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

[Buster's Uncle]

Added to my to-do list, high priority: take the text in these three previous posts and see how little space it can be crammed into w/o making the type smaller than 7 pt., at smallest.  -Aim for 9 pt. with editing for maximum brevity w/o leaving anything out.

Thank you, sir; you can not possibly know how grateful I am.  This is probably the starting point I needed.

[Buster's Uncle]

I have begun work on this...

[Buster's Uncle]

And oh lord, so many things came up.  This is going to take longer than I'd hoped - it'll need a line edit for brevity, for sure.

Still...

[benschwab]

I'm sorry but I cannot view the entire guide only the top of the image.  Also, I know I'm verbose.  I won't be able to help you with brevity.  Another possibility is to spin off some sections (e.g. a beginners guide to the base screen, a beginners guide to units) and reference these.  This will both allow for briefer meals to try and take in and allow a beginner to prioritize what xe wants to.

[Buster's Uncle]

That might be just exactly the ticket, now that you mention it.

That screenshot is only of the top half of the first page.  I can curtness-edit the HECK outta your (excellent; you're very thorough, and that's good) text, but busy night multitasking kept me from even finishing fixing the carriage returns.  I did this sort of thing successfully a decade ago with the How to Play Chess one-sheeter, and this's gonna be awesome and draw a lot of eyes here.

The pic was just to give an idea of what it'll look like when I'm finished - though one of the charms of the breaking it into two one-sheets is that it gives me a lot of room to do headers and break neatly into sections; it runs onto a fifth page currently at 7pt. type, a little smaller than I want, and I haven't been sure I could reduce it to two pages.  Two sections/four pages ought to be easy to fit, and make for a much more attractively laid-out and legible document - also, space to add a bunch of links to web recourses at the end.

This has high priority, 'cause I rather enjoy this sort of thing, feel a lot of pride in the result, and it needs to be done three years ago.  I'll keep you posted on my progress.

[benschwab]

Well...  Alpha Centauri is a little bit more involved than chess.

[Buster's Uncle]

The AI is definitely a lot further away from solving it, for sure.   And yeah; chess is a considerably more consistent and less-complex problem set by a couple orders of magnitude.

The problem set of a brief, compact how-to for SMACX is considerably more practical to address, however.

[Buster's Uncle]

Progress report.  I got some stuff done today, but not on this.  It's been sitting there open in my taskbar 13 hours, but stuff kept coming up.  I am too busy to live.  Like, I got none of my customary browsing done; New Horizons passed Pluto this morning and I ain't even looked at the science news, let alone posted any articles - and I need to go to bed an hour ago...

Maybe tomorrow - note that I DID do a How To Play Chess pt. 2 with a thoroughly annotated game to teach strategy and chess notation...

[benschwab]

You've said this needed to be done three years ago.  Not getting it done immediately seams okay.  Waiting a month or two for something that's been three years in coming, isn't bad.  Relax.  I can't tell you how to manage your life and I don't know your personality but I wouldn't worry about rushing hurrying this project.  I don't have the energy to pay you for that and I'm sure it will get done at some point.  Just relax, take care of yourself, do what else needs to be done, and this will get done in due time.

I can't comment on your chess guide without seeing it.  Sorry.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's linked in the OP.

Don't worry - I'm just in productive phase when my plate almost instantly fills to overflowing.  This WILL get done, and I'm explaining the delay, not kicking myself.

[benschwab]

It's linked in the OP.

It is?

...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]

Ok, reply #2: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=16547.0

[benschwab]

I apologize.  I could be dense but I'm not seeing a link to your chess guide anywhere... :-(

[Buster's Uncle]

$#@!  -multitasking.  This one's right:

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=4440.0

[benschwab]

Nice guide.  I still think it would be best to split it into several paged where each page is a single item.  A "setting up the game" page (perhaps a separate page for "factions"), a "base guide" page, a "unit movement and combat page," and a "early strategy" page would work with the main page referencing these.  If they were to be printed out a player could shuffle the pages around to reference what xe needs at the moment.

If posting these somewhere other than the wiki (where multiple pages would be easy and natural) then I would also post printer friendly pages too.  I tried alt-tabbing out of my AC game and it wouldn't work.