Come on Earthmichael, it's just one screwed tech choice, happens all the time in SMAC! I knew beforehand that I'm screwed with mine and hadn't even mentioned it until you brought it up. ;)
I played Aki for a moment. You can pick Industrial Base and then take PlanNet in 2107 and you still can't afford Planned anyway, so you won't actually see any difference. Still better off than me.
The scenario that you are having trouble with Miriam, was that a scenario you created with the 99% water? I personally don't much care for most heavily water maps, except the one time where all 4 players were Pirates.
Most people do not race to the middle on the vets map; they develop the primary features of their own continent first. I personally tend to build a land bridge to the continent before I develop the middle too far, so that it is easier to defend.
K, I've really appreciated your contributions all over the forum in the last month, while I've been in a non-talkative mood. Much of the trick to getting those strategy discussions going is persistence.
Would you be interested in becoming a CMN, perchance? Ask sisko for training.
When you said you use that energy bonus on the top I guess you meant building a solar collector? I'm going to forest it I think. Good idea with this land bridge, I keep forgetting about raising terrain because it spoils my improvements so much. If I remember correctly (do I?), it affects rockiness so that you can end up with rocky under a condenser or rolling under a mine. Unexpected fungus also can occur, not to mention the impact on moisture.
Re. 1) I'm sure we just have a misunderstanding when it comes to the definition of ICS, it can't be anything else. On the one hand, ICS is that very specific strategy of tight spacing, city-borehole-city, low infrastructure but keep building enormous numbers of colony pods up to 150 or 200 cities. And here I understand how you can disrupt this process. What I really mean by ICS is that SMAC (or CIV2) favors tight spacing and horizontal development, almost unhindered by such petty measures like bureaucracy. People do tight spacing, they crawl nuts, they keep building bases even after the 20th one - that alone fits the definition for me. What I would like to see is a civ/smac-game where you're better off with 6-10 well-developed cities.In my analysis, one IS better off with highly developed cities verses lots of small cities. That also has been my result in gameplay as well. However, the expectation that 6-10 cities will do the job depends on map size, and I don't think you can actually make use of a significant portion of even a medium map with only 10 cities. I don't try to artificial limit my cities, but I do try to make sure each city controls enough land to have significant size and leverage, certainly much more than the 4 squares per city common in ICS.
2) A given approach /strategy/unit is OP for me if you do it most of the time. Of course cancelling choppers will considerably slow us down (remember they're out in our game;) ), but jets will still comprise most of our armies if only for their movement points. The war will still be in the air, only not so drastically OP.My approach is always tailored to the situation, i.e. my faction, competing factions, map, special rules, etc. That being said, just like in chess, there is an opening book of a few strategies that are reasonable for the initial turns in various situations. It is after this point that the game truly develops (just as with chess, only much more varied).
While we're on the topic of ICS, a couple of questions (mainly for Kirov, but Earthmichael too when he does have time):
1. By city-borehole-city, I assume you mean a borehole every 4 squares (minimum spacing) and a base every 4 squares, so what goes in the other two squares?
2. For the second type of ICS (tight spacing, crawl nutrients), is that high-infrastructure, or low-infrastructure? And what's the terraforming involved?
As for Civ, I bought and played Civ 5 including the Warlords and BTS expansion packs, and I found the game just boring and frustrating compared to SMAC.
I was going to describe to you that screenshot Petek, thank god he helped me out. As you see:
BCBC
NNNN
I try to be adaptive with terraforming, which is why I adapt my spacing to terrain and not the other way round (which is why 1x1 is never so strict). I can go a tile farther if needed. Flat, arid, rolling/moist and rainy/flat usually get forested. I almost never level down rocky squares, they go for mines. Coast is for boreholes. With EcoEng I build some condensers, but soon after I'll try to build tree farms. I never build echelons and shun collectors. Bonuses matter a lot, but even the energy bonus I'd rather forest than put a collector there.
Infrastructure: core bases improve vertically, peripheral ones build more colony pods.
It took me a long time to get convinced to this, because I'd rather have a game with wide spacing preferred, where most tiles are worked and not crawled, where the placement of bases matters more.
Where N means farm/condenser (and enricher once you can)?
Why do you specifically build boreholes on the coast but not inland? Also, once you get thinkers (or better yet engineers) I think crawling nutrients is more efficient than forests even with Hybrid Forest.
And even with tightly spaced bases, the boost from facilities is worth the maintenance cost...perhaps a good step to weaken ICS would just be to increase maintenance costs slightly (which will of course cost more for strategies with more bases.)
I can agree we share the same concern, but increasing maintenance will rather boost ICS. What should be remembered about ICS is that each subsequent base, even an empty one, is beneficial to your empire for energy and industry reasons.
Kirov, I believe Yitzi is right, that the bureaucracy is 7.
Titzi, this is early game, there is no way that Kirov could have gotten to Democracy yet.
and I believe we both have 4 bases right now. In a normal single player situation I stop at the first limit and try to get some drone-related SP, I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do this time.
Every base after the bureaucracy limit costs two drones somewhere
so it is not worth building bases past this limit until you have some drone suppression technology available. A SP is ideal, but I would consider expansion with Rec Commons also.
So normally one only builds enough colony pods to get to this limit (7 in our case), and switches to something else at that point (typically terraformers, supply crawlers, and whatever buildings you have the tech to make, since we have no military worries for now other than mindworms).
By the way, just so both of you know...I'm pretty sure that any faction files are loaded when the game begins, so it'd probably use Kirov's settings at the time he started the game; changing the file afterward won't help any.
He's right and I think it's the scenario creation that matters.
1. I currently use the scient patch, which I think is standard for games on this board. I don't know much about the kyrub patch.
2. Is it possible to mod the techsteal ability into a current save file? (I don't know anything about what can or can't be modded.) If not, I guess I will live without it. As you are saying, your commerce ability probably won't do much good unless you can befriend an alien. So let's just say that we cannot treaty or pact with the aliens, even a surrender pact.
Oh my God, I'm like the most embarassed person on the planet right now. :-[ Feel free to kill me. It turns out I was playing with a modified alphax.txt before applying the patch. At the moment I'm too ashamed to admit what was changed and I swear I had no idea how this happened. But we need to reload, this was all cheating.
I think some alphax.txt variables also are fixed by the scenario, so you might want to just check that they actually were set wrong in the game before you restart.
No, it's the research rate and I'm sure it's not scenario-dependent because it has just changed when I applied the patch.
Yeah, the Rules section is among the non-scenario-dependent stuff (well, at least what's there so far is; due to the limitations of unofficial patches, the stuff I'm working on adding will not only be scenario-dependent, but probably even carry over from a saved map file; I will, however, provide appropriate versions of the default Planet maps as well as any other common maps that people want it for.)
Well, the early turns go fast, so lets just give it another try. Just post the corrected scenario file, and and I will launch the game over again.
Are you using the scient patch? I just want to make sure we are both patched the same way.
Well, that can be really helpful. I didn't even know you can play with different alphax.txt, I thought the game says something.
I don't get why they bothered with those pesky 'reload' warnings if you can get away with stuff like that.
Doesn't the game warn about discrepancies in IP games? Or is it just my imagination?
Children Creche bug is solved
Most people don't know how to abuse that sort of stuff.
I wouldn't know; it's entirely plausible that having different values in IP games will cause bugs, even if it won't for switching in PBEM or SP.
Which bug is that?
Also, in the course of fixing the Stockpile Energy bug, Kyrub seems to have introduced a more minor bug, in that when it shows the energy from a base (or even faction-wide income) it does not count the results of stockpile energy unless you stockpiled energy last turn.
What I meant was if you can play MP with modified txt, there is little point in banning reloads.
And most people know how to modify their files. I think it was part of SMAC's popularity back at the time where games were not that easily moddable, at least not to my knowledge.
The old datalinks say this should happen at the base tile:
if MORALE_setting >=0 add 12,5% (equivalent of + 1 morale) to combat
if MORALE_setting < 0 put exactly the bonus = 12,5% to combat (ignore negative and add 12,5%)
But as it is right now, CC affects units rehomed to CC-base, units attacking from CC base and units defending at CC base, all in a different but bugged way. In short, you receive morale penalties under positive MORALE value and vice versa. It also did funny things with the drone riot penalty, I don't remember.
Could you take a look at that?
Bummer. How do you know that, do you use this patch?
I saw many times Santiago trying to wage wars under FM, you can imagine what it looked like...).
I'm going to contact kyrub at 'poly and see if we can get him back to work on his patch. This seems like an important improvement.
I just want to make sure that this is a true report, and not a buggy game: you have SP started at 2 of your cities? I understand why you would do that, no issue there, I just wanted to make sure that there is not a bug.
I did not know that. I tried copying my GOG game folder to another location, but it seems like the save files want to go to the original folder. Is there a way around this?
;morgan;
Hmm, strange. Meanwhile, one thing - you do remember to pust stockpile energy after units, don't you? Unless we want to switch to kyrub.I don't want to switch to kyrub yet; it seems a bit unproven for now.
Stockpiling is allowed (remember to insert “stockpile energy” to the queue, but only after units!)
Earthmichael, the stockpile energy bug means that completion of buildings does give you money, while completion of units doesn't. This is why we make up for the latter. If you enter the stockpile after facilities, as I noticed you do, you get the exact opposite - you don't get the money the game would give to.Oh darn, I see that now. I did not read carefully enough, and just inserted stockpile after everything!
I always thought this is quite confusing, which is why I was very specific on that one in the very first post:Stockpiling is allowed (remember to insert “stockpile energy” to the queue, but only after units!)
But worry not, it looks like it won't matter much anyway, I'm going to lose with you. :) While I could call my energy advantage as comfy, your industrial output is significantly bigger than mine, I don't see how I can catch up. Let's play on for now, but I even see a moment ahead when it'd be a good time to surrender. Let's click around some if you're fine with that. Oh, it won't be easy! Well done! ;b;
;lol I've come to think that the only viable opening with techs (if not Morgan) is CE, then IA, then D:Flex (or D:Init if you're in the mood) and then either EnvEcon or D:AP, depending on the situation. Full possible tech slider at least until IA, cash for SE harvested from MW.
As for the beeline - I meant a CMN-made balanced, unknown map with zero-to-low number of formers. Without lovely starting points where you can go about and build colony pods without prior land improvement. Hence CE first. Then IA, for obvious reasons. Then sea, so you can (and you have to) explore.The timing of CE for me depends upon how bad the map is, but to answer your question, I do generally wait on CE even with a 2 CP / 1 scout start, or even with a single CP start.
EM, do you also wait with CE in the single player standard "2 colony pods, 1 scout patrol" issue? Because I can hardly imagine such an opening.
... So we can kill some time if you want to, but I won't catch up and I can surrender in this very moment.I understand being busy. I am not right now, but November and early December were quite busy for me. So we can postpone any further games until you get some time clear. I think it is a great idea to play any map on your own first if you can, before MPing. Of course, sometimes the MP map is secret, so you can't do that. But I would definitely encourage playing the Vets map on your own to gain experience with how to best start from each of the 4 starting positions. (The positions are not exactly equivalent, although they are pretty balanced.) I also did this where I controlled two factions, to get some experience of how a 2 faction vs. 2 faction game could work.
Your notes on CE are interesting, maybe I should try it out as well. Still, the Vets is a specific map. I wonder what you think about unknown maps where stuff like AI and exploration is an issue.