I like the Morgans, partly because it’s all about the money, partly because Morgan looks like an orgy-guy (I’ve always wanted to be an orgy-guy), and partly because the faction shares its name with one of my favorite alchohols.
Badtz: What Max said, although with a few caveats: there currently aren’t any synthetic fuels that are as cheap and as efficient as petroleum, and manufacturing such a synthetic might be significantly different on another planet, where you have different resources to work with. This background information is all presented in the game, but you have to take the time to read the description and flavor text to all your discoveries, which is a significant chunk of text for a computer game. 'Course, that’s one of the things that I love about AC. What other computer game qoutes Kierkegaard at you?
I love the University …
I tend to keep my cities tightly packed at the start so I can defend myself better …
that plus teching as many of the secret projects as I can tends to make for very very powerful cities which are more easy to defend again.
I have a hard time thinking there are no fossil fuels because:
1 I tend to beleive the theory that most planets conatin a high level of hydrocarben tar like yuck (non-bio theory of fossil fuels.
2 even if it’s not true (or if the designer doesn’t buy that) the planet does have life - so it should have some fossil fuels that are there.
3 Opal left a jerry can of gass there.
but even with that I can’t beleive they can’t use alchol distilled from food that they must have. Maybe they forgot to bring the right bactreia. Alc. fuel maybe is not the most ideal but it will fly a plane. Perhaps there is no O2 in the air (or no air)- now that could be a problem.
Well, according to the appendices of the rule book, they expected there to be fossil fuels there, but then found that the planet acts as a single organism…the ecosystem is so interlocked that when a living thing dies, it’s completly consumed by the other life forms on the planet…so there’s no material to turn into fuels.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the Alien Crossfire expansion? Amazon seems to be out of them.
Have you tried building tree farms and hybrid forests? Those are supposed to help tremendously.
Some of my favorite Secret Projects:
Command Nexus/Maritime Control Center/Cyborg Factory
Being able to crank out experienced units can be a lifesaver in combat.
the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm
Total immunity from probe teams - a must-have for the University.
the Space Elevator
With this, one can easily crank out one orbital improvement after another and derive the full benefit from them.
Another thing: does anyone else think the designers could have come up with a better name for the planet than “Planet”?
RoboDude: Well, its got a bit more zing to it than “Earth.”
As for finding a copy of the expansion, I doubt you’ll find it sold seperately anywhere. Instead, look for the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack, which includes the orginal and the expansion on one CD. Your best bet is to look in the bargain bins of your local software store. I poked around the EA and Firaxis websites, but it doesn’t look like either of them are still selling SMAC.
OK, the thing with eco-damage. It is tied to the number of minerals each city produces, as well as the “destructive” tile improvements of borehole, mine, echelon mirror, and condenser. The more minerals a city produces the more eco-damage you get. Little cities don’t get it because they produce only a few minerals. Improvements contribute to eco-damage even if they are not worked, although at half damage.
The solutions: build lots of forests, get tree farms and hybrid forests, centauri preserve and eventually temple of planet. But you still have to maintain low minerals or the worms will rape you. Sorry, I know you think you should have as many minerals as you want but you can’t. You have to spread your minerals between several cities.
A helpful strategy is to not build damaging improvements in the city radius, but outside, and work them with crawlers. In fact, crawlers are a key strategy to funnel food and energy into the city…obviously you can only do so many minerals. A typical mistake is to focus too much on minerals and not energy. If you have a high plateau nearby it should be crawlered and the energy sent to a science city, not built on. Don’t forget to make sea crawlers to funnel all the spare kelp back home. Especially get crawlers on bonus squares.
Also, clean reactors and probe teams can let you keep your mineral production balance healthy…that way you don’t have to produce as much minerals and risk eco-damage.
Diplomacy-wise, it often makes sense to give other factions what they demand. Sure, Yang and Miriam will eventually back-stab you, but so what? Just don’t give them your best tech. But they will eventually get the techs from the other factions, so giving away or trading tech is getting something for free. Especially give tech to Zak, so he doesn’t fall behind you…you want your partners to have almost as good of tech as you do.
If you have SMACX, the must-get is Cloudbase academy. That way all your puny cities get to take full advantage of skyfarms and can grow, plus all your choppers can heal in one turn in every city. Did I mention choppers? I hardly ever bother attacking until I get choppers. The AI doesn’t really know how to use them, but choppers and drop pods can chew through the computer easily. Remember, if you are going to attack, ATTACK. Attackers have a huge advantage over defenders.
My favorite thing to do? The one city challange. That’s right, just build ONE city. You can stuff everything into it, feed it with crawlers. You can also send back tons of energy. You won’t get planetary governor, but you also won’t be as much of a threat and will have more friends. You also will miss many of the key SPs that you are used to having. Don’t worry, you don’t need most of them, especially the “one X in every city” ones. The Merchant Exchange is your first priority. Oh, and you are going to need to make a beeline to the hab complex. Now, it wouldn’t be a one city challange if you got to keep captured cities. If you take over an enemy city, you just give it away to one of your allies. Nothing cements loyalty like the gift of a city. This challange is easiest to do as Deirdre, since you can get lots of free worms. Although it usually takes until 2400 or so to transcend, the game goes a lot faster…you have so much less to manage.
Alien Crossfire eh? I saw an add for it somewhere, a while ago. I’ll have to get it, cuz i like AC. I hope i can find it somewhere, though.
Ah ha I just beat it on transcend for the first time. Normally I get bored long before that:)
I don’t think eco damage has anything to do with minerals. Because I had several bases producing 30+ minerals with 2 eco damage. The bases with less minerals, but more mines had eco damage. Population also seems to do some eco damage once you get 10 and above.
In the expansion you should rush for green tech if you have the pirates. With isles of the deep you not only rule the ocean early on, you also have plenty of transports for later.
Eco-damage is heavily dependent on how many minerals you’re churning out…this is especially noticeable with boreholes. Flip borehole mining on and off and you’ll notice a major difference.
IMO, I think the ecodamage penalties, and Planet coming after your butt, are a great balancing factor to building up a massive industrial base. If you want to churn out an orbital facility every single turn, you darn well better be able to handle the consequences (which is progressively worse fungus creep and mind worm raids)
I disagree that the game heavily favors the attacker. With the use of bunkers (made by terraformers) in the right places, a defender, especially a mobile one, can be a very tough nut to crack. You bring in your bombers, and between turns they get nailed by interceptors. Choppers get chewed up by AAA units (and don’t even think of attacking cities with an aerospace complex) Your heavy infantry gets caught in the open by hovertanks. And drop pods deal damage to yourself, and are also prevented by an active aerospace base. And even if you have the biggest, baddest, highest-tech military in the land, the native-grown mind worms, Isles and locusts can eat you alive unless you maintain a specialized force to deal with them. 3:2 odds doesn’t seem like much, but it’s better than 1:15 of conventional weapons, and with the older mind worm masses, the fungus movement and attack benefits (I hear the expansion has a fungus warhead for ICBMs), the bio facilities, and the psychic Projects, you can really work over an enemy unless they trick their forces out with psych warfare gear (which gives your conventional troops more of a chance)
As you might notice, I like playing as the treehuggers 
My second, distant, choice is the Morgans, especially with probe teams. Towards the end-game you can just start buying everyone out, which seems so terribly appropriate for them 
The game is interesting on its own just militarily. The masterpiece of it is that it also combines economic, ecological, industrial and political aspects of the game at the same time, AND does so with incredibly good balance, and good AI at the higher difficulties. That’s what places it above Civ 2, even though, on the surface, the two games seem identical.
I need to pick up the expansion pack. Always meant to, never got around to it.
My last game stalled, though, when a faction I had on the ropes (Yang), being the last major power on Planet except for myself, and forseeing his own imminent demise, went to great lengths to acquire the technology to begin frantic construction on a planetbuster at a city deep within his territory. Despite my best efforts (and multiple reloads) I cannot find a way to stall, placate, bribe or conquer him in time to prevent him from turning my capital city into an inland sea. I cannot research SDI in time, and since I have a weaker industrial infrastructure, I can’t build my own 'Buster and do a preemptive strike in time (were I even willing to risk the Charter repercussions) I can still defeat him even after the nuking, and probably still win the game, but it’s a heavy price to pay, and one I’ve been searching for a solution to for some time.
I find it fascinating that a game can present such a believable (and relevant) dilemma, with so many possible ways of dealing with it. In its own way, the game is the perfect teacher of human history, despite being total sci-fi. It’s an excellent game, even if only a refinement of Civ.
Has anybody here seen the movie Baraka? Alpha Centauri takes quite a few of the scenes from this film for their “Special Project” movies. Such as the terrified Asian man in the Psi projects, or the chicken factory for the Cloning Vats.
Mekhazzio is right, eco-damage is heavily dependent on minerals. Your larger cities probably had treefarm or hybrid forests to keep down the damage. And I did say that mines, boreholes, condensers and echelon mirrors add eco-damage, even when they are not worked, independent of how much minerals they give.
A good strategy is to crank out crawlers and send them up to a plateau lined with solar panels and echelon mirrors. But you can get almost as much energy per crawler through sea crawlers on tidal harnesses, and it saves lots of former time. But wait until you get fusion, then skimships are as cheap as rovers.
Oh, another thing. Once you get fungicidal, fusion, and super formers you can still mass-upgrade your obsolete formers. You just have to hand design one on an infantry chassis, since the autodesign always picks rovers by that point. Then you can just upgrade the lot. If you have enough money you can throw in some armor too.
Now, attack vs. defense. I agree that strategic defense is easier. I suppose I should mention that “attack to defend” is also the best way to go. It would be better to have one best armor infantry and one best weapon rover than two best armor infantry. The rover kills the attackers while the sentinals protect the rovers. And the key to dealing with native life is to always attack. But, you’ve got to have decent morale units to do this. And your obsolute units are just as good as your front line units. And the greener you are the better your odds are, plus you can capture. I’ve always considered native units to be weaker than cutting-edge conventional units. My worms almost always get killed if they try to take cities and such.
I agree that the first wave of attackers often get killed. But the AI can’t keep up building enough defensive units. As the attacker you’ll seem to lose and lose and lose until suddenly you are cracking every city. This comes when the defender has lost all his offensive units and has to sit there and take your attacks. Plus they are usually very bad at retaking their cities. I usually leave captured cities almost undefended. And if he manages to grab one or two then you just grab them right back. The other thing to do is to park your attacking rovers under a needlejet. The AI will never build SAM units, so your rovers are immune to attack unless he brings out an interceptor. And if he does that, just kill it with YOUR interceptors.
You probably won’t be able to find Alien Crossfire by itself…but by now the Planetary Pack is very cheap. Sure, you have to buy an extra SMAC CD, but so what?
Yep, SMACX has fungal and tectonic payloads for missiles. Tectonic acts just like an earthquake and raises a huge mountain at groud zero, while fungal destroys improvements and paints fungus everwhere.
Now, what’s the solution to planet busters? Hmmm…I’ve hardly ever been attacked by one. You need to be waaay ahead on technology from the “mean” factions. Usually the best way is to trade tech like mad with the friendlies.
Oh, Sterra? I thought EVERYONE always played on transcend. O:-)
Late in the game, when fungal blooms and worm attacks get almost out of hand, I usually build special troops to defend against the worms. I usually also build special troops to attack the worms. Is it better to attack worms with conventional infantry, or is it better to use native lifeforms to battle native lifeforms?
I got tired of the game and switched back to Civ2. At least with that game you can see what’s going on.
That being said, my favorite faction are the Gaians. Efficiency is bloody important, particularly with a far flung empire. I think the Gaians actually gain tech faster than the University because of this. OTOH, if you get the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm (one of the most important Projects for any faction, IMHO), the University has no down side anymore.
Tactics: My favorite tactic is to have around four amphibious assault task forces - the strongest available ship and a transport loaded with the max number of marines. I take all the enemy ports I can, thus reducing the chance of invasion of my home territory. I simply defend them until I get helicopters, then start the slaughter.
Sua
Adam:
Again, you just need to limit your mineral production, and keep all polluting terraforming out of city boundaries. And improve your planet rating, and get treefarms. Then the only trouble is when you build the Voice, and you should be able to win in 2 or three turns after that…the worms aren’t so bad. And if you have manifold harmonics and all the tech and a good planet rating then fungus is the absolute best terraforming to have.
To “defend” against worms, all you need is 2nd line high morale troops and a good planet rating. And you don’t defend, you attack them first. Nothing like wiping out a giant stack of demon boil worms and locusts with a spare unity rover you’ve had lying around since the the beginning of the game…