I'm far from an expert on this subject, as I've only recently reinstalled the game and am still getting the hang of things.
One thing I used to do with other factions was to build Children's Creches, and switch to Democratic and Planned. If I remember correctly this would give you +6 growth in those bases and trigger a population boom. I mention this because the Cyborgs can't use that particular tactic with their growth penalty, which makes Free Market more attractive to me. You could use Democratic to get to +4 Efficiency with the Cyborgs (you can now set your labs or economy to 100% without penalty), go Market and supercharge either your income or research as you see fit.
But take all that with a grain of salt, I'm still rusty and those tactics might not work the way I remember them. Hopefully someone with a better handle on details can confirm or deny what I just typed.
It really depends on whether your style is emphasizing strengths or mitigating weaknesses. I tend more toward emphasizing strengths, so I'd be more likely to go FM under Aki. Keep in mind, Planned isn't really "free", even for Aki; not only do you give up the option of FM (or Green, though with Aki that's not something you're going to be wanting to do often), but you also give up your +2 EFFIC.
Planned boosts nutrient effects greatly, has a minor boost for minerals via industry, but is detrimental to energy due to the efficiency penalty.
Green boosts mineral capability greatly (as ecodamage is cut by 1/3), gives a moderate boost to energy, but is detrimental to nutrient effects (via the growth penalty).
Personally I always go for Planned economy as I find it's industrial bonuses and such much better. Free Market is too annoying with the policing, making me have to produce more units to police cities. And if drone riots happen then nothing gets done. Add the negative planet bit, I for one am more accustomed to planned.
Typically with Aki Zeta (and many other factions) I go with a Planned, Democratic, and then Knowledge basis. The negatives of all the social policies taken are countered out and you have a system which only gives you benefits. So you have higher growth rate, you also have better research as well.
I know that Planned never comes free
I must say I never saw SE this way. My own impression was that Planned is designed for early game, FM is designed for midgame robust but peaceful empires, and Green is for late game (at later stages with big enough ICS empire you actually get more cash/labs under Green than FM).
Dunno, somehow the idea that Green boosts minerals doesn't convince me. On paper you're not wrong, it's just when I consider going green I usually focus on specialists anyway. I almost never switch to Green for the reasons of eco-damage.
I don't really complain about FM eco-damage hit and I wouldn't say it's bad for minerals. The clean minerals limit is more or less the same regardless of SE choice, plus you actually want to trigger your first fungal pop, plus you can afford several fungal pops before it starts to be annoying, and any problems of that kind are over once you put tree farms in most bases.
If that were the intended method, then why would they all become available around the same time?
Also, focusing on specialists when going Green is sort of a waste, as specialists aren't affected by efficiency (and a specialist-heavy strategy will tend to have low mineral production, making eco-damage less of an issue). If you're going specialists, your best bet is probably Planned, so you can grow your population (and hence specialists) more easily.
As I said, what I described is how it seems it should work, but it doesn't due to the clean mineral mechanic, which is one of the worst offenders in terms of the havoc it plays with game balance.
That doesn't really mean anything, it's always better to have more options at your hands, and the designers sure wanted people to maybe consider early Green to go with mind worm rush. What I said is simply a rule of thumb, you can always find a situation where the opposite is true. Which I think is good.
As we are on the topic of SE choices, I think the politics and values are clearly imbalanced, for that matter it annoys me way more than the eco-damage mechanics.
but all in all, in most situations I prefer to go to war under Demo/FM/Wealth combo
Power is likewise designed for a wartime footing, and is extremely useful for that purpose.
If you go Democratic/Wealth or Democratic/Knowledge, and another guy goes Police State/Power or Fundie/Power, and you get into a war, he will probably beat you unless you've been running the "peaceful" options and him the "warlike" options for long enough to get a substantial tech advantage (and even then, Fundie gives probe bonuses) or just more production capability.
With that combo, you're facing 2 drones per military unit outside your territory, only 1 free unit supported per base, and -2 morale.
In my experience, in most wars you can’t win with the units you brought for the first wave. Some of them will get destroyed or damaged, some will be necessary to secure the perimeter. It means that in a regular war you need to constantly pump out and send out reinforcements.
And in such a case, I can always take on a player of my competence level, comparable empire and tech parity if he runs Fundie/Planned(or Green)/Power and I stay Demo/FM/Wealth.
Let’s get one thing out of the way, Yitzi. You can’t really embark a quest to improve the game balance if you don’t know the ins and outs of the game mechanics and how various tactics are used, abused, circumvented and mitigated by real players in real games.
As a matter of fact, running Demo/FM/Wealth gives you no problems with drones (actually, it gives Golden Ages every now and then), no problems with support and zero morale. All you have to do is set aside one base and either not let it grow (i.e. make the first worker a doctor) or build a Punishment Sphere. Then you can throw in several crawlers for mineral crawling, put them on a borehole, mine/rocky and 2 forests. Other bases make units (usually air) which you rehome to that poor base. Suddenly you can field a sizable army without any drone or support penalty for other bases.
Morale you say. You know that Children Creche is bugged and that it gives bonuses for factions with low MORALE SE?
Below are other reasons for not running warmonger settings, and here I compare them with their alternatives, not with the vanilla setting. For example, going from Wealth to Power gives you +12,5% morale boost (+25% on defence) traded for ~28% Industry hit (going from 1,1 Industry to 0,8 Industry)
- At war, you still need to get non-combat things going – you still build supply crawlers, you may want to build an SP, you want to build recreation commons in your conquered bases.
First and foremost, for a successful war you need a lot of probe teams.
- Of the combat units you build, some of them don’t need high morale at all. This includes SAM units (it’s funny how Green <2>-1-10 SAM smashes an Elite 8-1-10 Chopper, isn’t it?).
This also includes scouting units
drop pod units
probably artillery
Again, severe Industry penalty.
- But of course, some of your ground assault units could use a morale upgrade. Just visit your local Monolith to get one morale boost and cancel out the Fundie morale bonus.
- Morale disparity is also easy to make up for because of upgrade chances. After 2 battles, a Green unit will be Disciplined for 100% and Hardened for 50%, while a Commando unit has only 36% for the Elite upgrade.
- PROBE setting doesn’t actually give you any special bonuses for probing, Fundie only gives you +2 Probe team morale, which can be easily achieved by finding a nearby AI who says that crushing you is nothing personal, and then probe rape it for money.
But if you don’t want to be bothered, just build Covert Ops.
What is really important in + 2 PROBE setting is that it doubles the cost of mind control of bases and units. In fact, it’s crucial and it may actually save the Fundie guy’s life, because the FM/Wealth guy could sure as hell buy a lot. One minor thing: in the mind control formula, the energy reserves of the victim affect the price, so the rich guy always has an advantage over the poor guy.
And we could talk at lengths about what the Demo/FM/Wealth guy can do with all his energy, so let’s just assume he switches the slider to 80% cash and rushbuys units every turn.
I'm fairly aware with the detailed game mechanics and how they are abused, hence my searching for balance fixes to stop that.
Well, what I can say, of course if you’re gonna change so many rules, this will affect the entire gameplay and render my descriptions invalid. What I was trying to approximate was how things really are in my experience.
I think you're doing ok, but maybe there's room for improvement here. For starters, Children Creches do provide permanent morale bonus, in addition to that base-tile thingy you mentioned:
http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_morale.shtml (http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_morale.shtml)
Secondly, I must say I find it puzzling that you have such a hard time taking it from veteran players that things in SMAX are done the way they are actually done.
Choppers indeed are (too) powerful and AAA sucks as a counter. This is no esoteric stuff, in fact any average player could tell you that. But when this was coming from a very experienced player like Earthmichael, you appeared to remain somewhat skeptical.
Drop pod units are everything but niche. As a matter of fact, in the games I played this was the most popular special ability put in midgame ground units. You didn't really believe me that "chop&drop" is such a powerful strategy, did you? ;)
Because Earthmichael is very experienced playing in games where going for AAA will mean he'll get to D:AP as soon as (or even before) you get AAA, and then he can use needlejets for ZoC and stacking and terraforming destruction to beat you. If you don't need D:AP to counter D:AP (my proposed fix), then AAA as a counter to air power becomes a lot more appealing.
Experience can tell what happens, not what will happen after a given modification. For that, you need theory.
Well, as the saying goes: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." :)
But really, I'm going to state here what is probably like the most obvious thing in the world - you can't tell how much experience is important if you don't have experience yourself. And yes, I believe you do need exp to tell what will happen, because to tell what will happen it is necessary to know what happens right now. It's really simple - if you introduce a certain change to an environment, you won't be able to properly predict the post-change milieu if you don't know how it looks pre-change.