4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[Absinthe]

I'd have to disagree. SMAC isn't perfect. The AI is still retarded, the GUI is outdated, and like all civ games the endgame is a pain in the ass to manage. The combat system could be more interesting. Also the gameplay has some broken and exploited mechanics like crawler-rushing Secret Projects. Speaking of which, even not counting SMAX's Cloudbase Academy, some Secret Projects are still OP like Weather Paradigm. Also the game isn't balanced for multiplayer.

The AI gets much better with Kyrub's patch, and I think SMAC is better when you play with no crawlers and no boreholes. I'd also be interested in a way to remove clean reactors from probe units. The GUI never really bothered me.

Speaking of maintenance costs, IIRC the starting unit, any rovers you recover from pods, and any native life forms you capture don't have a home base, so they are all maintenance free at all times (unless for some stupid reason you decide to assign them to a home base). Any native life forms you build will cost you maintenance unless you park them on fungus tiles. There's a slight trick here in that you can just upgrade your starting unit and any rovers you found into more useful units later on without ever having to pay maintenance for them. I think probe-subverted units might not have a home base either so they'd be maintenance free too.

It depends on distance from your nearest base. If it is within a certain distance, then the nearest base takes up the maintenance. If not, it is free.

I believe that if it is nearer to an enemy base, it will also be free regardless of distance, but I could be wrong on this one.

Interesting. Probably needs more research to work out the details.

 

[Arrowgrab]

It's interesting to think about SMAC like that (as a Civilization-building game rather than a Space Empire strategy game). SMAC has this unique scope in the genre where the struggle is for one planet rather than a space empire. That sort of goes counter to the expectations we've been fed by science fiction literature, that along with space travel we will also have developed the technology to colonize the planets we find. In that sense SMAC has a unique story and situation where that's not true and in fact a lot of early technologies have been lost and have to be rediscovered, i.e. it's not until Advanced Spaceflight that human civilization has recovered space travel. SMAC take place entirely in those 10 turns in other space strategy games after you colonize an empty planet and click end turn waiting for it to grow enough population to build its own colony ship. You'd think there would be more games about this limited scope, a struggle over a single alien planet, but there aren't. If it's a single planet, it's Earth. If it isn't Earth, it's the entire galaxy. Star Wars expectations.

It's rare but not unique. I can think of Deadlock and Deadlock 2 off the top of my head.

 

[Jason Liang]

I don't think GURPS SMAC is a playable system. I've read through it, and doubt it's ever been played by anyone.

 

[laclongquan]

I will note that intra-system colonization is very possible and can be quite economical.

They can build an Orbital Elevator already, and that mean cheap ground-to-orbit transport cost. From the tail end you just sling object to other planets or the asteroid belts.

 

[laclongquan]

About an alien invasion, it's very interesting possibility

The enemy got starships so they have control of the orbitals.

They dont want to destroy the Orbital Elevator, just capture it. So a city that got it get continuous invasion in the form of flyers and dropped infantry.

Every turn they flood one or three city's area with dropped infantry in the form of orbital insertion. You counter it by hard defense of the city and get mobile intervention troops from nearby city.

The invaders will (capture then ) build a Landed Mothership city with all the facilities in one turn and defend it with plenty of inserted troops

You fight the invasion by build several extreme missiles to target the mothership city. you cover that destruction attack wave by several waves of normal missiles to swat the defense.

You can try siege with normal method but with one-three waves of invasions a day, you dont have the logistic to drag the war for too long.
(Obviously the capability to build missiles can be spent on normal troops. BUT. the design is to have the Landed Mothership city being surrounded by several line of bunkers with troop inside so normal siege will take too long)

 

[Jason Liang]

But I'm thinking about what they could do in a remake, not limited by the SMAC engine, make it actually play like UFO Defense. And really Alien Crossfire was gimped. It would be cool if all the factions had to suddenly respond to either an alien invasion scenario or alien crossfire scenario.

In fact, even the SMAX human factions represent interesting mini-crises.

Free Drones - a Genejack/ Drone revolt/ revolution affects all the human bases
Data Angels - Cyber-terrorists take over the network, spill secrets like wikiLeaks
Nautilus Pirates - Pirate attacks like in Europa Universalis
Cybernetic Consciousness - University rogue splinter branch, or even cooler diverging from what happened, if they are actually lead by a rogue AI. They have dangerous, experimental technology, get out of control
Planet Cult - Cult terrorism, neo- religion causes a crisis ala ISIS

 

[Althorion]

Honestly, how much the genre has advanced since the days of SMAC?

There are still some innovations here and there, just nothing so substantial and immediately great that would stick. For example, Civ: BE had quests (good idea, mediocre execution), semi-complex agreements (great idea, poor execution). Civ 6 has city districts (good idea, good execution).

Feature-wise, modern 4X games have about everything one could hope for. They just lack its artistic direction and clever underlying plot design, they are in fact very bland in that way. Plus, the AI hasn’t really improved much if at all—and that is the are I’d want to see most of the improving effort put.

 

[Dzupakazul]

Well, for what it's worth, I don't think SMAC's biggest advancements necessarily lays in its difficulty; I believe Civ3 Deity+, Civ4's Emperor+ or even MoO1's Impossible is harder than SMAC's Transcend. SMAC is a very advanced game, but the AI doesn't use this wealth properly at all. I haven't played SMAC with Kyrub's AI yet, but I generally think that the road to having a near-guaranteed win-ratio on Transcend is generally less rocky than climbing up in levels in some newer 4X games (definitely not Civilization 5/6). If you're a 4X player looking for a challenge, I think there are games better suited for that.

SMAC multiplayer community seems like it would really benefit from being able to set up Pitboss servers like Civ4.

Btw, why we aren't running SMAC RPG games? We got the rules already.

4chan's Traditional Games board recently has a renewed interest in SMAC for some reason, and they're theorycrafting some ideas for playing. Here's an excerpt:

plot ideas

tg plays games

The prevalent notion seems to be that adventures of a probe team is the way to go.

 

[Jason Liang]

The GURPS SMAC sourcebook has a ton of ideas but again, none of the actual systems are that well thought out or tested. It's got things like weaponry, equipment, etc...

 

[Average Manatee]

By far the biggest problem with all SMAX factions is that the max number of factions allowed in a game is 7, and there are 7 SMAC factions.

Aside from that none of them are really ideologically unique compared to the originals. Cyborgs and Hackers are both basically Zak (Hackers have probe resistance compare to probe vulnerability, yet both have "free flow of information" as their agenda, lol), Drones are proto Yang (Basically 20th century revolutionary communism, while Yang is the ascended 22nd century communistic ideal), The Cult is Deidre taken to stupid levels (and realistically should have killed itself, even Deidre says that Planet is incredibly hostile and needs care to deal with), Pirates are... just boring nomads, gameplay unique but not really fitting into the idea of factions that possess their own vision of society.

Granted, SMAC had it's own weaker ideological factions in Lal and Santiago, but they are still ahead of SMAX and you need some more grounded factions for the extremists to reflect on.

I'd love a mod for SMAX that lets the Aliens sometimes spawn after a certain amount of time though.

 

[Cael]

Granted, SMAC had it's own weaker ideological factions in Lal and Santiago, but they are still ahead of SMAX and you need some more grounded factions for the extremists to reflect on.

Lal is a leftard extremist. You refuse to subscribe to his brand of lunacy, he will abandon his stated goals of peace and Vendetta your ass. At least the others makes no bones about you not following their version of lunacy. Lal is a SJW shithead and he is the one I always genocide first and foremost unless some other faction declared on me first, and I don't care if I have to travel across half the damned planet to do it.

 

[Cael]

Lal is pretty chill... until you abandon Democracy. Then he becomes Liberty Prime - DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE!!



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That is why he gets a faceful of mindworms as soon as I am reasonably sure of hitting him with a force that would wipe him.

 

[Dzupakazul]

At least the others makes no bones about you not following their version of lunacy..

But they do. Yang is best friends with anyone who is willing to share his vision of a Police State but will constantly remind you that not running PS [or, heaven forbid, running Demo] is plain wrong; Miriam is also often painted in fanon as a very reasonable individual who just doesn't want people to progress at a human, moral cost, but her AI is a warmonger who really insists on her rivals running Fundy like she does.

Lal is a pretty chill fellow compared to everyone else and his land is probably one of the better places to live in on Chiron. Nothing in the game says he is incompetent or downright malicious. The other factions tend to belittle him as a coward for avoiding war, the -1 Effic malus outright states that the red tape sometimes bogs down the process in the U.N. forces, and Lal himself seems to actually be painfully conservative given that he is moved onto an entirely new land, yet still clings on to the U.N. Charter. Sure, Lal might be prone to policing everyone else, including his own drones, but that's still probably a tad better than getting held up to the standard of Yang, the ascended collectivist ideal, and effectively lobotomized to be more efficient at a menial job.

How the AIs behave towards you isn't really a good metric for how their leaders are in general, because on Transcend difficulty I find that a dominant human player gets Seething reactions from everyone, including their long-time trading partners or even completely backwards civilizations that have no business fighting you. I think I wrote in another thread that in my first Thinker game I saw Zakharov [up to this point entirely supressed and boxed in by Santiago] declare war on my massive empire with only three cities and his latest unit was a lowly Impact Rover - solely because I was running away with the game. I even constantly fed the guy tech for 25 credits apiece solely because he was so backwards and I needed the cash to min-max progress, so we were on good terms until the AI just simply didn't want to conduct diplomacy with a winner.

 

[Cael]

At least the others makes no bones about you not following their version of lunacy..

But they do. Yang is best friends with anyone who is willing to share his vision of a Police State but will constantly remind you that not running PS [or, heaven forbid, running Demo] is plain wrong; Miriam is also often painted in fanon as a very reasonable individual who just doesn't want people to progress at a human, moral cost, but her AI is a warmonger who really insists on her rivals running Fundy like she does.

Lal is a pretty chill fellow compared to everyone else and his land is probably one of the better places to live in on Chiron. Nothing in the game says he is incompetent or downright malicious. The other factions tend to belittle him as a coward for avoiding war, the -1 Effic malus outright states that the red tape sometimes bogs down the process in the U.N. forces, and Lal himself seems to actually be painfully conservative given that he is moved onto an entirely new land, yet still clings on to the U.N. Charter. Sure, Lal might be prone to policing everyone else, including his own drones, but that's still probably a tad better than getting held up to the standard of Yang, the ascended collectivist ideal, and effectively lobotomized to be more efficient at a menial job.

How the AIs behave towards you isn't really a good metric for how their leaders are in general, because on Transcend difficulty I find that a dominant human player gets Seething reactions from everyone, including their long-time trading partners or even completely backwards civilizations that have no business fighting you. I think I wrote in another thread that in my first Thinker game I saw Zakharov [up to this point entirely supressed and boxed in by Santiago] declare war on my massive empire with only three cities and his latest unit was a lowly Impact Rover - solely because I was running away with the game. I even constantly fed the guy tech for 25 credits apiece solely because he was so backwards and I needed the cash to min-max progress, so we were on good terms until the AI just simply didn't want to conduct diplomacy with a winner.

Irrelevant. None of the others profess to be peaceful and yet will Vendetta you at the drop of a hat if you don't follow their favourite civic. In fact, none of the other guys claim to want to be peaceful or wanting peace or singing Kumbayah EXCEPT Lal. That is his whole schtick: peace, peace, peace, how dare you reject MY peace? Fuck you! Vendetta unto you, rightwing warmonger!

Which, ironically, pretty much encapsulates everything I HATE about SJWs.

ALL of the leaders are basically caricatures. They are embodiments of blind zealotry taken to extremes. Morgan and his wealth generation, Miriam's religious fanaticism, Yang's communist police state, Santiago's warhawk outlook, Dierdre's greeniesm, Zakharov's research and Lal's peace at all cost including war. But it is only Lal's one that trips my berserk button because of the absolute LIE that is at the core of his fanaticism.

 

[Dzupakazul]

Irrelevant. None of the others profess to be peaceful and yet will Vendetta you at the drop of a hat if you don't follow their favourite civic. In fact, none of the other guys claim to want to be peaceful or wanting peace or singing Kumbayah EXCEPT Lal. That is his whole schtick: peace, peace, peace, how dare you reject MY peace? Fuck you! Vendetta unto you, rightwing warmonger!

The Gaians are just as likely to declare war on you for pushing their particular berserk button while their own faction showcase explicitly mentions that it's their pacifist tendencies which cause a -1 Police rating. The Gaians also have no qualms at using their vast armies of Mind Worms to mindrape your forces into submission, and Deirdre in "The Secret War" takes certain glee in how she could wipe out the Spartans without anyone even realizing that she is the one commanding the boils.

Also, the U.N. Peacekeepers seem to be doing things in line with how the actual U.N. forces enforce peace in the 21st Century Earth by acting as global policemen. Lal declaring war on a Police State seems to be in line with the idea of trying to stop oppressive regimes from spreading their influence.

Which, ironically, pretty much encapsulates everything I HATE about SJWs.

I think it's not a good idea to be equating a 2010 phenomenon of SJWs to a game about political attitudes in the nineties.

 

[Silva]

In my games the most peaceful one is Morgan. He is a true bro.

About Deirdre, I remember this time where she kept threatening me to adopt Green or something... until I made my first Planet Buster. Then she immediately came up on the link telling something like "I'm not afraid of your toys" and immediately asking for peace and then an alliance.



Most realistic behaviour from the AI I've ever had.

 

[Cael]

Irrelevant. None of the others profess to be peaceful and yet will Vendetta you at the drop of a hat if you don't follow their favourite civic. In fact, none of the other guys claim to want to be peaceful or wanting peace or singing Kumbayah EXCEPT Lal. That is his whole schtick: peace, peace, peace, how dare you reject MY peace? Fuck you! Vendetta unto you, rightwing warmonger!

The Gaians are just as likely to declare war on you for pushing their particular berserk button while their own faction showcase explicitly mentions that it's their pacifist tendencies which cause a -1 Police rating. The Gaians also have no qualms at using their vast armies of Mind Worms to mindrape your forces into submission, and Deirdre in "The Secret War" takes certain glee in how she could wipe out the Spartans without anyone even realizing that she is the one commanding the boils.

Also, the U.N. Peacekeepers seem to be doing things in line with how the actual U.N. forces enforce peace in the 21st Century Earth by acting as global policemen. Lal declaring war on a Police State seems to be in line with the idea of trying to stop oppressive regimes from spreading their influence.

Which, ironically, pretty much encapsulates everything I HATE about SJWs.

I think it's not a good idea to be equating a 2010 phenomenon of SJWs to a game about political attitudes in the nineties.

Being anti-police state is not being peaceful. It is being SANE.

You can think all you like and you are welcome to your OPINION. To me, however, the hypocrisy and the lies underlying both Lal and SJWs are similar.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Irrelevant. None of the others profess to be peaceful and yet will Vendetta you at the drop of a hat if you don't follow their favourite civic. In fact, none of the other guys claim to want to be peaceful or wanting peace or singing Kumbayah EXCEPT Lal. That is his whole schtick: peace, peace, peace, how dare you reject MY peace? Fuck you! Vendetta unto you, rightwing warmonger!

The Gaians are just as likely to declare war on you for pushing their particular berserk button while their own faction showcase explicitly mentions that it's their pacifist tendencies which cause a -1 Police rating. The Gaians also have no qualms at using their vast armies of Mind Worms to mindrape your forces into submission, and Deirdre in "The Secret War" takes certain glee in how she could wipe out the Spartans without anyone even realizing that she is the one commanding the boils.

Also, the U.N. Peacekeepers seem to be doing things in line with how the actual U.N. forces enforce peace in the 21st Century Earth by acting as global policemen. Lal declaring war on a Police State seems to be in line with the idea of trying to stop oppressive regimes from spreading their influence.

Which, ironically, pretty much encapsulates everything I HATE about SJWs.

I think it's not a good idea to be equating a 2010 phenomenon of SJWs to a game about political attitudes in the nineties.

PC culture was huge for a time in the '90s. Nothing about SJW's is really new, it's just more mainstream again.

 

[Silva]

I always thought Transcendi were ghost-like ethereal beings or something. But reading the TVtropes it suggests they are more like uploaded / virtualized people.

(well, if everyone uses augmented reality projecting the virtual world over the physical it would be the same anyway).

 

[Silva]

Is it possible to develop your empire vertically in SMAC? I mean, instead of the usual rush to spawn colonies to the maximum the map size permits (without incurring efficiency penalties - I think it's 7 for default size), build just a handful bases and develop them? Is it possible to keep competitive this way throughout the game?

I'm asking because returning to the game now it seems this kind of "horizontal" expansion is the only viable way to stay competitive, and that's a weak point of the game imo. If there is a way around it, please lemme know. If there isn't here in SMAC but other Civ game allows it (I've played only up to Civ 4), lemme know too. Thanks!

*Edit: actually, I used played it hotseat with a friend, we used to go until Tree Farm or MMI came first, then we stopped playing. Up until that point it seems more or less feasible to grow vertically with a handful very developed bases instead of Pod rushing. But I suspect it would be increasingly difficult to sustain oneself like that from that point onward.

 

[CptMace]

I always considered vertical building to be a safer way to develop your empire, but with lesser gains compared to horizontal building.
Now, I think building vertically is a sound strategy for early mid game. But ultimately, it's hard to reach the same pop as big ass empires in the late game - mb impossible depending on the map size. So I'd say it's viable as a temporary strategy, which should only help you transition to another one (sniping main cities or zerging around the map, mainly).

 

[Dzupakazul]

Play Peacekeepers for bonus Talents to facilitate higher population values from the get go and self-restrict to a few colonies. One City Challenge works in SMAC, so just make a perfectionist, 6-colony empire or so. I think that with enough abuse of Supply Crawlers or wonder cascading you can make anything work even on Transcend.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is it possible to develop your empire vertically in SMAC? I mean, instead of the usual rush to spawn colonies to the maximum the map size permits (without incurring efficiency penalties - I think it's 7 for default size), build just a handful bases and develop them? Is it possible to keep competitive this way throughout the game?

There's two general power builds:

1. Forests spam + tree farms + boreholes
2. Farm + Condensors spam feeding specialists + boreholes

#2 requires more investment of former turns and is eventually more powerful. It's also a lot more dense with a smaller tile footprint per base. #1 is a lot quicker to lay down and early forests are production powerhouses, letting you produce more infrastructure and more bases quickly.

So yes, you can build more efficient bases that compete with a bigger player, but there's never really a good reason to expand to a limit and then stop expanding at all. Additional bases are always going to be giving you more production and more tech.

One very real issue with SMAC though is that there's never really a reason to space bases out like the AI does. You'll never, ever want to work all 20 of the squares that each colony provides, you won't even be able to have that many pops until the game is within 10 turns of ending. So optimal play regardless of strategy is going to have a lot of bases in some kind of checkerboard ICS-like fashion.

 

[Silva]

So imagining an hypothetical official patch released these days, it should increase the penalty for excessive number of bases, making it heavily onerous to go beyond the threshold, right?

About the 2 power build paths, thanks. I knew about the option #2 (Specialists) but never tried it out. What factions would acomodate it better?

 

[Silva]

Morganites would be one helluva Tall expansion civilization if not for their low pop limit, just stay there Free Marketing and expanding your economy into the infinite.

Oh well remembered! I've used it to good effect a couple times. Any other factions that could make it efficiently besides Morgan?