I Want to Play Alpha Centauri

[Space Satan]

Beyond Earth stirred me to play AC once again. At least something good from this clusterfuck of decline.

Anyway, it seems that general consensus here on Coderx is that AC shuld be played only as vanilla.
Question to you - what makes Alien Crossfire so bad? I can't remember from my last AC games that it ruined something completely and my main complains were about how new factions had advantages and almost no penalties. I.e. cyborgs were University without penalties, drones had superior productin bonuses etc. Well this and plus alien factions, who sucked.

 

[Irenaeus]

Alien Crossfire shits all over lore and doesn't introduce anything useful. That's the konsensus

 

[mastroego]

I actually like some of the new improvements (mostly the watery ones) and enjoy playing as the Consciousness.
The aliens are overpowered but they're supposed to be used by the AI.
Also if you select random opponents with all the new factions as additional options, unusual and potentially fun combinations may come out of it.

In short, people complains too much about the expansion. It may spice things up, and it's fired from its own, separate executable, so no harm done, you can switch to vanilla whenever you feel to.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Seeing now that C:BE is released and selling well, wouln't it be wise for EA trying to capitalize on this by making a SMAC HD remake?

Just don't try to make a goddamn sequel. Nobody will succeed in making a worthy sequel, probably not even Brian Raynolds himself. Just leave the core functionality and the writing untouched and re-do the graphics/sound.

 

[Average Manatee]

The additional human factions are just completely retarded (one of the faction leaders is literally, I am not making this up, described as "The infogrrrrl") and the alien factions have no real justification other than "lol now we added aliens". They are also generally quite overpowered (especially aliens). All-around feels like entirely amateur mod level stuff basically. They are disabled by default and you can keep it that way, or put a single alien faction if you want a kind of rival faction to make the game harder.

OTOH there are new techs, secret projects, native life forms, and balance tweaks that I think are quite well made and broaden the possibilities. e.g. the new Planetary Energy Grid is a good early game secret project which is normally off the beaten path. Hunter-Seeker algorithm being nerfed to slightly less than godly for University was desperately needed. The native Artillery can be a great shake-up since normal units have trouble entering fungus squares to engage them. Sea bases can actually be pretty competitive with land bases now and are worth building to exploit resource deposits. The new unit abilities are all quite well balanced and fill a good niche. Cloudbase Academy is a bit OP but that's more just because helicopters are OP and didn't really need the help.

I don't think anything is lost at all by playing SMAX with the new factions disabled over SMAC.

 

[Space Satan]

What disappointed me in SMAC is that each and every of my games are
1. Get tree farms
2. Get Hyrbid Forest
3. Plant forests across entire planet.
Otherwise, eco-damage skyrocket and my bases got overrun by endless hordes. I can't remember using boreholes or mines in the late game because forest give so much reosources it outclasses everything else.

 

[Average Manatee]

Mines are indeed mostly useless, except in that the mineral booster lets you break the 3-mineral limit early on and get a large mine up for a base that absolutely spams through secret projects. Then in the midgame get your first few crawlers up and running to crawl everything to one base and suddenly in the span of a few turns you are completing production assignments in 1/5th the time for a large turn advantage when everyone else is just starting to crawl 2 or 3 minerals per crawler.

Boreholes are pretty damn amazing, I dunno why you wouldn't have at least one per base in the late game. Potentially two. 6 minerals + 6 energy = 12 output, the best in the game, and past the early game food is generally the least useful resource leaving mineral spam for building and energy spam for upgrading/teching. Half of the reason to get the Weather Paradigm is to drill boreholes fast and early, even before restriction lifting 0/2/2 isn't bad and when it's lifted you are immediately ready to boom.

Eco-damage is a two-fold topic:

1. Eco damage from improvements. All tile improvements affect eco damage. Something like every borehole adds 8, farms add 2, mines add 4, and every forest is -1 (numbers may not be accurate but should be close). This is just from existing. What's important is that Tree Farms gives -50% and Hybrid Forest gives another -50%, meaning once you have both this is a big flat 0 effect.

2. Eco damage from production. The number of minerals your city generates also affects eco damage. This can't be stopped. However, there is something called the "clean mineral limit", which is never explained in-game. Everything below your clean mineral limit won't affect eco damage. What's important about this is that certain buildings (including tree farms and hybrid forests, among others) increase clean limit. Furthermore, clean limit is global. 10 cities with 10 tree farms and 10 hybrid forests = another 20 clean limit for all cities. So ultimately this too isn't a big problem so long as you don't go way too tall on a city compared to how wide you are.

One oddity though: Clean limit doesn't go up until you get your first event signifying eco damage. And these events also increase clean mineral limit by 1. Also there is a bug in vanilla where buildings could be continually scrapped and re-built to continually increase mineral limit, but I think all unofficial patches fix that.

Also intentionally going way over the clean limit in a city can be a good way to farm credits from killing mind worms. Set up some artillery to soften up their stacks first and have at it. Kind of cheesy though.

 

[Johannes]

What disappointed me in SMAC is that each and every of my games are
1. Get tree farms
2. Get Hyrbid Forest
3. Plant forests across entire planet.
Otherwise, eco-damage skyrocket and my bases got overrun by endless hordes. I can't remember using boreholes or mines in the late game because forest give so much reosources it outclasses everything else.

Some boreholes are definitely good, mines are mostly good with Supply Crawlers. Eco-damage is not a problem, actually it's can be a very good thing if you're prepared - remember that killing native worms gives you energy.

If you've got high spots solar panels are definitely good too.

 

[Average Manatee]

BTW if you want a nice mod that improves the datalinks to explain most of the hidden quirks of the game like eco damage, see here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=291246 (SMAX only I think)

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Whenever you have a fungal bloom in one of your cities, your clean mineral limit rises throughout your entire civ.

This adds another perk to having a dedicated pollution factory city. Every time that city has a fungal bloom, the rest of your cities get more leeway in how much industrial output they can safely have.

 

[Space Satan]

With late game it is almot impossible to breach that limit to keep bases up to challenge with raising mineral demand for future buildings. Sadly, with this you are guaranteed to have several +50% psi def and api attack anti-worm units in every city to counter popping fungal swarms.

 

[Average Manatee]

In the very late game? Sure, once you unlock and build the several buildings that give +50% minerals along with satellite spam that gives every colony a base +16 minerals just for existing. But at that point you are probably teching at the rate of at least 1 tech per turn and are inches away from Transcendence. For the 90% of the game before this it is perfectly possible to have a low eco-damage society even with 1 or 2 boreholes per city.

In my last game I had around a 120 clean mineral limit, and 120 minerals is more than enough to build just about everything including secret projects in 1-4 turns (keep in mind that you only carry over 10 overflow so there's massive waste). Most of my bases sat around 100-130ish minerals per turn (and 50 or less eco damage generally isn't a problem). And this at the point where I'm getting ~7000 energy a turn and can flat out buy the Ascent to Transcendence anyway, so minerals are pretty much meaningless.

 

[Borelli]

So i decided to play SMAC again but this time with a different goal. Reach the maximum score (enough to get the final title at the end screen), for that of course i had to choose the transcend difficulty. Map was of the Planet and not a random map which helped me a little (i could metagame). In case you don't know the Planet looks like this

Spoiler

This picture is slightly changed but it is otherwise a good representation (best i could google).
University, Spartans and Morgan started on the left continent. The middle L shaped one had only Gaians while the little island in the top right (and left) corner had Miriam who just sat there being shit with her -2 research. Right continent had me as Hive and Lal.

Early game i rushed Lal and had the whole island to myself, Gaians quickly expanded to the whole continent making them the most powerful faction while Sparta defeated both University and Morgans. For some reason however it made Spartans decline heavily in tech and for most of the game they had horrible internal development despite being very large and in peace for most of the time. This greatly made my game easier.
Around middle to late game i made a massive invasion of Gaia taking the whole middle continent for myself (and most of the secret projects of the game since she built most of them) then invaded Miriam and finally Spartans. Since population factors heavily into the score after conquering everything i left one AI alive then sat on my ass for about 15 turns while my cloning vats pumped 50 of my cities. Then finished the game on military victory (transcendence gives you more score but i don't like it story wise).

Overall while i do think that SMAC is the best Civ game i must admit that it's AI is lackluster and achieving max score rank was not that difficult (although i had luck with how the Spartans after defeating two factions went to shit).
Civ4 is for various reasons a more difficult game.

 

[Destroid]

Overall while i do think that SMAC is the best Civ game i must admit that it's AI is lackluster and achieving max score rank was not that difficult (although i had luck with how the Spartans after defeating two factions went to shit).
Civ4 is for various reasons a more difficult game.

Considering the difficulty settings just give the AIs insane bonuses over the player, perhaps that is where the difference lies? Or maybe Civ4 has better AI, it's been so long since I played either I don't remember.

 

[Jaedar]

I always felt SMAC ai was pretty good. Not necessarily at winning the game, but it larps the faction leaders and the diplomacy between them damn well. And I never really felt like the ai did something nonsensical or random.

 

[Destroid]

I always felt SMAC ai was pretty good. Not necessarily at winning the game, but it larps the faction leaders and the diplomacy between them damn well. And I never really felt like the ai did something nonsensical or random.

I can never make my mind up about whether I prefer larper AIs or gamist AIs in 4x strategy games

 

[Borelli]

Overall while i do think that SMAC is the best Civ game i must admit that it's AI is lackluster and achieving max score rank was not that difficult (although i had luck with how the Spartans after defeating two factions went to shit).
Civ4 is for various reasons a more difficult game.

Considering the difficulty settings just give the AIs insane bonuses over the player, perhaps that is where the difference lies? Or maybe Civ4 has better AI, it's been so long since I played either I don't remember.

Main difference is in the nature of warfare. SMAC is offense centric which means that even when losing tech race you can win the war because if the AI has 8 attack 3 defense while you have 6/2 you can still win every fight on the offense. Not to mention that low armor values make +50% defensive bonus you get from forests/rocks/fungus unimportant. Most fights are about 10 attack 1 defense berzerkers charging each other until one side falters, conquering cities is easy for many reasons, garrison units usually have 1 attack which means that you are safe from counterattacking, perimeter defenses can be taken down by probes (love this tactic).

In Civ4 on the other hand, the defender has the advantage (tactically, not strategically). The rock/paper/scissors system means that in a doomstack the best unit for the job will always take the defense. The fusion of attack/defence scores into one also means that camping on hill/forests (it stacks!) gives you huge bonuses. If you want to capture a town you will always need more units than the opponent (you either sacrifice siege units or human wave ordinary ones).

All this means that the AI doesn't need to be smart, it just needs to park the doomstack in a city on a hill and you, the human player will have to accept pyrrhic victory to defeat him. This puts a strain on the war's strategic scale because the AI will usually have more cities than you (on higher difficulties city maintenance kills fast expansion while AI with its bonuses doesn't need to think about that). Also, the culture system means that every city you conquer will have half its terrain unusable until you conquer all of AI's cities. (i hate this mechanic so much)

I have also googled it and yes, the AI bonuses are stronger in Civ4 than SMAC.

I always felt SMAC ai was pretty good. Not necessarily at winning the game, but it larps the faction leaders and the diplomacy between them damn well. And I never really felt like the ai did something nonsensical or random.

Agree, diplomacy in SMAC always feels better than Gandhi the nuclear warrior demanding tribute.

 

[Average Manatee]

There's also a very, very big difference between SMAC and Civ4: Enemy units can't use your roads in Civ4. Generally in Civ4 whenever something is about to attack you, you can see it coming because the enemy unit has to move next to you. When you attack the AI, you generally have to stretch it over multiple turns in which time the AI can pool half their army to defeat you. In SMAC virtually every attack will be coming from a unit that you didn't even know existed before you saw it.

AI's have an incredibly hard job of managing uncertainty and knowing where to expect something to attack from, solutions either take a huge amount of programmer time and computing power (never gonna happen in games) or cheating so the AI can see everything. Not doing either, you can easily see how the AI is effectively a mindless child unable to comprehend what to expect coming the next turn in SMAC.

Furthermore on a strategic level, I'd say that SMAC tends to snowball much harder. Early game secret projects are far more powerful than wonders are, and when you slingshot to a specific tech you dominate much harder for much longer than an AI who techs on a more diverse basis.

 

[tuluse]

I don't think that's right. I'm pretty sure you can use enemy roads in Civ4, but you can't use enemy railroads.

 

[Average Manatee]

You can use them with the Commando promotion, which is fairly high level. Since it's generally futile to attack only one unit having it, I'd say it's effectively useless. You'd need it on a whole stack to be useful, which is just not happening in most cases.

 

[Irenaeus]

I used to give all my boys the Commando promotion

Never seriously played Civ4 on highest levels or in multiplayer, tho.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's probably possible if you stack enough +xp and +promotion boosts from wonders (I can't remember all of them from Civ4 or how much they would give you though), but even then to give it to a whole stack you'd have to destroy several other stacks of equal size without taking losses, at which point you're probably steamrolling enough as it is.

I'm sure it's great for harassment units though. But certainly you'll never do like in SMAC where a helicopter/airdrop rush can take several cities every turn.

 

[Borelli]

There's also a very, very big difference between SMAC and Civ4: Enemy units can't use your roads in Civ4. Generally in Civ4 whenever something is about to attack you, you can see it coming because the enemy unit has to move next to you. When you attack the AI, you generally have to stretch it over multiple turns in which time the AI can pool half their army to defeat you. In SMAC virtually every attack will be coming from a unit that you didn't even know existed before you saw it.

AI's have an incredibly hard job of managing uncertainty and knowing where to expect something to attack from, solutions either take a huge amount of programmer time and computing power (never gonna happen in games) or cheating so the AI can see everything. Not doing either, you can easily see how the AI is effectively a mindless child unable to comprehend what to expect coming the next turn in SMAC.

Furthermore on a strategic level, I'd say that SMAC tends to snowball much harder. Early game secret projects are far more powerful than wonders are, and when you slingshot to a specific tech you dominate much harder for much longer than an AI who techs on a more diverse basis.

Oh yeah, i forgot to mention this. The simulationfag in me doesn't like the mechanic. Makes conquering a flatland equally slow as conquering a highland.

 

[blamzooie]

Furthermore on a strategic level, I'd say that SMAC tends to snowball much harder. Early game secret projects are far more powerful than wonders are, and when you slingshot to a specific tech you dominate much harder for much longer than an AI who techs on a more diverse basis.

I like turning on Time Warp to cure the OCD slingshotting that would otherwise dominate my early game.

 

[Norfleet]

I don't think that's right. I'm pretty sure you can use enemy roads in Civ4, but you can't use enemy railroads.

Nope. Civ 3 removed the ability to use enemy roads and railroads. I am not sure why this makes any sense, since as far as I knew, roads were inert things that did not pick sides. Hell, technically, railroads are that way, too, and people (Russians) have attempted to sidestep attempts by the enemy to use their railroads by building them in non-standard gauges. That really should have been made one of the national decisions: Use a standard gauge, or insist on being a special snowflake, thus rendering your railroads useless to others and vice versa.