AARG!

[bvanevery]

Ok I'm weak, I reinstalled SMAC.  I've had enough of the Free Drones for quite awhile though.  I thought about all the factions, their formal relationships via the social engineering choices.  There are at least 9 factions that "can't choose X".  The Free Drones are the ones who can't choose Green, and boy I think it has a disproportionate effect.  I couldn't think of any theoretical faction, any mod, that would explore the social engineering choices any differently than the factions already do.

I thought about all the history of all the games I've played this year.  All the many factions I've focused on for a time, and how their play styles differed.  Quite a lot of them, I had no desire to revisit them again.  I'd really done their stuff to death.  The Free Drones were the only one I really hadn't, and now I really have.

So in the final analysis, what seemed most enjoyable?  Pirates!  Why be annoyed by them, when you can annoy other people with them?  And they don't have any social choice restrictions.  Yes I've done plenty of aqueous civilizations in the past, I've certainly done many games all in a row with them before.  I've become bored with them before too.  But maybe now, I'll play differently?

One thing I know doesn't actually work with the Pirates, is trying to drown everyone in a nuclear holocaust.  It happens too slowly, it really doesn't kill enough enemy bases to be effective.  And it wrecks any land terraforming you've done meanwhile.  So I won't be doing that sort of thing.

What will I do?  I guess we'll see.  Huge map, average settings, random opponents.

One benefit of being the Pirates, I remember, is it takes quite awhile for anyone to screw with you.  Your "moat" keeps you relatively safe from enemy incursions.  So if you want to sit back and build, you can.

[bvanevery]

I start next to The Garland Crater, which is an island all by itself.  Of course I settle it.  I try to pop all the pods on it before doing so, but there's a fungal stalk on the southern tip of the island.  I thought it didn't look that tough, but it killed my scout.  Sea and settlement logistics, with fungus in the way, keep me from getting to that 1 remaining pod.  I did pop a Monolith in the middle of the island, so my base near the center of the crater, will be my "Secret Project cranking" base.  I have already fished 4 Artifacts out of the water, which will make that a lot easier!

Safe Haven, I settled on a sea nutrient touching the island.  My 2nd colonist, I circumnavigated the island looking for some similar beneficial resource.  However everything was covered by fungus.  I ended up on a sea nutrient adjacent to a small spit of land to the south.  It's at the very bottom of the map.  That land had 3 pods on it.  Popping them triggered a fungal bloom, rendering the land useless.  Again there's a stalk and 1 pod that didn't get popped.

I checked who's in the game on Turn 1.  I had fantasies of making some empire more grand and impressive than anything any other player could possibly imagine.  The Caretakers, Usurpers, and Believers are in the game.  The latter can be rather spammy in the ocean, so that could pose a problem.  However the Believers have a really weak start on the graph, so I don't have anything to worry about short term.  I got Aki Zeta's comm frequency from a pod, and we became allies.  The Gaians and the Spartans are also in the game.

I have found the Caretakers a distance by ocean to the west of me, but we can't talk yet.  The west was mostly explored by my initial scout ship.  I haven't built any other skimships to explore with yet, just 2 transports fishing stuff out of the water.   Thus I've explored only some to the east, and not much to the north at all.

Currently I have 2 cities in the water, and 2 on The Garland Crater.  The sea cities are working on sea colony pods, as they were both settled on nutrients, and they might get completed when I pop a pod.  The central land city will start belting out Secret Projects any minute now.  I think I will start with The Human Genome Project, as I've already had my citizens get a little cranky due to all the food.  I could finish that in 1 turn!  Maybe I'll just opportunistically block other factions from starting secret projects, finishing things as soon as they try to start.  My Artifacts are legion, and I think I can keep getting more of them.

My research foci are Discover, Build.  I wonder if I will beat others to Secrets of the Human Brain?  I'm definitely going to try to get The Virtual World.  Aki already has the tech, but she's small and nobody's going to beat the minerals I'm sitting on top of.

Later...  That unpopped pod next to the fungal stalk on my island, triggered an earthquake!  So now Safe Haven is a land port and I lost the sea nutrient it was on.  Port Svensgaard is a 1 tile sea bridge to that small land mass to the south.  My island has doubled in size and fortunately, none of the Crater squares with the extra minerals were affected.  The land is not habitable yet though, it's just a big patch of fungus.  I founded 2 more sea bases next to 2 nutrients I passed when circumnavigating the island.  Sea Formers are working on developing those.

The Caretakers summarily declared war on me without any negotiations, as mute Aliens are inclined to do.  As it happens I have no interest in negotiating with them either, just stealing from them.  I got their 2 techs: Progenitor Psych and Field Modulation.  I will be armoring up all my cities shortly.

I discovered the Usurpers on a land mass to the northwest.  Good, maybe they can fight each other.  Marr declared war on me immediately.  Whatever, more to steal if he's even got anything.

I amassed seven Artifacts.  I completed The Human Genome Project without challenge.  Then I banged out a Headquarters, The Weather Paradigm, and The Merchant Exchange in 4 turns.  This knocked the Aliens out of any Secret Project competition.  Now I have begun The Virtual World and still have 1 Artifact left.  Aki Zeta has switched to that as well.  We have about the same number of turns to go: 23 for me, 22 for her.  But I have an Artifact and she doesn't.  I've got 6 cities to her 3.  I'm very actively fishing stuff out of the water and am way better at it than she is, so pretty much it'll be cake to beat her.

Unfortunately she does have Doctrine:Loyalty so she is likely to get The Command Nexus.  I'd like to have that, but I can live without it, and I'm not going to research for it.  I'm keeping my Discover, Build focus for now because I'd like to get Secrets of the Human Brain.  Deirdre got it already; I went Planned and that slowed down my research too much.  But it got me piles of Secret Projects cheap so I'm da winnah!

My cities are building Network Nodes in anticipation of The Virtual World.  I plan to "go big" and not spread out much for now.  Particularly since Planned puts me at -3 Efficiency.  There also isn't much of anywhere to go anyways.  The East is pretty empty, mostly ocean, no factions.  The Northwest has a big land mass with a lot of fungus in the way.  I've got 2 free rovers exploring it, and I killed 1 of Marr's colonists.  The North I haven't explored as much, but I don't think there's anything there, just water.  I have a pretty big moat around me, with the Caretakers the only potential threat.

Sooo... fishing Artifacts out of the water, from the very start of the game with nobody bothering you, is insanely profitable.  Way better than waiting for those backward retard Free Drones to figure out how to make a boat.

Later...  I did great.  I beat my allies to The Citizen's Defense Force, for instance, even though I got the tech way later than they did.  I took a Caretaker city and went back and forth between Truce and war, depending on the needs of my allies.  I fished pods and got the occasional Artifact.  I got Cyberethics and Pre-Sentient Algorithms at the same time.  I had just gone Power and was going to start a war, and then I have these Secret Projects to worry about.  So I considered going Democratic Planned Knowledge, which would have given me a net efficiency of 0.  That would have been fine for my highly centralized empire.  Meanwhile, Industrial Automation and Adaptive Economics continued to elude me.

At 5 AM I just found myself bored.  This is nothing I haven't seen before in hundreds of games.  So I deleted it.  I even wiped the thumb drive this time.  It's time to find something else to do with my life.