Transcending quickly

[bvanevery]

Details jumping jacks

jumping jacks

MY 2313.  I've got Transcend Dudes now, so I no longer have to micromanage the Specialists in my capitol.  They're the best!  See, this is how they sell you on the Transcend idea.  They make you look like you're inherently cool and radiating all kinds of energy, instead of sitting around in a vat of blue liquid like the lesser dudes.  What they don't tell you is, battery power is all you're good for.  Yeah you're a lightning rod, but do you have an independent thought in your head?  Not for long, gonna get rid of all dem brains.

[bvanevery]

Details bigger test tubes

bigger test tubes

MY 2316.  I gain Quantum power and build as many labs as my money can buy me.  I disband Super Formers in order to avoid rush penalties.  All they're actually doing lately is terraforming the land around Aki's cities.  Hey she's my grateful slave, why not?  I freed her from the evil clutches of the Usurpers, before I wiped them out.  Really it's just a holding pattern, I'm nervous about leaving myself with zero terraformer capability. 

[bvanevery]

Details woohoo

woohoo

MY 2317.  I have achieved 1 tech per turn!  The Quantum Labs have done the trick.  Looks like my current social choices and budget are all required to achieve it.  Free Market forever baby, rip dem trees!  What Would Saruman Do?

[bvanevery]

Details quelle research

quelle research

MY 2320.  I am able to reduce my Labs budget to 30% and I still get 1 tech per turn.  I have piles of cash and nothing to spend it on.  I'm going to upgrade my units to Singularity but I'm waiting for a prototype to finish next turn.

[bvanevery]

Details low budget research

low budget research

MY 2323.  Labs at 20%, still 1 tech per turn!  Wouldn't mind hurrying up to win this thing though.  It's 4:20 AM.  There's been nothing quick about this game from a time usage standpoint.  Well hopefully I'd be able to run through it faster in the future.  Key is to stick with Free Market.

[bvanevery]

Details vote for your mother

vote for your mother

MY 2327.  Zhakarov calls an election.  This is just to demonstrate how much I'm overkilling this game.

Details showtime

showtime

I had the foresight to make some crawlers last turn, anticipating that I might need to make some kind of Secret Project.  Happy for it to be this one.  It's 5:10 AM and this has been a long time coming.

Details bulk matter pop

bulk matter pop

The Singularity Inductor caused some eco-damage.  It's supposed to lessen the amount of damage done, but since I had no factories, the jump in productivity was enough to tip the balance.  The Bulk Matter Transmitter exacerbated the problem further and now I've got my first good mindworm pop in quite a long time.  There's only 4 of them though.  Pity I got rid of my anti-mindworm units eons ago, as I had decades of stability.  Well I can start by attacking with that 1 mindworm I captured in the stone ages and have been saving forever.  I killed the rest with an Elite String Disruptor Hovertank.  It hardly took a scratch.

Details cheeky techie

cheeky techie

Fortunately I no longer need to do any research, so I can now drop Free Market like a hot potato!  Planet rating jumps from 0 to +5.  Just for I'm going to keep researching 1 tech per turn, because I've got more money than God.

I don't really have to leave a clean place, as I will probably Transcend next turn.  But I'm going to build Centauri Preserves and Temples of Planet in all the cities that are doing eco-damage.  Some cities I've already done that, and I'm still doing eco-damage because of my amazing minerals output.  Those cities, I'll build another anti-mindworm garrison unit.

Details need more sea crawlers

need more sea crawlers

That leaves my vast sea crawler fleet to assist me in final Transcendance next year.  Wow, sea fungus is worth 5 energy now!  To think all the work I did earlier in the game to get that kind of yield.  UN Social Council shall be the designated "Transcendance" city, as it has coastal access, no eco-damage, and is unlikely to be bothered by mindworms next year.

Details counting change

counting change

If that isn't enough, I've also got a few land crawlers to add to the mix.  I've made special denominations of crawler sizes, so that for any given base, I can make the crawler that completes in 1 turn.  That way I don't waste any minerals building them.  I figured out a few games ago that more expensive crawlers do fully transfer to Secret Projects.  I had so many crawlers this turn that I only had to spend 472 cash to rush the Voice of Planet.  Next turn should be cake!

Details dissed

dissed

Since I'm gratuitously Green this turn, I thought I'd try to make Deirdre my last minute ally in Eternity!  Guess she wants to stay behind and rot with the plants.

[bvanevery]

Details I have the best thoughts

I have the best thoughts

In general.  Maybe not at 6 AM as I finish this.

Details snacks

snacks

I got some fungal pops, and some cities are doing massive eco-damage, but only 5 mindworms seem to have shown up.  My Demon Boil is still healthy so it took out the main clump of 4.  The Elite Whatever took out the Spore Launcher.  I suspect the uptick in eco-damage is because I'm getting piles of minerals out of fungal squares now.

On to the main event!  Let's see if 20k credits and a pile of sea crawlers is enough to put this baby to bed.

Details cake

cake

Yep.  The crawlers were worth almost half the project.  I've got more than twice as much cash as needed.  In sum, I exceeded resources needed by a factor of 1.5x.

[bvanevery]

Details doh

doh

Dammit, the buttons didn't cooperate and I didn't get my victory monument screenshot.  This will have to do.  Transcend Victory in MY 2329.  So I beat Brecon's time by 8 years.  Have to be honest: there was nothing fast about this game at all.  6:30 AM as I finish this.  But at least now I have a better understanding of Free Market research.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've always thought the game design and details almost explicitly indicated Transcendence was the best victory while trying to pretend to treat all victories equally...  At first, it's certainly the most epic and interesting - but you've read my Roze story for the GotM -my inspiration was autobiographical- and know we think alike in how we'd react IRL fer realz...

[bvanevery]

Well from an advertizing standpoint, it's a case of "see how much content this game has got!  You will get your 40 hours of gameplay" or whatever people believed in back then.  However modern board games have taught me the perils of "overproducing" one's empire.  You only need as many gewgaws as are necessary to finish the game.  Modern board games often have conditions like "you end on turn 9" or some such to keep them short.  This makes it very apparent that if you spend a lot of resources on some capability, but you won't have that capability all that long in the game, it's not a profitable way to spend.

A partial excuse for Civ-likes is they're open ended and a bit sandboxy.  Somebody who fools around a lot, rather than focusing on how to win quickly, might not mind meandering through the tech tree.  I do wonder what good all the fungus production techs are going to do anyone though.  By the time you obtain those, you could have long since gotten your victory resources by other means.

When I contemplate possible RPG aspects of 4X TBS, I wonder what is supposed to make these changes in the game "interesting".  I spent an awful lot of this game just waiting for techs.  Hovertanks?  Useful in other games I've played, but not interesting in this one.  I'd already conquered Marr, could have won the game right after that, and made a rather slow effort at conquering him anyways.  I basically won the game, then declined to win and sat around to find out how long it would take to Transcend.  I don't think Quantum and Singularity engines have been interesting in any game I've played.  Too late in the game to be meaningful.

This also makes me wonder what it means to "win" in the real world.  Is the USA winning?  Is China?  Is Russia?  What would a victory look like?  I think people fantasize about the world being taken over by Nazis, but if one doesn't have world conquest, what is victory?  The English got about as close as possible to world domination, but where is their empire now?

[Buster's Uncle]

They didn't ultimately have a real choice, but the British DID choose to go along with LETTING their empire GO.  -And that got them a stable consensual world Commonwealth, to everyone's mutual profit and collective power, which is winning if you ask me.

I'm sitting amidst my ancestral heimat, which is a bit eroded by overpopulation these days, but not bullets or radiation, and I'm alive with real prospect of another couple decades in comfort, not mere survival, and that's pretty winning for the US, despite an actual fascist national political trend going (that isn't inevitably going to get worse, at least if we bother to fight back)...



I'd venture that the smart game design strategy is "an hour of fun -or weeks- to a game" w/ all the defaults all set to auto and governors - which SMACX actually did somewhat, and we're just the NOT-casuals, by the very nature of an online fan community.

My sister Mylochka's experience playing SMACX was I set her up with a copy -I legit own three paid-for ones- and a custom deliberately-super-OP faction I made a long time ago as training wheels for SMACX newbs while they learn the game, The SupahNewbs faction to be found in Downloads, and she won her very first game and had a ball - if she was much of a gamer and had stuck with it, I'd have pressured her to switch to playing Gaians before she got bored.  Sometimes an easy game is all I want...

SO - you make ALL the grognard elements optional and have-to-be-turned-on, I say, as the smart design strategy in building a game...

[bvanevery]

I'm sitting amidst my ancestral heimat, which is a bit eroded by overpopulation these days, but not bullets or radiation, and I'm alive with real prospect of another couple decades in comfort, not mere survival, and that's pretty winning for the US, despite an actual fascist national political trend going (that isn't inevitably going to get worse, at least if we bother to fight back)...

Yeah but I'm hazarding a guess from your avatar that you're white, as am I.  Blacks are not winning in the USA.  Some are doing better than historically, many are doing badly.  I see articles even in the local paper every week, indicating just how bad it sucks to be black, in general, in the USA.  60 year old unarmed black man gets shot to death by police here a few days ago.  Yes his behavior was erratic, he was being uncooperative in a traffic stop and supposedly tried to get in a wrestling match with a cop.  Details may emerge, but I'm not seeing the white guy dead in a similar situation.  I'm wondering if there would even be a situation to begin with.  The more I hang out in Winston-Salem during the winter, the more I'm made to realize how segregated my upbringing was here.  There's this whole other world in half of the city where people have got a pile of problems.  The local paper put out a murder map this winter, guess where all of them were?  Yep, the black side of town.

Other minorities aren't doing well either, look at all the people fleeing Mexico.  [Sleezebag]'s gonna try to get the armed forces to play Gestapo on the border for awhile.  If this kind of society is "winning", it looks more like Chairman Yang winning.

Does Miriam ever find God anyways?  How is that sect really supposed to win?

I'd venture that the smart game design strategy is "an hour of fun -or weeks- to a game" w/ all the defaults all set to auto and governors - which SMACX actually did somewhat, and we're just the NOT-casuals, by the very nature of an online fan community.

My play experiences over the past year, do favor longer games.  Especially to the degree they were AAR driven.  However I'm also conscious of the lack of value proposition, the long boring interludes where if I wasn't doing reportage on the games, frankly I would have quit and found something else to do.  I need to find a way to make a better experience out of this.  I find myself contemplating TV serials and why I do or don't continue to watch those.

My sister Mylochka's experience playing SMACX was I set her up with a copy -I legit own three paid-for ones- and a custom deliberately-super-OP faction I made a long time ago as training wheels for SMACX newbs while they learn the game, The SupahNewbs faction to be found in Downloads, and she won her very first game and had a ball - if she was much of a gamer and had stuck with it, I'd have pressured her to switch to playing Gaians before she got bored.  Sometimes an easy game is all I want...

My project of getting the neighbor kid to play has stalled.  Especially since he's not next door anymore, and I'm going out of town imminently anyways.  Spring has come so it's back to Asheville.

[Buster's Uncle]

White as a sheet snow.  The avatar is heavily altered from a washed-out photo of Texas rockabilly musician the Reverend Horton Heath, who looked like my dad a good deal, into the Brother Manuel alt. Believers custom faction - and the hair changed and face fur added to make an uncanny-close likeness that even impresses me that I nailed it so.  I'm grayer even when I did that, and the eyebrows are a teeny bit off, but that's close.

Hey, black folks nothin'.  I'm sitting in a state no longer a democracy -google it- where it's illegal for a trans person to pee, and I'm not even exaggerating much.

I was speaking of the US collectively, and nothing but, and I still stand behind my remarks.  -Notwithstanding your correct quibbles.



The SupaNewbs


In case the kid could use training wheels...




P.S. Darcell Grimes is a smokin' babe for a woman who has to be in her low 60s, and it's a pity Tammy Watford is gay...

[bvanevery]

Hey, black folks nothin'.

Actually, black folks sumthin', in NC, you and I both know it.  Legislature got caught red handed gerrymandering to suppress black votes, and with the voter ID stuff.  So hath said the Federal courts.  Aren't we about to have a special election or something?  I need to get my voting situation together, might have to do absentee.

I think we conversed before that SMAC didn't touch race, as a major political ideology, aside from the Aliens.  I mean, I have a hard time seeing the Morganites keeping black folks down.  Who do they make into their labor class anyways?  Yang used Genejacks; where do Morganites get their cheap labor from?

[Buster's Uncle]

No. I totally acknowledge the point; just saying the trannies don't even have human rights on paper in this state, on top of not needing a bad cop or a trashy brotherman to be in high murder-risk always.  Blacks have it suboptimally unfair - trans people are right on the bottom, under the vanilla gays, in this by Duke Power, FOR Bossman Duke, third-world banana republic of a state.

-I DO hope it's just a fascist phase, me being a passionate NC patriot...


SMACX does loverly for teh diversity, actually.


Finally, Ingrid Alstadt is a GODDESS.