jeroendstout
Educated
Series 2 - Part 7
Thank you very much, TNO !
I can very much recommend PBEM - the AI (even with the patches) has no real comparison to humans. With PBEM you can also play against people who like role-playing, so you're not even limited to early aggression cut-throat tactics. As to your questions--
1) SMAX and "regular" SMAC are both played, both with player-imposed limits on tech or secret projects. Planetary Transport Network is very impopulair, along with Cloudbase. Personally I am a SMAC player, but some people prefer SMAX.
2) The difficulty setting also affects things like when the first drones show up and ecological damage rates. The AI is never truly a challenge in PBEM games, though if you play single-player, you can abuse your knowledge of the AI; with one or more human players, you cannot use the same cheesy tactics, because they might stop you. A higher difficulty setting makes cities harder to manage and AIs harder to just steamroll, really.
3) Spaws can make or break the game, though I suppose it's more of an agreement between players whether it is a GG to land in the monsoon jungle. I think the joy of 4X is also that random element, so if you are interested in the role-playing along the strategy some asymmetry can be quite OK.
When you PBEM are you doing about 1 turn per day? Or do you have a session where you do several turns back and forth via PBEM?
I would be interested in a multi player game next time you start one if you do a turn a day.