Peacekeepers - same map, same start

[Buster's Uncle]

Looks possible to me. [shrugs]  Not trolling at all this time; I'm customarily running out the clock by around MY 2300...

[Mart]

It is normal year, if you think about it, on standard size map. Going into other victory conditions, one may not see that often, but when going for Transcendence Victory on standard map, this is the case. In late game, a skillful builder can out-build/out-research AI opponents, who would not be able to pass player's defenses. Then fast growing energy incomes make it possible to get 1-2 techs per turn! Someone playing really tight might get even more, I think. Whole tech tree is 85 or 86 techs? So after getting technologies, that multiply energy, allow for build-up of energy infrastructure, which are somewhere in the middle of the tech tree, then you can enter period of roughly 40-50 turns to transcendence, as I estimate. SPs, and particularly Ascent to Transcendence  are instabuilt. AtT is 2000, so standard crawlers of 30, you need 67 of them. On mag tubes, they can reach AtT base without move cost.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's really 78 techs, isn't it?  There's something like 85 slots, but the rest are dummies.

[Mart]

I just counted in alphax.txt, there are 89 slots, from which 3 are disabled. This is without TT1.
SMAC vanila may have less slots, but I haven't checked.

[Brecon]

Sorry for the late reply.

If you are interested here is how it went:

With not having waste resources fighting for land I was free to build bases across the continent.  I also built the WP and ME early in UN HQ which opened terraforming options and gave a nice tech boost.  Then I terraformed the continent and afterwards sent the terraformers to raise some land and build boreholes.  The energy from those was crawled by UN HQ which also built the supercollider and theory of everything along with purchasing a crawler most turns.  Unfortunately I did not realize which category the tech for lifting energy restrictions was in and so for a while I was working with limited energy.

[bvanevery]

I'll peruse at some point.  I just finished a rather comparable game, started next to the Monsoon Jungle and was unopposed.  Transcended in MY 2329.  So now I know what is possible.  Sounds like I played a rather different style than you did though.  I made few cities, mostly just around the Jungle.  No boreholes, just Hybrid Forests.  I did crawl a lot, but aside from my capitol, I don't think it even mattered.  If I were to do it again, I would crawl only from my capitol.  If I had nothing better to do, I'd send crawlers to my capitol and assign that as Home.

I could have outright conquered everyone easily 100 years earlier.

[Buster's Uncle]

That was this http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=20914.0 wasn't it, b?

[bvanevery]

Yep.  Plenty of details for the curious.  Basically, tech research rapidly accelerates at the end of the game.

[bvanevery]

Ok Brecon I've perused your saved games.  I'm baffled that it seems like you built quite a bit less of an empire than I did, in that "comparable" game I just played.  Yet, the difference in our Transcend times amounts to a mere 8 turns.

The biggest difference I'm noticing, is that I played the end of the game with no crawlers from my capitol.  I had a lot at one point, although they were only crawling forests for 4 energy, not boreholes.  I cashed them all in to make some Secret Projects.  Your capitol at game's end had double my capitol's tech output, about 2000 vs. 1000 for labs.  It is quite possible that everything else about my empire was a complete waste of time, and only energy crawling the capitol actually matters.

[Buster's Uncle]

MP teaches one to work all possible advantages and efficiencies micromanaged VERY fine and exactingly, and I say that not knowing at all if Brecon is even any good against seasoned human MPlayers...

MPower is MAX, is all...

[bvanevery]

Um, frankly, looking at Brecon's saved games, he didn't build remotely near the number of city improvements I did, or get the populations I did as early as I did.  But it seems that none of this matters.  I predict that only energy farming a research capitol matters.  I intend to prove it using the Believers.  Although, not quite yet, as I'm worn out from 2 days of slugging at this "quick" Transcend game.

It looks like my understanding of the budget wasn't problematic at all.  I had no idea that energy crawling the capitol could be this decisive.  I've done it plenty in various games, but I was never really looking at it with an external metric, like "beat this time".  So conceptually it's always been in the realm of "I guess this helps... but I can't tell."

[Brecon]

I crawled with the capital since it has no energy loss to inefficiency and it had the secret projects that boosted energy and labs.  So energy going there gave a labs return several times the same amount going to any other base.  In a single player game, once you have the terraforming tech and energy restrictions lifted, crawling to the capital with secret projects should work pretty well for tech no matter how bad the factions' efficiency rating is or undeveloped the other bases are.

I view my first game as the one to count for the competition and so I was not interested in spending a long time micromanaging the game to finish a few turns quicker.  Specialists were only used to deal with drone riots and bases other than the capital were sometimes left to stockpile energy in the late game.  In total the game took about 5 hours (less than 2 minutes per turn) which in terms of real life time is quicker than taking over militarily.

In a multiplayer game this strategy would be very risky since the crawlers are vulnerable and one planet buster would take out most of the factions' research, although micromanaging would be fine since taking several times longer on a turn would be no problem.  But I am not really sure of the differences between single player and multiplayer since I am only part way through my first multiplayer game.

[bvanevery]

I've started on that "prove it with the Believers" game and so far all I've proven... is.. that... my...... research....... is..    really......... really......... slow.  Can't seem to get Planetary Networks and nobody will trade it with me.  The Virtual World hasn't even been built yet, an accident of everyone being in land proximity to each other and at war, I think.  I'm the biggest power and the Governor, but I still don't have the troops to overwhelm anyone.  I might be getting there soon though.  Very slow game in real time too, I think I've been playing 5 hours and am only in MY 2214.  1 AM as I write this.  Maybe the slowness is from all my manual terraforming.