4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[SpaceWizardz]

I was curious and took a look into what Brian Reynolds was doing nowadays.
Do not look into what Brian Reynolds is doing nowadays.

Spoiler

 

[laclongquan]

His tweet is pretty interesting~

 

[RK47]

Maybe I misunderstand something, but a good Morgan colony should be just 2-3 pop working on forests/borehole with 3-4 crawlers covering their nutrient as needed while the extras go for energy harvesting right?

Tried to do the worm rush as Gaians..only to end up with 8 failed captures after the first success.

FFS

Had to rely on that sole worm + two Unity Rovers instead to take on the entire Believers colonies. There is no way I'm letting them settle down. Miriam AI loves to expand like crazy. Already told my colony pod to back off from her borders. Fuck off, bitch.

End result: one Rover lost and the full demon boil mind worm. Miriam is now a prisoner.

Will just worm farm with these two I guess.
The extra worms would've helped anyway cause guess who owns the Monsoon Jungle to the south?

 

[imajia]

Try the Thinker mod. Makes the AI competent or some such:

Would like to know what you think of it.

Thanks a lot for this link, so far this mod is absolutely stunning. Finally the AI doesn't send its colony pods 30 tiles through the fungus to reach a lonely resource, but *builds*.

Usually I play with randomized factions as it got boring to see the same faction (Yang) dominating the others, so I can't say how the default settings perform. In any case the city placement is a massive boost for *all* factions.

An example of Lals' cities and a pretty balanced power graph:

My current test game is quite promising. Yang is off the chart, which in vanilla is a sure sign that the AI is on the jungle. Except that it's in my territory. Oh well, what can possibly go wrong when super-Yang is your neighbour and doesn't like you .

One thing the mod mentions is that the AI sucks at managing eco-damage. I second that and recommend the alpha.text change in the read.me to keep the damage under control.

Edit:
forgot to mention that the AI still doesn't seem to know how to pop-boom on purpose. Would be great to see this one day.

 

[imajia]

Holy shit, I haven't lost a games as badly since Deidre nuked me out of the blue in the vanilla SMAC release 20 years ago.

Yang is building 6-1-10 needlejets and I'm struggling with my first 6-1-2 rover prototype. Before this patch, it was always the other way around. Yang researches tech every 6 turns and I dropped to 20-something. And I haven't even network nodes in half of my cities. Or treefarms. Or condensers. Granted, I didn't play very focused and Yang had a good location, but still.

Look at one of Yangs' cities:

• crawlers
• condensor
• borehole
• excelent infrastructure

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Today on SMAC Thinker Mod testing:
- Science is for fags.
- Peace is for faggots, let's crush some skulls.
- You don't need any fancy infraestructure if you can just take it from more developed people
- The AI (or at least, Morgan's AI)
- Getting Industrial Economics was amusing. Felt like defeated Morgan had to explain to Santiago's Roadwarrios what this "trade" and commerce thing is about.
- Thinker Mod builder AIs can rise themselves up to incredible levels of build-up, but it seems most of them are unable to defend themselves. I know the Hive could, but Morganites and Gaians are clearly bad at it.
- Gaians are ALWAYS number one in my games, its getting bizarre now.

 

[laclongquan]

At highest difficulty, play Peacekeeper for a surprising change~

 

[Cael]

If the AI is that good now, Gaians might be farming mind worms from the start. If they have pop 10 cities by 2170, think how bad their mind worm boils are going to be...

 

[RK47]

Are they not cheating with resources

 

[Cael]

Are they not cheating with resources

That is possibly the root cause behind the massive bloat. 4X games are particularly susceptible to the bonus everything at higher levels. In Civ4, for example, the difference between FFH2 starting units as a factor of difficulty was, IIRC:

normal = settler + 2 units (usually scout + warrior)
deity = 2 settlers + 1 worker + 9 units (usually 3 scouts + 6 warriors).

 

[RK47]

Are they not cheating with resources

That is possibly the root cause behind the massive bloat. 4X games are particularly susceptible to the bonus everything at higher levels. In Civ4, for example, the difference between FFH2 starting units as a factor of difficulty was, IIRC:

normal = settler + 2 units (usually scout + warrior)
deity = 2 settlers + 1 worker + 9 units (usually 3 scouts + 6 warriors).

Yeah the easiest way to play this is then to use their power against each other.
Meaning: probes for tech and frame your enemy. You'd fail but nothing stops you from trying again and again

That's what I found successful in higher level anyway when I played Hive. I was trying so hard to catch up and instead decided to just go for bases 1 tile apart to save time on former travel.
Spam Forest Tiles and enough military to drone suppress and fight off worms. Then target a Weather Paradigm project for the sweet river energy income. This works to help out the Hive bad eco by splitting 8 formers into two teams and planting river tiles next to each other to bypass the restriction.

Then bee line for Planned economy and Probe Teams. Spam the shit out of Probes. And frame the enemies against each other.

 

[laclongquan]

Army of Formers for the win! I like digging buncha of river, raising mountains, and sea-terraform the bay next to my capital~

 

[imajia]

That's what I found successful in higher level anyway when I played Hive. I was trying so hard to catch up and instead decided to just go for bases 1 tile apart to save time on former travel.

Depends on the faction I guess. With Zakharov you can have crawlers before you finish your first colony pod (build order: former->scout->colony pod). I still don't get how anyone is supposed to catchup with this. At least on bigger maps. Tech to crawlers, then for better units. Build a few crawlers per city, the end? I mean Uni doesn't *have* to go full builder.

Spam the shit out of Probes. And frame the enemies against each other.

This part still pisses me off with the AI and it is like this since day 1. Yangs sends 9 probes to my nearest city and...they all go back and forth. Why the hell doesn't he just probe the shit out of me? He ended with the 9 probes in one tile, without defender. My single city-scout killed them, the end. WTF? WHY?

Are they not cheating with resources

Not really they only cheat with

• drones
• unit maintenance when you gas their cities to size 1
• mind control costs
• etc.

 

[RK47]

Got a surprise worm capture when I'm not even running Green as Hive.
How is this possible? Where did the +1 Planet come from?

 

[laclongquan]

You captured a world landmark site? Manifold Nexus?

 

[RK47]

You captured a world landmark site? Manifold Nexus?

Amazing. I did think of that. I checked the damn in-game datalinks too and it didn't mention that. That's a new thing I learned today.

 

[RK47]

SMAC Veterans, opinion on this sort of start?

Would you split the monolith output into multiple colonies or just focus on HQ to reap the benefit?
Does it differ for each faction and why?

 

[Cael]

If you could, split it. Monoliths tend to fall by the wayside later in the game, but are a good boost early. Make it in such a way that you can hand off the monolith tile bonus to another city once the current city has outgrown it.

And no, monolith is always +2 to all three resources as base production regardless of faction.

The start is not a bad one, but not superb either. I would prefer a nutrient bonus to an energy one, and on a mountain than on flat lowlands. But it is not the worst start by any means.

 

[RK47]

If you could, split it. Monoliths tend to fall by the wayside later in the game, but are a good boost early. Make it in such a way that you can hand off the monolith tile bonus to another city once the current city has outgrown it.

And no, monolith is always +2 to all three resources as base production regardless of faction.

The start is not a bad one, but not superb either. I would prefer a nutrient bonus to an energy one, and on a mountain than on flat lowlands. But it is not the worst start by any means.

I think my question meant - do you handle it different for every faction? Keep in 1 or split?
Anyway, suppose you want to plant a 2nd colony - where would you place it and why?

 

[Cael]

If you could, split it. Monoliths tend to fall by the wayside later in the game, but are a good boost early. Make it in such a way that you can hand off the monolith tile bonus to another city once the current city has outgrown it.

And no, monolith is always +2 to all three resources as base production regardless of faction.

The start is not a bad one, but not superb either. I would prefer a nutrient bonus to an energy one, and on a mountain than on flat lowlands. But it is not the worst start by any means.

I think my question meant - do you handle it different for every faction? Keep in 1 or split?
Anyway, suppose you want to plant a 2nd colony - where would you place it and why?

Every faction should handle it about the same. It is that good right at the beginning.

I would put the second colony just north of where the colony pod is now, where you can get at the nutrient bonus and a monolith, but the fungus is in the way...

Explore further eastwards? The monsoon jungle on the mountain look like a good anchor for a city, and higher elevation = more energy from solar panels.

 

[imajia]

SMAC Veterans, opinion on this sort of start?

Would you split the monolith output into multiple colonies or just focus on HQ to reap the benefit?
Does it differ for each faction and why?

Depends on how fast you want to dominate everyone. I'd settle 1 city 2 tiles west and 1 city 2 tiles north. Which would give each city one monolith and one city additionally the energy resource. Not that it matters as you also have the jungle.
What is IMHO a total waste in the beginning is plastering the jungle with farms. A jungle-forrest gives you 2 food which is enough to grow to size 2 (size 3 already produces a drone for the uni) and gives minerals.
But as mentioned, with a start like this it doesn't matter

 

[RK47]

Another weird start -
where would you settle the 2nd colony?

 

[imajia]

Another weird start -
where would you settle the 2nd colony?

Depends on your prefered style and the city-overlap you can tolerate.
One option might be 1 SW to get one monolith and the food resource. Once you have your former, I'd first add a solar to the food resource, build a road, 1 N build a forrest then a road
Another option might be 2 S then you have 2 food resources (farm + solar). Next city then 2E to get the other 2 food resources. The food resource with the river could be forrested as it will take a while until you can get >2 energy per tile.

I'm not a hive expert, but just foresting everything will not be enough in the beginning to keep a decent energy output. Build the cities close to the HQ as otherwise the horrible efficency will drain your energy fast. One big advantage though is that compared to others, thanks to the +1 growth, you will grow like weed even with forrest.

Btw, what are your settings and where are all those monoliths coming from?

 

[imajia]

example of a "Super Science City" (average city one the left, SSC on the right) which shows the power of "crawling" energy into the HQ:

At this stage it's basically worth 15 cities. With the 2nd science secret project, it'll be 40.

 

[RK47]

Worms don't get affected by morale penalties right?
Assuming I have a few captured worms and run Green economy and Wealth, will it somehow downgrade their combat performance?