Beginners' Strategy Guide for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire

[Buster's Uncle]

...We need one.  Anyone?  We need (more) content that's the sort of thing someone who just got SMACX will google for.  This thread title alone is gonna raise our lurker hits significantly.  Anyone game, please?  It's something even I, an SP exploit guy could do - but, as always when I get into a productive mood, my dance card has filled almost instantaneously and I need 36 hour days, or I would have gotten enough sleep last night (and the third thing I wanted to be doing tackled and the two things I did badly multi-tasking done well).

Any bright person who has played the game could do this - copiously illustrated a plus, but not required.  I will be happy to lend a hand as editor for increased English fluency, so no excuse for you furriners.

A post here, promoted to Front Page, posted to Articles and definitely our Wiki -it's something I can promote using directly, too- and I think we could suddenly find ourselves meeting new newbs every day, which we could use to be a robust community, ongoing...

Please, won't you help?

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't want to pressure anyone unduly, but I've put out a few feelers to qualified persons, both of whom are not active here - and am trying to reach out to Velociryx via a good friend of his with whom I'm in contact.  -I was doing that before I had this idea yesterday, because Vel.

Anyone could do this, really - and I encourage trying - it's for beginners, and good getting started advice is what's needed.  I'll help with the writing, but am short on time for the basic generating.

[Buster's Uncle]

I dug this up early in the week http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=4440.0 to post somewhere else, and it cannot be a coincidence that I came up with the idea in the OP a day or two later.  For those of you not clicking the link, a little one-sheet of chess rules I whipped together about ten years ago called How To Play Chess turned out to be very popular, linked all over creation from a little website for a small chess club in an obscure NC town.  Kinda figure it was the title, y'now? -Also that I did a good job.

So maybe the ball will begin rolling if I free-associate a few things I reckon ought to go in the aforementioned SMACX guide for beginners.


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Read this guide through and then play the game a few times on citizen difficulty, not trying particularly hard to win, but trying things and exploring the world and how stuff works.  Then read the guide again - it'll make a lot more sense after you've fooled around with the game at some length.  There is no substitute for just playing.

There's a lot to assimilate in SMACX as you open it for the first time; all of us were intimidated.  You can do it.  The tour is on by default - leave it on and read it until you've got this stuff down.

F1 is the keyboard shortcut to the Planetary Datalinks.  Read that sucker, piecemeal as you go or in full, but refer to it frequently.  An edited and corrected version is available for download here: [link the latest edition of the GooglyBoogly/ete  Comprehensive Datalinks Update]

Talk about 4x.  eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.  Explain each and elaborate.

Talk some basics about units, the unit workshop, facilities, growth, and I dunno; this is for beginners, so can't cover everything.  Encouraging them to look at the game info resources and play and learn the way the rest of us did is the most useful advice in here, I bet.

Some breakdown of the factions - strengths, weaknesses, the way Lal goes crazy a hundred turns in, basic play strategy  (builder, conqueror, and what-all else?) and which tend to work best for which faction...

Always colonize the Monsoon Jungle ASAP if you can.

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Suggest more ideas, pick apart mine, whatever.  Pick some point made and write it up a paragraph or two for the guide. 

We can do this, and I picture we go with the How To Play Chess model - a one-sheeter, front and back page, done up as a neat .pdf (I got somebody who will do that part if I've typed up and formatted the document) suitable for printing off as a sort of cheat sheet to have in hand.  I'll put the old site banner logo on the top, (bottom for a version to share with other online SMACX nexii, 'cause more polite/paletable for them) hyperlinked to AC2 - and search engines can read .pdfs, so we'll end up linked and reposted around the webs no matter what, our URL and that title spread all over the place.  That would be good for this community.

Thoughts?

[Buster's Uncle]

I left out linking the latest edition of Vel's stratetgy guide we host at the end, noting that it's advanced for accomplished players.

(Try to contact Vel for permission to do a carefully-formatted version once I get a copy of Works, or something else able to do text columns and the other formatting stuff I need for Beginner's guide, running.  We can insert some little illustrations if space permits - and Vel's guide is long already, so less space constraints for it.)

We have the option of extensive hyperlinking of resources and further reading.  That stuff works in Works documents and the .pdf releases I have in mind.

[Mart]

I believe, that Vel's guide is one of the best. It is an old one, though Vel released around version 4.5? (which is later than his book, hard copy version (4.0) you could buy in bookstores/online printed).
The guide is a bit long, but there may be general parts, let me see...
We have here in downloads section version 4.0.

We may create a compact version, but I am not sure, we will easily achieve something better what Vel did.
I would link new players with that pdf in downloads section.
And recommend them to read part of chapter 2:
- "Early expansion and growth"
- "Terraforming 101"
That's about 11 pages, that should get them quickly into fun-playing SMACX.
Velociryx has excellent style of writing, I mean it is very pleasant to read his thoughts on the game and its strategy.
So if after these 11 pages they are not hooked into reading more, they are not "guide-reading folks."

I am still thinking about modding. Standard SMACX is great, but we can all see where it really lacks. I think about creating something, that would recover from these problems.
Reducing micromanagement, making late game more interesting, rebalancing builder/momentum, when having these, then we would need guides for the new strategies.
Yitzi made recently so much work with creating many new options for modders. They cannot go wasted.

[Buster's Uncle]

We can hyperlink things of that sort at the end...

We definitely should.

[Buster's Uncle]

I opened Vel's 4.0 yesterday (I think the version I read many years ago was the pirated and garbled edition, a huge .txt file.  What we host is insanely nicer) and then kept getting interrupted and didn't manage to actually even give chapter two a quick skim.  I'm busier than a [insert hyperbolic joke] lately, so busy juggling so many things in progress that I didn't have time to skim a chapter of promising source material (to maybe steal [crediting, of course], ruthlessly edit for brevity and so on), and I. read. fast.  Faster than [insert hyperbolic joke building on the last in absurdity - perhaps something like George Clooney can get a date, before, then, Charlie Sheen picks up skeezers backstage at a pron awards show, here].

This is why I need help, is all; I want this thing showing up on search engines three years ago, and I need copy to work with.

[Metaliturtle]

I'm interested in such a guide

[Buster's Uncle]

Am I really gonna get left dangling on this?  Really?

I got MSWord working, so the formatting is totally doable.  Seriously; go have a look at the How To Play Chess thing.  I covered a lot in a small space.  We can do this - let's do it faster than leaving all the work to me will take.  It'll be better with your input, too.

[ninja'd]
As a reader, right?

[Metaliturtle]

I'll read some stuff for ya

[Buster's Uncle]

Start here.  http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=91

You're closer to beginner than most here, and your input could be very helpful.

[Metaliturtle]

20 pages in and Vel's guide jives with me as far as similarities to CIV games and rudimentary understanding of SMACX already. 

[Buster's Uncle]

  It's kinda CivII with more advanced graphics and mo' features - and a story.  I luvs me some II.

You want to look at Cpt.2 for our purposes...

[Metaliturtle]

most frustrating is the format I get that it's supposed to be printed but still...

[Metaliturtle]

Vel waxes philosophical a lot, what I'd like to see as a beginner is a 10-30 point checklist for a decent start (I get that there are variables that may influence it)

something like terraforming>scouting>zerg rushing etc. would even be helpful