4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[Nutria]

the fungal river worm farm pictured above, the means of which were secured by mega-rushing the Paradigm with disbanded formers

I was worried I was having a stroke before I realized you were probably talking about a mod.

 

[Absinthe]

We ban crawlers in our games, so disbanding regular units to rush SPs is a thing. With crawlers people regularly rush SPs on the same turn they tech it, which is just a tad ridiculous. Also Weather Paradigm got moved a bit up the tech tree so that the terraforming lead is not completely ridiculous.

Honestly in MP games whoever beats the competition to Weather Paradigm is usually in a very good position.

 

[passerby]

I like crawlers, but they are OP, my dream crawler nerf would be:

Disable SP rushing, only regular 50% unit disband.
Make them cost support, or -1 resource penalty like in Yitzi's patch.
5 rows cost.

Without binary patching I can have 5 rows cost, house rule SPs rushing out and refrain from using them on tiles producing less than 3 resources.

 

[Absinthe]

That doesn't stop stunts like the armored supply crawler defense grid, 100% specialist bases that live off of crawled tiles, and stunts like Gaians with a Wealth value and a Merchant Exchange (maybe a Supercollider on top, who knows), planting the HQ in that Exchange base, fiddling with psych specialists and pop to lock it into a golden age (+2 ECON total, like Free Market!), and crawling every single energy tile in the game to your base where there is zero inefficiency and all the tiles produce +2 energy.

Banning crawlers was a marked improvement for MP games, tbh.

 

[passerby]

That doesn't stop stunts like the armored supply crawler defense grid, 100% specialist bases that live off of crawled tiles, and stunts like Gaians with a Wealth value and a Merchant Exchange (maybe a Supercollider on top, who knows), planting the HQ in that Exchange base, fiddling with psych specialists and pop to lock it into a golden age (+2 ECON, like Free Market!), and crawling every single energy tile in the game to your base where there is zero inefficiency and all the tiles produce +2 energy.

Banning crawlers was a marked improvement for MP games, tbh.

With nerfed crawlers you have to consider an opportunity cost of pulling all these stunts.

For example I've found that with crawling penalty from Yitzi's patch, house rules mentioned and increased price, it was not worth it to plant swarm of them on forest tiles in early game, since you'd get a better return from other investments.

Armored ones ?
If you couldn't cash them for 100% in SP, with increased cost and support cost, building them would be less effective then sentinels, since weaponless units have half the defensive strenght.

Crawling energy to a 100% Efficiency base ?
You are crawling only one resource from a tile, the rest is wasted, imagine that resource gathering has one point penalty, or your crawler cost support and is more costly to build.
Your crawler park is also a low hanging fruit for enemy to easily destroy ( yes even armored ones ) and waste your investment.
You sure that no efficiency loss, or Market Exchange stunts would be worth gathering only half or less resources from tiles, opportunity cost of building them and risk of having your investment wiped out anytime by other player?

Crawlers are fun and give an opportunity to level the field for factions that landed on a terrain that can't sustain fast population growth in early game.
Just nerf them to the point, that other strategies are equally viable and the player doesn't feel pressured into micromanagement hell of covering all land with them.

In general making probes and crawlers cost support is a great idea.

 

[Kalin]

Crawlers are shit. You're wrong on the Internet.

 

[Zarniwoop]

What kind of ass faggot uses crawlers?

 

[Induktio]

You need to check out the Will to Power: Alpha Centauri Bear's adjustments to Induktio's Thinker mod. He set up infiltration to expire after a variable time, based on the relative probe ratings of the two factions, though I believe there's also an RNG factor at play. You can set up to four infiltrators into each other faction.

Also, Will to Power gives you the option to disable planetpearls. Sounds strange at first but makes a marked improvement in gameplay.

Disabling planetpearls was also included in Thinker. Though I don't monitor what other stuff goes to WTP other than merging some binary patches, so it can do something similar or something entirely different with the other features even if the config options are same. So far Thinker hasn't included much stuff that could be said to be vastly different from the vanilla game mechanics so that's the differentation for these two mods.

 

[oldbonebrown]

Is there a way to drop all 14 factions into one game?
14 players

edit: "civfanatics.com" tells me it is not to be
shame, would've been fun

 

[Kalin]

There are only 7 factions

 

[oldbonebrown]

There are only 7 factions

You're a fool, Zakharov. Planet is alive.

...
The original factions are more fleshed out and mostly more interesting too. But if I could just put in more players then I wouldn't mind adding several from alien crossfire, there is plenty of room for them on a huge map of planet.

 

[BING XI LAO]

14 player PBEM would take twice as long per TURN with twice the number of potential dropouts/"sorry my laptop died".

 

[oldbonebrown]

I was thinking it would be fun offline.
But in PBEM too, many factions would be eliminated early. Could lead to a bad turn schedule but it would be fun with more chaos and conflict.

 

[Space Satan]

I mostly got annoyed that DLC factions had no downsides. Drones, cybers, worm-lama, all of them have next to no or negligable downsides. Compare it with +1 drone for Zakharov or Santiago's -10% to production.

 

[L'ennui]

Who would be interested in playing a forum-based game of GURPS Alpha Centauri using GURPS Realm Management and the official GURPS Alpha Centauri sourcebook? Players can play faction leaders for 4X stuff and henchmen for RPG stuff.

 

[Cael]

14 player PBEM would take twice as long per TURN with twice the number of potential dropouts/"sorry my laptop died".

It would also be twice as epic, however.

Althrough I'm not sure the Huge Map of Planet is big enough for 14 factions.

The first century would probably see quite a few factions getting killed off.

Can you imagine the amount of intrigue and scheming?

Yang would outright be in heaven just taking over faction after nearby faction in the early game.

 

[JBro]

Resources exist to be consumed and CONSUMED THEY WILL BE

 

[DesolationStone]

Now I'm reading for the second time "Red Mars" of K.S.Robinson, the novel that inspired Firaxis for the main plot of the game

So, here some parallels between the game and the series of books by Robinson:
1. In both, we can find a female scientist obsessed with plants and nature: Deirdre Skye and Hiroko Ai, but the earth in the Mars Trilogy it's not fallen, so Hiroko want only to create a utopia of men within nature and not against
2. The theories about resources by Nwabudike Morgan are in the book by the words businessman William Fort
3. The Longevity Vaccine it's also in the books, as "Gerontological Treatment": for this, all of the primary characters of the series are immortal
4. Prokhor Zakharov it's very similar to Sax Russel
5. Another character similar to Deirdre it's Ann Clayborne, but Clayborne not even want a "green world", she wants, since the start, that humanity left the planet in the same state that they found, without any terraformation

 

[Absinthe]

I mostly got annoyed that DLC factions had no downsides. Drones, cybers, worm-lama, all of them have next to no or negligable downsides. Compare it with +1 drone for Zakharov or Santiago's -10% to production.

Worm faction definitely has downsides. It has the biggest fucking downsides. It has Santiago's production (-1 INDUSTRY, no Wealth value) combined with Gaian inability to achieve +2 ECON (It can run Free Market, but it has -1 ECON and cannot run Wealth, so Market is trash). The only thing it's good at is worm rushing, ecodamage management, and a slight bit of policing. The best things that can be said for it are that it can ease its early game by capturing mind worms and having them police bases and that it is the best at early game mind worm rushing. I guess with Ascetic Virtues it can use the free Brood Pits to achieve +3 POLICE without ever bothering with Police State (and it's not like you're ever gonna run Free Market as Cha-Dawn), but you still eat support costs doing that unless you're using clean reactors or a dedicated base to take the production hit for the rest of them. Still, Ascetic Virtues is definitely worth the pickup if you can manage it. "Independent" converted worms are effectively support-free to park in bases at least, but you will run into the capture limit eventually, although Cha-Dawn does have the biggest capture limit since it scales off of PLANET rating. Cha-Dawn like Santiago feels like a faction that should quickly get its hands on some Secret Projects that boost its entire faction in order to avoid falling behind as the game progresses if pursuing a builder game. The good news on that front is that Cha Dawn has immediate access to Weather Paradigm, and a Weather Paradigm can do a pretty good job of making up for shit industry and economy, especially because Cha-Dawn's strong ecodamage reductions from PLANET score means he can plant supertiles like boreholes a lot more frequently without worries. In fact, if he gets Manifold Nexus, he becomes outright immune to ecodamage. Basically rush the shit out of Weather Paradigm if you can when you're playing Cha-Dawn and start cranking out huge fucking armies of terraformers, using one or two bases to absorb the support costs for the rest of them by homing all the units to it. It will go a long ways towards redeeming all your fucking problems.

Free Drones are definitely bullshit though. -2 RESEARCH doesn't really mean much when you can just run Knowledge (or Wealth - that's good too) and Free Market, and your ridiculous +2 INDUSTRY means you will have more bases with more infrastructure than the competition which again converts into bonus science. He does start with 1 fewer free tech than the rest, which is a bit of a second research penalty, but in the long run his infrastructure will overcome such disadvantages and you can likely trade, probe, or pod your way to more techs anyway. The inability to run Green economics, aside from not really making sense, doesn't really impact them either. +4 EFFIC is strong, but +3 EFFIC and +2 ECON is usually better, unless you're stuck in a war anyway. You can't really stop the Free Drones' strengths either, since he can apply them in pretty much every circumstance. Blitzkrieging him is usually the way to go because in a slow war he will make his production advantage felt, but if you're playing something like Believers you can try a slow war paired with probe rushes to put the brakes on him, since you have attack, SUPPORT, and PROBE bonuses to make that shit painful enough on him that knocking him out of Free Market, Knowledge, and Wealth will hopefully do you good.

Cybernetic Consciousness at least has to deal with an inability to achieve pop booms without golden ages and the -1 GROWTH is actually painful early on, but GAs are manageable. Before patches fixed it so it became possible to pop boom off of golden ages' +2 GROWTH bonuses, they were pretty much fucked on this front until they can run Eudaimonia future society unless they get Cloning Vats, which meant that Cyborgs/Pirates/Hive/Morganites all fell off once you played against people who were good at pop booming (although Morgan was just doing PTS ICS to make up for it and then using the energy lead to go crazy). Nowadays though they're a very strong faction and the +2 EFFIC makes it easier for them to pop boom with psych allocation, especially if they run Wealth so the booms also kick their bases into +2 ECON while they're doing Dem+Planned (extra energy makes extra psych), but at least it's a proper speed bump, until they convert their tech lead into a Cloning Vats anyway. Where Cha-Dawn has both Santiago and Deirdre's weaknesses (industry penalty, cannot run Wealth, cannot achieve +2 ECON) without their strengths (+1 POLICE, +2 EFFIC), the Cyborgs have both Zakharov and Deirdre's strengths (+2 RESEARCH, +2 EFFIC) without their weaknesses (drone issues, -2 PROBE, inability to run Free Market). Stopping them from getting Cloning Vats is probably a good idea if you want to at least put some brakes on them, as this faction can effortlessly tech up a storm with Democracy and Free Market giving it massive energy while letting it allocate 100% of income into research without any penalties while collecting research bonuses.

 

[oldbonebrown]

I think it would make sense character-wise if Cha Dawn started out with a boost to terraforming. That would make the faction stand out, even more so if they nabbed the Weather Paradigm. +100% terraforming would be fun.
Who needs Economy or Industry when Planet provides?

Shame there's no alternative for that in the faction edit.
On second thought I guess you could edit them to have Superformers as a free ability

 

[Cael]

I think it would make sense character-wise if Cha Dawn started out with a boost to terraforming. That would make the faction stand out, even more so if they nabbed the Weather Paradigm. +100% terraforming would be fun.
Who needs Economy or Industry when Planet provides?

Shame there's no alternative for that in the faction edit.

Just add bonus resources in Fungus. Like +3 food, +2 production, +4 energy. That would be really "Planet provides".

 

[oldbonebrown]

That reminds me I should post this drawing I did

and also this one that I have posted before but with a different background

 

[TheSoul]

Got into playing this for the first time and I like the atmosphere a lot (Quotes being from the game's leaders instead of historical figures was a nice touch). I miss how fast turns used to be in games from 90s. Even on low graphics settings, modern strategy games just become long loading screens.

Every game I've played just has Hive/Spartans/Church wipe out the other factions and it's not even close (playing on difficulty 3). Should I be supporting other civs more or is it just an AI being stupid problem?

 

[Cael]

Got into playing this for the first time and I like the atmosphere a lot (Quotes being from the game's leaders instead of historical figures was a nice touch). I miss how fast turns used to be in games from 90s. Even on low graphics settings, modern strategy games just become long loading screens.

Every game I've played just has Hive/Spartans/Church wipe out the other factions and it's not even close (playing on difficulty 3). Should I be supporting other civs more or is it just an AI being stupid problem?

It is a function of their factions. They are all highly aggressive and are good at early warfare. The Hive, in particular, usually parlay that early expansion into an incredibly difficult to beat production in the mid-late game. The other factions are late bloomers.

 

[CootKeeper]

Got into playing this for the first time and I like the atmosphere a lot (Quotes being from the game's leaders instead of historical figures was a nice touch). I miss how fast turns used to be in games from 90s. Even on low graphics settings, modern strategy games just become long loading screens.

Every game I've played just has Hive/Spartans/Church wipe out the other factions and it's not even close (playing on difficulty 3). Should I be supporting other civs more or is it just an AI being stupid problem?

It also depends on starting locations. Morganites/University/Gaians take longer to develop and they'll get crushed if they start too close to the other factions.

Play on a map with a bit more water so that continents are not linked together and give more breathing room to every faction.