Average Manatee
Arcane
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If that's the case then all of the SMAX factions should have that stamp.
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4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread
- Thread starter The Brazilian Slaughter
- Start date
Average Manatee
Arcane
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- Jan 7, 2012
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- 14,276
Trying the Will to Power mod and... it seems entirely random whether you get an extra colony pod at the start or not? This has to be a bug right? I've tried starting like 20 games on map of planet/librarian and it's just sometimes I get a free 2nd colony and sometimes I don't. Obviously this is ridiculously imbalanced one way or another and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be getting or if AIs are also randomly getting twice as many colonies to start with.
Average Manatee
Arcane
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- Jan 7, 2012
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- 14,276
Induktio QoL suggestion, let us activate crawlers on squares already being worked (turn off/move the pop currently working the tile). I usually have most bases on automatic pop allocation, which means I need to hit O (fails)->go to base->turn off pop->go back to crawler and hit O(this then cycles me to the next active unit which could be far away)->go back to base ->go to governor->turn on pop automation every time I want to use a crawler, which is a lot of work that shouldn't be needed.
Cael
Arcane
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It happens in all of the old Civ games. When you start on a goody hut, the game gives you an extra settler. The AIs get it too, and at higher difficulties, they get more units at the start by default, IIRC.
Average Manatee
Arcane
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Had a good game as Deidre, Thinker mod/Thinker Difficulty/Stagnant research. I was really impressed that Miriam actually looked like she was about to run away with the game, she somehow kept up in tech well almost entirely by stealing tech. When I declared war her tech/turn was 170 to my 800 and Morgan's 700, but it was still a tough fight with only a very temporary tech advantage before she stole it from me. I along with most of the map was pushing on her but her death was getting her empire split in half by global warming.
Morgan did keep up relatively well with me, I have 4.3k tech per turn right now and he's 1.8k. But my net income is +4000 a year while his is +440. Engineers OP.
Only early game SP I got was Weather Paradigm, which is essential for this kind of terraforming strategy. Picked up Planetary Energy Grids and Ascetic Virtues myself. Surprisingly Miriam had like half the other SPs that I inherited by killing her.
End game
Miriam at the height of her power
Might try another game on non-stagnant. Thinker overall slows the game down but it seems a bit much on stagnant for my taste, turns take like 5 mins to sort everything out which is why I didn't play to the ultimate end.
Morgan did keep up relatively well with me, I have 4.3k tech per turn right now and he's 1.8k. But my net income is +4000 a year while his is +440. Engineers OP.
Only early game SP I got was Weather Paradigm, which is essential for this kind of terraforming strategy. Picked up Planetary Energy Grids and Ascetic Virtues myself. Surprisingly Miriam had like half the other SPs that I inherited by killing her.
End game
Miriam at the height of her power
Might try another game on non-stagnant. Thinker overall slows the game down but it seems a bit much on stagnant for my taste, turns take like 5 mins to sort everything out which is why I didn't play to the ultimate end.
Cael
Arcane
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Miriam and Yang both have an early advantage, and if they can leverage that into a large empire, they can run away. Yang does it almost by default. Miriam have to work for it. In an old Civ game like AC, the higher difficulty encourage both to run away due to bonus resource and free unit upkeep.
Average Manatee
Arcane
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Had an hilarious game with a few learning moments...
So I figured I'd go for the exact opposite this time, a rush-focused build. We're Santiago on Transcend, Thinker mod, no spoils of war (thought it would make it too easy).
Early game I find a unity pod with a unity mining laser. Lal is next door. Just messing around and attacked his 1 pop colony (normally this is a bad idea, it just dies and you don't capture anything, better to wait till they are 3). He immediately surrenders to become my vassal, which means I also can get all his tech for free whenever he researches anything and he can't backstab me. Cool. Will make sure to do that in future games.
Then I get a bunch of rovers to go SE to Zakharov. He's got the nice jungle terrain I want to own and there's a monolith right by to upgrade my troops before they go in. Easy victory, he also capitulates.
Now at this point I'd found everyone and unfortunately made the mistake of calling a vote for planetary governor. The choice was between Miriam and Deidre. Since Miriam was right next door watching me slowly conquer Zak I didn't want her to backstab me, so I voted her in (despite having the most colonies I didn't have the pop to affect much). So Miriam got a huge energy boost and really started getting strong.
At this point I'm friends with everyone else anyway (Morgan loves me... I'm not sure why, Yang because I'm running police state as the only way to not collapse). Because lol transcend cheats Lal and Zak have snowballed decently and are researching techs far faster than I can. I literally have jack shit for energy due to inefficiency + distance but between them and trading the techs they research to other AIs, then giving my vassals all tech whenever I get something, we're pretty overpowered.
Miriam is a pain in the ass mostly due to probes. She has way too much money and just outright mind controls several bases with way too many units in it. The key thing I found out here was making all of my defensive units probes (e.g. 1 move/3 armor). This way any probe that attacks has to chew through my defensive probes, and if they do and the base gets taken then all my expensive rovers in there with high morale and better weapons than Miriam had would just be cleaned up on the next turn since I was on the offensive against 1 armor rovers. It is a little more expensive than normal troops but probes don't count against support so I'm pulling ahead over time. I also figured out a trick where I just accept peace when Miriam asks for it after I take a base, wait to rest my dudes, then just be rude to her in commlinks to get her to declare a vendetta again. Works great. Miriam concedes. Not that she's giving me much tech but she'll throw shit at whatever I'm attacking just fine.
Then we get to Deidre. Oh boy, despite conquering most of 3 AIs she has over twice my pop. Mostly because my economy is shit and everything is going into war. Bases I take can't be policed at the population they have so they starve and go lose half their people. I could avoid this by rush buying key facilities but I don't have the money because at this point Miriam's bases are literally losing 100% of their value to inefficiency. I think I fucked up by staying on Police State so long but I wasn't really paying attention to anything but the war economy and the minerals so ehh w/e. But it really caught up to me halfway through the Deidre war where I realized my income per turn was -60 and I was only surviving off looted energy from cities. I eventually decide to transition out of police state by nerve stapling everyone during a sunspot event, which I THOUGHT prevented all negative consequences for atrocities. This way I'd be able to keep drones down while building the facilities.
Unfortunately I found out as soon as the sunspot ended that factions will still react to atrocities if you nerve stapled their former cities, which includes your vassals.
Morgan gets fucking everything... although at least I picked up command nexus from Miriam which let me get all elites for the war against Deidre.
Not sure what I'll do, think imma reload and just replay the last 10 turns. urgh.
A few other things in retrospect:
1. Even if you get a mineral and food resource immediately, you're probably not gonna beat any AIs to SPs. I tried to get both of the military ones and failed. Granted it *probably* didn't do much as all my starting bases didn't contribute anything to the war effort past Zak.
2. In retrospect I should have gone for Morgan rather than Miriam. He was on the other side of the map but both are far from the original base and rovers are fast. Fighting Miriam (or Yang or Santiago) is too painful.
3. I found something REALLY interesting. It turns out disbanding a unit at a base adds half its mineral cost to the current construction item, much like rushing a SP with crawlers (although that gives you full return). I've always just been disbanding units willy nilly that I didn't want. This might be interesting for rushing some SPs a bit... spam some early forests for minerals on a few of your extra bases and just eat the penalty.
4. I tried tree spam but it unfortunately doesn't work that well if you're losing much energy to inefficiency on due to distance + need for police state to manage drones, so its far better to go the specialist route which ignores inefficiency. Unfortunately most of the AIs seem to go tree spam in thinker so fixing that would have cost a lot of former time.
5. I figured out that I should really be selling techs I collect to my subservient vassals rather than just freely giving them away. Oh well... the energy obviously would have helped.
6. Alternatively, I just now figured out you can ask for credits from them and threaten to cancel the pact and they seem to always pay up. That seems almost cheating. But its also pretty good against AI pact friends who like you, morgan just gave me a bunch of dosh for nothing.
So I figured I'd go for the exact opposite this time, a rush-focused build. We're Santiago on Transcend, Thinker mod, no spoils of war (thought it would make it too easy).
Early game I find a unity pod with a unity mining laser. Lal is next door. Just messing around and attacked his 1 pop colony (normally this is a bad idea, it just dies and you don't capture anything, better to wait till they are 3). He immediately surrenders to become my vassal, which means I also can get all his tech for free whenever he researches anything and he can't backstab me. Cool. Will make sure to do that in future games.
Then I get a bunch of rovers to go SE to Zakharov. He's got the nice jungle terrain I want to own and there's a monolith right by to upgrade my troops before they go in. Easy victory, he also capitulates.
Now at this point I'd found everyone and unfortunately made the mistake of calling a vote for planetary governor. The choice was between Miriam and Deidre. Since Miriam was right next door watching me slowly conquer Zak I didn't want her to backstab me, so I voted her in (despite having the most colonies I didn't have the pop to affect much). So Miriam got a huge energy boost and really started getting strong.
At this point I'm friends with everyone else anyway (Morgan loves me... I'm not sure why, Yang because I'm running police state as the only way to not collapse). Because lol transcend cheats Lal and Zak have snowballed decently and are researching techs far faster than I can. I literally have jack shit for energy due to inefficiency + distance but between them and trading the techs they research to other AIs, then giving my vassals all tech whenever I get something, we're pretty overpowered.
Miriam is a pain in the ass mostly due to probes. She has way too much money and just outright mind controls several bases with way too many units in it. The key thing I found out here was making all of my defensive units probes (e.g. 1 move/3 armor). This way any probe that attacks has to chew through my defensive probes, and if they do and the base gets taken then all my expensive rovers in there with high morale and better weapons than Miriam had would just be cleaned up on the next turn since I was on the offensive against 1 armor rovers. It is a little more expensive than normal troops but probes don't count against support so I'm pulling ahead over time. I also figured out a trick where I just accept peace when Miriam asks for it after I take a base, wait to rest my dudes, then just be rude to her in commlinks to get her to declare a vendetta again. Works great. Miriam concedes. Not that she's giving me much tech but she'll throw shit at whatever I'm attacking just fine.
Then we get to Deidre. Oh boy, despite conquering most of 3 AIs she has over twice my pop. Mostly because my economy is shit and everything is going into war. Bases I take can't be policed at the population they have so they starve and go lose half their people. I could avoid this by rush buying key facilities but I don't have the money because at this point Miriam's bases are literally losing 100% of their value to inefficiency. I think I fucked up by staying on Police State so long but I wasn't really paying attention to anything but the war economy and the minerals so ehh w/e. But it really caught up to me halfway through the Deidre war where I realized my income per turn was -60 and I was only surviving off looted energy from cities. I eventually decide to transition out of police state by nerve stapling everyone during a sunspot event, which I THOUGHT prevented all negative consequences for atrocities. This way I'd be able to keep drones down while building the facilities.
Unfortunately I found out as soon as the sunspot ended that factions will still react to atrocities if you nerve stapled their former cities, which includes your vassals.
Morgan gets fucking everything... although at least I picked up command nexus from Miriam which let me get all elites for the war against Deidre.
Not sure what I'll do, think imma reload and just replay the last 10 turns. urgh.
A few other things in retrospect:
1. Even if you get a mineral and food resource immediately, you're probably not gonna beat any AIs to SPs. I tried to get both of the military ones and failed. Granted it *probably* didn't do much as all my starting bases didn't contribute anything to the war effort past Zak.
2. In retrospect I should have gone for Morgan rather than Miriam. He was on the other side of the map but both are far from the original base and rovers are fast. Fighting Miriam (or Yang or Santiago) is too painful.
3. I found something REALLY interesting. It turns out disbanding a unit at a base adds half its mineral cost to the current construction item, much like rushing a SP with crawlers (although that gives you full return). I've always just been disbanding units willy nilly that I didn't want. This might be interesting for rushing some SPs a bit... spam some early forests for minerals on a few of your extra bases and just eat the penalty.
4. I tried tree spam but it unfortunately doesn't work that well if you're losing much energy to inefficiency on due to distance + need for police state to manage drones, so its far better to go the specialist route which ignores inefficiency. Unfortunately most of the AIs seem to go tree spam in thinker so fixing that would have cost a lot of former time.
5. I figured out that I should really be selling techs I collect to my subservient vassals rather than just freely giving them away. Oh well... the energy obviously would have helped.
6. Alternatively, I just now figured out you can ask for credits from them and threaten to cancel the pact and they seem to always pay up. That seems almost cheating. But its also pretty good against AI pact friends who like you, morgan just gave me a bunch of dosh for nothing.
Last edited:
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 14,276
Huh... after restarting and not nerve stapling, Deidre decided to submit to me as soon as the sunspot activity was up. Then I immediately won the game. I thought I at least had to call the vote for being the supreme leader? Kind of funny considering Morgan had basically every SP and 2x my research, but I obviously had the votes.
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