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4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

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Demo.Graph

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 17, 2018
Messages
1,157
How do I fight needlejet spam?
AA gun-only choppers.
Scout for airfield where enemy jets land and run kamikaze chopper there, they can attack 1 time per AP.
IIRC armor doesn't get used in air-air battles at all.

If I go Planned will my economy just die?
It depends. If you have a few megacities near capitol, it won't.
If you ICS and need support, go Demo-Planned-Power.
 

CthuluIsSpy

Arcane
Joined
Dec 26, 2014
Messages
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Location
On the internet, writing shit posts.
I lose about 200 income if I go planned and police. I did unlock thought control though so maybe I should go Fundamentalist-Planned-Power. You get so much support as Police-Power though. Don't need Clean when you have size 16 cities.
This is as Usurpers btw, and apparently they like planned.
Is there a way to see how many units a city can support? I know you can see what they are currently supporting, but I'm talking about an actual counter.
Also, military garrisons doesn't seem to do anything to drones? I have bases with several units in them but they still suffer drone riots.
Using nerve gas pods is fun. It adds so much damage and cleans up all of the shitty little settlements the AI spams everywhere.
 

CthuluIsSpy

Arcane
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Messages
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On the internet, writing shit posts.
I thought of doing that, but I need to keep them making military units. I did have them make a few more police garrisons though to make use of the +4 police rating I have going. Apparently the problem is I just didn't have enough; 4 squads of police basically solved everything.
I'm fighting a two front war against Pirates and Caretakers, and the Caretakers used a nuke on a city I just captured from them, which prompted the Spartans and the Peacekeepers to declare war on them. So basically it's me against the pirates and caretakers, pirates against the spartans, spartans against the peacekeepers and peacekeepers and spartans against the caretakers. Pirates will refuse to agree to a ceasefire because I kept using nerve gas on them, but they launched on a surprise attack on me and blitzed me with like 10 helicopters that just instantly died to my interceptors so fuck 'em.
This is just on Talent difficulty.

Usurpers feel kind of OP. I somehow have nearly every secret project in the game so I'm having a huge power spike. Just built the dream twister so now sealurks and psi battleships can just wreak havoc.

What does it mean when the cost is red in the design window? I couldn't find anything about that in the manual.
 
Joined
May 11, 2007
Messages
1,854,332
Location
Belém do Pará, Império do Brasil
I've started playing Alien Crossfire and I don't quite understand how to use the resonance laser. Is it only effective against mind worms, or can I make units do psychic attacks with it?
Against psychic units in general.
So usually you can use it to fight worm-heavy factions like Gaians and the Cult. 6-Res/3-Res beats psychic shit silly, especially if you add a few extra unit abilities. For all other purposes, it's a normal 6 attack weapon like the missile launcher.

How do I fight needlejet spam? I'm playing as Usurpers and the Caretakers have a lot of them. They just are killing my forces and AAA doesn't work that well because they are too passive but they are killing my air superiority jets and choppers. The enemy jets only have 1 armour, so should I just give the choppers and air sup jets lasers and not bother with giving them the best gun? Or does it work differently for air combat?
You could also try Air Superiority Rovers stationed in key points behind the right defensive units. Kill their needlejets after their attacks. If you use cheap units to bait them, it can be cheaper than trying to match them 1v1 with Air Superiority Needlejets.
 

CthuluIsSpy

Arcane
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Messages
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On the internet, writing shit posts.
So beat the game as Usurpers on talent. Got like 166% rating in the final score, lol. Prior to that I played Spartans on Specialist in vanilla and got like 88%.
Having nearly every Secret Project helped that, I think. I'm not sure if the Alien factions are well balanced. Being able to use nerve gas with impunity is pretty strong and they seem to get a bunch of other buffs too.
What are some good map settings? I tried Huge for SMACX and SMAC and there was a lot of empty space. It's not like Stellaris where the AI will completely populate a huge galaxy.
 
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Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
15,047
Yeah, Aliens are kinda OP. The penalty is supposed to be that you can't interact with humans well but on higher difficulties where everyone hates you anyway that doesn't really matter.

Can Aliens make the other factions into their vassal (by beating the shit out of them) and take all of their tech that way? If not that's a decent penalty for a warmonger-er.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
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It also spreads mind worms. The issue is that the missile effect size depends on their reactor and reactor upgrades are fairly late game, by the time you get 3 and 4 you're probably best off not fighting wars and just quickly transcending.
 
Joined
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Messages
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Belém do Pará, Império do Brasil
It also spreads mind worms. The issue is that the missile effect size depends on their reactor and reactor upgrades are fairly late game, by the time you get 3 and 4 you're probably best off not fighting wars and just quickly transcending.
This is why I play with Tech Stag on, post-mid game the tech advancement just blurs full speed ahead. You can't even enjoy the late-game techs, which is a pity because the late game techs are some of the coolest techs. By the time you get 3-Reactors, your game is either defacto won or about to go into ridiculous tech advancement.
 

Cael

Arcane
Possibly Retarded
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
21,747
Every time I see "rebalance", I just

giphy.gif
 
Joined
May 11, 2007
Messages
1,854,332
Location
Belém do Pará, Império do Brasil
Every time I see "rebalance", I just
SMAC/SMAX does need some rebalance tho

Terraform action plant fungi should be reduced to 3 turns, it can't be that hard to spread the stuff
Makes sense.
The real issue is that Fungal bonuses come too late in the game to matter, by then you've carpet-forested almost everything. The only reasons to keep fungus around is:
- Anti-Pollution
- Using the Xenoempathy Dome to make "Fungal Roads" only you can use in your territory (Worms can use this from day 1, too)
- Gaians, maybe
- Hunting worms for taming/energy

If Hybrid Forests were a terrain improvement instead of a building, it would be better. I think Planetfall mod for CivIV does this, actually?
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
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15,047
SMAC/SMAX does need some rebalance tho
Weather Paradigm is especially bad in this regard. I'd move it to Enviro Econ or Adv Eco Eng.
Ehh, its fine IMO. Moving it later makes half of the point of it (unlocking advanced terraforming early) useless. It's only a real balance issue if you plan to play a completely passive builder game and your neighbors let you. For everyone else it takes a long time to pay off, unlike other SPs that immediately grant massive benefits WP requires a lot of former turns to start paying itself off after you've invested 200 minerals upfront.

In my current games with Thinker mod on Transcend difficulty I completely ignore early SPs because there's no practical way to be sure you get them (I've had multiple games fail even when I had the "perfect" base with multiple mineral resources inside the jungle that gives +1 food per square). On the other hand 200 minerals invested in impact rovers can take any early SP you can get them to.
 

Demo.Graph

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 17, 2018
Messages
1,157
unlike other SPs that immediately grant massive benefits WP requires a lot of former turns to start paying itself off after you've invested 200 minerals upfront.
We're probably calculating it differently.
Each former is 20m, WP makes them twice as fast. If you need 1 former per base, with WP you save an equivalent of 10m per base in construction cost and 0.5m/base/turn in support.
Even with 5 bases you save 50m+2.5*turns or ROI ~1.6%/turn. With 10 bases it's 5%/turn.
You also get tempo (faster tform means less pop/crawler turns lost on unupgraded plots) and can do aggressive speed tforming potentially cheaper. And I haven't even considered better terraforming.

Compare it to Merchant Exchange that gives 0.5m/pop/turn or 2.5-3m/turn pre crawlers and energy upgrades or ROI ~1.5%/turn.

Considering that you basically have to ICS, WP has significantly more ROI than other early projects (HGP gives ~1m/turn/base, CDF and CC are more situational, TVW is great but it's a bit later one).

I guess, I don't play enough competitive MP to value CC and CDF properly. I don't remember needing 6+ bases churning units nonstop to make CC worthwhile vs AI.
 
Joined
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unlike other SPs that immediately grant massive benefits WP requires a lot of former turns to start paying itself off after you've invested 200 minerals upfront.
We're probably calculating it differently.
Each former is 20m, WP makes them twice as fast. If you need 1 former per base, with WP you save an equivalent of 10m per base in construction cost and 0.5m/base/turn in support.
Even with 5 bases you save 50m+2.5*turns or ROI ~1.6%/turn. With 10 bases it's 5%/turn.
You also get tempo (faster tform means less pop/crawler turns lost on unupgraded plots) and can do aggressive speed tforming potentially cheaper. And I haven't even considered better terraforming.

Compare it to Merchant Exchange that gives 0.5m/pop/turn or 2.5-3m/turn pre crawlers and energy upgrades or ROI ~1.5%/turn.

Considering that you basically have to ICS, WP has significantly more ROI than other early projects (HGP gives ~1m/turn/base, CDF and CC are more situational, TVW is great but it's a bit later one).

I guess, I don't play enough competitive MP to value CC and CDF properly. I don't remember needing 6+ bases churning units nonstop to make CC worthwhile vs AI.

Weather Paradigm is +50% former speed, not +100%. Faster terraforming also means you spend more time running around and losing former turns to get to places, so that balances out. If you have 1 terraformer per base it's +10 minerals immediate worth of former value and +0.5m/turn in support for each base. Let's say 20 bases, which means it pays itself off immediately (200 minerals saved) and thenceforth "earns" you 10 minerals/turn in saved mineral upkeep.

Merchant Exchange is a famously awful special project that no one should care about for normal gameplay. Let's ignore that.

Human Genome Project: Replaces a Rec Commons at every base. This costs 40 minerals/base for an immediate gain of 800 minerals worth of infrastructure at 20 bases, along with saving 1 energy/turn in upkeep which for 20 bases is 20 energy/turn. Now, you can directly buy 1 mineral with 2 energy so this can be converted into 10 minerals/turn in a much better and more flexible way than base minerals can. So we're looking at 4x the immediate payoff and the same per-turn payoff.

Note: exactly how much HGP saves can depend on what you avoid building, if all you would have needed was 1 police then it obviously saves a lot less, 10m/per base and 1 mineral upkeep/base for a total of 200 minerals and 10 minerals/turn. Which... is exactly the same as WP. If you would have needed later more expensive buildings then its even more powerful than I calculated before. I chose rec commons because its a fairly common early game building you need on transcend.

Virtual World: Costs 300, replaces hologram theaters costing 60/each with 3 upkeep, so 1200 immediate mineral saves and 60 energy/turn, convertable into 30 minerals/turn. Turns out to be similar ratios as HGP, though it has the downside of the fact that you don't often need this much drone suppression everywhere and you need to build the network nodes.

Planetary Energy Grid: Costs 300, gives an energy bank costing 80/each with 1 upkeep. 2400 mineral savings and 20 energy/turn. And unlike the other two you do kind of want energy banks literally everywhere.

Keep in mind, ALL of these SPs are amazingly useful once you have tons of bases. The problem is that they require a huge initial investment that you can't pool all of those base's mineral income to rush (until supply crawlers). Which means you're risking a lot of immediate time to go for one, and as I've said on transcend it seems usually not worth it (though you can disband non-supply crawlers for half their construction cost towards the project, I'll have to try using that to rush SPs sometime...)

On the other hand, impact rover spam is something you CAN dedicate all of your 20 bases towards, and quickly skyrockets you to having 30 bases and a nice SP along with it. The only problem is if all the good SPs are magically finised by some AI on the other side of the world. But at long as 1 or 2 decent ones are nearby you can take it and adjust your plan to fit with what you get.

As to WPs early unlocking of terraforming, it's kind of hit or miss. Really depends on your resources, since condensor farms are only particularly good on food resources while boreholes need minerals or energy resources and also take a ton of time to finish.
 
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civac2

Novice
Joined
Jan 22, 2022
Messages
49
The Weather Paradigm enables making boreholes faster. This does snowball. You go ahead with one former (ideally rover chassis bu often just infantry) to make roads so you don't lose any more turns moving. You can then build and maintain more formers with the additional production. The ability to get early boreholes and condensers on the right resources is very powerful as well. Weather Paradigm is the strongest Secret Project in the game by a large margin.
 

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