Good luck! Looks like you're playing it a bit fast and loose with all of those undefended bases on transcend, but I guess with such aggressive neighbours you have to take some more risks.Yeah, one of the things I'm still trying to balance is just how much I can sacrifice defenses for faster expansion early. In this case, I could have kept the base I lost by just buying the defender a turn earlier (and I'd seen the mind worm coming, so this was just a miscalculation.) Still, I usually lose a new base or two each game at this point.
I like your AAR style, thanks for writing :)
If you'd gone for a transport foil in the first base and then used it for shuttling pods then it or your base could also have just ended up eaten by an Isle of the deep. You never know what might happen.
Looks like a good start this time, and pirates are a strong faction.
Also interested to see how the combat rules work. Thi ker changes some of the rules (inspired by will to power, I think), but it still offers near guaranteed wins to units that are twice as strong as their opponent and artillery isn't that great.Oh, and I believe the only major change here is that reactor isn't a combat modifier any more. Fusion reactor units are cheaper, but no stronger than fission, etc.
Looks very dicey for you! I was worried that encouraging the other factions to attack Deirdre would lead to this because of the nonlinear growth in power that SMAC has: she could have stomped them ages ago and got more powerful, but they hadn't upset her, so she didn't. I feel like the anti Deirdre coalition would have to share all their tech to compete and even then factions would be wasting research points chasing the same techs; each faction would be paying for prototypes Vs Deirdre only paying once and Deirdre also has a smaller proportion of her bases on the frontline so she can concentrate her war effort on offense. The only advantage I can think of for the coalition is lower energy losses to inefficiency because their territories are smaller (but then energy will still be wasted on duplicate techs, so :/)Sure, but Diedre switching to a war footing really helped me get ahead on tech rate. She switched from the usual Democratic-Green/Planned-Research-Cybernetic to Fundamentalist-Green-Power-Thought Control. That's a ton less research, and no more pop-booming. On top of that, she was council president and we'd passed the trade pact, so commerce numbers were huge this game. Cutting her off from all the free energy was also a huge boon. Her tech rate per turn dropped by more than 40% when I instigated those wars. Yeah, it let her snowball her city count, but... seems like it might have been the right call anyhow. Hard to say.
pblur, if you have any notions for a user title -in place of where it says "Citizen"- and/or an avatar, I stand at your disposal as a form of applause...