Still not clear on the pop booming for Morgan.
This is only executable after achieving golden age + creche + democracy correct?
Correct, but Children's Creches and Democracy are the same tech. Also, achieving a golden age in a base gives it +1 ECON, which means you have +2 ECON without any SE settings.
But with the Hab Complex requirement, I have to wait till I'm mid-game before I can start doing that correctly?
You can do it before then to get bases up to 4 pop, but that's not as valuable. If you are doing golden ages as Morgan before Hab Complexes, it's probably because you wanted to get +2 ECON in your bases without SEs.
Even so, with pop booming, the drone suppression without a police force is proving to be a pain on Transcend.
I spent 20% Budget on PSI just to get 1 talent for the 1 drone at 2nd pop followed by Rec Commons after the Rec. Tanks & Energy Banks are out.
If I can do golden age pop booms in PBEM multiplayer as Yang, it is definitely doable as Morgan.
It seems like I'm maxing out my cheap drone suppression options at Pop 4 already. And that's assuming I have enough energy income to get the PSY slider to kick in.
You can move psych slider to 100% for one turn for the golden ages to kick in then move it down as the golden ages sustain themselves with superior energy tile yields. Also Human Genome Project and Virtual World make golden ages a lot easier. High energy tiles and facilities with psych bonuses (Hologram Theater, Research Hospital, Tree Farm, etc.) all help too.
In regular SMAC supply crawlers make booming very easy since you can just use specialists or get high energy if you want to do psych slider booms. With Human Genome Project or a Paradise Garden (or just playing Lal) to give automatic talents and crawlers to provide nutrients, you can assign every citizen other than your 1 talent into specialists too and because all your non-specialists citizens are now talents, you are in a permanent golden age.
Setting up this infrastructure takes a lot of minerals and credit spending. Is it worth it?
It is, once you have hab complexes. And once you have Hab Domes it's mandatory until the psych caps make you cry, but at that point you should have Eudaimonia anyway.
Creche and demo you would anyway, same as everyone but Yang. Obviously demo is a pain as morgan due to the support issues, on top of the fucking size 4 limit in vanilla, who at Firaxis thought that was a good idea.
Morgan is rather strong when he gets going, honestly. Extreme income is his strength and it's a potent strength too. Another crazy thing Morgan can do is Democracy+Green+Wealth and throw 100% of sliders into labs or energy with 4 EFFIC.
GA is a bit trickier to pull off and the actual hard part, not impossible but obviously the effort is high. Hive, while making less money and fucked from effic perspective, has an easier time to GA pop boom due to being able to run police state-planned for booms which gives them extra police drone squashing, but they have less options for the psych slider high. Also they can get the longetivity vaccine for extra -2 drones with planned. Lastly they don't have to deal with hab complexes as soon as vanilla Morgan and start with +1 growth anyway.
Hive methods for GAs basically involve terraforming for high energy yield (which is usually a good idea since that affects your tech speed too) and SPs. In PBEM I had Human Genome Project and Longevity Vaccine (plus owing to Kalin's fuck-up the rest of us were all playing at Librarian difficulty, not that it mattered with the aforementioned SPs and Police State) on top of a giant army of terraformers ensuring all my bases had strong energy output, so golden age booms were pretty easy for me.
Morgan might not be able to do Police State+Planned booms, but he can do Democracy+Free Market+Knowledge booms (With +1 ECON from GA this raises your ECON to the cap of 4, and as Morgan this puts you at +3 Commerce) with psych sliders. High energy is high psych and Morgan gets high EFFIC too, which is fewer bureaucracy drones and even more energy (which again converts into more psych), unlike Yang who is stuck at 0 EFFIC and -2 ECON (-1 ECON with GA, 0 ECON with Wealth value on top) doing all his pop booming shit. Yang is more likely to need to throw Psych to 100% for a few turns of booming, although last game I had everything from SPs to strong terraforming to psych multiplying facilities (Tree Farms + Research Hospitals, no Hologram Theaters though, as I will always skip them if possible because the 3 maintenance drain is shit if you can get your drones suppressed anyway), which meant that 40% psych was the most I needed and usually 20% could keep GA going in a lot of bases.
To trigger GA you need three conditions, talents equal to at least half of the base's population, a base size of at least 3 and no drones.
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Golden_Age
Getting talents is arguably the easier part, for every 2 energy going into psych one worker becomes a talent. If you run out of workers the psych budget slider will start turning drones to workers. This sounds simple enough but the reality is the psych slider alone is the hardest way to trigger GA, because it removes drones as a last resort, so you need obscene amounts of energy or lots of +psych facilities.
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Psych
There is another problem too: Psych is hard capped at 2 psych per citizen. Any excess psych is wasted, so you need facilities to make up the shortfall. Usually 80-100% psych sliders with basic drone suppression will get your golden ages going even if your infrastructure sucks, but it does help to have a police unit and rec commons.
With that out of the way this is what you can do in practice:
1. drone reduction facilities, rec commons and hologram theater are a must. Both reduce the number of drones by a flat amount of 2. Theater also gives +50% psych to whatever energy is going into psych at the base, that translates to one extra talent (or one drone less) for every 2 created directly by energy diverted to psych. Problem is the theatre has a maintenance fee of 3, but that still is more economical than putting that 3 energy into psych to reduce drones, plus it really is the next fastest to build drone suppression solution after police scouts or the rec commons.
Apart from that the research hospital kills one drones and grants more +% psych. Not sure if there are any other facilities reducing drones directly apart from the punishment sphere. There's also the longetivity vaccine, but you can't run planned for -2 drones, green lowers growth, so you would need to run simple econ. Probably better to just go market as explained below, unless you go wealth, simple-wealth-vaccine would give +2 drone reduction (one from vaccine, one from police) compared to market which is a lot.
You missed Nanohospital, which is basically a second Research Hospital (+50% Labs, +25% Psych, -1 drone, reduces genetic warfare pop losses). Punishment Sphere is the worst option possible for golden ages of course, since it permanently nerve staples your base (so it cannot have talents, meaning it cannot have golden ages).
Vaccine is kinda shit for Morgan. I wouldn't recommend building it. It's basically +50% econ in a single base in Market and 1 drone suppressed in Green, unless you sit in simple economics. Sitting in simple economics sucks, but it does let you retain your 1 police unit (so 2 drones suppressed with non-lethal methods) when pop booming. On the other hand Free Market gives your base +4 energy and +2 commerce while in a golden age (or when combined with Wealth), which is more psych with sliders and psych multiplying facilities, so sitting in Simple is really not necessary. Still, until you have clean reactors (or if you have independent units), leaving military units sitting in base can be a pretty ugly support cost, so generally you'd rather just defend Morganite bases with armored probe teams or armored supply crawlers which do not cost you any support.
2. Police as that also reduces drones, although as Morgan at best you will have 0 police when going demo, and have low support. Practically as long as pacifism is not an issue in the bases scheduled to boom it is better to go market and use the extra energy (since market effectively doubles it) for the psych budget. If you snatch the ascetic virtues it also makes it easier for GA pop booming if you go simple economy-wealth as you will have +1 police.
On the POLICE front there is the Brood Pits facility in SMAX, which raises POLICE score by 2 for the base in question (useful, especially if you have Ascetic Virtues).
3. anything giving free talents since those reduce the pool of workers/drones that psych has to deal with and get you closer to the 50% of the base's population. In vanilla this practically means only the human genome project, as the paradise garden is very late game. In the modded version we play in PBEM I think the starting future society value gives an extra talent making GA easier overall.
Clinical Immortality gives +2 Talents in every base too.
4. specialists granting psych, this works better once empaths are available, but doctors are good enough if the alternative is 10% more into the psych slider just to boom one more base.
Specialists are great as long as you can afford the nutrients and have at least +50% Psych in base. Freeing up psych slider is pretty valuable and there are times when your base just doesn't have the extra energy tiles (granted, as Morgan, energy tiles should not be a problem).
5. making lots of energy and pushing the psych slider up, facilities with psych multipliers are your friend. Hologram theatres are the cheapest to build, research hospitals also increase labs and squash one more drone to boot. Tree farms don't squash drones but they also give econ, food and raise the limit of minerals before eco damage starts fucking up tiles.
Once you have Hybrid Farms it's pretty easy to golden age boom a base. Tree Farm + Hybrid Farm give the base +100% Psych, and your forests give 3 nutrients and 2 energy now, giving you strong returns on econ slider and surplus nutrients that let you throw in a doctor or better yet an empath.
And the last but most popamole option:
6. Playing on a lower difficulty level than transcend since then you have less drones
You missed four more options:
7. Specialist bases with guaranteed talents. This isn't using doctors for psych bonuses. This is leaving only the guaranteed talents from Peacekeeper faction, Human Genome Project secret project, Clinical Immortality secret project, or Paradise Garden and making all the rest of the citizens into specialists so that there cannot be any drones, only talents and specialists. Meaning you set the specialists to Technician/Librarian/Engineer/Thinker/etc for the econ or labs. You get a guaranteed golden age this way and never need any drone suppression whatsoever. It's a cheesy stunt that's usually done with Human Genome Project (or Peacekeeper faction) and lots of supply crawlers. Without supply crawlers, at 80+ population as Peacekeepers, assuming no SPs or Paradise Gardens, you will automatically end up here since every possible tile is being worked by a talent and the rest are therefore by necessity specialists, but you can end up here much sooner, especially with Paradise Garden facilities, Human Genome Project, and Clinical Immortality, or if your base just has less than 20 available tiles. Lal with Paradise Garden only needs 24 population in a base to work 8 tiles.
8. Building Cloning Vats. Build once, enjoy pop booms forever as special function of Secret Project. This thing removes all difficulties with pop booming and also lets you run Power and Thought Control values without any penalty. It effectively removes the penalty from running Green too. It's great.
9. Teching your way to the Eudaimonia SE setting, which gives +2 GROWTH, +2 ECON, +2 INDUSTRY (and is completely fucking nuts), letting you use Democracy+Eudaimonia+Creches for all your pop boom needs. But Eudaimonia is a very late tech and if you leave pop booming for that late you are probably losing. It does, however, enable you to run pop booms at later stages where psych caps permanently cripple your ability to do golden ages unless you do specialist bases with guaranteed talents.
10. Technically not a pop boom, and if you manage to do this and actually spent your turns on this, something is probably wrong with you and the game, but it's constantly developing enough Sky Hydroponics Labs that you always grow pop in 1 turn. If you go down this road it's much easier to sustain a specialist base with a Paradise Garden and Sky Hydroponics Labs where you work as many tiles as you have guaranteed talents and make all the rest into specialists for permanent golden ages since you can ignore all drone problems this way. You only really need enough talents to work all your boreholes really (so 6 max without borehole cluster, but in ICS style 2-3 talents suffice, making Paradise Gardens and/or Clinical Immortality sufficient). You should really have Eudaimonia at this point though.
