What's the deal with supply crawlers?

[Hierophant]

I have been playing SMAC for a long time. Seems like forever. And I am not very good at it (I am not good at strategy games in general). I know all the beginner tricks and tips, but I still can't play very well. Yet I still love this game.
I am curious about supply crawlers. It seems like everyone is in agreement about how powerful they are, but I don't get it. Maybe that explains why I am not so good. I build one, maybe two per base at most. What is it that I am missing about them exactly? I know you can cash them in to make special projects, I know they can ferry one resource from any square. I guess I should ask, what is the optimal (or better) supply crawler play?

[Nexii]

Mostly because of exploits like upgrading them to get way more minerals on cash in than what the rush cost would have been. And you get more minerals at low IND so you can tank IND, cash in, then boost IND

Otherwise they aren't crazy OP. 1 per base crawling nutrients is good. Or crawling a mine is pretty good too. I think I have them costed slightly higher than the default cost. And since my unit costs are flat on armor/abilities there's no temptation to exploit

[bvanevery]

If you want to see supply crawlers, thermal boreholes, and condensers fully exploited, go play Thinker Mod.  That's why I delayed all of these things in my mod and made them more expensive.  If anyone ever combines my work with Thinker Mod, the AI is not going to be able to exploit like that until late game.  Unless you let the AI get the Weather Paradigm.  Then 1 faction only will be pulling the early to midgame shenanigans, and they'll be doing it without supply crawlers at least.

[EmpathCrawler]

Crawlers are extremely powerful to the point that once you figure them out you may have to hold yourself back. You can free up citizens to work on better tiles or promote them to specialists. Try crawling tiles that are generally only good for one thing, like a rocky mineral bonus tile. Sea tiles are also good for crawling. Once you hit the pop limit, why work a tile for nutrients and energy when you can crawl the energy and put the citizen to work elsewhere?

[Hierophant]

Yeah I understand the general principles. I was just wondering if I was missing something.

[EmpathCrawler]

Try building a base with The Supercollider and The Theory of Everything and crawl a ton of energy into it. It will knock your socks off.

[Hierophant]

I'll definitely try that on my next game.

[lolada]

I suppose optimal use is to exploit them to max and then they break the game. They are like a free unlimited citizen that that channel resources to your base without food maintenance. At least in vanilla game where AI doesn't use them its totally game breaking if player spam them. T-hawk has that nice site with tactics... and pretty much every optimal strat is beelining and spamming bases and crawlers.

In Thinker mod for example AI uses them more and its good for AI. A bit annoying is then that player is supposed to use them as well or you end up falling behind _a lot_, So that equalizes it.

ICS (or something resembling it) seems to be one the best ways to play the game and its interesting that there you cover all land with bases so crawlers lose a bit on value. This is micro heavy and ton of bases is not fun - so at least i tend to space bases 4 tiles usually.. and that lets me use 1-2 crawlers per base.. rarely 3. Its also easy to see one could use many crawlers for single super base.. like that super-energy base. Or you could cover every sea tile and extract energy.. looks anti-fun xD. Logical use for them is single-resource tiles  - to minimize waste - so i usually place them on mines or condensers. And i restrict myself on those uses only. I tend to roleplay factions anyway to their strengths and play suboptimal.

Anyway - playing WTP mod at the moment and crawlers are costing there ton of minerals. They are much more sane - in this case its not sensible to spam them on forests - they take long to pay of.. so occasional use for mines and high nutrient/energy tiles looks reasonable. Losing them is also a pain. That looks to me like good way to balance them.

[Nexii]

Yea I modded crawlers up to 50 minerals for slow infantry, 70 for rover, 100 for sea crawlers. I'm not sure if that's the sweet spot. I would rather have seen a hard crawler limit per base size, something like 1 for a base without Hab Complex, 2 for a base with Hab Complex, 3 for a base with Habitation Dome. Not really a fan of taking things out of the game but I also wasn't a big fan of mass former/crawler spam.

[bvanevery]

My Fission Infantry Supply Crawler costs 100 minerals.  A Fusion reactor cuts that cost in half, 50 minerals, equivalent to an Artifact.  My intent is to punish any human or AI who wants to use them to crawl resources.

It does not affect one's ability to complete Secret Projects early at all.  One has always been able to make more expensive denominations of supply crawlers.  They cash at full value.  Once I learned this trick a few years back, I started making several denominations of crawlers, using abilities, armor, and chassis to create 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 mineral versions of them typically.  That way, when choosing what to produce next turn, I do not have to waste the mineral output of a city.  I can have almost exactly what it's capable of producing for those turns.

Nobody gets supply crawlers in my mod until late game.  They come after Hybrid Forests.  I never bother to make them.  Maybe they are still powerful, but if I'm not in a winning position by that stage of the game, I'm a big screw-up!  If people want to sandbox their way to victory that way, they can, but it shouldn't be that relevant in my mod.  I've sort of soft-retired the crawler.  I don't think a beelining to crawlers strategy can ever work now, as there are too many tech prereqs.  One should probably figure out some other way to win the game.

[lolada]

Been playing with 120 min supply crawler costs and that seems to fix a lot of issues. There's not much point to rushing them especially early on because even the mine takes 30 turns to pay for them. Placing Crawlers on forests.. something thats ok for awhile in vanilla does not look good anymore. Crawlers on condensers are sweet.
Later in game with +50% mineral facilities crawlers become more cost efficient, but its kind of ok because there's less turns to the end and bases get big so they can work mines/borhole around them.

One thing thats is really unfair vs AI is secret project rushing with them - as far as i know AI never rushes secret projects and that's like basically easy cheat to win.

[bvanevery]

The stock AI does rush SPs with crawlers.  Why do you think this is not true?  The problem is more that it may not have the crawlers around to do a good job of it.

Especially since in my mod, I made fission crawlers cost 100, so that fusion crawlers would cost 50.  The AI doesn't know to make a fusion version of the same design.  I was determined to defeat and penalize the Thinker Mod's exploit of the stock rules, if anyone sought to combine our works.  And to penalize human players wanting to spam crawlers for resources.  They're pricey enough to demotivate players, at least it demotivates me.  But it remains to be seen if someone can kick the ass out of my mod with the usual crawler abuse.  I do offer them rather late, that was my other major way of curbing the abuse.

The stock AI doesn't know how to rush SPs with money.  Which is a problem.  Whereas I accumulate big piles of money and buy SPs nearly wholesale.  I also cash Artifacts to get it done.

Nevertheless, I've managed to get the AI to win a number of SP races, by simply making SPs later, more expensive, and more diverse as to what you have to research to be able to start them.  I think there's inevitably going to come a point in the game though, where if you're trouncing the AI, you're trouncing the AI.  You'll be able to build all the SPs before they do.