Orbital Power Transmitters are useless

[bvanevery]

Yeah, ok, I am Yang on a huge map.  Efficiency 0, Economy -1.  I don't know if any Advanced Society can improve it, as I haven't gotten Cybernetic or Eudaimonic yet.  In the course of all my conquests I've built The Cloudbase Academy and 38 Orbital Power Transmitters.  I found myself wondering, why am I not rich yet?  My income is merely 240 credits per turn, in a Police State Planned Wealth Thought Control society with The Cloning Vats.  If I switched to Free Market I'd get a measly additional 40 credits per turn, not exactly compelling.  Reading the Help entry on OPTs, I see

Each Orbital Power Transmitter increases the energy output of every base by +1
Can only be produced by bases with Aerospace Complexes
Energy bonus is halved for bases without Aerospace Complexes, and cannot in any event exceed the size of the base

I have not discovered Habitation Domes yet.  I do have The Ascetic Virtues, so my bases grow to size 16.  Seems that the best I can get is +16 energy which is kind of lame really.  Even if I had Hab Domes, it seems I've already built as many OPTs as I could ever possibly need.  So I guess I'll find something else to do.

[Geo]

Found more bases? 

[bvanevery]

Found more bases? 

I am Yang on a huge map.

[Geo]

Children's Creches?

[bvanevery]

Children's Creches?

Eons ago.  This is late game.

[Kirov]

What Geo said. Yang relies heavily on the ICS strategy (Infinite City Sprawl). He needs to make up for his Econ deficiencies with his huge industry boost. Each base means a cheap Energy Bank and Network Nodes. But more important, Yang is never about being rich, but rather about churning out ridiculous numbers of offensive units. If you prefer a slower, more builder style, I recommend energy-related factions like Zak, Gaia, Morgan or Cyborgs.

[bvanevery]

I think for me it's more about preferring Huge maps.  Yes they generate tedium, but if the world isn't Huge it isn't even a challenge to figure anything out or make any strategic decisions.  And a Huge map, I think, does tend to promote a Builder style.  You could have near neighbors and have a conquest style earlier in the game, but early long distance conquests simply don't work on a Huge map.

[Kirov]

I'm afraid there's a trade-off between fun and micromanagement here. Basically, and especially with bigger maps, there's no such thing as 'too many bases'. This is more true for SMAC than even for CIV games before CIV 4 (I saw you mention these somewhere). The reason is more flexible terraforming - there are no real terrain-related limits on a base's profile, not like in Civ anyhow. Simply drop another colony pod 2-3 tiles farther and repeat ad infinitum (hence Infinite City Sprawl). It's one of the gameplay features which I'm not really fond of, but I still believe that SMAC was uncontested in the TBS department for many many years.

An interesting and long-term-oriented faction is Morgan. He's really good, but needs an experienced player to handle his penalties. And he relies on ICS on par with Hive. If you ever get tired with microing dozens of bases, just go with Lal. He's a decent faction with a nice vertical style of growth.

[bvanevery]

Basically, and especially with bigger maps, there's no such thing as 'too many bases'.

Sure there is.  It's the point at which you simply can't stand administering them anymore, as a human being with fingers that get tired, who needs food and sleep, who has <gasp!> responsibilities in Life, etc.  Personally I've minimized those, so you folks get these AARs as a benefit.     But let us not pretend for a moment that building infinite numbers of bases is some kind of Good.

Granted, I do not automate bases.  I am playing the game; if I wanted the AI to play the game, I'd set the AIs to play themselves.  Can't remember when I last tried to do that, but I think I accomplished it at some point in the distant past.  Either that or I'm channeling the ghost of FreeCiv.

And [Morgan] relies on ICS on par with Hive.

Perhaps you do, but I never have.  And yes, I can pretty much win any game with any faction under any conditions on Transcend on any size map.  Literally any size, I played vastly huger maps than Huge for awhile.  When I quit games, it's usually because I've been in such-and-such a position dozens of times before and do not wish to waste the real wall clock time.  I do not want to put time into suboptimal, subpar games.  Rarely do I actually get my ass handed to me in an unsalvageable way.  Only one recent example of that: I started on a small island with the Believers and signed a Treaty with them.  No no no no no!  Never do that.  You cannot out-jostle an AI for colonies on Transcend, they are given too many resource advantages.  The correct response is Truce, followed by war at the moment of your choosing.

Wanna make your life at SMAC gratuitously harder?  Play with supply pods only at crash sites.  Been there, done that, for a long time.  I thought it was so trivial to win games by popping lots of pods, that I came to regard it as a crutch or cheat.  But then after playing without them for such a long time, I came to feel it was a drier, more boring game.  So the pods are back, for enjoyment.

Anyways if you really believe in ICS as "the thing to do", as opposed to merely being something you can do, I've issued a challenge in the Nexus subforum where that could be tested.  Each player plays a single player game.  Each starts with the same map, same faction, same start, and we all compare how we do as time goes on.

[Kirov]

Perhaps you do, but I never have.  And yes, I can pretty much win any game with any faction under any conditions on Transcend on any size map.  Literally any size, I played vastly huger maps than Huge for awhile. 

Of course you can, why couldn't you? Transcend under any conditions is not that hard to beat after all. Like many others, I moved to multiplayer when I started to find singleplayer immensely boring. First you tweak the in-game options - like playing Morgan against 6 Usurpers on a Tiny map (max land so there's no escape). Then you go for the challenges - you don't use crawlers or choppers, etc. I like the 'one city challenge' (because I hate microing) but my favourite one remains 'switching sides' - every now and then you switch to the weakest faction and make it the best one. It takes a lot of time and experience to do it more than 3 times in a single game.

And then you realize that you could literally write your name with maglevs across the entire map and still easily win. Then the only option left is to go multiplayer, where you need to unlearn many singleplayer habits as they can get you killed. Not enough bases is definitely one of the most important ones. I try to hit at least 20 bases, of course it's not always possible. But 10-12 is definitely not enough.

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly about the map size. Are you saying that Huge and bigger are harder? This is definitely not my experience, but it's been ages since I played those. What gets harder? In my opinion, the bigger distance to the AI, the easier it is to dominate them as they let you grow unhindered. Whatever problems come with bigger size, a human player will always handle them better than the AI.

And many thanks for your invitation, but I'm afraid I need to pass on that due to my current RL schedule. And trust me, I'm not going to use ICS in a singleplayer environment. This would be boring AF. ICS is only good for certain factions to dominate a multiplayer game. Since I hate that, I don't usually take factions like the Hive (I like Morgan though and yeah I pack my bases super tight; come to think of it, I always do that).

I hope we'll meet some day in game, I see that you're an experienced player. However, this is the worst period in my life when it comes to commitment to SMAC. I'll let you know if anything changes. But I'm not sure if I'd like to go back to single player. Still, see you around!

[Buster's Uncle]

Seconded on that about Huge and bigger not being harder - when I first started playing at transcend, I had to go bigger right away; the AI's in inherent advantages are such that I couldn't win for a while unless I had time to get my builder empire established.

-BTW, Yang and Morgan don't actually ICS; they CS like crazy up to some limit to make a dense empire, than stop founding new bases.  I'm pretty sure some pretty elementary game-testing would bear me out, if you don't believe.  You could set up a basic scenario v the two with each carefully isolated on a largish continent, leave them alone for the first 100-150 turns, and watch both finite city sprawl.

[bvanevery]

What gets harder?

Staying awake.  Which is why ICS is the daftest thing I've ever heard of.

I hope we'll meet some day in game, I see that you're an experienced player. However, this is the worst period in my life when it comes to commitment to SMAC. I'll let you know if anything changes. But I'm not sure if I'd like to go back to single player. Still, see you around!

I think SMAC is totally hopeless for multiplayer.  I can't even stay interested in my single player games for longer than a week, and these multiplayer over the internet things can go on for months.  I wonder if playing on Tiny maps would work better?

[Buster's Uncle]

I've experimented with that - at the very smallest size the game will accept, you can see north and south edges at the same time -depending on your screen- and very little scrolling for east and west.  The game will start with only you and one or two opponents -two or three bases in all- and research goes astonishingly fast, considering you can only have one or two bases -mind you, I'm particular about only bases founded where they command all 20 squares unless I'm trying to crowd an enemy base out- before the game ends.

It's good for short/quick game, even the way I play, running out the clock terraforming - and for everybody else who tends to go for a victory as soon as they can, I think there should be a satisfaction to playing through a whole game in a half hour when you just don't have time to smoke the SMACX crack all day...

[Kirov]

Anyways if you really believe in ICS as "the thing to do", as opposed to merely being something you can do, I've issued a challenge in the Nexus subforum where that could be tested.  Each player plays a single player game.  Each starts with the same map, same faction, same start, and we all compare how we do as time goes on.

Funny you should say that, because just days after we spoke, Mart prepared a GotM. I have just submitted my first attempt and I'll welcome a challenge. I won't try to reroll the game until somebody joins the fun. Maybe you could check it out?

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=20906.0

[bvanevery]

I plan to at some point, but right now I've been bit by the modding bug.