As for terraforming, the first thing I always do at each base is plant a forest on the driest, flattest square adjacent to the base - forests slowly spread on their own, and this will save you terraforming time later. If you look closely enough, there IS a visual different between dry, moist, and rainy squares, as well as between flat, rolling and rocky ones.
When you say unit supply, you mean support? If it bugs you enough, you might try playing as the Spartans for the higher unit support.
The morale becomes less of a problem as you work up the tech tree and build units with better reactors (more HP).
sisko or anyone who's played a lot of MP can tell you more about directed research - I've almost never touched it, and can't really help - but that is another one of those play more deals, as without a chart in front of you, it's too much to learn in a hury and keep in your head.
I really dislike this unit supply system. The global supply of the later civ games has spoiled me, and makes this annoying.Faction and Government pays a huge role in support. If you want a lot of support, you can pick factions with support bonuses (like Believers) and/or Government with support bonus (like Police State). However, this is a relatively short term thing. Once you research Clean Reactors, you can build units at a slightly higher cost with ZERO support cost. At that point, I will often upgrade many of my support-cost units to the clean version. At that point, your support concerns are largely over.
I usually play with blind research (as it was the default), but perhaps that is not best? If not, I don't know what to beeline nor do I have a good working knowledge of the tech tree.I absolutely HATE blind research. I will never play a game (other than perhaps some short specialized scenario) that has blind research. Reseach is the most important (and fun) part of the game, in my opinion. You must study the tech tree well enough to know what are the most important things to research at various points in your game. No wonder you don't enjoy the game if you are playing blind research!
I don't understand the best way to utilize formers at all. Civ, I can look at a tile and tell you what it needs. This, not so much. And it's complicated by there being more options. Why is that farm giving me 4 and that one giving me 3 when they otherwise look same? Stuff like that. Doesn't help that I have a long standing hatred of workers no matter the game. Especially at this damn unit supply scheme.The terraforming system in SMAC(X) is incredibly flexible; it is one of the main things that make SMAC so much more enjoyable than the other Civ games. I remember playing Civ 4, and thinking, after this many versions of Civ, all you can do is roads, farms, forests, and mines??? SMAC had 3 times as many terraforming options.
I don't get the morale combat at ALL. FAR too often does one of my units that appear superior on paper get mopped by a lesser mindworm or something. Seems to happen far more regularly with the Morale combat than with the actual combat. (to the point I took to being the treehugger chick to overrun the world with mindworms at one point, and it works surprisingly well.)Morale combat is very straightforward. You ignore EVERYTHING except unit morale and morale modifiers. Attacking land units get +50% bonus, so it is far better to be on the attack on land, in general. There are a bunch of modifiers to consider, such as the bonus for trance, terrain, etc. All of those are shown on your combat screen.