4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[Average Manatee]

Looks like the kind of thing stamped in red ink on product info leaflets in Chinese imports.

If that's the case then all of the SMAX factions should have that stamp.

 

[Average Manatee]

Trying the Will to Power mod and... it seems entirely random whether you get an extra colony pod at the start or not? This has to be a bug right? I've tried starting like 20 games on map of planet/librarian and it's just sometimes I get a free 2nd colony and sometimes I don't. Obviously this is ridiculously imbalanced one way or another and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be getting or if AIs are also randomly getting twice as many colonies to start with.

 

[Average Manatee]

Induktio QoL suggestion, let us activate crawlers on squares already being worked (turn off/move the pop currently working the tile). I usually have most bases on automatic pop allocation, which means I need to hit O (fails)->go to base->turn off pop->go back to crawler and hit O(this then cycles me to the next active unit which could be far away)->go back to base ->go to governor->turn on pop automation every time I want to use a crawler, which is a lot of work that shouldn't be needed.

 

[Cael]

Trying the Will to Power mod and... it seems entirely random whether you get an extra colony pod at the start or not? This has to be a bug right? I've tried starting like 20 games on map of planet/librarian and it's just sometimes I get a free 2nd colony and sometimes I don't. Obviously this is ridiculously imbalanced one way or another and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be getting or if AIs are also randomly getting twice as many colonies to start with.

It happens in all of the old Civ games. When you start on a goody hut, the game gives you an extra settler. The AIs get it too, and at higher difficulties, they get more units at the start by default, IIRC.

 

[Average Manatee]

Had a good game as Deidre, Thinker mod/Thinker Difficulty/Stagnant research. I was really impressed that Miriam actually looked like she was about to run away with the game, she somehow kept up in tech well almost entirely by stealing tech. When I declared war her tech/turn was 170 to my 800 and Morgan's 700, but it was still a tough fight with only a very temporary tech advantage before she stole it from me. I along with most of the map was pushing on her but her death was getting her empire split in half by global warming.

Morgan did keep up relatively well with me, I have 4.3k tech per turn right now and he's 1.8k. But my net income is +4000 a year while his is +440. Engineers OP.

Only early game SP I got was Weather Paradigm, which is essential for this kind of terraforming strategy. Picked up Planetary Energy Grids and Ascetic Virtues myself. Surprisingly Miriam had like half the other SPs that I inherited by killing her.

End game

Spoiler

Miriam at the height of her power

Spoiler

Might try another game on non-stagnant. Thinker overall slows the game down but it seems a bit much on stagnant for my taste, turns take like 5 mins to sort everything out which is why I didn't play to the ultimate end.

 

[Cael]

Miriam and Yang both have an early advantage, and if they can leverage that into a large empire, they can run away. Yang does it almost by default. Miriam have to work for it. In an old Civ game like AC, the higher difficulty encourage both to run away due to bonus resource and free unit upkeep.

 

[Average Manatee]

Had an hilarious game with a few learning moments...

So I figured I'd go for the exact opposite this time, a rush-focused build. We're Santiago on Transcend, Thinker mod, no spoils of war (thought it would make it too easy).

Early game I find a unity pod with a unity mining laser. Lal is next door. Just messing around and attacked his 1 pop colony (normally this is a bad idea, it just dies and you don't capture anything, better to wait till they are 3). He immediately surrenders to become my vassal, which means I also can get all his tech for free whenever he researches anything and he can't backstab me. Cool. Will make sure to do that in future games.

Then I get a bunch of rovers to go SE to Zakharov. He's got the nice jungle terrain I want to own and there's a monolith right by to upgrade my troops before they go in. Easy victory, he also capitulates.

Now at this point I'd found everyone and unfortunately made the mistake of calling a vote for planetary governor. The choice was between Miriam and Deidre. Since Miriam was right next door watching me slowly conquer Zak I didn't want her to backstab me, so I voted her in (despite having the most colonies I didn't have the pop to affect much). So Miriam got a huge energy boost and really started getting strong.

At this point I'm friends with everyone else anyway (Morgan loves me... I'm not sure why, Yang because I'm running police state as the only way to not collapse). Because lol transcend cheats Lal and Zak have snowballed decently and are researching techs far faster than I can. I literally have jack shit for energy due to inefficiency + distance but between them and trading the techs they research to other AIs, then giving my vassals all tech whenever I get something, we're pretty overpowered.

Miriam is a pain in the ass mostly due to probes. She has way too much money and just outright mind controls several bases with way too many units in it. The key thing I found out here was making all of my defensive units probes (e.g. 1 move/3 armor). This way any probe that attacks has to chew through my defensive probes, and if they do and the base gets taken then all my expensive rovers in there with high morale and better weapons than Miriam had would just be cleaned up on the next turn since I was on the offensive against 1 armor rovers. It is a little more expensive than normal troops but probes don't count against support so I'm pulling ahead over time. I also figured out a trick where I just accept peace when Miriam asks for it after I take a base, wait to rest my dudes, then just be rude to her in commlinks to get her to declare a vendetta again. Works great. Miriam concedes. Not that she's giving me much tech but she'll throw shit at whatever I'm attacking just fine.

Then we get to Deidre. Oh boy, despite conquering most of 3 AIs she has over twice my pop. Mostly because my economy is shit and everything is going into war. Bases I take can't be policed at the population they have so they starve and go lose half their people. I could avoid this by rush buying key facilities but I don't have the money because at this point Miriam's bases are literally losing 100% of their value to inefficiency. I think I fucked up by staying on Police State so long but I wasn't really paying attention to anything but the war economy and the minerals so ehh w/e. But it really caught up to me halfway through the Deidre war where I realized my income per turn was -60 and I was only surviving off looted energy from cities. I eventually decide to transition out of police state by nerve stapling everyone during a sunspot event, which I THOUGHT prevented all negative consequences for atrocities. This way I'd be able to keep drones down while building the facilities.

Unfortunately I found out as soon as the sunspot ended that factions will still react to atrocities if you nerve stapled their former cities, which includes your vassals.

Spoiler

Morgan gets fucking everything... although at least I picked up command nexus from Miriam which let me get all elites for the war against Deidre.

Not sure what I'll do, think imma reload and just replay the last 10 turns. urgh.

A few other things in retrospect:

1. Even if you get a mineral and food resource immediately, you're probably not gonna beat any AIs to SPs. I tried to get both of the military ones and failed. Granted it *probably* didn't do much as all my starting bases didn't contribute anything to the war effort past Zak.

2. In retrospect I should have gone for Morgan rather than Miriam. He was on the other side of the map but both are far from the original base and rovers are fast. Fighting Miriam (or Yang or Santiago) is too painful.

3. I found something REALLY interesting. It turns out disbanding a unit at a base adds half its mineral cost to the current construction item, much like rushing a SP with crawlers (although that gives you full return). I've always just been disbanding units willy nilly that I didn't want. This might be interesting for rushing some SPs a bit... spam some early forests for minerals on a few of your extra bases and just eat the penalty.

4. I tried tree spam but it unfortunately doesn't work that well if you're losing much energy to inefficiency on due to distance + need for police state to manage drones, so its far better to go the specialist route which ignores inefficiency. Unfortunately most of the AIs seem to go tree spam in thinker so fixing that would have cost a lot of former time.

5. I figured out that I should really be selling techs I collect to my subservient vassals rather than just freely giving them away. Oh well... the energy obviously would have helped.

6. Alternatively, I just now figured out you can ask for credits from them and threaten to cancel the pact and they seem to always pay up. That seems almost cheating. But its also pretty good against AI pact friends who like you, morgan just gave me a bunch of dosh for nothing.

 

[Average Manatee]

Huh... after restarting and not nerve stapling, Deidre decided to submit to me as soon as the sunspot activity was up. Then I immediately won the game. I thought I at least had to call the vote for being the supreme leader? Kind of funny considering Morgan had basically every SP and 2x my research, but I obviously had the votes.

Spoiler

 

[Average Manatee]

What's the consensus on the Alien Crossfire factions balance-wise? I know they are generally looked down upon for not fitting in that well lore-wise but I'm wondering which ones I can switch in to spice things up without utterly destroying game balance.

Cyber consciousness: Obviously overpowered for players, it's university with less penalties and more bonuses. But for AI maybe it's fine? Zakharov seems to get shat on in all of my games and it ends up being Morgan who is tech leader.
Pirates: Maybe balanced? Sea bases are both low minerals even with +1 per square and its far more costly to make sea units in general, which is a problem for formers (formers can do sea improvements quickly but that's because there's no powerful advanced ones like condensors and boreholes). Might play this myself next just for the uniqueness.
Free Drones: Also maybe balanced? Powerful industry and drone bonuses but also a big research penalty akin to Miriam.
Data Angels: Not sure? For player they seem underpowered because +2 probe is kind of trash while -1 police is a huge penalty with higher difficulty drone amounts. But on the other hand the free techs that any 3 other factions know might be huge and basically keep you in the game on its own. As long as you're relatively even on tech with AIs you can usually fight them off.
Cult of Planet: Really underpowered? Econ and Industry penalties are both generally far worse than the +2 planet bonus even if you are spamming mind worms and psi rushing because you need an economy and industry to do that. Mind worms doing double police duty is interesting but you get that unit ability pretty early anyway.
Both alien factions: seem vastly overpowered, but maybe the AIs gang up on them to compensate? I doubt it though.

 

[oldbonebrown]

Cult of Planet: Really underpowered? Econ and Industry penalties are both generally far worse than the +2 planet bonus even if you are spamming mind worms and psi rushing because you need an economy and industry to do that. Mind worms doing double police duty is interesting but you get that unit ability pretty early anyway.

For a human player the starting worm gives you early mobility which translates to a lot of pods.
Privileged access to The Weather Paradigm makes its power almost a given to them, and with the extra pods you can usually easily cap the Human Genome Project on top of that. The worm police can sometimes be helpful in drone control when rushing those secret projects early.

 

[Average Manatee]

I feel like on harder difficulties you'll struggle to get weather paradigm and other early SPs with -1 industry. I can barely get it with Deidre on thinker and she can start it immediately as well. And double police duty for worms doesn't help that much since standard infantry are far cheaper anyway. It's 11 minerals for a scout infantry vs. 55 for a mind worm. That's... atrocious.

Not saying you can't play him but he seems almost completely inferior to Deidre and only useful for a very slightly better early game mind worm rush. And the police thing isn't even that useful there since bases below size 3 will die so it's only good for making AIs capitulate, you won't be occupying any bases for yourself.

 

[oldbonebrown]

I always get the weather paradigm with one of my first three bases, whichever has the the most minerals. Usually the only things I will build before it are former>scout>colony pod and maybe a recycling tank. Using worms, or more likely spore launchers, as police when building projects early is about capturing them, not building. The cost of worms is atrocious indeed, but that's just the cost of playing Cha.
Getting both WP and Human Genome Project is reliant on pod luck, which might in turn depend on how lucky you are in capturing natives to get more pods with. Playing with Thinker I can't say it's the usual outcome, but it works often enough to be my plan. Spawning too close to an aggressive enemy often makes me fold early.

The best game I ever had as Planet Cult was against the Usurpers that had conquered a majority of the map and I got to completely rip them apart with a combination of Locusts and Probe Teams using genetic warfare. It seemed the most fitting way of making war as Planet Cult imaginable.
Of course the main advantage of playing Cha Dawn is the vibe. Earth-Deirdre cannot comprehend the true power of Planet.

 

[Average Manatee]

I tried to go for an SP with my 3rd base that had mineral + food resource as santiago and failed on transcend difficulty my latest game. Was a huge blow because I also failed on all of the SPs I transitioned to so it was just like 30 turns wasted.

In any case, I really don't see Cha Dawn performing well as an AI, AI doesn't really do mind worm rush. Deidre does tend to overperform in my games though, I think due to the fact that Thinker improves AI terraforming and she gets a head start on that.

 

[Average Manatee]

Looking at Sven right now for my future pirate game. As far as I can tell there's literally no reason to ever build mining platforms?

Kelp + Tidal Harness = 3 food/3 energy
Kelp + Mining platform = 2 food/1 mineral
2 energy directly converts to 1 mineral for rush buying purposes so the mining platform is stupid. Sven himself adds +1 mineral to all squares so it stays the same, trading 3 energy and 1 food for 1 mineral.

OK, but lets add the boosting buildings. Subsea Trunkline adds +1 mineral to mining platforms, and Thermocline Transducer adds +1 energy to tidal harnesses.

Kelp + Tidal Harness = 3 food/4 energy
Kelp + Mining platform = 2 food/2 mineral
OK, so at least now if we spend 2 energy per mineral we're even. Except Subsea Trunkline comes after Thermocline Transducer in the tech tree, costs more, and if you can build just all energy and only need one building why wouldn't you?

Now you could say that inefficiency hits energy production but not minerals. But then you also get more labs/economy bonuses than mineral ones. And the food on its own means you can just run specialists, every 2 food = 1 specialist = at least 3 econ or labs.

This all holds *even* on mineral resource squares. It's not like land where you can get rocky terrain for an extra mining bonus, the mineral lifts the cap, and you've got a super SP churning base very early.

Eventually you get advanced ecological engineering to add another +1 mineral per mining platform but by that point the game is basically over.

Ohh, and mining platforms take 8 turns to make as opposed to 4 turns for farm and tidal. lol.

 

[oldbonebrown]

Tried it on Thinker Transcend:

Planet Diary

2106 (turn 1)

2110, second base with minerals

2119 start building the Weather Paradigm after making a Former->Scout>Colony Pod, rushing production with petty planet-pearl credit fund

Discovered Biogenetics in 2140. Finished WP in 2141, rushing the last 88 credits. Starting Human Genome Project in 2143 after first building a Recycling Tank in that base

Caretakers and Usurpers both start their first secret project in 2145: Human Genome Project. The Usurpers finishing it in 2151

An easy start with no opposition and nearby resources, held back by not finding a single artefact. Good start gave me an easy WP, but it shouldn't be a problem in any game.
I would've needed 8 turns of construction to finish Human Genome Project too, or 392 credits to rush it the turn that they built it. Harsh, but not completely outside reach with better playing & planning and a little more luck with the pods. I have a bad habit of avoiding Nerve Stapling, so I throw quite a few credits on rushing smaller constructions to prevent drone riots.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

What's the consensus on the Alien Crossfire factions balance-wise? I know they are generally looked down upon for not fitting in that well lore-wise but I'm wondering which ones I can switch in to spice things up without utterly destroying game balance.

Cult of Planet is generally agreed to be the weakest of all the 14 factions.

Strongest imho are Free Drones, Cyborgs and Pirates.

The most unbalanced human ones are Cyborgs and Pirates I think. The AI doesn't cope that well with naval warfare so it pretty much can't reach the Pirates, and the Cyborgs are like University+ without its nastiest issues.

I don't think the Free Drones are unbalanced, they have the BEST industry in the game but the AI has issues coping with the tech advancement.

 

[oldbonebrown]

The Cult of Planet is the strongest faction of all.

 

[Average Manatee]

I tried Pirates and they really seem kind of shit.

Spoiler

1. Sea mining as already discussed is shit. You basically have no minerals even with the Pirates boost. Additionally foil chassis then makes every unit 2x as expensive. So realistically its like you're taking a -50 to -66% mineral nerf compared to other factions, which gets much worse compared to bases with boreholes/mineral resources. This also means you can't really get SPs, at least in Thinker mod where AI is relatively competent at them.

2. The only upside I can find is that planting seaweed is awesome. Its quick (5 turns), it spreads automatically, it's 3 food base and 4 food with an aqua farm. That's much better than farm + condensor (16 turns total).

3. Unfortunately you have -1 efficiency. This pretty much nukes your ability to collect energy from squares once you've expanded (and you need to expand a lot). In my game I spent a lot of former time placing tidal harnesses that was wasted. I think you want to pretty much just do seaweed past the first few bases and grow grow grow.

4. You need to take a *lot* of territory to keep up. You're running full specialists only and buying everything you have with credits.

5. You kind of really need the SPs that give -drones or +talents to avoid revolts before you get crawlers. Because you need to be size 5 to run specialists, and then you need to feed size 5, and do it without drone revolts. And you have a cool -1 growth to slow your growth towards size 5 as well.

6. Unfortunately with double cost supply crawlers your ability to snowball once you get them is screwed hard.

7. Your seaweed is stuck at 4 food, so you can't really develop past that. This means each base needs more space, which means you have to simultaneously ICS while also spreading out further.

Do I think I can win? Yes, I kept even with Deidre on tech (who is assblasting the entire rest of the map). But with basically any land-based faction playing 100% economy the whole game I'd be swamping her, and beating AIs in wars isn't really proof of a good faction just that you understand how to beat AIs in wars.

Cyborgs definitely seem the most broken (excluding the aliens).

Drones are good IMO because the economic development just swamps everything. Having 25% more bases or 25% more infrastructure will make up a -20% research penalty, and you can always trade/steal/war for techs. -1 drones automatically is always great pretty much all the time whether you're conquering or just trying to power up economically. AI might suck in vanilla though but I expect they'd do well in Thinker. Though a lot probably comes down to initial tech choices, Deidre seems to take off every game because she starts with Ecology and I bet that everyone else suffers in relation to how slowly the AI is to research that tech.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I loved this game as a kid. I got the crossfire pack with the prima strategy guide, tech progression poster, and nice manuals. I've even got the novels and comic book! Currently trying to get the GURPS world book.

The mindworms and the overall hostility of the Planet were absolutely terrifying, and the Gaians are absolute badasses for being willing to wander into the deadly wilderness to psychically bond with the beasts.

I'm really surprised nobody has made a spiritual successor yet. SMAC has the best world building and characterization of any 4X game. It's been decades, yet no other 4X game has been able to achieve the same memorability. Why is that? You don't need the copyright to SMAC, you just need to be willing to write deep and interesting (and occasionally funny) characters with wildly different philosophical and political beliefs.

SMAC gives us memorable quotes like "Einstein is rolling in his grave. Not only does God play with dice, but the dice are loaded." when you discover some quantum probability prediction tech. How has no other 4X game come close in the decades since?

 

[mastroego]

"just"?

 

[v1c70r14]

I'm really surprised nobody has made a spiritual successor yet.

But they did. Firaxis made Civilization: Beyond Earth and it was published by 2K, and Pandora: First Contact was published by Slitherine, developed by Proxy Studios.

Since Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is owned by EA they had to make do without the intellectual property when they made Beyond Earth, which resulted in a very bland game stripped of what gave SMAC its soul. I'm not sure you could really replicate what made the game special outside of the periodic context of the late 90's anyway. Beyond Earth didn't just remove the personality and concerns of the setting but also followed that trend of giving the player busywork and useless decisions. Be it setting up trade routes that needs to be "refreshed" for some reason, or making important decisions that will give you +2 food resource, or +3 coins, like the +.05% damage of modern RPGs, or endless expeditions of Stellaris that spam you with messages you never read after the first time you encounter them.

Pandora was an attempt of trying to capture some core aspects more faithfully, having stand-ins for the copyrighted factions and letting you create your own units and such, but everything about the game was like a more basic version of SMAC, begging the question why you aren't just playing SMAC instead when you boot it up. Off-brand Miriam being a Tiktok simp queen and discord mod was funny though.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

By the way guys, https://alphacentauri2.info/ is no more. If you haven't backed up the unnoficial patches somewhere, follow the links provided for Yitzi, Kyrub and Scient here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/s/ntN6qPeJ7q

Thinker is on github:
https://github.com/induktio/thinker

kyrub

 

[Catacombs]

By the way guys, https://alphacentauri2.info/ is no more.

The website is active but without the forum. The admins say it'll be back soon.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

SMAC was lightning in a bottle, I'm not sure it could ever be recaptured, especially by western writers.

First you need to fire anyone who's even remotely an SJW in your writing team out from a cannon. Good job finding modern-day western writters who aren't subject to the social justice meme-virus. Eastern Euro writers are probably the way to go, but I'm not sure if eastern writers could do it, the slavs were left too cynical by the fall of the USSR.

A SMAC-sucessor needs a carefully balanced level of idealistic futurism to go with the dystopia, because its the player who will ultimately decide whrever their state is a utopia or hell, and a certain level it needs to be subjective, because this is not OUR world.

I think part of what made SMAC work was its post-Cold War context. It was very much the child of the post-Cold War world and the end of the Capitalism vs Communism showdown. It was also a massive refutation of the "End of History" american triumphalism in fashion at the time. It was all about looking to the future and the new issues of the time, and then reflecting on how people on another planet could live.

Like how the emerging "Green Movement" and ecological worries were turned into Lady Deirdre Skyie and her Gaians, a faction that would have been doomed to turn into annoying preachy eco-hippies in most pens but instead we got an interesting faction lead by a compassionate woman who was one of the first to understand that Chiron was an alien environment, yet it could be lived with in harmony, while having mind worms munch on people for "The Greater Good". Or how Miriam Godwinson smacks of Le American Christian Theocracy 80s Cliche, but then you read all her quotes in-game, and you start to realize she might be one of the sanest faction leaders, and it might be better for humanity were she in control and not the other nutbars gladly committing atrocities and creating horrors beyond mankind's comprehension in the name of "progress".

Also, you need hard sci-fi writers. SMAC was hard sci-fi and that was part of the appeal. The only thing which wasn't hard sci-fi was the psionics, and even psionics never gets treated like mystical shit, but another field of science you need to learn - even if its a science of symbols, meaning, feelings, thoughts and concepts.

One guy who might be good is J. Steven York, who wrote the novella and plot-related blurbs of Outpost 2: Divided Destiny, which is ALSO a 90s hard sci-fi game about humans colonizing another planet and dividing in factions. But he's kinda old tbh.

Been a while since I read something from him, but Peter Watts might also be a good candidate. Been a while since I last read a book of his (I need to read the sequel to Blindsight), but he's good too. No idea if he has been swallowed by the Woke Mind Virus recently.


Ok, fine, so let's say we got someone competent to write our game.

Next issue is mechanics. SMAC is pretty much Civilization II in space with its own added mechanics, for good or ill.
Yet, I think a cool thing about it is that it tried to push the envelope and influenced the next civ games.
A good example is how SMAC's terrain and climate mechanics work, and how the terrain is constructed by dynamic voxels and not 2d tiles. Thus you can elevation displayed on a 2D map, changing climate, etc. No civ game has done this, before or since. Its all static-ass tiles.
SMAC's Social Engineering was so cool that it was present in Civilization IV, the best mainline civ game.
There was the unit design, which isn't considered popular but was definitively different from what 4X games did at the time, with units also made of voxels.

Right now the 4X genre seems to be pretty much doomed to mimicking Civilization VI. We're not getting the next SMAC while the morons are ripping off the worthless post-IV Civilization entries.

SMAC is a futuristic game series, I think that by default devs not only have to take from what was done before and worked, but also try and innovate.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Yes, it is absolutely impossible to replicate today, because it was made in the tail end of bygone era where games could be made by people versed in history, philosophy, hard sci-fi, people who read literature and watched movies for adults. Replicating the writing and world-building of Alpha Centauri today would be like asking Somalians to build a space rocket, the basis is just not there.