for Yang and also probably every single other faction in the game. Historical Note: The People's Republic of China didn't get its UN seat until 1971, This would have been 28 years ago in 1999. The lead designer of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Brian Reynolds, would have been 4 years old at the time. Some ideological notes. Yang has the same inherent bonuses as Planned Economy yet his Preference is Police State. He usually runs both of course. His penalty to Economy doesn't come from any of the existing Social Engineering choices but is similar enough to the default Efficiency penalties of Planned Economy and Police State. I think Yang and his Human Hive is 'coded' as being Red China. I would need to look at more US propaganda about China from before 1999 to make a more accurate assessment but this feels right to me. So Yang + Planned + Police State lets him have good Growth, Industry, Police, and Support but poor Economy. In Earth terms this would translate to a massive population, large amounts of industry, a large army, and an impressive level of internal control of their own population but held back by a poor economy. I think this maps very well onto perceptions of China in 1999. Of course, around mid-game my Energy worries usually go away as I've terraformed enough forests/solar collectors/thermal boreholes to solve that problem.  Here's a screenshot of my economy from when I played Yang this weekend. If you look at mid-game you can see when I finally solved my economy problems. I had a bunch of unexpected wars early game that really delayed me being able to set everything up properly. Coming up next. Yang's disadvantages, especially his secret disadvantage of having the worst growth in the game.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:59
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skooma512 posted:Ok so when I play SMAC, I always end up way behind the AI in everything but especially military even on easy and usually just build tall on some godforsaken island. Who are you playing as and what Social Engineering choices do you usually run? my dad posted:I prefer somewhat closer colonies, it's OK to overlap radius. When choosing where to settle, it's much better to have a few good tiles than a bunch of mediocre ones. No matter how lovely a tile is, you can always turn it into a 1-2-1 forest. These are all good pieces of advice. I prefer minimum (or none) overlap on colonies but close colonies work very well. I personally don't like the look and feel of ICS or even semi-ICS, the computer usually avoids doing it so I feel safe doing so as well. One thing you can also do is make colonies the good distance from each other (enough so there's minimum overlap) until you are hemmed in by the other factions and then fill in your territory with more cities if you need to. What I usually do is build a bunch of scout guys early on and then build a colony pod every time I see a fancy bonus resource I want to grab until I run out of space. Only then do I start upgrading my cities. A lot of your scouts will die but they'll pay for themselves in bonuses from the unity pods and the Mindworms. Fighting against the Mindworms uses Psi-Combat, weapons and armor are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is your Morale (Green, Veteran, Elite, Etc...) and who is attacking, the attacking party gets a massive +25% bonus to the combat. Later on you'll get abilities, weapons, and armor that affect Psi-Combat as well but early game just build the scout patrols. my dad posted:Specialized units > generalists. lovely 1-1-1 guys can be upgraded to what you need when you need at a reasonable cost in an emergency. This needs to be emphasized more. Building a 2-2-1 (attack-defense-movement) unit costs you as much Minerals as building both a 2-1-1 and a 1-2-1. More complicated units are a lot more expensive than you would think since the cost increase isn't linear. One thing you may have missed, when you attack only your units' attack rating matters and when you defend only your units' defense rating matters.. The units defense rating doesn't matter if you're not defending. If you're defending a city with one unit then it should be a 1-Max-1 unit with whatever the highest defense rating you can get is. I also like to put Hypnotic Trance on that unit to defend again Mindworms. If you need to add a second unit, it should be a high attack unit instead of another high defense unit. When an enemy unit gets near your base, hit it with your attack unit and then retreat inside your own base. I like to have my attack unit have high mobility as well so I can rove out a bit. Sensors are a terraforming improvement that can really help with this strategy. I'll be writing about Pop Booming soon. The short version is if you can get +6 Growth (Children's Creche + Planned Economy + Democratic) then you can get one population every single turn for as long as you have 2 surplus nutrients. This is a lot better than waiting 7+ turns for your cities to grow naturally. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 01:40 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 01:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:here's a question: I've often heard that Supply Crawlers are OP in SMAC, and that it becomes easy to beat the AI because the human knows how to use it, and the AI does not Supply Crawlers are great. They're upkeep free and give the base they're built at free resources when doing their supply crawling. Citizens give you all 3 resources but they also cost 2 nutrients in upkeep per turn, plus buildings or police to keep them from turning into drones, and they're limited in how many you can have per city and where they can work. I like to use them on tiles that my base can't work. If you use them on high mineral tiles they can pay for themselves in a relatively short number of turns. On the other hand if you use them for Nutrients then you can turn more people in their home base into specialists. 2 Nutrients --> 3 labs or econ in the early game. These labs or econ you get are immune to inefficiency penalties and get multiplied by the various base buildings you have. And specialists only get better as the game goes on and they can't be turned into Drones. In general, if your base is at the max population it can support then you should have as little food surplus as possible, just turn all those guys into specialists. I don't really use Crawlers for energy and I'm not sure it would be much good, I'm usually swimming in energy by the time it makes sense to use them. Crawlers can also be converted back into minerals at any base, this is very useful for rushing Secret Projects that one of the other factions unfairly started before you could. The tricky part is they need to be kept safe so you need to clear the area of xenofungus first. I don't think I've ever tried putting Hypnotic Trance on them, maybe it would work. I would definitely prioritize them behind Formers.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:14
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Speleothing posted:ICS is "Infinite City Spam" and it was the objectively correct way to play that era of Civ, and carries over pretty well into SMAC too my dad posted:Yeah. It's unfortunate, but that's how the game works. ICS (Infinite City/Colony Spam/Sprawl) is the strategy that revolves around putting down as many cities as possible without regard for the quality of the terrain they're one. A new city gives you 1 free worked tile, allows you to support more units without upkeep, and gives you a free citizen to work a single tile or become a specialist. There aren't a lot of Facilities (buildings) you can build in your base early on that can compete with that. There are the Recycling Tanks which give you +1/+1/+1 (Nutrients/Minerals/Energy) but those are even better when you ICS. To be clear to the new players, ICSing is good but isn't necessary to win, especially on normal (Librarian) and lower difficulties. It can be tedious to micromanage so I personally avoid it. my dad posted:Yang is every yankee racist fear about East Asia in the 90s combined into one faction. Oddly enough I usually play on rainy maps and I still wind up mostly putting forests everywhere. They're just so fast to put down and they scale all the way up to the endgame. I build a few farms+solar panels until I get enough food to grow that base to seven and then I put down forests on all the other squares. I often play with the extra rocky map setting to break this up a bit. I feel like Yang is one of factions that can afford to miss the Weather Paradigm (Double Terraforming speed) secret project, just because he can have so many terraformers. You still want it though because it's one of the best project in the early game. Why should the AI get it when they're not even that good at terraforming?
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Oct 31, 2023 03:25
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On to Yang's gameplay disadvantages. He has two big disadvantages, his economy and his population growth. Earlier I treated his population growth as being very good because he can effortlessly get +3 Growth but actually he has a big problem with growing. However, let's look at his Economy first. Yang has -2 Economy. This gives a relatively mild penalty of -1 energy per base (min 0). It makes your early game difficult but you can eventually get enough Energy from other sources to overcome it. However, this penalty also prevents him from using the Free Market policy to get his Economy rating up to +2, Yang + Free Market only takes his Economy rating to 0. +2 Economy is the magical breakpoint for when Economy gives you +1 Energy per square worked, this is basically the entire reason why people run Free Market. If you need energy, you run Free Market and you need Energy a lot in Alpha Centauri. It is used to maintain the Facilities in your bases and used to rush construction of those selfsame Facilities (or military units, or non-military units, or Secret Projects (Wonders)). You can also use Energy to upgrade your units, for bribing other factions, and for bribes/mind control when doing spy stuff. Energy is also used for researching things, this is called "Labs" in the game because you're using the energy to power your Labs (and because the term Research is used for something else). The Energy that goes to your Labs is your primary method of getting new technologies in the early game and you need energy to maintain the Facilities that multiply that Labs income, this is all competing with all the other things you want to use Energy for. There's one more thing you can use energy for and that's making your Citizens happy. You make your citizens happy to prevent them from Rioting and to cause Golden Ages. More on Golden Ages later. Yang gets +1 Growth and can easily get +2 more from running Planned Economy. +3 Growth reduces the number of Nutrients you need to get a new Citizen by 30%, +4 reduces it by 40%,, +5/50%, and finally +6 gives you a Population Boom. A Population Boom gives you one population a turn until you don't have two Nutrients to spare or you hit the Habitation limits (7 early game for most Factions). It takes something like 7-10+ turns to normally grow a single population for a low population base, this can go up even higher for high population bases. So there is a massive difference between +5 and +6 Growth. So how do you get +6 Growth? It's not actually that hard, you need a Children's Creche which is a Facility (building) that gives you +2 growth in that City, then you get +2 from a Planned Economy, and you get +2 more from running a Democracy. Here's where we get Yang's problem, he can't run a Democracy.  Here are all the Social Engineering choices in the game. You get to unlock the Political and Economic choices in the early game, the Values are unlocked roughly mid-game, and your Faction's vision for a Future Society is only unlocked late-game. All the choices except the base ones come with both bonuses and penalties; although there are Secret Projects that remove the downsides of certain Social Engineering choices. That's why some of my choices have no red icons. You'll notice there's no Democratic choice at the top, that's because I'm playing as Yang. Alright, so you can't do a normal Pop Boom strategy if you can't run either Democracy or Planned Economy. This affects Yang and Morgan (Capitalists) and a few of the expansion Factions that we won't talk about. There is another method of get a +2 to Growth and that's Golden Ages. You get a Golden Age in a city when you have at least as many Talents (happy citizens) as normal workers/specialists and you don't have any Drones (unhappy citizens). The easiest way to get Talents is to divert some of your energy to making your Citizens happy; Morgan has an easy time of this while Yang really struggles with getting Energy income early game. It's the same problem as with diverting energy to research, you need Energy both to divert it to making your citizens happy and to maintain the facilities that multiply that Psych (Energy used for making your Citizens happy). Morgan meanwhile is swimming in energy and doesn't need to grow a lot because his early game bases max out at 4 population. Yang could switch some of his Citizens to Doctors and use police to suppress any drones so it's not impossible for have a Golden Age, but it is harder than for him than for the other Factions. it might be harder for the -1 Growth Factions from the Expansion but they're supposed to have a hard time growing, Yang on the other hand is supposed to have Growth as an advantage. So there is the problem as I see it. Yang is supposed to be a Growth Faction but is one of the worst at Growth. The solution seemed obvious to me, give Yang +2 Growth instead of +1. This takes him from being one of the worst at Growth to being unarguably the best. You just need Planned + Children's Creche to Pop Boom. It's a very powerful ability, but one that limits itself due to Hab limits. He's not doing anything other factions can't, he just gets to do it a lot easier. The one problem I can see is that Yang is one of the Factions that the AI is actually pretty decent at and by making Pop Booming so easy that AI will actually do it. I've played as him and had fun and now we'll see how the AI does with him.  Here's my new and improved Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang. You'll notice that I also slightly modified the highlighting and also hosed up the indentation a bit, I fixed after this screenshot. I also made another modification after playtesting. I removed his ability that prevents his Efficiency from going below zero and replaced it with being immune to the negative consequences of Police State and Planned Economy. Those of you who've played Alpha Centauri may be confused right now because this change doesn't seem to actually do anything. It actually does do something, previously his ability prevented his Efficiency from going below zero but penalties still applied before adding up all your bonuses. This allows you to better mix and match Police State and Planned with Social Engineering choices that increase efficiency. This makes the following combinations more viable. Police State + Green Economy = Climate Stalin Police State + Planned + Knowledge = Sharashka Police State + Planned + Cybernetics = Project Cybersyn (or Project OGAS) I've also completed my modifications to the rest of the original 7 Factions. The most changed is Pravin Lal, the least changed is Zhakorov. As a modder I am unilaterally declaring my modded version of Yang balanced, his Faction's power level is roughly where I want all the factions to be. This will be the first game I'm playing with the full changes I've made for all the Factions, my last game was just with Yang with +1 Growth. I'll probably be playing as Morgan. I plan to play a normal sized map with that's Rocky, Rainy, and overrun with Xenofungus. I'll be playing at Librarian difficulty, this is the difficulty where neither you nor the AI get any advantages. I usually play with tech trading off, should I have it on for this game? Morgan can buy a lot of technology. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 08:01 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 06:57
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 Here are all human Factions in the game. The top six and Deidre are the ones from the original game. The other five are from the expansion, there are also two Factions of the same alien race that aren't in this image. The expansion factions are usually considered to be less well-written than the original seven. That being said, most people do usually like one or two of the new Factions with the Free Drones often being considered a stand-out. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 07:16 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 07:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:if it's not too much trouble, can I ask you about the various UI enhancements that are introduced by the fan-made patches/mods? You mentioned that it's important and I'd like to gain some perspective because finding out what a UI is designed to convey is usually a good insight into how a game should be played "properly" Go here and scroll down a bit, I can't paste it here without losing the formatting. https://github.com/DrazharLn/pracx You can see that it adds advanced UI improvements like being able to zoom in and out, scrolling in menus, turning on resource and terrain overlays, being able to see terrain under fungus/forests. It also adds the ability to run the game in windowed mode. This mod really brings the Alpha Centauri UI into 2006. The original game has excellent hotkey support and has a surprising amount of configurable automation. gradenko_2000 posted:I would vote to keep it off Then it will stay off unless we somehow get outvoted. I wish Alpha Centauri had a "No Tech Brokering" rule where you can only give people techs you researched yourself or a "Blueprints" rule where buying a tech only means you get a significant research bonus for it. Alpha Centauri is over two decades old and we've had 20 more years of development of the 4X genre since then.
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Oct 31, 2023 07:33
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Didn't start the game today due to normal life stuff. However I was able to take a bit of a look at Nwabudike Morgan while on company time. Check him out below (you may need open the picture in a new tab to actually read it). He's an African tycoon who used his initial wealth from diamond mining to eventually invest into space travel and essentially buy himself a ticket to Alpha Centauri. The parallels to Elon Musk are startling, they're both "self-made" men from Africa who got their initial fortune from gem mining and parlayed that into investing in space travel. They both espouse a libertarian philosophy. Of course, Morgan is far more charming and charismatic than Elon and much better at both business and the business of actually making things. The coincidences are still weird though, and there's almost no way that Alpha Centauri was inspired by Elon. SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) was released in February 1999, Elon Musk wouldn't found (the first) X.com until March 1999 and wouldn't merge with PayPal until a year later. SpaceX was only found in 2002, with Elon Musk having bought his way into being one of the founders. If you made SMAC today then you would make an Elon Musk type character to represent the capitalist Faction since he's one of the richest people in the world and heavily involved in space technology. It's weird that Morgan is so similar in 1999. You unfortunately can't remake SMAC today due to our restrictive copyright laws and the rights to SMAC being distributed among multiple corporations (including EA). It's a shame because Brian Reynolds (the guy behind Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) has said that he would be willing to come out of retirement to make an Alpha Centauri remake. There is one more interesting thing about Nwabudike Morgan that really sets him apart from the Musks and Ayn Rands of our world. He really seems to value family and his children. Nwabudike means "a father's power comes from the son" and there is at least one quote in the game that comes from one of his children. It's these subtle touches that keep any of the Factions from becoming simple cliches or stereotypes and make them feel like fully realized people and societies.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:50
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In 2060 earth launched the UNS Unity to our nearest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The great starship was built as a great unifying project for mankind and to give mankind a fresh start on a new world. This great project was contrasted by the increasing chaos, war, famine, pollution, and poverty of Earth during middle part of the the 21st Century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY9uZeAjl9I The ship traveled through the void between the stars for 40 years before reaching the their promised land in 2101. A new planet, a new century, a new start for humanity. Things started to go to poo poo even before planetfall. The ship malfunctioned, the captain was assassinated, and the survivors split into seven factions. Each Faction took a orbital colonization pod and rode it down to Planet. We're playing as Nwabudike Morgan, a business tycoon that significantly funded the construction of the UNS Unity and stowed away on a secretly installed cryopod. quote:Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need as well as greed has followed us to the stars and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse. I selected Customized Random Map, Normal size, low amount of oceans, Weak Erosive forces (increases rockiness), Abundant native life, and Dense Cloud cover(increased raininess). The AI has trouble with oceans and I feel abundant resources make things easier on the AI. The Abundant native life makes things harder for everyone but I like starting out with tons of Xenofungus. I chose Librarian difficulty. This is the normal difficulty with no advantages for the player or for the AI. Feel free to play on a lower level if you're new to Alpha Centauri. The AI isn't very good but there are a lot of quirks to the game and one or two of the AI will land on great location and still wind up giving you a challenge anyway.  Here are the custom game rules I used. I turned off Blind Research and turned on Look First. Blind Research makes you unable to pick what you will research next, you just pick from one of the four areas to research and get whatever technology is next there. I think most people turn it off. Look First replaces your Colony with a Colony Pod that you can move around a bit.  This is a great start, I got both a nutrient bonus and a mineral bonus in range of my start position. Not only that, but I still got a bonus colony pod because the computer thinks this start isn't so great. An auspicous start. Alright, now we're going to have to do something weird. Earlier I said I wanted to turn off tech trading but there was no option to do it earlier. Turning off tech trading is something you can only do in scenarios. So we need to go to the menu there in the bottom left, go to scenario, and activate the scenario editor, then go to the scenario rules in the same place and turn on "no technology trading". Then you gotta save do "Save Scenario" (not "Save Game") and load the Scenario. I wish there was a way to just do it as a rule. I think this also disables adding your game to the Hall of Fame, if that's something you care about. I drop my base straight down and begin exploration. I get lucky and my first find is a Battle Ogre MK1. I forgot to screenshot the explanation but this is basically a lost alien battle unit. It's very powerful early game and it's sheer size makes it useful to police your populace. On the other hand, it's made using non-human technology so we can't repair it. Once it's used up that's that. On the other hand, it's great at intimidating your population even when damaged.  I set my colony to building a scout patrol to explore faster and put my citizen on the Nutrient bonus (the green thing) to get grow my colony faster.  One of the "unity pods" turns out to be a monolith! Monoliths are ancient alien artifacts so it looks we we weren't the first ones here. They give you 2/2/2 resources on their square and can promote a unit to a higher level of Morale. 2/2/2 (Nutrients/Minerals/Energy) is pretty great early game. it doesn't scale well to the mid-game but it's still pretty good even then. Another one of the supply pods from the UNS Unity turns out to be a data pod. In the early game most of the research goes to recreating the technology that we had on Earth when the Unity was launched. I think it's up until tier 3 that we're reresearching things from Old Earth. The not being alone in the universe thing is a pretty big deal, but at this point we're just trying to survive on Planet. Any navel-gazing about alien life should be done when not on company time. We need to learn more about the native life here, Xenofungus is what those red splotchy areas on the map are. It's awful because we can't get any resources from those squares (but some other factions can) and it slows down movement. I sure hope it isn't hiding any more unpleasant surprises. You'll also notice I'm still building scout patrols. I want those Unity pods and I want to explore Planet as fast as possible. I didn't build that Colony Pod you see, I started with it. I haven't built anything aside from from scout patrols.  quote:Our first challenge is to create an entire economic infrastructure, from top to bottom, out of whole cloth. No gradual evolution from previous economic systems is possible, because there is no previous economic system. Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order; otherwise the system will crash out before it ever gets off the ground. Industrial Economics is researched! We've traveled an unfathomable distance from Earth through space to a a new "virgin" planet and one of the first things I'm going to do is recreate Capitalism. In your goddamn face Tim Curry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM I forgot to post the changes I made to Morgan's Faction.  I made two simple changes, I made it so he doesn't take penalties from running his preferred Social Engineering choice of Free Market economics. Normally running Free Market significantly reduces your Police and makes it a lot harder to use your militarized police force (or policized military force?) to clamp down on your unruly proles. I made it so that thanks to Morgan's extensive experience with private security contracting lets him run a Free Market economy without sacrificing his ability to maintain order. Free Market is normally also highly polluting, Morgan also ignores that but has an Inherent -1 Planet rating at all times due to the normal corporate disregard for pollution. It probably should be more, especially with Free Market, but I didn't want to do anything too unbalanced and doing exactly what I want would have been impossible. Good enough is better than perfect after all. Balance-wise, this lets me run Free Market and rake in all the cash from it while continuing my exploration. If I was any other Faction I would have to pick one or the other. In the future, this will also let me run rake in the profits while also fighting a forever war. I feel that this really showcases the strengths of Capitalism.  I founded a new city (Morgan Construction) and I'm using my Energy Credit reserves in order to rush another colony pod. My focus is on exploring with scout patrols to find good locations for cities and then putting down new cities. Honestly I could plop cities down wherever and they would work good enough but I like to spread them out and get nice features for each city.  That's not good. Thankfully my troops are able to handle them with their standard issue flamethrowers. Mindworms are easy for disciplined troops to handle. You don't need any fancy weaponry, you just need to endure their psychic fear assault on your mind and bring out the flamethrowers. If you do then you win, if you can't then you'll be literally paralyzed by fear and the Mindworms will lay eggs in your brain. There's no other way to deal with them (don't @ me Deidre, I don't even have your commlink frequency yet).  The tons of money we're getting from running Free Market lets us quickly research stuff. We'll be learning Biogentics so we can build Recycling Tanks. I'm not sure why we need to Biogentics to get Recycling Tanks. Presumably we need to bioengineer some bacteria to handle all the various things/corpses we toss into the tanks.  Why if it isn't Academician Prokhor Zakharov. I'm glad to see he's doing well and he's directly next to us. Zakharov is the leader of the University faction, focused on research. His weakness is that his information is a little too free, if you know what I mean. Somebody could hire some skilled hackers and easily hack his information networks to slurp up all his research data. I'm going to immediately create "Project PINATA" in order to develop Probe Teams and then hit Zakharov with probe teams until all his research data comes out. I also sign a Treaty of Friendship with Zakharov.  It is now turn 29. I've founded four cities, which is a pretty reasonable number against the AI. I've built my first unit of Formers and planted a single forest. I've built almost nothing but scouts and colony pods, although I did find time/money to build Recycling Tanks in two of my cities (and that one Former). My exploration efforts have gone great, I've gotten not one but two alien Battle Ogres, I found a Unity Rover from one of the pods and that Rover immediately found another Unity Rover. My exploration efforts have also discovered that I'm on a very limited landmass and I'm blocked in by the University. I'll still be placing down more cities but I'm running out of land to claim. The era of free real estate is coming to an end for me. In my next post I'll be sidetracked by explain a bit about placing down cities, how to hurry production efficiently, and the the pluses and minuses of the Free Market and Democratic choices and what it suggests about the ideology behind them. quote:Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
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Nov 2, 2023 08:22
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Alright, a bit of Alpha Centauri gameplay things. I'm not going to be talking about normal tutorial stuff but some stuff that isn't often mentioned unless you go looking for it. First thing, cities and their base square that they work. As you know, cities work the tile that they're place on for free. The city's tile isn't effect by moisture or rockiness (or altitude), they always give you a base 2/1/1 (Nutrients/Minerals/Energy). So feel free to put that city on a Flat, Arid, tile; you'll still get 2/1/1. However the city tiles do still get a few bonuses. Rivers give +1 energy on each square they flow through and this applies to the city as well. There are the single tile Nutrient/Mineral/ Energy bonuses, those still apply if you settle your city on them. Additionally, there are Landmarks in the game. Landmarks give +1 of their resource to every square they occupy, including your city squares! I actually found a landmark but forgot to mention it. Here's the earlier picture I captured it in.  quote:Pholus Ridge. Planet exhibits plate tectonics much like those of Earth. In one region, a continental plate is sliding over an ocean plate, sending the lower plate down into Planet's mantle. The result is earthquakes and mountain-building activity all along the line of Pholus Ridge. Pholus Ridge isn't very geographically distinct but it is geologically distinct. That +1 energy in whichever tiles are part of Pholus Ridge will come in handy in my quest to corner the energy market on Alpha Centauri. I don't remember what happens if you settle your settlement on a Monolith. As an important note, any tile bonuses that apply to a to a city also apply to a forest (I think). So rivers, landmarks, and resource bonuses apply to forests as well. Edit: The Energy bonus from your city tile can be increased by having a good Economy (or reduced by a poor one). Finally the Recycling Tanks building increases your colony's base tile income by +1/+1/+1. It's a very cheap building that helps early cities out a lot, you should build them everywhere. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 01:13 on Nov 3, 2023 |
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Nov 3, 2023 00:43
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I'm back baby. We're rather well. It's turn 44, we've only gotten one more colony (which I've named Morgan CryoComputing) right near the Arctic Circle of Planet. Unlike the Arctic Circle (Bear Circle) of Old Earth, Planet's Arctic is bear-free. Maybe we'll clone some. I'm quite happy with our territory, we're hemmed in but we do have a good amount of space. The cities all have some sort of bonus, whether that's a tile bonus, the Pholus Ridge landmark, or even just a few river tiles. I managed to nicely tile my cities as well. I'm in first place but just barely. Second place is the Pravin Lal's U.N. Peacekeepers and he's in first place in population. This sort of prodigious growth by the AI usually means one thing, Pravin Lal managed to land near the Monsoon Jungle. The Monsoon Jungle is a Landmark that gives +1 Nutrients on all of its tiles. Whichever AI lands there usually does pretty drat well for itself. Fun Fact: Planet actually does have a name, it's just that nobody uses it. It's called Chiron, after the wisest of the centaurs. The star itself was named Alpha Centauri because it was the brightest star in the constellation of the Centaur. You can't ever see Alpha Centauri from most of North America. Southern Florida and Texas (and Hawaii) are exceptions.  Here's the constellation of the Centaur(?!?) as well as the the famous Southern Cross. Both are visible from Alexandria. There's Alpha Centauri too, our closest neighbor. Alpha Centauri is a Southern Circumpolar star, meaning it revolves around the South Pole and (if you're in the Southern Hemisphere) is visible for every night of the year and for the whole night. I think this also means that Alpha Centauri is more or less to our south in space.  I researched probe teams and my next choice lets me get Hab Complexes! I was going to rush this after probe teams but apparently it's right there. Hab Complexes normally let you increase your max population per Colony from 7 to 14 (doubling it), hower Morgan and his followers have expensive tastes so they have -3 max population. This means that Hab Complexes increase your max pop from 4 to 11 (almost tripling it). Getting Hab Complexes really goes a long way to mitigating one of your biggest weaknesses as Morgan.  You get a ton of energy as Morgan so you'll be using it to rush production a lot. I've been doing that a ton but haven't really noted it because it's not that interesting. Morgan's low Support often means that you'll be paying minerals in upkeep to support your units so you need to hurry production more often than other Factions. You can see that I'm paying 2 This time I had exactly enough to Energy to finish this building. Honestly, looking at the cost I'm probably building these Energy Banks prematurely. An energy bank gives you a 50% bonus to your econ income (not total energy production). I've got 4, so it gives me 2 extra energy every turn. One of that energy goes to paying Maintenance for the energy bank so that's one net energy per turn. That means it will take 124 turns to pay back just the rush cost of this Energy Bank at current rates. Of course this colony will be getting more energy income as times goes on but Rushing the Energy Bank won't make that happen faster (unlike Rushing something like Recycling Tanks). On the other hand, I don't remember if there was anything better to spend my energy around this turn. Energy Credits are meant to be spent after all.  Terraformers, or Formers are the key to building your economy. They're more important than building facilities but usually less important than building new colonies. My philosophy is that if have more than one unimproved tile being worked on in a city then I need to build more Formers. You have a few options early-game for terraforming. You can build a farm + (solar collector or mine) or you can build a forest. I usually build Farms + Solar Collectors until I am going to have enough Nutrients to grow the city to max size, then I plant Forests until all the tiles that are going to be worked are forested. Forests give you 1/2/1 early game but that massively improves as the game goes on. If you're not sure what to put down on a tile, put down a forest. They're very fast to put down, give you a decent mix resources, they can spread automatically and kick out Xenofungus, and if you decided something better should go on that tile then they give you five minerals when you cut them down. They're basically that one tree from The Giving Tree, an absolute sucker that we can massively exploit for our own profit. First note: These are genetically engineered trees that leach minerals from the soil, and store them in condensed nuggets inside of themselves. That's how they give us minerals. The wood is probably also used for consumer-grade goods like furniture so that frees up industrial capacity to make other things. I don't think even the Gaians build nuclear reactors out of mostly wood. Second note: Mines are kind of terrible. They're okay on rocky terrain but bad anywhere else. Outside of Rocky terrain they only give you +1 minerals with no way to improve that. Farms, Solar Collectors, and Forests all have ways to improve them while Mines don't, they're instead sort of replaced by Boreholes. On top of that, the Alien Crossfire expansion decided to further nerf mines by making them reduce the Nutrients of a square by one (to a minimum of 1). I modded this out (alphax.txt file). In the unmodded game Mines are basically only a good idea on Rocky terrain and sometimes on Mineral bonus tiles, otherwise just make a forest. With my unnerf they also make sense on low-lying regions that produce decent amounts of food during the early game. Forests still give you the same amount of minerals but with my unnerf a farm+mine can give you more food with the same amount of minerals in exchange for more terraforming turns (depending on the tile of course) Back to the game, you can see I'm about to have two of my terraformers be attacked by Mindworms. I managed to save one by moving a scout patrol on top of it in order to defend it.  quote:In the borehole pressure mines 100km beneath Planetsurface, at the Mohorovicic Discontinuity where crust gives way to mantle, temperatures often reach levels well in excess of 1000 degrees Celsius. Exploitation of Planet's resources under such brutal conditions has required quantum advances in robotic and teleoperational technology. This is a huge technology. I already explained how big a deal Hab Complexes are for everybody but especially for Morganites. It also gives me the Wealth social engineering choice which will drive my economy even higher. It will also let me build supply crawlers, which are incredibly useful but I also have a lot of other things I need to build.  Zakharov you bastard, you want to probe me? No, I should be the one probing you. This aggression will not stand.  Alright, we all hate that Peacekeeping rear end in a top hat but I'm really focused on myself right now. You'll have to backstab him without me. Feel free to send all your units to your southern border. What I really need is for you to remove your military units from my territory.  drat it, you're quibbling and you know it. I doubt those hackers are bring all the specialized computer equipment out for a nice stroll.  Whatever, I just had them arrested and interrogated and then sent them back home. Murdering them would have caused a diplomatic incident and apparently disappearing them isn't an option. "Really, you somehow lost your probe team in my territory? That sounds rather careless of you. Well, I'll keep an eye out and tell you if I see 'em".  I then spent my turns building hab complexes, increasing my Psych spending to trigger a population boom (along with going Democratic + Children's Creche), and increasing my population as much as I could. In order to get a colony to my new max population of 11 I had to increase my Psych spending to 80%. Costly, but only for one or two turns. In the meantime, I only now started building my first Secret Project (wonder) and Pravin Lal started the same one although he was behind a few turns. I beat him to finishing it, probably by a significant amount. Pravin Lal then switched to building the Merchant Exchange and I'm going to try and beat him to that to. I do like that as soon as the AI starts a "Secret" Project you're immediately notified. I guess it's hard to keep such a massive undertaking actually secret.  I may have pop-boomed a bit too much. I've gotta get more anti-drone and psych infrastructure build so I don't have to dedicate 3 full pops to Psych. I don't even have any multipliers to Psych in this colony yet. I'll probably delay pop-booming my other colonies for a bit. They got a reasonable amount of growth while I was doing this. I also finished The Weather Paradigm, so here's the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPvK2p28Pho What the hell is this froufrou hippy-dippy Gaian nonsense? Listen, we're going to be peeling a lot of layers of mystery from this planetary onion. In fact, at some point we're going be drilling holes from the top layer of this onion going down until we hit the gooey lava layer and then we're going to be harvesting the energy and minerals from that hole. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 02:01 on Nov 4, 2023 |
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Nov 3, 2023 22:52
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skooma512 posted:Any tips on UGCW? Keeping with my theme, I'm utterly inept at that game too lol. My troops seem to always lose every matchup even with artillery support and 2:1 numbers. https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/25750-ui-and-ai-customizations-mod-v192/ The most important things it fixes are; 1. The first tutorial mission being the hardest mission in the entire game. (This was a ridiculous choice from the devs, why would you make the very first mission the hardest?) 2. It shows you the range at which artillery will use canister/shrapnel/round shot. This will let you know how much damage they'll do. 3. Makes it so that having more men/cannons will always do more damage than having less. Previously if you had too many cannons in a unit it would actually do less damage. You still get diminishing returns but it won't screw you over just because you don't know the magic number for the cannons/men. It also changes a few other things, like making perks that didn't used to work actually do something. For my actual battle advice. The 6-pounder guns that you start with are cheap, easy to buy, and quick (for artillery). They're very bad at long range (when they shoot solid shot) but have an easy time getting into medium (shrapnel shot) or short (canister shot) range. Even if they get all shot up, you can just buy more of them. I would still use your infantry to pin enemys into place and then get the cannons into medium or even short range. Infantry is also still the best unit type, don't skimp on getting plenty of them. quote:Edit: Also thanks for pointing out Alpha Centauri isn't visible from the northern hemisphere, I didn't even know that It is visible from the northern hemisphere, just not from most of the United States or Europe. You can see it from Alexandria, Egypt. Frosted Flake posted:That's true for pretty much any smoothbore gunpowder era game. You want to blast a hole in the target over open sights, using canister if possible. The trick is extracting you guns from trouble and keeping cavalry away (not generally a problem in the ACW). It's actually a mixed era. You get both smooth-bore and rifled cannons. I think you might get one unit of each in the first mission, so double check which one is which. Smooth-bores are great at medium and short range, rifled cannons are great at long-range. You also get howitzers, which are so short-ranged that I couldn't figure out how to use them. sullat posted:Hard to say what's going on. Just remember, ABDS (always be detaching skirmishers) and using them to try and flank the enemy. Also this isn't frosted flake's artillery doing indirect fire at 10 km range, this is Napoleonic artillery where you should be rolling the guns up to grape-shot range and blasting away. Try to use your green brigades to absorb fire and then the veteran ones to dish it out. The narrator is also trying to get you to repeat the mistakes of the historical generals so you watch out for that. For example, on the union side at Shiloh you're not really supposed to hold out at the first defensive line and if you stay there too long you'll get swamped by huge overpowered rebel brigades. This is also great advice. I managed to repeat quite a few historical mistakes despite watching a documentary on that specific battle on my second monitor during most of the battles. I would hear about the mistakes of the Union generals and think "I'm built different though". BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 01:57 on Nov 4, 2023 |
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Nov 4, 2023 01:43
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Alright, I've continued playing SMAC and I've gotten to turn 100. Let's see what's happened. I've continued my "Splendid Isolation" style of game. I got a nice start in that I got a decent amount of land to play in but was also completely hemmed in by Zakharov and his University faction. One of Morgan's (my Faction) bonuses is a +1 Commerce bonus. You get commerce by signing a Treaty of Friendship with another faction and that +1 Commerce means that Morgan gets more commerce per commerce. What commerce actually does is give you more energy in your cities, especially in your biggest cities (or most energy producing cities?). It's not a big amount, especially when playing against the AI, my most profitable city gets +3 per faction treaty. Given that I wanted to see how my modded factions did, the terrain I started in, and my Faction bonus to commerce I decided to play rather passively. I'm now trying to grab as many Secret Projects as I can. Free trade = Free money, how's that for an ideological note. It is basically an implementation of comparative advantage from Econ 101. Honestly, no real complaints on that note. It's a very simple implementation and gives you a reason to not just destroy all the other factions as fast as possible. I'm not even sure how you would better implement trade with a resource system as simple as SMAC's. It is interesting that when you engage in free trade with a capitalist like Morgan, you both benefit but Morgan benefits more. I like that.  CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly" posted:Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need as well as greed has followed us to the stars and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9AYmlCJny8 Merchant Exchange completed, in your face Pravin Lal! This gives you +1 energy in each square of the city that it's built in. You'll notice that it's actually less powerful than running Free Market, which gives you +1 energy in each square of all cities. It doesn't have any disadvantages though and it stacks with Free Market. The quote that comes with it is from our very own Morgan. There's also a bonus MorganQuote in the chyron at the bottom. MorganQuote of the Day posted:Greed ensures the transfer of power from the weak to the strong This is actually a really interesting quote. It's a MorganQuote(tm) rather than a Morgan quote. It's probably not from Morgan himself but from some intern that has to write out a quote a day calendar. It lays bare the fundamental ideology of modern Capitalism without the economical and philosophical justifications that Morgan normally surrounds it in. So what it's revealing isn't what Morgan thinks but rather more about what lessons the Morganites are taking from Morgan. Morgan may be an absolutely brilliant business tycoon that manages to find a win-win solution nine times out of ten but the people below him aren't necessarily like that. They're just normal business people and industrialists. That scrolling thing on the bottom is known as a "chyron" which is a genericized trademark. The name comes from the Chyron Corporation which specialized in adding graphical elements to news and sports programs back when that took a dedicated computer to achieve. I believe they only became omni-present on news shows in the way we're used to during the OJ Simpson trial (1995). Chyron Corporation was named after Chiron, the wisest centaur in Greek mythology, this was also who the planet in Alpha Centauri was named after. Weird right?  Here's what my most wealthy city is like, I built the Merchant Exchange here. That +6 energy square is +1 energy per square from Free Market, another +1 from the Merchant Exchange, +1 from the river, +1 from the Pholus Ridge, and +2 from the Solar Collectors at over 1000 meters. I'm going to make this my new capital so that will ensure this base works at 100% efficiency and then completely dedicate this base to Energy. I then beat him to the Virtual world as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJlPr2KHSFo Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter" posted:What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. Whoa, we're not doing any sort of weird philosophical enlightenment thing. We're just ripping off VR Chat. It will be free but with in-app purchases, just like Alpha Centauri would be if it was remade today for mobile devices. It looks like Pravin Lal tried to rip off the Metaverse instead, which is why he lost. The Virtual World gives you a Hologram Theatre for every base with Network Node. Morgan Stellartots Keynote Speech, "Mythology for Profit" posted:Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours— the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers. Perfect, this is exactly the sort of full experience we want for our fancy new Virtual World. Morgan Stellartots does great work, I should give them their own colony. The free Hologram Theatres will keep the Drones pacified and give me yet another Psych bonus for more golden ages for more pop booming.  Pravin Lal did beat me to the Human Genome Project. It gives one extra Talent (happy citizen) per base, useful but not vital. I will eventually have to do a hostile takeover of it though. The Human Genome project was started in 1990 and completed in 2003 so SMAC came out right during the height of it. I used to wonder if the Human Genome project (HGP) gave you an extra Talent because of eugenics reasons but I don't think so anymore. The HGP gives the exact same bonus as the Cure for Cancer from Civilization 2. Back in 1999 people thought that once the HGP was completed the cures for a lot of genetic and genetics-related diseases were right around the corner. Cancers would be treated easily with targeted gene therapies. Instead we got a slow plodding march towards better treatments. Also, when the game does talk about eugenics it does so pretty openly.  We are now on turn 104. At this point the balance of Alpha Centauri can start falling apart a bit, especially in the research area. If you have a decent amount of income, then you start finishing a new Research in five or less turns. You get new research faster than you can take advantage of it. New facilities are researched faster than you can build them and military units you build can become obsolete before they reach the enemy base. To avoid that I've set the research rate for the game all the way down to 50%. This should give some breathing room for the mid-game. In SMAC, the cost of a research is based only on how many previous things you've researched. The tier of the research is irrelevant. I know the Thinker mod changes this so that Tech at each tier has a flat cost, as well as making a complete overhaul of the AI. I'll probably try it out next game. From the screenshot you can see that I've still got all my same cities but they've grown nicely. That fungal tower up top has been my bane for a while now, my crappy planet rating and my undisciplined troops mean I need at least 3 units to take it out but I need 4 to really guarantee it. The problem is that every time I've tried to move my troops in position I encounter a mind worm or something that destroys or badly damages one of my units. It literally took out 3 scout patrols the first time I tried to destroy it. Part of the reason Morgan Cryocomputing is so underdeveloped was from the failed attempts to take it down and the support minerals I have to pay while waiting for my units to heal up. University is not doing well. They're down to a single colony. They're getting their rear end kicked by the U.N. Peacekeepers. I think I'll let them be destroyed, but I need to steal all their technologies first. I have a number of early ones I skipped. Despite it being past turn 100, nobody has called a UN Council. Apparently nobody has found everybody's commlinks yet. I think might be time to end my Splendid Isolation phase soon and see what the heck is going on in the world.  Here's Zakharov and his University faction. The only change I made is that he no longer takes the -2 Probe penalty from the Knowledge value Social Engineering choice. Oddly enough, if you're running Alpha Centauri with only official patches then this is actually a nerf. Knowledge would take his Probe value to -4 but the table in the game only had Probe values down to -3, so at -4 it would default to the neutral Probe effect at 0. The Scient patch fixes this. This was the only change I made to Zakharov because I removed the penalties from everybody's favored Social Engineering choice. He's already perfect otherwise. Zakharov is one of the few Factions where their Inherant Faction penalties are the same as the the penalties from their favored Social Engineering choice. Usually the penalties are thematically similar but to different values than the Faction's Social Engineering choice. I have got to finish probing him for all his technologies no matter how many probes teams it takes and no matter how pissed off he gets.
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Nov 5, 2023 06:43
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I'm back, back again. With more Alpha Centauri, tell a friend. When we last left off I had modded the game to reduce total research rate by 50%, doubling the time it takes to research everything. I had gotten so much energy income that I was researching everything way too fast for my taste. This is a very common problem with Alpha Centauri and it shows up around mid-game usually. You get the tech/infrastructure to build up your cities enough to have a ton of energy income and your research increases massively while the increase in research costs is a lot more gradual. Research in 4X games in general is usually one of the most important things in the game. Doing well in the game lets you research more which unlocks better stuff which lets you research more which lets you go do even more gooder in the game. This lets somebody who is already doing well in the game do even better. From a game design perspective, you can't do too much to mitigate this, because the the concept of snowballing is central to 4X games, not just in technology but in everything. Players don't want to be punished for doing well so you have to use a careful touch when designing catch-up and anti-snowball features in the game. Modern games often implement some sort of "tech spread" where technology is cheaper to research the more people have researched it (especially your neighbors). SMAC does actually have a few systems to prevent the player that's in first from just running away from the game. First off is inefficiency, colonies that are further away from the colony that has your HQ building the more energy is lost to inefficiency in that distant colony. You also get more drones the more bases you have. This can be modified by Social Engineering choices but then you're missing out on the bonuses of the other choices you could have made. Technology can be spread by diplomacy (I disabled this, so...) and using probe teams on other factions. Finally the more ahead you are, the more likely other factions are to gang up on you. None of this is really enough to stop the player from running away from the game, or even to really slow you down, and certainly not enough to let the other Factions have a chance to catch up with you. Back to my game. The very first thing that happens is that God punishes me for my hubris.  Remember that city I was so proud of that was producing all that energy? All the solar collectors got destroyed by hail. I didn't even realize that Planet had hail. I'm going to have to rebuild all of them. Next up, I probe Zakharov for some of his sweet, sweet technologies. I get caught and lose a few probe teams and Zakharov declares war on me. I basically continue probing him until he gives me this message.  You get a message like this if the enemy Faction is doing very badly and you reject a few of their offers for peace. This will permanently bind him to be my vassal state. I'm pretty sure he can no longer declare war on me or break the pact he swore. If you reject an offer like this then the enemy will fight you to the death. I accepted. He didn't actually give me the technologies since tech-trading is off, which is interesting. I just probed those techs out of him. It's weird that I got this message without attacking him at all, just sending a few probe teams (5-6 because I got unlucky a few times). I guess he was getting his rear end kicked by Pravin Lal pretty badly. I then hunker down to build as many Secret Projects as I can. Due to my tech and production lead I manage to get almost all of them. Including The Longevity Vaccine, which I placed at my city that had all those solar collectors, then was hit by hail and lost all those solar collectors, and that I'm now building more solar collectors at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdCB9yE9Hcc CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3D-Vision Interview posted:I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice. If you watch only one Secret Project video, watch this one. Morgan is probably the most charming and likable leader in the game. He doesn't have the insane cult leader charisma that Yang or Deidre have. That 500 years quote is probably a reference to the fact that the game ends in a score victory if it lasts until 2500, Morgan would be about 500 then if you count the time spent in cryosleep. He was born in 2005, making him a Zoomer (insofar as marketing generations can be applied to people born outside the US). He would have turned 18 earlier this year actually. I also stole the Superconducter tech from Zakharov. CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview posted:Important? Yes. Critical? Absolutely! I would go so far as to say that superconducting fiber alone makes our present economy possible. Not all the quotes can be winners. The Superconducter tech doesn't really give you anything by itself, just a better laser gun. However it is vital to progressing in the game since you need it for Fusion power. The other thing you need is Pre-Sentient Algorithms in order to do the calculations necessary to keep a fusion reaction running. A lot of computing technology comes from military-type techs or requires military techs. The same thing happened in real life with computing advances being driven by military needs. I also got more some more Secret Projects. The Xenoempathy lets me treat Xenofungus as roads, very useful when moving through neutral or enemy territory. It also lets me add or remove fungus faster and makes my Native units better. I got a few other Projects that are "nice to have" rather than vital. This includes the Planetary Energy Grid which gives me free Energy Banks in all my cities, those come with a Morgan quote. CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly" posted:Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival. I also managed to finish the Empath Guild! I was suprised to be able to beat the Gaians to it, they were building it for a bunch of turns before me but I guess they didn't finish it fast enough. I did use money to rush it when I got the message that it the Gaians were about to finish it. This was out of spite since the Empath Guild isn't that useful to me. The Empath Guild lets me contact everyone and lets everyone contact me. Once the various Factions got my number, they immediately started declaring war on me.  Here's a map of the world, I stole most of this map from the Gaians. You'll notice I'm at war with everybody Zakharov (who I've defeated) and Pravin Lal. I was planning on declaring war on Pravin Lal but he's the only person who hasn't declared war on me. I've tried to get Zakharov and Pravin Lal to be at peace but it hasn't worked and I don't care enough to actually stop them, I just throw Zakharov some money occasionally. Maybe I should give him some fancy units too. I'm protected by water on two sides and I have a friendly regime to my south, meaning I can go to war however I feel like. I've decided on Gaians First strategy for my wars, mostly because they're the closest to me. My naval strategy will involve these Isles of the Deep.  Lady Deirdre Skye, "A Comparative Biology of Planet" posted:The Isle of the Deep is really not a single creature but a colony of thousands of individual tubules, an aquatic vector of the Mind Worm which terrorizes Planet's continents. Over its lifetime certain tubules secrete a tough, gluelike substance which hardens to form the characteristic shell that floats the colony and creates the appearance of a rogue island. I've got pretty decent Lifecycle bonuses, which are the equivalent to Morale bonuses but for native units. I can't put Clean Reactors on these guys, because they're basically a raft of native life so I have to pay 1 mineral each turn in support for these things. The reason I like them is because they're both a combat unit and a good transport. So I don't have to build two separate naval units per ocean and they can defend themselves quite well if attacked on the high seas. They're quite nice if you're not going for complete naval dominance. The other units I'm building is Cheap Trance Rovers (1-1t-2). These are very cheap units, they have Clean Reactors so they don't cost upkeep and I put Hypnotic Trance on them so they can defends themselves against Mindworms. They're very cheap so I'm going to put 3 of them in every single city I have and use them as offensive troops. Now you may be asking "But Bears^3, doesn't that 1/1 attack/defense make them more a liability than an asset?". Well that's where we get clever because you can upgrade units and upgrading units costs Energy and I have metric tonnes of Energy. I can spend a relatively small amount of Energy to upgrade these units to modern standards when needed.  It takes about 2 or 3 turns build a Cheap Trance Rover. This one is called a "Clean" Trance Rover because I hadn't renamed it yet. It then takes about 150 Energy to upgrade it to either 5-1-2 or 1-3r-2 depending on whether I want it to be an attack or defense rover. It's cheaper than building an advanced rover in the first place because I can hold off on upgrading them until I actually need it. Honestly even if I need to upgrade all my units I think I'll still come out ahead because I have an easier time getting Energy than Minerals. It's a just-in-time system for military weapons and it works perfectly. Edit: You'll notice that I'm going to be building Clean Formers that don't require upkeep while I am still paying upkeep for a few units at this base, despite the fact that I could easily afford to upgrade those units with Clean Reactors. This is because I forgot to go through and actually do that.  Here's my first assault squadron. Two probes and 4 assault rovers. I sent in the probes and stole a tech and the world map from the Gaians. Four assault rovers should be plenty to destroy the Gaians. The Rover's two movement lets me disembark from the Isle of the Deep and attack at the same time. So I'll just go searching for their capital and end the war in one swift stroke.  Alright, that attack failed. I did some damage but it wasn't enough to actually take the capital and I had to retreat after losing two of my four rovers. I'm going to need a lot more units and I'm going to have to start with taking their other cities. That wall around the capital means they have a perimeter defense which gives a large defensive bonus. This is when I actually started using my Assault/Defense Rovers doctrine. I could also start using Infantry, they have a bonus to assaulting cities. On the other hand, I really like having two moves with my rovers. I also have to switch up my assault rovers a bit and give them a Psi attack bonus instead of their current defense bonus. Edit: Roads look awful when you build a lot of them. One of the things I would love from a remake of Alpha Centauri is making roads look less terrible. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 09:23 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 05:16
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:SMAC talk here prompted me to pick up the game again from GOG (I originally bought it back in the day on physical media, which is now lost somewhere). Quick question, is there a way to group units or move a stack all at once? I was playing as Yang and securing my natural borders, and it got to be a pain to move all of the units in my big stack individually, but I can't remember if there was a way to do it in the original, or if the newer UI mods help that at all. Yes, but the game is from 1999 so the system is asinine and a complex multi-step process. The short version is use Shift-J to assemble a group and J to send them to your base or an allied base. Shift-J assembles a group and it does so weirdly, make sure you check all the correct options. Do NOT uncheck the "exclude units farther than 2 squares away checkbox", that will effect every applicable unit that isn't otherwise excluded; this includes every unit that already has a go-to command. There is no way (as far as I know) to exclude units that already have a go-to command assigned to them. You can exclude units that are automated, have a hold (or sentry) command, or are on patrol. These same caveats apply to the "Assemble at Cursor" button, it's more trouble than it's worth unless you want practically everybody on the map to assemble at the cursor. The cursor is your selected tile not your actual mouse cursor. Shift+Right click to select a tile. Once you've done all this, press J to send the group somewhere. Repeat all this for each group you want to send to somewhere. Here's the actual step by step process. 1. Make sure the units you want to send somewhere are waiting for orders and not hold position or something. 2. Select one of the units (or select the tile they're on) 3. Press Shift-J 3B. Make sure all your checkboxes are correct, the settings are remembered so you only need to do this the first time. 4. Press OK on the Shift-J menu 5. Press J and select a destination for your group. 6. Maybe press W (wait) a bunch of times to see your units start moving. Don't press Space, that removes all the moves from your unit while W sends you to the next unit [W]aiting for orders. 7. If you have other units that need to be moved, go back to step 1. The Shift-J command only groups units within 2 spaces. It's relatively fast once you get the hang of it since it remembers the previous settings, it just takes a lot of clicks. Also, the pathfinding in the game is not the greatest. If your location is across a sea they may have trouble, even if there is a longer route across land that's perfectly usable. If your group keeps waiting for orders near the coast then that's what's happening. Once my victory is inevitable, I often automate my military units and let them do their own thing. Just press Shift-A and stop thinking about them. I have plenty of units, they'll be fine or they won't be.
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Nov 10, 2023 23:43
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StashAugustine posted:Anyone played Nebulous? Still early access but might be interesting, basically trying to do "realistic" space combat with a vaguely readable UI I've played it. It's interesting but there are a few things I don't like. It's too much of a "click ability off cooldown" game, there's too much mandatory micromanagement. I like the simulation of deep mechanics and the ability to micromanage but I really want to be able to give general orders and have them carried out to the best of the AI's ability and then have the option to micromanage when I really want to get into the nitty-gritty. It is a very unique and interesting game. I'm hopeful they fix the problems that I have with it. There's also not a lot of content but already implemented modding so that's very nice. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 00:47 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 00:33
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FirstnameLastname posted:there's not really much micro at all It's been a while since I've played so maybe things got fixed or maybe I'm misremembering. The annoying things I'm remembering is jamming and missiles (with maneuvering and facing also occasionally being an unnecessary pain in the rear end). Especially jamming having to be manually activated against enemy missiles. My complaint wasn't so much about requiring a high APM as requiring unnecessary micro. Edit: It looks like the devs added in some improved missile handling including mixed salvos. So maybe a lot of my missile complaints are fixed. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 01:46 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 01:38
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When we last left our hero, Nwabudike Morgan, we had ended our Splendid Isolation period and contacted all the factions. Then everybody declared war on me except Pravin Lal and Zakharov. Zakharov then declared war on me after I did a bit of corporate espionage on him. Kicked his rear end and forced him to submit to me and now he's essentially my vassal. Despite everybody being at war with me I'm in a pretty good situation. I'm protected on both sides by water, to the north by the arctic (and end of the map), and to the south I have Zakharov and then Pravin Lal. Thankfully Pravin Lal is the only one who's not at war with. Well that's that. Pravin Lal sensed weakness and tried to extort me. When I told him where to shove it he also declared war on me. That's everybody at war with me except for Zakharov who I already kicked the rear end of. 1400 credits is a massive amount for the AI. Greedy bastard.  Also Planet is trying to kill me. I'm trying to establish some new colonies here. Come on man, give me a break.  On the western front, the Gaians have some serious forces here. I've lost my first attack army trying to crack the capital but I've managed to get a foothold on the continent by taking a lightly held city. I need to build an actual proper army so I can defeat the Gaians. This capital could be a tough nut to crack but it's doable. There are a few ways to do it. First is obviously just overwhelming forces, just get enough troops that you can attack and beat every single unit there and then take the city. A tech advantage is likely necessary to be able to win even with the advantage from that Perimeter Defense. Another way is to use artillery, this allows you to damage them while they're in the city and forces them to face you outside their city walls, where you're on more even ground. Finally, the actual strategy I was planning to use was to just ignore this capital and fight them elsewhere. I retreated to the city I had already taken and planned a defense there until I could get more military units there. What wound up happening was she kept sending units to try to take back her city and and I was able to defeat them defensively by using counterattacks and my superior interior lines on the narrow peninsula that I took. Eventually I was able to build and transport more troops to this front. At that point the number of defensive troops in the Gaian capital were reduced enough for me to take it.  They're trying to counterattack me but it's too late. I was able to get my units mostly healed and easily counterattack. Those are some tough mindworms, Deidre has some serious bonuses layered on them. Deidre and the Gaians can be tough to fight because she uses both conventional and psi attacks so you need to be able to handle both. I've got psi-attack bonus on my assault rovers and psi-defense bonuses on my defense rovers, so I'll be fine as long as my assault rovers aren't attacked by mindworms. However, these extra abilities do drive up the cost of building/upgrading my units. My superior strategic acumen lets me win with relatively few losses. My fast rovers let me pick the time and place of the battle, my superior weapons let me win most of the fights, and my Defense Rovers can be moved onto damaged troops to protect them from counterattacks. I basically lose units only when that unit loses an attack, sometimes the rolls just don't go my way. My damaged units are sent back to bases to be quickly repaired. I captured the Command Nexus Secret Project from the Gaians. it was in Gaia's Landing, their capital. It gives you you a free Command Center in every base. Secret Projects that give you a building in every base are pretty common and this is another one. That saves you the minerals and turns to build it and these free buildings don't cost maintenance, so it's pretty nice. However, the Command Nexus is better than it seems. When you capture a base you lose some of the buildings. The building you most want in a base right after you capture it is a Command Center so it can repair your units immediately. Getting the Command Nexus allows you to speed up your attacks significantly. Your other option is waiting a bunch of turns to heal or rushing a Command Center (which still takes at least one turn instead of zero).  My various advantages and exhausted state of their military let me easily take more Gaian cities and convince Deidre to surrender. 2 down, 4 more to go.  Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams" posted:In the great commons at Gaia's Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to our people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth. Now that Deidre is beaten I should show my changes to her. I gave her free Tree Farms once she researched them. This gives her a big boost in the mid-game and really encourages you to focus on forests. I also removed her bonus nutrients on Xenofungus. I'm going to give that to Cha Dawn, so Deidre will be the Forest faction while Cha Dawn will encourage covering the planet in Xenofungus. This will distinguish them a bit more. Deidre is fundamentally an earth ecologist and has absolutely no problem with mixing Earth and local Planet ecologies while Cha Dawn is a Planet purist. Lady Deirdre Skye, "The Early Years" posted:The prevalence of anoxic environments rich in organic material, combined with the presence of nitrated compounds has led to an astonishing variety of underground organisms which live in the absence of oxygen and "breathe" nitrate. Likewise, the scarcity of carbon in the environment has forced plants to economize on its use. Thus, all our efforts to return carbon to the biosphere will encourage the native life to proliferate. Conversely, the huge quantities of nitrate in the soil will be heaven to human farmers. I'm probably going to give her the Mindworm policing bonus from Cha Dawn as well, they can share it. Deidre certainly uses them to terrorize people enough. Deidre will have Mindworms in the early game (before anyone else does), Forests and Tree Farms in the mid-games (before anyone else does), and have her Efficiency bonus late game. I think this will give her an interesting and distinct gameplay style. She adapts to Planet faster than anybody else due to her ecological background (and is also probably a cult leader who uses terrifying psychic aliens as attack dogs). I also let her ignore the penalties from using her favored Green economics since everybody gets that for their favored Social Engineering choice.  I then moved my army to face the Yang and his Human Hive. I had to only take one city to have him offer a surrender. This was only 3 turns after Deidre surrendered. 3 down, 3 more to go. I was elected Planetary Governor earlier after I took a few Gaian cities, now I have enough of a majority (4 to 3) to force through the Global Commerce pact. I actually had to do a load an earlier turn to pass that, Zakharov didn't vote with me for some reason and I had to go back in time and give him a small bribe of 50 credits. My diplomatic corps should have warned me about that. I've already noted my changes to Yang. One more Growth (+2 total) and Police State and Planned don't give you Efficiency penalties anymore. I still think the changes were solid and open up his gameplay more. I've declared him as balanced so all the other factions I've changed should be compared against him.  Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs posted:The Academician's private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt! I always found this quote really funny because it pops up when you research Retroviral Engineering. It turns out they were researching retroviral engineering! This technology gives you access to the Genejack Factory. Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter" posted:My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain? We've finally created the perfect worker. The Genejack Factory gives you +50% Minerals at that base but also gives you an extra drone and makes the base more vulnerable to mind control/being bribed. This is the very first building that gives you a mineral bonus while you get energy bonuses very early on and the energy bonuses stay common throughout the whole game. In my opinion this makes minerals much more precious throughout the game. Fast Facts: Facilities (buildings) cost 2 energy per mineral to rush, Secret Projects (wonders) take 4 energy per mineral to rush. Units take more than 2 energy per mineral to rush, with more expensive units costing Energy per Mineral and also more overall due to the larger Mineral cost. If you haven't paid at least ten minerals for the production, the cost to rush the production is doubled. This is very important to remember to efficiently use your energy on rushing stuff. Rush Facilities that have had at least 10 minerals invested in them for maximum efficiency when rushing production. There's also some weird stuff with building cheap units and then upgrading them with energy, I don't remeber why that works out better. It certainly is working out easier for me. One of the takeaways is 1 Mineral is worth about 2 Energy, and 2 Nutrients is worth about 3 energy. This makes 1 Mineral worth about 1.5 Nutrients. There's a lot of caveats with this analysis but it's accurate enough. Nutrients become worth more late game, Energy has to deal with inefficiency but is Faction-wide, and Minerals are local to a base. However, Energy income skyrockets throughout the game due to the tons of economic multiplier buildings you get and access to Specialists (which can give Energy but not Minerals). Excess energy is usually used to hurry production (or to upgrade units). I've realized that I forgot a Morgan quote. It's about the Research Hospital which you have to research before you get the Genejack factory. I think this implies Morgan and Yang collaborated to create the Genejack, or possibly it was parallel development or maybe it was corporate espionage. CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Personal Diaries posted:Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival. Moving on. With Deidre and Yang pacified I could bring my newly built (and upgraded) forces to bear upon Pravin Lal.  Here is Pravin Lal. He's extorted me, he's the second strongest faction in the game, and he built the Human Genome Project before I could. I pooh-poohed it earlier but it's actually pretty good. It gives one extra Talent (happy citizen) per base. This can either cancel out a drone (unhappy citizen) or make getting golden ages easier. The easier golden ages, especially on small cities, would have been wonderful for me as Morgan. I think this is one of the very few Secret Project that helps you deal with drones directly. The only other one I can think of is late game only. You'll notice that he started in the Monsoon Jungle, that's that very green area. The Monsoon Jungle is a landmark that gives you +1 food on all the squares in it, on top of that all the squares in it are guaranteed to be Rainy which gives you +2 food as a base. This might be the strongest landmark in the game, especially during the early game and it's especially useful for the AI. You can find out which faction landed near Monsoon Jungle by looking at the Faction Rankings and seeing who is pulling ahead of the others. Luckily my superior human mind should be a match to Pravin Lal and his U.N. Peacekeepers. But first, let's look at the changes I made to Pravin Lal.  Comissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights" posted:As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master. Pravin Lal consistently comes in near the bottom of faction popularity polls. Miriam sometimes come in below him but by God is she memorable as an opponent, usually in the worst way. He's just uninteresting and uninspiring. This is despite him being one of the stronger factions in the game. Those extra talents make drone control significantly easier and that extra 2 pop cap lets each city be about 25% more productive in the late part of the early game. So I wanted to do something big for him. For my theme I decided to be inspired by modern Liberalism. I've got three potential names for my Pravin Lal rework. Pick your favorite. Pravin Lal: Yesterday's Man Pravin Lal: The End of History 2 Pravin Lal: There is No Alternative Pravin Lal saw what happened to Earth, traveled to a whole new planet, and decided that we just need to recreate the modern International Community but just do it better this time. We need the U.N. back, we need to recreate the Rules Based International Order, we need to unleash the innovation and potential of the free market. In short, we need to recreate all the systems of Old Earth on Planet and we shouldn't think about why they failed on Earth. There's no such thing on history and we already know how to create the ideal society, it's the society we came from. His new advantages are that he ignores the penalties from the Democratic, Free Market, and Wealth social engineering choices. His brilliance and study of political history combined with the skill and talent of the liberal elites that he's gathered under him let him run a democracy with a large military, a free market society with a heavy police presence, and have a people whose lust for wealth doesn't abate their lust for blood. Additionally, he can now take Police State. Gameplay wise this encourages recreating Western Society and largely staying there, changing it up only under exigent circumstances. You can switch to planned economy when you need Growth (like the US during WW2) and switch to a police state if the proles start threatening your economy. How does the the self-styled leader of the U.N. on planet justify switching to a police state and ignoring human rights? It's easy, it's an emergency and we've got tons of legal precedent so it's fine. The U.N. Peacekeepers are already great at using questionable legalistic arguments to get things they want, that's how they get double votes during the Planetary Council meetings. I removed his +2 max pop, it never really made sense to me and it would be a bit too overpowered to keep it. Don't worry, that will come back later elsewhere. I also gave him -1 Police. This makes policing things harder and removes the ability to do Nerve Stapling by default, which feels appropriate. Pravin Lal would only create a Police State and start Nerve Stapling people if he really thought he needed to. His bonus Talents from attracting intellectual elites makes avoiding Drone Riots easier as well. Pravin Lal prefers using societal elites in order to manufacture consent over heavy-handed police presence. I like how this rework turned out. I feel like now Pravin Lal has a very distinct identity and gameplay style. He was the head surgeon on the Unity. How do surgeons fix people who have been in accidents? As much as possible, they put everything back the way it was. This is also Pravin Lal's political philosophy. We just need to put society back the way it was before things went to poo poo. We need to reassemble the U.N., we need put the Rules-Based International Order back in order, we need to clone his dead wife. We just need to get things back the way they were and then everything will be fine. I'm also proud because he stays as a "good guy" faction outside of leftist circles but in places like this he becomes a clear villain. Tell me what you guys think. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 20:58 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 09:51
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More Alpha Centauri, we're reaching the end of the game. I also found something. Here is an interview with Brian Reynolds, the head designer of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. https://www.everand.com/listen/podcast/417939986 Direct Link.MP3  Honestly conquering Pravin Lal was not difficult. I already was building up an army the whole time while I was mopping up Deidre and and Yang. It was just a matter of spending the Energy to upgrade all the units I need and sending them forward with the same tactics as previously. I seized the Human Genome project, so now I finally have all of the Secret Projects built in this game. The only tricky part is that I have to leave units behind so my newly conquered cities neither rebel nor are reconquered back from me, at least one per city.  Dr. Otto Octavious posted:
Comissioner Pravin Lal, "The Science of Our Fathers" posted:Our ancestors harnessed the power of a sun, and so again shall we. Fusion Power! This is one of the very important techs in the game. It's place very high up on the tech tree but we know that Old Earth did have Fusion technology. In fact the UNS Unity, the very ship we flew to this planet on, is powered by a fusion core. There's a diplomatic option you can vote on called "Salvage Unity Fusion Core" that gives every Faction in the game 500 Energy. So it looks like we're receating techs from Earth but we need to do it better because of our far more limited resources. The upcoming spaceflight tech makes this a lot more explicit. Fusion Power unlocks the Fusion Lab, which is yet another Econ and Lab multiplier. Not too exciting, but useful and gives me even more Energy. I'll be building those everywhere I can as soon as I can. The other thing it gives you is portable Fusion Reactors for your units, especially your military units. This is a huge deal for two reasons. The first is that it doubles the HP of your units, increasing the chance that your weaker units get lucky and decreasing the change the your stronger units get unlucky. That's already pretty nice but the biggest thing Fusion Reactors in your units can do is actually make them cheaper instead of more expensive.   Check it out. Creating a Fusion speeder armed with a Chaos Gun costs 60 Minerals compared to 108 Minerals for building an inferior Fission-powered Chaos Speeder. Why this happens is a bit complicated to explain but the short version is that it changes the formula for how the cost is calculated. Fusion Reactors don't make every unit cheaper, specifically it makes already cheap units more expensive. This is because the Fusion Reactor increases the minimum cost of a unit. Think of it this way, as a vehicle gets more and more power-hungry the effort required to get more power of of a conventional Fission reactor increases. A more advanced reactor scales up better and lets you build units with more stuff on them for cheaper. Basically, my engineers were really struggling to build a rover that could fire a Chaos Gun with the power from the on-board reactor. Presumably they've been using super-capacitors and redirecting power from the drive train to the weapon and running the reactor real hot with some fancy isotopic fuel. Now they don't have to, just put a Fusion Reactor on there and don't worry about it. On the other hand, my old Formers will continue being built with the cheap Fission Reactors since that's all they need and I want a huge number of them. Speaking of which, let's see how my Terraforming doing.  I've forested pretty much everything. Forests are just too good and too fast to create. Once you have Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests there are few reasons to do much else. I have been doing 2 other things. The first is Drilling to Aquifers. I do this all the time but I rarely see people talking about it so I might be one of the few. Drilling to an Aquifer creates a River which flows downward until it reaches the ocean. Rivers give +1 Energy to all squares they flow through, this includes Forest squares. It takes a while and doesn't give you a huge amount of resources but you can do it on top of any other improvements you have. You can't do it everywhere since you can't drill to an aquifer on a square that's already next to a river. It's something that you do after you're done the rest of your terraforming. The other thing I'm doing is drilling Thermal Boreholes. This is a mid-lateish game terraforming improvement (although I could have started building these earlier since I built the Weather Paradigm). It gives you 6 Minerals and 6 Energy regardless the original square's stats. I think it works like a Forest, so a few things should affect it (Landmarks, Square Bonuses, Economy rating,Rivers?) but I haven't actually tested it. I'm especially unsure about Rivers because if a River reaches a Thermal Borehole it will fall into it. Six is a large amount of Energy for a square but is an absolutely massive amount of Minerals, getting both from one square is a huge advantage.. The downsides of a Thermal Borehole is that they generate no food, cause a lot of eco-damage, and can't be built on slopes. That last part is the most annoying, I usually skip building them if I'm way ahead just because it can be hard to be sure what counts as a slope or not. I built a few as demonstration here and I'm going to be setting my Formers to fully automatic mode from now one. Maybe they'll build more Boreholes and maybe they won't, who knows at this point.  Mind Control?!? This is something that I meant to do and then never did and now it's being done to me. This is incredibly unfair. Mind Control is something a Probe Team does to take over one of your cities. It costs Energy to do it, with more Energy required the more developed the base is. It not only takes over the base but also any units inside the base so Pravin Lal now has one of my units. This actually happened just a few turns before I finished the Hunter-Seeker Algorithim which will make me immune to Probe teams.  It wasn't a huge setback. Pravin Lal surrended once he was down to four cities. Three or four cities seems to be the normal surrender threshold. Although, shortly after this Santiago surrender to me without me attacking her at all and with having more than four cities. I know Miriam had recently taken one of her cities so maybe that's it. On to Miriam  Miriam her gang of Lord's Believers. Here is her empire and it looks like things aren't going so well. Notice that area of explored area surronded by unexplored area. I don't know how that happened, I get vision of everybody's cites from being elected as the Planetary Governer, but that's only the city itself. I did get maps from other people instead of exploring this area myself but then how did they get their map to look like this? Each answer only leads to further questions. Miriam was a some sea colonies. I only recently started building more of my own so she had more than I did for most of the game. I have a land army and the various seas are separated from each other on the map. I'm hopeful that I can force her capitulation without taking any of those sea colonies. We'll sea how that goes.  Moving units out in a cool formation from my Yang's base. Keeping units in a single square means that if one unit is destroyed the rest of the units are damaged and I didn't feel like waiting for any defensive units. This sort of formation isn't necessary at all though. But first, some research!  CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed" posted:You ivory tower intellectuals must not lose touch with the world of industrial growth and hard currency. It is all very well and good to pursue these high-minded scientific theories, but research grants are expensive. You must justify your existence by providing not only knowledge but concrete and profitable applications as well. This only gives you the Supercollider Secret Project. It increases your research output at a single base, I'll be putting it in the same base as I put all the rest of my single base improving Secret Projects let all those projects synergize.  CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Strategy Session posted:Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100-million-year production process, we can corner this market once again. Remember fossil fuels? They're back in synthetic form! I am researching this late, normally you get this before Fusion Power. This will let me get aircraft soon, I'll probably use those instead of ships if I need to take those sea bases I mentioned earlier.  CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morgan Industries Annual Report posted:Objects once measured in meters have become so small that they cannot be seen by the naked eye, with revolutionary applications across the board. Gentlemen, forget what your courtesans have told you: size does matter! Nanominutarization gets you Hovertanks. They're faster than rovers, but not inherently any more tanky. We also know they don't use anti-grav technology since that is researched later. The game will probably be over before I seriously use them.  I had set some Assault Rovers to automatic mode and it looks like one of them managed to actually take a city, good job little guy. A lot of them have been fighting the wildlife and just roaming around. It's at this point that I realize that I forgot to take an important screenshot. We got a random event and it was sunspots. Sunspots knock out communications for 20 turns. This means a few things for me specifically. Miriam can't surrender to me and I can't get myself elected as Supreme Leader. There are some other interesting things you can do during sunspots. For one thing crime is legal for 20 turns, you can put nerve gas pods on your units and nobody can complain. Well I'm not going to bother taking advantage of this comms blackout to do something underhanded. I'm close enough to victory that it doesn't matter.  Oh. It looks like my enlightened attitude towards the comms blackout isn't shared by everyone. I didn't even realize that your vassals could betray you like this. I'm not even sure if this is related to the comm blackout or if Deidre was always going to betray me. Either way, I've got to take her out. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 08:04 on Nov 12, 2023 |
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Nov 12, 2023 07:58
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Zeppelin Insanity posted:C. Interesting idea suggested by a friend. Since decks in the game have a fixed starting hand, play on that and also give these guys a fixed ending hand: a bunch of cards that are always on the bottom of the deck, representing the arrival of the main force that the paratroopers are securing positions for. I think that's a really cool idea, and plays into what paratroopers would actually be for, but I'm a little worried about introducing unique mechanics like that. I feel like once you introduce it in one instance, you quickly start running into "why just in that one instance" - and either one deck sticks out like a sore thumb, or suddenly the game is way more complicated with everyone having special snowflake rules. I'm an absolute sucker for unique mechanics so I support that. You could genercize it with some decks getting a supporting "Reinforcements Deck" that they can draw from once they run out of normal cards. Then it's not a unique mechanic but a normal mechanic that only some decks use. There could be some cards interact with that as well if you want to do that. I haven't actually tried your card game yet, I need to get tabletop simulator over Thanksgiving. It looks neat.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:48
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Slavvy posted:In the post-cold-war afterglow it was reasonable to think Russia might enter NATO one day, I think we can forgive the sweaty computer touchers for their slightly imperfectly Marxist prediction Russia joined the NATO "Partnership for Peace" program in 1994. Command and Conquer came out in 1995. (Red Alert Came out in 1996). Russia signed the "NATO–Russia Founding Act" in 1997. The chance to join NATO was dangled over Russia just like it was over Ukraine. I'm not surprised that video games reflected that. The USSR tried to join NATO in 1954. "Former" Nazi Adolf Heusinger was appointed Chair of the NATO Military Committee in 1961. On a related note... Command & Conquer: Generals came out in 2003 and featured the Paladin tank, available to the US faction. It had an anti-rocket point defense laser. The way to counter that was to just use more RPG troopers to overwhelm the point defense system. The game featured a few highly unrealistic elements, like Patriot missile systems being able to stop Scuds. Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars(2007) featured the NOD RPG troopers who each carried an RPG that fired two missiles in close succession. I don't recall if there was any point-defense in that game for those RPGs to overwhelm. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 09:21 on Nov 13, 2023 |
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Nov 13, 2023 06:53
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Alpha Centauri 2: Sunspot Boogaloo So Deidre has recently and shockingly betrayed me, possibly taking advantage of the sunspot-caused global comms blackout to do so. I need to defeat her again and also take out Miriam. However, there was another matter I was wondering about, I was generating tons of energy, more than anybody else, so why hadn't I won an economic victory yet? I'm pretty sure I researched the proper technology a while ago. A brief investigation brought me to the answer.  It turns out I forgot to press the "Win Game" button. I was thinking it worked like it does in Endless Space 2, where if you generate tons of Energy you win without needing to do anything. It turns you you need to press a button and then wait 20 turns. I could have done this a long time ago. Oh well, I probably wouldn't have done so anyway in order to play out the rest of the game.  1000 Energy, that's so cheap! I think it's supposed to be the cost to mind control all remaining bases with 1000 as a minimum. It excludes your own bases and the bases of your rivals.  It costs more Energy to mind control a single base. I think the very cheap cost of an economic victory for me is somehow related to me being way ahead in Commerce techs? I can't get a clear answer on how the number is actually calculated. It should be pretty low but not this low, maybe on the order of 15,000 ish Energy credits as a very rough estimate. Enough to use the Mind Control ability from the probe teams on every city that doesn't belong to either me or one of my vassals.  My guys automatically take over another base. If you've got a solid lead then putting your military in automatic mode usually works out OK. They don't have any brilliant strategic thinking but they'll get the job done eventually and with some casualties.  Deidre surrenders again. The last part of that message should say "I shall never trouble you again ... again." I'm about to win the game so I'll just forgive her for her underhanded betrayal.  CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly" posted:Planet's Primary, Alpha Centauri A, blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth. Orbital Power! Satellites are a late game game mechanic. They're expensive but once you build one, every single one of your bases gets +1 Energy. This stacks up to your population for that base. There are also satellites for +1 Nutrients or +1 Minerals. So we enough satellites every single citizen in your city produces an additional +1/+1/+1 Nutrients/Minerals/Energy. This is a massive bonus and makes marginal bases very useful. The +1 Nutrients is especially useful for small marginal bases, it lets them continue to grow and as they grow they get even more nutrients. Large bases are usually already limited by your hab limits (14ish, or currently 13 for me). However, once you get an upcoming technology you can build a facility that completely negates the hab limits and lets your bases grow huge.  Anonymous Metagenics Dockworker, MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview posted:Optical computers, genetic catalogs, nanorepair modules—forget all of that. It's when you see a megaton of steel suspended over your head by a thread the thickness of a human hair that you really find God in technology. This is it, this is the tech. This is the one that lets you have super cities with a population only limited by your nutrient intake (and then doubled with the Nutrient satellites). It's a shame the game is usually essentially over before this point. I'm hoping that playing with the Thinker mod makes the AI better. We're only 3 turns away from winning an economic victory. The only way somebody could stop us is by conquering the colony with our HQ and that's very unlikely, especially within 3 turns.  I've conquered all of her land cities but she still has her sea colonies. I would need to build an navy or air force in order to conquer these. I won't bother, Miriam is the only one not on my side but she can do literally nothing to stop us now.  I really didn't expect this. Is Miriam desperately trying to become the Supreme Leader in the single turn she has left? This would be the first step and I think she can convene the council twice on her turn.  I carry the election 742 votes to 43. I love democracy. Also, Pravin Lal conquered Zakharov's last city while they were both my vassals. I think I tried telling them to stop fighting and they both refused.  That's it, I've cornered the Energy market. Miriam was the only holdout to my military might but she couldn't do anything against my economic might. We've finally fulfilled the dream of Earth to recreate Capitalism on another planet. We demonstrated the superiority of our economic system, out competing all other systems in the marketplace of ideas (with just a tiny little bit of help from military invasions and subversive espionage). Just as predicted in Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" the final hold out was religious fundamentalism. It just turned out to be Space Evangelical Protestantism instead of being Islam on Earth, who would have thunk? 
BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 10:02 on Nov 13, 2023 |
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Nov 13, 2023 09:13
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Orange Devil posted:Reading over the mechanics again, do any of the main civs or civ clones maintain a city size limit the way AC has a hab limit? I think it's an interesting mechanic, especially if it were combined with mechanics that limit ICS. It might lead to some rubberbanding, which the 4X genre can use. Nothing is exactly like it that I can think of off-hand. Endless Space 1/2 have population limits based on the planet type and those can be increased by buildings and techs throughout the game. Not quite a 4x, but Rome:Total War 1 also comes to mind, as your city population grows you need to upgrade your administration building or else your city becomes overwhelmed with squalor as your bureaucracy is overwhelmed. There are probably more examples. Orange Devil posted:I do like how the fundie Christians live only on the water in the end. I just took another look at my screenshot of her cities. One of her cities is named "The Rapture". Sister Miriam Godwinson posted:it wasn't impossible to build a city under the ocean. It was impossible to build The Rapture anywhere else. I've got to get her to talk to some Morgan-brand brand-consultants so they can convince her to drop the "the". Just call it "Rapture". gradenko_2000 posted:one of the things that really elevates AC beyond "Civilization on an alien planet" are things like being able to plant your own rivers, being able to plant your own forests, and "no pop limits ever, restricted only by nutrient availability" You're welcome, this is my first time doing something like this and it took longer than I thought. I've gained respect for the people who do this sort of thing. I'll be playing another game soon with both my changes and the Thinker mod installed. It's supposed to greatly improve the AI. I'll report back how it goes and possibly post some screenshots of my game. I'm thinking of playing Deidre. I'll also be posting my continued musings on the mechanics of Alpha Centauri until I get bored. Also a summary of my mod changes since I forgot to post a few of them. Alpha Centauri really lets you do a lot of neat things. If I really wanted to take down Miriam instead of ending the game I would have tried to avoid building a navy or airforce out of pure spite. Instead I would would have used my diplomatic power to vote to launch the Solar Shade and try to dry up the seas and used my many terraformers to build a land bridge to her cities Siege of Tyre style.
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Nov 13, 2023 10:19
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Samog posted:civ 1-3 all used the size cap, with buildings like aqueducts, sewer systems, and hospitals increasing the cap I completely forgot that the Civs used to do that. Probably because I played Civ 4 most out of all of them. StashAugustine posted:Coincidentally civ 4 is also the peak of the system mechanics Agreed, Civ 5 made some choices and then didn't polish the mechanics enough to deal with them. Never played 6. Orange Devil posted:And when did they start implementing anti-ICS mechanics? I don't remember if it was Civ 2 or 3 that added (or increased?) minimum distances between cities. That was the first anti-ICS mechanic and it wasn't hugely effective. Lostconfused posted:Weird to make a conclusion that's the opposite of your argument. How so?
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Nov 13, 2023 21:53
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My version of each faction and my quick thoughts on those changes. I wanted to make each faction a bit more distinctive and interesting to play, especially if you've already played a ton of SMAC.Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter" posted:Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they quote:+2 GROWTH: {Rapid population growth} A simple additional Growth changed Yang from the Faction with the worst growth of the original seven to the undisputed best. Yang being the worst at pop booming of the entire original factions was the single thing that inspired me to make all these changes. I also gave him actual immunity to inefficiency penalties from his 2 favored Social Engineering choices, this lets him benefit from +Efficiency SEs while keeping his Police State and Planned. I feel that this opens up his gameplay choices a bit. Overall, I had a light touch with Yang and this is the rework I'm most proud of. I spoke a lot more about him earlier. I've already mentioned Yang being the Yellow Peril personified but check out that -2 ECONOMY. "Little Political Freedom" translates to reduced ECONOMY? "The freer the market, the freer the people" indeed. I don't have a name for Yang's specific changes. Pick your favorite below or suggest one. Yang: The Hive Will Grow Larger Yang: Imagine a Population Booming, Forever Yang: 1984 with Chinese Characteristics Yang: Despotism in One Faction Edit: Yang: 2184 Commissioner Pravin Lal, “U.N. Declaration of Rights” posted:As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, quote:-1 EFFICIENCY: {U.N. style bureaucracy} Pravin Lal, he was so unpopular despite being quite strong. I thought he needed a big rework for him. I was heavily inspired by very society we all live in (or live in the periphery of). His big advantage is recreating the Liberalism and Rules Based International Order of the Earth that he came from and that he loves so much. You take no penalties from a full three Social Engineering choices, more than anybody else. Additionally, I decided to allow him to take Police State. Fascism is what happens when Liberalism bleeds. Cracking down on all those protestors is a tragic necessity when they threaten the very fabric of our society, hopefully they learned their lesson and won't force our hand like that again. I think this change also makes him still disinclined to Police States but less so than before? That's fine, the US doesn't mind allying with Police States after all. I wrote a lot more about my Pravin Lal changes earlier. To nerf him a bit I removed his +2 Hab Limit and gave him -1 Police, which seemed appropriate. Now he can't Nerve Staple his populace unless he switches to Police State. It's not much of a disadvantage since his extra Talents let him prevent Drone Riots, presumably by manufacturing consent. This is the (other) rework that I'm most proud of. Names for Pravin Lal's changes. Pick your favorite or suggest a new one. Pravin Lal: Yesterday's Man Pravin Lal: The End of History 2 Pravin Lal: There is No Alternative Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “For I Have Tasted The Fruit” posted:The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards quote:+2 RESEARCH: {Brilliant research} Zakharov and his University of Planet. The only change I made was to allow him to use the Knowledge value without penalties. I did that for everybody's favored Social Engineering policy on the idea that those penalties are already integrated in their society, this is especially true for the University of Planet. Other than that, he was already perfect. A single name for the Zakharov rework. Pick your favorite from the single choice below or suggest a new one. Zakharov: Why Reinvent the Wheel? Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Blessed Struggle” posted:The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. quote:+25% Bonus when attacking enemies, from strength of convictions. Miriam, disliked but memorable. Pretty strong too. I removed the penalty from the Fundamentalist government for her since she already has -2 Research. Her and Zakharov are the Faction whose favored Social Engineering perfectly matches their own disadvantages which is an interesting symmetry. Santiago is similiar but only at half of the penalty. The other thing I did was to give her free Creches and Recreation Commons to represent the things that the church community provides instead of the state. Those are cheap but very useful buildings early game buildings. Miriam is already pretty flexible but this lets her both expand faster and take full advantage of conquered bases faster. Religion and community are factors whose importance is often ignored in the modern world despite the fact that they carried us through thousands of years of history. Names for Miriam's rework. Miriam: It Takes a Village Miriam: Church and State Together at Last Miriam: Church, People, and Steeple Colonel Corazon Santiago, “Spartan Battle Manual” posted:Superior training and superior weaponry have, when taken together, quote:+2 MORALE: {Well-armed survivalist movement} Santiago gave me trouble for a long time and was the very last Faction I figured out how to fix. She's a pure war faction with no real advantages during peace. What do you do as Santiago if you can't win your first war? In real life the answer is "be consigned to the dustbin of history" but I needed something else for the game. Santiago is obviously inspired by Space Militarism found in places like Starship Troopers. I rewatched both Starship Troopers and the original Top Gun for inspiration. As I watched and rewatched the shower scenes it struck me how emotional closeness in military movies is often shown through physical closeness. So I gave Santiago the +2 pop limit that I removed from Pravin Lal. Now you can actually do something as the Spartans if you can't win a war. You get no benefit from this change until you hit size 8 and don't have anything else that will help you reach it but now you can play Santiago as a builder and be rewarded for it. Names for Santiago's rework. Santiago: Sweaty Arenas of Fort Legion Santiago: Hard Times and Harder Men Lady Deirdre Skye, “Planet Dreams” posted:In the great commons at Gaia’s Landing we have a tall and particularly quote:+1 PLANET: {Environmental safeguards; can capture mindworms} Lady Deidre Skye, she's the only Faction leader that is referred to by her first name. I decided to distinguish her more from Cha Dawn, making Deidre focus more on blending Earth and Planet ecosystems together while Cha Dawn is more of a Plane purist. This is in line with both of their in-game quotes. Deidre gets free Tree Farms when they're researched. These are great buildings that you usually rush to build once you research them. Deidre no longer needs to spend the time and Minerals to build them or the Energy to maintain them. I assume the Gaians are already keeping tree-lined parks(and tree-lined housing blocks and tree-lined recycling tanks) in their cities and we just need to figure out all the steps to make all those trees and natural features a net economic benefit. This encourages you to focus on a Forest-based terraforming strategy and rush Environmental Economics. I also had her share the "use Mind Worms as cops" ability that Cha Dawn has in order to encourage her to have breed more Mind Worms. I spoke about her a bit more in my earlier posts. I always felt that Deidre's early-mid game was a bit weak. She can use her captured Mind Worms to nullify an enemy's tech advantage but she has a limited number of those early on. She can't use Free Market to rake in the Energy and doesn't really have any advantages in the mid game. Now she has distinct early, mid, and late game advantages. Early game you have an increased chance to capture Mind Worms and can use them as explorers, military, or police. You can continue to use Mind Worms as police throughout the game, with the your unlocking of Mind Worm breeding replacing most faction's methods unlocking of Non-Lethal Methods as a way to get more effective police. Easy access to Tree Farms is your replacement for Free Market as your way to rake in the dough early on, this gives you a nice strength in the mid-game. As you begin reaching late game your Efficiency bonuses let you lose less money to inefficiency and get less drones from a large empire. I did a minor nerf to her by removing her Xenofungus Nutrient bonus, that's going to go to Cha Dawn. Deidre has to adapt to Planet the same way the rest of us do, with technologies and possibly secret projects. She just has more incentive to do it faster and is better at adapting. I feel pretty solidly about this rework. To the extent that I'm going to play as Deidre next, both to test the rework and because she's one of the most different Factions from Morgan. I'll also be using the Thinker mod and seeing how the improved AI adapts to my new factions. Deidre rework names. Deidre: I Speak for the Trees. Deidre: Hearts and Mind Worms Deidre: GreenWar CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Centauri Monopoly” posted:Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, Morgan, the guy I just played as. The only change I made was to let him ignore the downsides for Free Market and gave him -1 Planet. He was fun to play but right now he's too similar to how Pravin Lal plays but worse. I'm too emotionally invested in my Pravin Lal rework to change him so I have to change Morgan. I'm excited to announce (and you guys better be excited to hear) that I'm going to be reworking Morgan right here on this very forum. The theme/name I've chosen is "Morgan: Contradiction of Capitalism". 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Nov 14, 2023 01:28
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Morgan Unmodded posted:+1 ECONOMY: {Industrial conglomerate} Alright, here's base game Morgan. Let's go through take a look at his various parts and determine what to keep and what to change. quote:+1 ECONOMY: {Industrial conglomerate} "Industrial conglomerate" but it doesn't give Industry but gives Economy instead, what an odd phrasing. This is basically unchangeable, you can't increase it because it will give you the massive bonus of +2 Economy (+1 Energy for each square worked), and you can't decrease it because being good at Economy is basically Morgan's identity. Economy is such a weird thing because most of it's benefit is when you have +2 Economy and going higher or lower than that has very marginal benefits/penalties. It feels like the +1 Energy per Square bonus should be at somewhere like +5 Economy and Free Market should give you much more of a Economy bonus. I can't actually make that change though. quote:-1 SUPPORT: {Followers have expensive tastes} This reduces the amount of units you can support for free and so it essentially reduces the amount of minerals you earn. quote:COMMERCE: {bonus increases value of treaties, pacts, loans} Increases the value of loans? I don't know what that means. In general this attributes gives you bonus Energy for being at peace. It doesn't really do much since you get plenty of Commerce bonus from technology but I'm going to bump it up to +2, just to give Morgan a nice +2 somewhere. This is purely a vibes based decision. quote:Begins with 100 extra energy credits. A very minor bonus but nice to have. quote:Need HAB COMPLEX for bases to exceed size 4: {Creature comforts at a premium} This is either a very harsh penalty or a very irrelevant penalty. Here we come across the specter of ICS (Infinite City Sprawl). If you're ICSing (or even just semi-ICSing) then this penalty is irrelevant to you. ICSing is already a very strong but micromanagement heavy strategy. I avoid doing it and so does the AI, which makes Morgan pretty weak in the hands of the AI. In my opinion, from a game design perspective we should be discouraging ICSing and we certainly shouldn't penalize players for not doing so. I am going to be removing both this and the Support penalty for this reason. However, we now need to add some things to make Morgan both different and interesting. I will obviously be making him be able to run Free Market without penalties since that's something everybody in my mod gets to do for their favored Social Engineering choice. This unfortunately makes him rather similar to my version of Pravin Lal so I need to add some things to distinguish them. In order to distinguish playing the Morganites from playing the Peacekeepers I'm going to steal some mechanics from the Peacekeepers and add some Marxist Materialism. The base version of the Morganites is a system of exploiters with no exploited, we're going to fix that. Capitalism at its best is a brutal meritocracy. To show this I'm going to give Morgan both extra Talents and extra Drones. I'm thinking 1 Talent and 1 Drone per 4 citizens, leaving 2 normal workers. These numbers can be adjusted up or down and the symmetry can be broken if necessary (or to make an ideological point with capitalism producing more Drones than Talents). This is going to have some weird effects. The number of Talents you get is rounded up while the number of Drones is round down. The net effect is that you get one more Talent from these abilities except when your Population is divisible by 4. The other effect is that getting Golden Ages is going to be more difficult. Psych spending, Specialists, and how they affect Talents and Drones is a very complicated topic to explain. It takes 2 Psych to turn a normal worker into a Talent or to turn a Drone into a normal worker. Psych spending is the very first thing that affects your citizen's happiness and it prefers to make Talents over removing Drones. Overall, this means that as Morgan you're going to have to work extra hard to remove drones if you want to have Golden Ages. This could mean lavish Psych spending, Hurrying facilities that make Drones happy, harsh police presence, or heavy use of Specialists. On the other hand, if you're fine with slower growth then Morgan's capitalist utopia is usually more stable than most other Factions despite its vast amounts of inequality. Just how will you usher in another gilded age? Next up is Capitalism and Industry. Capitalism was responsible for industrializing huge swathes of the world and yet now its de-industrializing those same places. What determines whether the means of production are created or neglected within a capitalistic system? Profitability. I'm giving Morgan -2 Industry and giving him a 20% discount on Hurrying production. -2 Industry increases Mineral costs by 20% which also increases the cost of Hurrying production by 20%. I'm then giving Morgan a 20% discount on Hurrying production. Because of the way that math works, this works out to Hurrying production costing 96% of normal after everything is accounted for. For Morgan, Hurrying production is cheaper than normal but not Hurrying production is a lot worse. Sidenote: Positive Industry works differently than Negative Industry despite the numbers and effects looking very similar. Stacking Industry is more powerful than it seems and very low Industry isn't as bad as it seems. This is why the Free Drones are so strong. -5 Industry = 50% More Minerals = 67% Production Speed (100/1.5) -32% Total -4 Industry = 40% More Minerals = 71% Production Speed (100/1.4) -3 Industry = 30% More Minerals = 77% Production Speed (100/1.3) -2 Industry = 20% More Minerals = 83% Production Speed (100/1.2) -1 Industry = 10% More Minerals = 91% Production Speed (100/1.1) 0 Industry = No Effect +1 Industry = 10% Less Minerals = 111% Production Speed (100/.9) +2 Industry = 20% Less Minerals = 125% Production Speed (100/.8) +3 Industry = 30% Less Minerals = 143% Production Speed (100/.7) +4 Industry = 40% Less Minerals = 166% Production Speed (100/.6) +5 Industry = 50% Less Minerals = 200% Production Speed (100/.5) +100% Total Isn't math crazy? Note that this gets more complicated because only 10 minerals can overflow from one production to another. The gameplay implications is that going Power during a war might be an even better than it seems for my new Morgan. He still benefits a ton from Wealth as he usually does. Next up, Morgan orginally had reduced Hab Limits. I removed that for both gameplay and thematic reasons. When I think of capitalism I think of the huge, neon-drenched cities in cyberpunk or the massive metropolises of South Korea, Japan, or even London and New York. Teeming masses of humanity crammed into tiny apartments or squalid slums. The elites get plenty of space to demonstrate their wealth but the vast majority do not. I'm going to go even further than removing his Hab penalty and actually give him a +2 Max Pop bonus, the same one I removed from Pravin Lal and also gave to Santiago. This will benefit Morgan hugely due to his +1 Energy per Square bonus from Free Market but will be difficult to reach due to his increased amount of drones making Golden ages harder to trigger. This will be his major advantage over Pravin Lal, ironically stolen from him. Now for a tricky addition, I'm going to give Morgan 2% interest on the Energy in his treasury. This is going to be very difficult to balance. This bonus is available in the Faction editor but isn't on any Factions, probably because it was such a nightmare to balance. 2% interest means that your balance doubles every 36 (72/2) turns and then will double again in 36 turns and so on. This can get out of hand very quickly. 2% is a relatively small amount, enough to give a bit of a reward if you're saving for something or being indecisive but not enough to base your entire strategy around. Finally, a -1 Planet rating just to make dealing with the native life more difficult for him and give him at least a small amount of the penalties from Free Market. So let's take a look at my new version of Morgan (3.0) Morgan 3.0 posted:+1 ECONOMY: {Corporate conglomerate} If I achieved my goals. Playing Morgan should feel like you're earning a ton of Energy but somehow it's never enough. You have a lot of problems and the solution to all of them is Energy but you don't have all the Energy you need so you have to prioritize what gets developed and what doesn't. You benefit greatly from population and can get more population than other Factions but you either have to get that population the slow way or spend lavishly on Psych and Hurrying Facilities and getting dedicated Police units. The main reward for spending all this Energy is even more Energy. You have to spend Energy to get Golden Ages, you have to spend Energy to Hurry your production, you have to hoard Energy to get interest from it then spend it on Secret Projects so you can finish them in good time. Don't forgot about upgrading your military and bribing your neighbors. Energy, Energy, Energy, Energy. So that's that. Morgan is now conceptually finished, the numbers may need to be fine-tuned through play-testing by both myself and the AI. He's going to be hard to play for new players but the number of new players for a 24 year old game that are going to be installing a Faction mod is vanishingly small. That number is probably zero. For anybody else, this new Morgan should let you show off your skill at handling the internal economic development side of Alpha Centauri like no other Faction. The AI will probably not be able to handle him properly due to the interlocking complexity of these changes, oh well. Names for my Morgan rework. I already like the first one but here are my other ideas. Morgan: Contradictions of Capitalism Morgan: The Gilded Ages Morgan: Rising Rate of Profit Morgan: Infinite Growth, Finite Planet
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Nov 14, 2023 07:33
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sullat posted:On the one hand ethnic cleansing is bad, but on the other hand Yang's cities are too close together and aren't situated in the right places... You can starve a city down to Pop 1, (sell all the improvements), and then build a Colony Pod in order to abandon it. This doesn't count as an atrocity. It turns out if you spread out your ethnic cleansing over enough time people don't regard it as an atrocity even if the end result is the same. In Alpha Centauri. I'll be doing more SMAC but this time with the Thinker mod in order to improve the AI and as Deidre. I'll be posting significantly fewer pictures and updates but I'll probably still do a few. Previously I was doing full size screenshots with the [img ] tag. Should I use the [timg ] tag in the future? This makes the pictures smaller but for some reason when you click them it doesn't expand to full size but instead to a medium size, you have to open the picture in a new tab in order to get the full size view and be able to actually read anything. Please enjoy this picture of what the original 7 faction leaders looked like when they were younger. The actual pictures were taken from the diplomacy screen in the game. 
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Nov 15, 2023 01:55
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sullat posted:Call me David ben Gurion but I do know how to conduct an ethnic cleansing without running afoul of the rules-based international order. Just, you know, musing on the morality of it. I mean I guess I can pretend that all those starving Yang drones are being assimilated into the genejack factories of Morgan Industries, but we all know most of them are ending up as mindworm food. Where are kids sharing their files nowadays? Here's a mediafire link. https://www.mediafire.com/file/gibueaguzgc8ksv/Bears_Faction_Mod_v0_21.7z/file I've implemented my Morgan changes and I've also done a few things to Cha Dawn. He stole the Xenofungus Nutrient bonus from the Gaians, got immunity to the downsides of Green economics, and is now opposed to Free Market instead of Wealth. I think he was made anti-Wealth to distinguish him from Deidre but I want them to be weird inverted mirror factions to each other. Intended gameplay is to cover the world in Xenofungus. I also had to remove one of his starting techs to fit in my changes. I also play with Mines no longer giving a Nutrient penalty but that's not included. You'll have to go into "alphax.txt" and change the "Nutrient effect in mine square (0 or -1)" field to zero. quote:Some more early game advice. You start with a single scout patrol with a very special status. It's "Independent". This means that it's not supported by any base and doesn't need to be. Independent units can only be gained from events or by capturing native lifeforms. Independent units are worth their weight in gold early game, or more precisely they're worth 1 Mineral per turn, this is massive in the early game. Protect your independent units, use them as police or for other safe tasks or at least use up other units first if you must use them in combat. I can't remember if they keep their independent status if you upgrade them. I'm using these tactics as Deidre, keeping my captured mindworms near home while sending my built scouts further out afield. Speaking of units and their Support, you can assign a unit to a new base if you want to spread out the support burden. You do this with CTRL+H. Obviously never do this to your independent units or you lose what makes the special. bedpan posted:iirc in SMAC you could get yourself elected council president then pass the law legalizing chemical weapons. equip the units who storm enemy cities with the now entirely legal and legitimate defensive weaponry and presto, no problems with garrisoning captured cities Another fun fact about Nerve Gas. It's only illegal to to use it against humans. You can use it against the Progenitor factions from the expansion with no consequences. The Progenitors can also use Nerve Gas against both humans and each other with no penalties. Another weird quirk, committing atrocities causes the planet to react and send units against you, presumably from the psychic backlash or something. However, once you make atrocities legal that stops happening. Does Planet also read and abide by the U.N. Charter? BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 04:28 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 03:00
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Alpha Centauri, everything you ever wanted to know about Hurrying production (but were afraid to ask). You can Hurry production (sometimes called Rush production) in Alpha Centauri and it works very similarly to how it works in Civilization. Instead of waiting for production to be finished using Minerals, you spend Energy in order to hurry it and get it done now (actually it only gets done the next turn). There are a few quirks to be aware of. The first and most important quirks to be aware of is that Hurrying production costs double before ten(10) Minerals of production have been spent on whatever you're building.. Hurry production costs different amounts of Energy per Mineral depending on what you're building. It's 2 Energy per Mineral for normal Facilities, 4 Energy per Mineral for Secret Projects, and finally 2+ Energy per Mineral for building units depending on how expensive they are. To maximize the benefits of using your Energy you should mostly be rushing Facilities that have had at least 10 minerals spent on them. For units you should probably be building cheap units and then upgrading them with Energy instead, I haven't actually done the math on that though. For Secret Projects you should be Hurrying them with energy as late as possible, this also has the benefit of screwing over any AIs that you're racing for Secret Projects for. A quick trick to getting new bases up and running for cheaper. You need those first ten minerals filled to make hurrying the production cheaper but new bases have terrible mineral production. You can fill those ten Mineral slots with Energy. First turn, do a partial payment to Hurry the production forward just enough so that ten mineral slots will be filled on the next turn, this will cost you double but it will be a small amount overall (less than 33 energy). Second turn just Hurry it as normal, now at normal cost because the first ten Minerals are filled. On the third turn you can once again start doing this trick to Hurry the next production. On a closely related note, 10 Minerals is also the amount of Minerals that can overflow between productions. When you finish building something you usually have some extra Minerals left over that turn. Up to ten of them can overflow into the next production. If your base is making 10 minerals or less, don't worry about it. On the other hand if you're making more than that then doing a partial payment instead of a full one can save you a bit of Energy each time you Hurry a production. For a facility, you should subtract ten from your mineral production and then double that and then subtract that from the full cost of hurrying the production. I usually only bother doing this if I'm in a tricky situation and need to squeeze out every bit of Energy. Those ten minerals that do overflow let you do back-to-back production Hurryings at normal cost. The Thinker mod calculates the actual cost to finish a production that turn and just gives you that number so that makes it much easier. And speaking of which... The Thinker mod I'm now using makes a few changes. It removes the doubling of the cost if the first ten minerals are missing. You don't have to count the minerals anymore and figure out if you're paying double price or not and you don't have to squint at late-game high mineral buildings to figure out if the first row was actually filled or just going to be filled. However, Secret Projects now cost double if the first 40 minerals aren't spent, making very rapid rushes of them more difficult. I approve of both these changes. If you're using the Thinker mod read this part first and then you don't need to read the things I wrote up above.
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Nov 16, 2023 23:30
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BearsBearsBears posted:We'll begin with how to start playing Alpha Centauri in the year of Our Lord 2023. The process was almost painless. We'll be adding a bugfix patch and a UI patch. You too can be playing Alpha Centauri in about 10 minutes or so. Installing the Thinker mod is pretty drat simple as well. You can start at step 4 if you've already done everything above. 1. Follow steps 1-4 on the above guide. 2. Installing Scient's Patch (Step 5) is now optional. Do it or don't. I think the only difference might be some differences in the Datalinks (in-game gameplay encyclopedia). 3. You should still install PRACX as normal (Step 6) 4. Download the latest version of Thinker Patch from the below link. I grabbed the 3.8 version which is apparently from last month. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qsps5bhz8v020o9/AAAp6ioWxdo7vnG6Ity5W3o1a 5. You can read more about what this patch does from the below link. It does feature both gameplay and AI changes. A lot of stuff can be customized from the "thinker.ini" file. https://github.com/induktio/thinker/blob/master/Details.md 6. Unzip the Thinker mod that you downloaded, then take the folder that was unzipped and drop its contents straight into your Alpha Centauri folder. You should wind up with the "thinker.exe" file in the same folder as "terranx.exe" 7. Create a shortcut from the "thinker.exe" file and set it to always run in admin mode. This step may or may not be optional. 8. From now on you will only run Alpha Centauri from the "thinker.exe" shortcut (or executable) instead of the normal "terranx.exe" executable. 9. Run Alpha Centauri from your "thinker.exe" shortcut/executable. 10. Press ALT+H to bring the Thinker menu up, this can be done even from the main menu of Alpha Centauri. If it comes up then everything worked, if it doesn't then check that CAPS LOCK is off and try again. If it still doesn't then something went wrong. 11. The shortcut is ALT+T if for some reason you don't have PRACX installed but you really should install PRACX. It makes the UI easier to deal with. 12. Enjoy Alpha Centauri with improved AI (and some fan patching and an improved UI).
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Nov 16, 2023 23:57
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Alpha Centauri, in media res We've successfully destroyed a newly established colony of Zakharov's University. Their technical knowhow was no match for our extensive military and also their own technical knowhow that we stole from them. Our mind worms are used as supporting troops as Zakaharov seems to favor using Hypnotic Trance on his units, the increased cost of hypnotically indoctrinating all of his units helps us outproduce him with traditional unites though. As our units march into position to assault the next city my thoughts turn towards the past and how we got here. Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams" posted:In the great commons at Gaia's Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to our people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth. I'm playing as Lady Deidre Skye of the Gaia's Stepdaughters. I am using the Thinker mod and I've transferred over all* of my changes to the Factions. However, mistakes and coincidences have marked my play to the extent that I question how useful this game is going to be for playtesting. Oh well, I'm mostly playing to play anyway. First, how tech costs work in the mod. In unmodded SMAC the cost of a technology is only based upon how many technologies you've researched. The mod changes it so that the primary determinant is the tier of the technology. The default is a sort of hybrid system that makes early techs cheap. This should slow down the tech research speed in the mid to late game. Unfortunately I made a mistake and also turned on Tech Stagnation. In the normal game this increase the cost of techs by 150% but the Thinker mod increases it by 200%. This makes the early game tech research too slow for my taste, especially since I play without tech trading. I did eventually go into the "thinker.ini" file to essentially disable the tech stagnation. However, the lingering effect is that it's turn 100 and I'm only now entering into mid-game techs (hab complex and all the lifting of resource limitations). It was interesting to try but I wouldn't recommend it to others. Secondly, I forgot to add Miriam's bonuses from my previous game. Whoops, I guess she'll be the control group. Thirdly, I made a line break error and caused Lal's official title to be "Pusillanimous Wimp Lal" which is hilarious. Fourthly, my rapid expansion managed to cut off almost every faction and gave me a massive amount of expansion room. To this extent that even at turn 100 I still have room for expansion. I've finally had to slow down just because of my drone problems (from excessive cities). I still hope to continue expanding but I need to take some time to actually build up my cities a bit. Also, check out the University's territory, he's got roads, sensors, mines, and forests. That's some decent terraforming, nothing compared to my own but still much better than the vanilla SMAC AI. Check out the mass of cities as well. They're each three squares away from each other (this is configurable in the "thinker.ini" config file). Three squares is the exact amount an infantry unit can move along roads, meaning these cities can reinforce each other. While theoretically my cities can work more squares, that's limited by population. I am considering increased the distance the AI founds it's cities at to maybe 4 or 5, get me those nice aesthetically spaced cities that I love so much. But that's for next game.  My vast heartland. I suspect part of the reason that I was able to spread out so much was the AI building their cities so close together. I have the Manifold Nexus, an odd landmark that grants you +1 Planet instead of any resource bonus from the squares. I also have Mount Planet which I think is the only Volcano on planet, it gives a nice +1/+1 Minerals and Energy the bonus is only for nine squares but that is very nice. I also got part of Monsoon Jungle, unfortunately Yang got the other half. Additionally there seems to be a second Monsoon Jungle on the map which Pravin Lal got (although I might be able to get a part of it that is across the water). The Thinker mod does modify the map generation, mostly to reduce the amount of small islands. It also allows you to have a new unique land mark called Nessus Canyon. I regretfully did not enable that before this game. I've been at war with Zakharov, apparently it's when he dedicates himself to the "unfettered pursuit of knowledge" but when I use probe teams to pursue knowledge inside of his computer networks that's enough to declare vendetta on me. I managed to steal about 5 techs from him so that was very nice and certainly worth it. Sunspots just knocked out communications but I'm hoping to force him to vassalize himself to me. We'll see what that takes, maybe I'll just do a truce because of the following problem.  Yang... isn't at war with me. I save-scummed to try and figure out what his deal was; when I politely but firmly asked him to leave my territory he declared vendetta on me. I reloaded to see if he would declare war on me and ... he just didn't. I suspect I know what is happening here.  Yang is at war with Pravin Lal. They share a sea border but no land border. Yang can't reach Lal except through my territory but I won't let him through. So he's stuck trying to move his troops around and try to get around my city but the pathfinding just isn't good enough. This does lead to a problem. I built up a significant army in order to be able to fight Yang and Zakharov simultaneously. What am I supposed to do now? Just disband it? Not invade anyone? I'll probably invade Yang after I take care of Zakharov. If I can take care of both of them then I can secure my western borders. On the other hand.  Here is Yang's industrial heartland. That's a lot of cities. Cities that can support a lot of armies. Cities with free perimeter defenses. Yang also has The Command Nexus, which means that every single base has a command center, letting him both build more experienced troops and heal his troops faster. I've got some concerns about conquering Yang. Maybe we'll just take over Zakharov for now. Not sure how much terraforming Yang is doing, I don't have an updated map from him, I think I stole this map from the University. I do get to see his cities since I managed to get elected governor thanks to my large population. Onto other less important fronts. On my Eastern front is Pravin Lal and Miriam, I've got them hemmed in so they can't expand. Morgan is to my North and is also on the opposite side of Morgan. I share a border with Morgan but he is not fully hemmed in yet. Santiago is somewhere, she's doing terribly and I think she may be trapped on an island or peninsula. Ironically enough, I gave her +2 Max Pop that could really help her when she doesn't have anybody to conquer. It's too bad the AI probably won't be able to take advantage of that. This is the second time I've tried to make this post. Firefox crashed on me the first time, what did I get all this RAM for if not to have 80 twitter tabs open? I certainly don't need it to play Alpha Centauri. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 02:47 on Nov 19, 2023 |
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Nov 18, 2023 10:34
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