AAR: I believe in the peace that comes after your destruction (Thinker Mod)

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Welcome to another After Action Report for Thinker mod! I've been playing SMAC and beating Transcend for many years, and recently installed Thinker AI. At first, it absolutely stomped me, even on Thinker difficulty, but I slowly figured out what I was doing wrong and, after a half dozen games on Thinker, started actually beating it. I've won six games on Transcend difficulty (four in previous AARs) so far, but the game is (usually!) hard for a while. Just how I like it! I'm considering tweaking the settings to up the difficulty a bit more, since I'm beginning to think it gets easy too soon... but we'll see. There have been some moderately close games in a couple of the AARs after all.

I'm playing with the latest Thinker Dev build (3/14/22). Many awesome changes recently from Induktio; I'll try to showcase a few of them as the game plays out.

Differences from default settings:

• New world builder disabled
  I don't love the pangaea-ness of the maps it made on my first few tries.
• Rare pods disabled
• Nessus Canyon enabled
• Buff to Planet Cult
  +4 Planet instead of +2.
• Nerf to Usurpers/Caretakers
  -1 INDUSTRY and no recycling tanks

Again, map is just Standard with middle-of-the-road choices for all customizations. Transcend difficulty, blind research, no Unity Survey. All factions randomized (note: I'm rerolling till I get a faction I haven't played in an AAR. For some reason I got Svensgaard twice in a row.)

Who are we this time?

Ah, our fundamentalist friends. It always amused me that the 'fundamentalist' faction in alpha centauri would be *radically* ecumenical today. They're quite fun to play, with that support bonus making early game so much less fiddly.

And our targets the heretics our loyal opposition is?


Well, whatever. They're all probe-bait to me. I hope I start on an island with Zak.
Note that in Thinker mod, -Research factions don't have their tech delayed as the datalinks says. On the other hand, -RESEARCH is worse in Thinker: at -2, your techs/turn is reduced by 20% instead of 16.66%. At -4 (Fundamentalist), your techs/turn is reduced by 40% instead of 28.6%. This is the flipside of Thinkers rebalance to keep Zak from getting insane research. +RESEARCH stacks worse than vanilla, and -RESEARCH stacks 'better' (ie, more potently, ie, worse for the player) than vanilla.
Apparently I misunderstood how vanilla handled RESEARCH. Turns out that stacking -RESEARCH has ALWAYS sucked a lot.


Very nice start with high nutrients and minerals.


Turn one spore launcher? Come now, how's that fair game?

I march my scout patrol over and murder it, but it does delay settling my second city by a turn (since a spore launcher can eliminate a size 1 city.)


Nice start with the Nessus canyon there! Two options: one, I get a great landmark. Two, I get a nearby enemy to murderize.

Either way I win and end up with the canyon!


Speaking of nearby neighbors, I stumble into morgan by just walking next to one of his bases. Yeah... war-time. I start focusing on Conquer techs as a hedge against this taking a while (since I'm already working on Centauri Ecology.)

I refuse peace, march on his nearest city, and keep exploring his territory with my scout.


Oh, that will help NICELY. I also start cranking our scout patrols as soon as I have 4 cities:

First city only has one defender, but unfortunately loses the coinflip and shrinks on killing it.

Second city conquered intact, without a scratch on the Ogre:

Looks like there's probably one more over on the mesa somewhere.

I hope I can get a submissive pact; morgan will be much better at teching than I am for a while.
Another nice Thinker feature:

You can see that I have one more drone than I should ordinarily (no inefficency yet, so I should be able to handle size 2 with a single police unit.) That's because it's a conquered base of course, and Thinker conveniently shows how much longer I have this penalty for. 25 turns seems really long for a size 2 city, but whatever. Time flies in the early game.

Now that I've basically beaten him, time to switch back to exponential colony pod growth!

And his last city...

falls, without him offering a submissive pact.


I wonder what dictates this. Was there something I could have done differently to get a submissive pact? Or was it randomly not in the cards?


Oooh, I get Uranium flats too? Truly, I get the most metal of landmarks.

I'm really getting a lot of space to expand here. Very nice. I think I might have to go builder... or at least Hybrid, which is probably as builder as Miriam tends to get.

It's worth noting that Miriam's builder game is actually really solid in spite of her -RESEARCH and no KNOWLEDGE, at least in my opinion. Consider the Weather Paradigm; we all know it's one of the best Special Projects in the game, and I don't think it's controversial to say that's mostly just because of the 50% increased terraform speed. (Your early access to advanced terraforming is of limited utility before you unlock resource caps, and, well, you get all that terraforming unlocked at mineral cap removal ANYHOW. It's nice to get a few condensers up before that, and the occaisional borehole on mineral/energy bonuses on flat ground can be really impactful... but it's nothing compared to 50% terraform speed once you can spam those ultra-long terraforms everywhere.)

But do you know what's better than 50% increased terraform speed?
Duh, 100% increased terraform speed!
How can you get that?
By building a second former in each base!
Doesn't that take a lot of minerals?
Doesn't your momThe Weather Paradigm take a lot of minerals?
Ignoring the cheap joke, sure... ish. After all, TWP is 20 mineral rows, and formers are 2 rows. Would you usually have only 10 formers? Plus, what about the support for all these extra units?


Yeah. Going from 2->4 units supported for free means terraforming happens a lot faster. And it's even cheaper on up-front minerals until your twentieth former! Of course, you may notice that I'm also building the weather paradigm in New Jerusalem. #WhyNotBoth?


Cashed in my two alien artifacts for a quick finish on TWP. I don't really have good production in any of bases. (Not shocking, since they're all size 1-2...)

That's a bit painful on a Miriam who has no friends, no enemies, and no probe teams like me, because I'm struggling to get any real research speed. Oh well.


Speaking of friends... they immediately extort me for High Energy Chemistry and Industrial Base, refuse to trade any techs, but do sign a Treaty of Friendship. (Trading plasma armour for friendship is admittedly weird for the believers to be doing, but I have a ton of land I need to eXpand and eXploit. There's no real reason to go to war offensively before air power, except to probe the [poop] out of somebody.)


And there's their border. Ugh. I was hoping I was alone on this island. Hopefully, it's just a couple bases and not their entire civ. Oh well, we're friends for now. And there's a lot of fungus over there. I need to finish expanding through my land quickly though to minimize how much they can claim.
Final Map:

You can see I've claimed the entire north, and I'm about to claim Metal Peninsula.
Final Techs:

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Expansion and "Friends"
All right, we're still on the 'spam colony pods' train. Lets get as many cities as possible! Who cares if we have interminable drone problems?!

Dangit, there goes my best drone bait. With him and Morgan out of the game, there really aren't any proper builders left. Lal has some advantage there I guess. Usually he's an a-hole unfortunately.

However, now that we're down to 5 players, I wonder how my expansion is going compared to the world at large.



Not bad! I have 33% of the bases on planet. If we make it to satellites without me getting my face stomped in, I should win easily. That's a huge edge.
My 27 bases:


I keep pushing south east until I find more spartan borders:


Looks like maybe I have a narrow connection with them, or an inland sea?

I FINALLY get Industrial Economics and try swapping to Free Market. It's no good. I can't quite get as much energy into useful things as now, once I drop the required 50% into psych to keep my size 1 bases from going rioty. Fine. Time to start focusing on rec commons. Maybe in 20-30 turns this will look a lot better.

I meet a Hive boat and:

No demand for tribute. Just instant war. Why so mad Yang?

After that, I almost immediately meet Lal, who is far and away the highest power faction (according the the nebulous power charts):

Hopefully I can do something for peace with him. I can't really afford grumpy, tech-leader Spartans, war-happy hive, and a war with Lal.


Ooooh, tough choice. But if I get a pact... then he'll probably be willing to trade me techs. I still don't have probes, so I have no catch up mechanism. And he's obstinate, so I won't get techs if I say no, and I'll maybe get war.

Yeah, gotta declare on the spartans I guess.

Wait, I have techs YOU want? YES PLEASE.

I get Gene Splicing, Ethical Calculus and Environmental Engineering. Nutrient and mineral uncaps and Creches!

Lal's map:


And immediately after meeting me, he calls a council to elect himself governor. That's cool, now I have Roze's comm. I hit her up, and he's delighted to trade me more techs. Probe teams, impact weapons, etc. All right, my tech is no longer hopelessly behind. She has Industrial Automation as well, but she's working on the Planetary Transit System. I'd like to have that myself, but seems unlikely, and she won't trade me the tech.

Final map:

Final tech tree:

Current blind research odds:

I'd be really happy with either of those top 2.

[Induktio]

Note that in Thinker mod, -Research factions don't have their tech delayed as the datalinks says. On the other hand, -RESEARCH is worse in Thinker: at -2, your techs/turn is reduced by 20% instead of 16.66%. At -4 (Fundamentalist), your techs/turn is reduced by 40% instead of 28.6%. This is the flipside of Thinkers rebalance to keep Zak from getting insane research. +RESEARCH stacks worse than vanilla, and -RESEARCH stacks 'better' (ie, more potently, ie, worse for the player) than vanilla.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here in the latter part. Thinker removes the start research delay from -research factions but otherwise social engineering research rating should work the same as in vanilla game. Thinker's tech cost algorithm doesn't directly factor in SE research rating. Instead, like in vanilla, SE research is only factored in when the labs output from bases in considered. They have two different numbers on the labs screen, "tech cost" and "tech per turn" for labs output from bases. So the mod shouldn't affect how SE research for labs output is calculated as long as the start delay is excluded.

[pblur]

Note that in Thinker mod, -Research factions don't have their tech delayed as the datalinks says. On the other hand, -RESEARCH is worse in Thinker: at -2, your techs/turn is reduced by 20% instead of 16.66%. At -4 (Fundamentalist), your techs/turn is reduced by 40% instead of 28.6%. This is the flipside of Thinkers rebalance to keep Zak from getting insane research. +RESEARCH stacks worse than vanilla, and -RESEARCH stacks 'better' (ie, more potently, ie, worse for the player) than vanilla.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here in the latter part. Thinker removes the start research delay from -research factions but otherwise social engineering research rating should work the same as in vanilla game. Thinker's tech cost algorithm doesn't directly factor in SE research rating. Instead, like in vanilla, SE research is only factored in when the labs output from bases in considered. They have two different numbers on the labs screen, "tech cost" and "tech per turn" for labs output from bases. So the mod shouldn't affect how SE research for labs output is calculated as long as the start delay is excluded.

Seems like I was confused about how vanilla handled RESEARCH. I thought that it worked like INDUSTRY in vanilla, applying to costs rather than production. I'd seen the comment in Details.md that RESEARCH applied to tech production and thought that was a change. But I just fired up vanilla and loaded a save and, indeed, RESEARCH impacts tech production there too.

Sorry for getting this wrong, and thanks for the correction! And thanks for a major AI improvement mod which has given this game a new lease on life for me.

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Uneasy Building



Well, fortunately I'm only connected to the spartans through a narrow isthmus. Unfortunately, they've already forward-settled it.

Doesn't really matter. I build a few impact rovers and move in on Ranger Barracks.


I also bring a few probe teams so I can catch up on some techs. I get Air Power and a couple of lower-tier techs, and then take Ranger Barracks. As you can see in that last picture, they're having real trouble with the Hive; I get the impression that they just don't have the resources to contest my weak attack at all.

Now that I have that front consolidated and recreation commons in most cities, it's time to make the Free Market switch. That's REALLY painful in an empire this large, with this many super drones. It takes a lot of psych to make any impact at all, but I manage to get all the cities happy with slightly above parity labs/econ. And that should get much better as I optimize on fixing the drone problems in the most problematic cities.


Huh. I just realized that this has to be pre-sentient algorithms. Noone else has it yet. Will I get a free Hunter-Seeker?

Wait.

Lal is already working on it. And 4 turns ahead of me, even after I optimize every spare citizen for labs. I sure hope he can't afford to rush it. Fortunately, he's in a giant grind-fest with Yang which is hopefully distracting him from rampant crawler/energy credit stockpiling.

Next turn:

Yep, that was exactly what he was researching.

The network nodes and whatnot I bought last turn sped my progress by a turn. Only 3 turns of lead. Also, wait a second. I have Lal infiltrated. He now has this tech ahead of me. Shouldn't that have reduced my cost for the tech? I thought that was how things worked in Thinker... checking Details.md, indeed, I should be getting a 10% cost discount now. I'm guessing this locks in when the tech is randomly chosen? Not sure.

Speaking of that Yang/Lal grindfest:


Someone raised a land bridge between their continents, and they seem to be pretty evenly matched. Most of the conflict seems to revolve around them using probes to buy ocean bases from each other. As a bystander, I can only applaud their willingness to pour credits into the void! Unfortunately, I'm at 'Seething' with both of them, so this is only a matter of time. I'm the only person Yang is at peace with, and our blood truce expired a while ago...

I finally unlock the Hunter Seeker Algorithm, and finish it in the same turn. Whew. No need to run fundamentalist for most of the game and kill my research.

I'm researching another Discover tech now. It has to be either Fusion Power or

Well then. My days of Free Market are officially over, and my days of popboom scaling have begun. I JUST bought Environmental Econ from Roze a few turns ago, so I haven't had an across the board nutrient fix to popboom heavily from yet. Most cities are size 2. Not for much longer though. I go Planned+Demo, and as hard on economy as I can without huge penalties from unbalanced labs/econ. I almost manage to rush two nutrient satellites every turn, missing one only a few turns. I scale up to 13 satellites, and start building hab complex->Aerospace complex in almost all of my cities. This might be the best infrastructure I've ever had for first pop-boom. Near universal recreation commons + childrens creche, hologram complexes, network nodes and research hospitals in most good cities. I scale up FAST.



And all of a sudden, all my terraforming is paying off like crazy. These cities have really solid minerals, and I'm turning out tree farms, hybrid tree famrs, and soon fusion labs all over the place.

Then...

I manage to be the first person to Mind/Machine Interface (followed one turn later by Lal.) I rush both secret projects though... for once, cloudbase academy just isn't that awesome. I already HAVE so many aerospace complexes.

I guess it's an infusion of cash, and denial of it to a less-well-infrastructured rival:


I keep pushing hard on the popboom, tipping back toward econ to rush hab complexes, tree farms, etc. Whatever I can do to keep every base I can growing every turn. I manage to snag The Ascetic Virtues too for +2 size; great additional scaling!

Unfortunately, I'm now on a bit of a clock. Yang and Lal have pulled farther ahead of me in tech. In fact:

That has to be advanced spaceflight. I don't have even Organic Superlube yet. And Yang has eradicated the Spartans and the University. He has a ton of bases to scale off satellites.

Still, I really need to finish my popboom. I'm just getting too much scaling now to switch to labs. I just have to trust that huge population and great infrastructure will let me keep up. I keep it up for another 8 turns, when I have 20 or so of my best bases at size 16, and then swap to full efficiency and labs:

Yang is 6 turns out on getting power transmitters.

I'll probably build them faster than him when I do get them, but since a recent change in Thinker, the AI really prioritizes them a lot more sensibly and I'm sure he'll be turning out a couple per turn.

On the other hand, WOW. When I'm full labs now, I'm blowing everyone else out of the water. I suppose this is why you don't let one the largest factions just build by themselves while you war interminably. We'll see if I can get advanced spaceflight before Yang has a chance to catch up.

Final Map:


I hit the Next turn button and:

Well. That's honestly past due. I'm surprised it took him till turn 2262 to declare on me. Of course, this resolves the Advanced Spaceflight issue. As soon as he finishes it, I'll just steal it.