I deleted SMAC on my other laptop. Since I've got 2, deleting it on both and swearing off for several months is a bit of an exercise. I was doing fine last game but got really really bored with it. 6 AM has a way of making one realize how bored one is. I'm not sure what the answer is, except to "try harder not to do boring things". Sometimes on a Huge map, I don't feel the game is inclined to cooperate.
Free Droning again. Huge map, random opponents, average settings. I start on a small island with so-so agricultural land. Not completely dry but no great shakes either. I don't even have any pods in view, and I am given a slow transport. There's a pod in the water so I pop it. I get an Artifact from that. As I'm on flat terrain I found a city immediately, figuring I'm not going to do any better by wandering around. My 2nd colonist, I head north, to rendezvous with my transport. It has to go around some fungus and I figure I'll lose no time on that maneuver.
I put my 2nd colonist on a land mass to the north. Then I pick up a scout with the intent of exploring a little bit west of where my colonist landed. Lo and behold, it's the Hive's home base! !#$!#$!!!@!@@ if I had avoided exploring, I wouldn't have met him, and I could have just settled undisturbed. But on a Huge map, what are the odds, to plan for that sort of thing? Would have been a rather different game, colony jockeying with Yang. As it stands, Yang has now majorly interrupted my colony spreading. I decline to go to war with him, I make peace. In fact we're even in a Pact for awhile. But the only tech I ever get out of him is Industrial Economics, and eventually he blows me off.
I sail west with my transport, which incidentally got wounded popping a pod in the water. No sooner started than someone sets off an earthquake and creates a land bridge behind me, cutting me off from my home island! Grr! Who the hell did that? There were no pods on Yang's island there, so there must be someone else right next door to me, to the west. Sure enough, it turns out to be Morgan. And he goes to war with me. It's pathetic as all he's got is a slow transport as well, but he chooses to sit on a sea minerals deposit and deprive me of it forever.
Eventually I take the long way back to my island and heal up my transport. I put 2 scouts on Morgan's territory, hoping to do "something". There's not much I can do as we both have synth armor and no weapons. I try stirring up mindworms in the fungus next to one of his cities, but it doesn't work. My guys just move into the fungus fairly easily. So eventually I just leave, because they're not doing any good here.
I colonize a small island to the southwest. I've got 5 cities on my home island, and 3 on this new island. I put a colony on a land mass to the southeast. I don't know it's extent, as I figure I need to strengthen that foothold before even bothering to explore. The Aliens are extant in the game. I know at least the Caretakers are present, and maybe the Usurpers as well. I got Cha Dawn's frequency from a pod, and he's not real friendly. Eventually he declares war on me. I'm about to colonize a land mass to the northeast, and I'm similarly cautious about who I could run into there.
As I write this, I've just gained Doctrine:Flexibility. I will go artifact fishing and try to at least finish The Weather Paradigm. A lot of players are trying to build The Command Nexus, so there's no way I'll get that. During this time, Yang went to war with Morgan and completely eradicated him. Morgan escaped in a pod so I may see him again someday. At least I've only got one neighbor now. War is pretty much inevitable, I just need to stall until I can prosecute it on my terms.
Later... I got roundly beat to coughing out The Weather Paradigm. I started it late on the small island to the southwest. So many factions were trying to build The Command Nexus and of course they couldn't all get it, so they switched to The Weather Paradigm and finished up. That left me with the possibility of getting The Merchant Exchange for all this trouble. Who friggin' cares?
Also irritating is I built a bunch of Energy Banks. I simply didn't have anything else to do, there was no productive use of my home island. I knew they were pretty much of no value but I built them anyways. And then of course when I finally got Doctrine:Flexibility, they delayed me building transports for several turns.
Both Alien factions are in the game, and this whole thing just made me itch. That was a pretty bad start. I don't see the point of belaboring this game, so I quit. Something about having a beer this afternoon, also made me inclined to delete SMAC from my 2nd laptop. So now it's really possible I'll take a break for months. The final act would be to delete it from the USB drive I have a copy on. Even that isn't permanent as I can always get it off the internet anyways. I'm shameless like that, having paid for the game twice in my life already. I figure I'm licensed and the internet is just my backup copy. Anyways time will tell if I will play again, but this particular game felt like a waste of maybe 3 hours this afternoon.
New SMAC quizzes available.
