Never played it before and just picked it up from the GOG sale, what should I expect?
also
>Favourite faction and why?
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?
Never played it before and just picked it up from the GOG sale, what should I expect?
also
>Favourite faction and why?
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
|
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
If you know the right cheat code there's a hidden cut scene showing Deidre and Miriam engaged in a steamy lesbian sex scene.
Ok. What's the cheat code.
faction and why?
yang since by the nature of playing yang do not have to play against yang
Miriam is the best, everyone else builds a godless transhumanist dystopia.
Also if you conquer Zakharov as her you can get all his network nodes and steal tech with probes during the war.
stop larping its embarrassing
You will never be one with the planetmind
>everyone else builds a godless transhumanist dystopia
As opposed to Miriam, whose dystopia is godful
Yes.
Favourite faction is morganites because who cares about transendance or world conquest when you can just buy the world with an economic victory? Not recommended for a first time play. First time play, its best to go with gaians (easy growth), peacekeepers (easy happiness), the spartans (easy defense).
Believers, hive, morgans are three factions that work a lot better when you've got some familiarity with the game.
University is in between.
https://pastebin.com/QgEvG3ET
>Higher resolution
Add DirectDraw=0 in the .ini file for SMAC or SMAX - it will make run the game at the desktop resolution; the only graphical drawback is that in the "customize random planet" menu the background won't be animated.
>Higher resolution & UI imrovement
Install PRACX patch https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=14308.0 which is running for SMAC and SMAX. Adds:
- windowed mode,
- higher resolution,
- viewing tiles by hovering over them (V hotkey),
- potential yields view in the base view,
- alternative map view modes (elevation, rainfall, rockiness, faction territory),
- smoother zooming and scrolling.
Besides disabled "customize random planet" animation it also makes the mini-map view box unresponsive to the scrolling.
>In-game help update
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/comprehensive-datalinks-update.291246/ - corrects and expands the description of techs, abilities and so on. Available only for SMAX.
>CPU usage fix
Some people report high CPU usage, this fix works with SMAC/SMAX:
https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=20433.0
>SMAX vanilla conversion
https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17869.0 - allows to play SMAC in the SMAX engine by removing all expansion assets.
>Unofficial patches
Several fan-made patches fixing bugs and improving AI:
https://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Category:Unofficial_patches
>Custom factions
Not an exhaustive list. To enable a new faction in SMAX you need to open alphax.txt, find #CUSTOMFACTIONS line, and add the name used in the new faction .txt file like this:
#CUSTOMFACTIONS
FACTION, FACTION
No more than 7 custom factions can be added at the time.
In SMAC you can only replace existing factions (plus features introduced in SMAX won't work).
https://alphacentauri2.info/My%20Custom%20Factions/Custom%20Factions.htm
https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=102
>University is in between.
It's the easiest faction in the game.
Op here, first off I love sucking sweaty wieners as I am a gay, second off I saved this thank you for the info.
Anyone got any funny suggestions for RAPING frens for our first mp game (provided we can make it work)?
Worm rushes are really difficult to stop for new players in my experience. Play deidre and go for the immediate free capture on a worm, then have that worm constantly move back and forth in fungus and work to capture more worms. Then send them all next to your neighbor's border and invade, or if they haven't seen you yet release them all and pretend to be sympathetic as the worms murder them. Bonus points if you can find a monolith to make them all bigger before release.
I tried Cha Dawn for the first time and could easily defeat my neighbor with my starting worm despite late start
Noice!
I got the game ages ago but could never adapt to the UI, it's awful.
you just gotta learn the hotkeys and it gets bearable.
also get Yitzi's unofficial patch for the best vanilla experience
i think there are others like PRACX or something that improve the UI
>get a mod for the best vanilla experience
das rite
you got a problem with that, filthy earthbeing?
My favorite trick is to capture Lal, have baby mindworms inserted up his rectum, and then have his anus sewn tightly shut.Then we shoot him full of all sorts of drugs. Mostly sensory enhancers and time expanders, so everything becomes incredibly intense and seems to last forever.
The mindworms will get hungry after a few days and begin eating their way up through his intestines towards his brain. But being babies they are quite weak and so this takes a long time. The screams Lal makes are quite entertaining. Especially when we gently jab him with a neuron lance, that sends the mindworms into a frenzy. Many weeks of giggles to be had. The children in particular enjoy watching the spectacle. We give them sub lethal electro-darts to throw at Lal, They call it "shrieking".
I am not sure if I want to play this game if it attracts sicko-freaks like you.
How do I play this shit? I have never played a civ game before.
set your terraformers to auto
Forest forest forest
Don't think too hard. If things are working, let them be. Eventually it'll make sense
>what should I expect?
It's civilization in space, with some additonal cool features like being able to terraform the planet.
Is there any unofficial patch for Linux?
Every base faction is fun except Lal. More votes for the supreme leader i-win button, who cares.
>More votes for the supreme leader i-win button
True i-win button is bribing AIs for the vote. It's easier than spending effort and resources on building up relations the normal way.
>Is it possible to choose exactly what new techs I want to research or can I only choose the type of research (build, explore, etc)
It's customized in the rules, option "blind research". Aliens in SMAX have a directed research by default.
>Is it a good idea to let certain units like the formers and crawlers automated?
I've never tried but I don't trust AI on this. There are many variables (resource caps, bonus tiles, terrain features) that factor in how to develop tiles. IIRC you can set formers to autobuild roads, I'd not trust AI with much else.
>you can set formers to autobuild roads
Can you set them to autobuild a specific thing everywhere?
no, they have a couple of auto-settings and that is not one of them.
You can set formers to auto remove fungus, auto make roads (they will prioritize mapping between bases), a few other specialized autos iirc like improve home base, and general auto. All the factions can work pretty well with all those settings barring a few outliers, but its certainly easier to optimize when manually doing things and the one big issue with auto-remove fungus is that mindworms can pop up and kill your formers easier. Personally, I'm lazy about terraforming so I usually just use a mix of the autos depending on what I need/want and then mix in a couple manually controlled ones.
Note that the general auto-terraforming generally does not plant many forests, and if you want to play a game using very minimal formers usually "forest and forget" is the best way because forests auto spread (and will replace fungus when they do) making them ideal for cheap players or those who want to put their production toward things like military early.
I'm playing for the first time, this game is AMAZING and HORRIFYING at the same time.
I was playing through the tutorial (quick game) and when I finally managed to defeat Miriam, she was captured for "interrogation" then it played a cutscene with her screaming in agony inside this magnetic sphere.
You guys lied to me, this is not a comfy space building game, this is stuff of nightmares.
Two things I didn't figure out so far:
Is it possible to choose exactly what new techs I want to research or can I only choose the type of research (build, explore, etc) and the techs of that type will be developed at random?
Is it a good idea to let certain units like the formers and crawlers automated? Will they optimize the tiles when automated?
>a cutscene with her screaming in agony inside this magnetic sphere
But that's the best part!
...and then you can imagine yourself coming into the room, discarding your clothes, stepping into the sphere, and beginning to slowly oil down her hot naked writhing body, all while softly whispering into her ear "Where is your God now?"
>random techs
One of the settings when starting a game is something like "Directed Research", but it lets you pick techs.
>former automation
Ideally you do your forming manually. Forests are good for improving the shittiest tiles since they set resource output to a fixed 1/2/1 while other improvements give modifiers to their tile. Forests also make a tile into difficult terrain so they're a good way to prevent getting dogpiled by rovers/probes/etc. I don't know why I sperged about forests in particular since there are plenty of interesting ways to terraform.
>amazing and horrifying
Yes this is accurate. It lets itself get grim in places, without drowning the whole thing in grimdark.
I think I'm near the end now, I have more bases than I can manage, about to annihilate Miriam, Yang has been gone for a long time and I have some late techs.
I got the tech that lets you raise locusts of shiron, I invested a lot in techs that benefit aliens and they seem to be just as powerful as my great boil worms.
I also got a tech earlier that lets me use fungus like roads and makes them produce bonus nutrients. I'm considering tearing down all these forests and spamming fungus everywhere, my army is almost entirely alien and apparently I'll get benefits from fungus.
>the fungus got to him.
Sad. Bye bye earthdeirdre. Stop we no.
>You guys lied to me, this is not a comfy space building game, this is stuff of nightmares.
What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.
How does this game have such great writing? Every game that tries something similar comes out as a pretentious cringe-fest
They just put a lot of work in, and then edited down the bad parts.
There were seriously badly written parts originally, like the written part about the murder of the captain. But this all got cut out.
It's like the first star wars movie is pretty decent, but you watch some of the cut material and it's an absolute cringefest. These days it's a lot rarer for material in games to get cut, so you get all this bad stuff bloating it up.
It also has to do with how education has changed, but that's a longer conversation.
>It also has to do with how education has changed, but that's a longer conversation.
I'd be interested in you spinning this out a bit more, if you get the time.
I'd love to go into it more, but I don't have the time for effortposting.
The quick and short of it is that students arrive at higher eductation, whether it is art's college or university, with bright eyes and ambition and the strength and vitality of youth, and they are guided to use their creative talents towards ugliness. This either crushes their soul or at least, warps what they produce. You can go to art exhibits of any nearby art college to see it in practise. First year students still produce things intended to be beautiful, even if their hand and vision is unskilled and underdeveloped. But with each year you see that their hands do not continue the practice and that their vision is becoming skilled and cultured, but towards things nobody want to watch or experience. Fourth year students work is horrendous to watch, they're like the meals served in the movie brazil, pic related. There seems to be more effort in the explanation and description than the actual work. I say seems, because I know how much work goes into their crap in practise.
After education, students learn to shake this off, typically in their late twenties or early thirties, but by that time they've missed the most vital period of their life. Both mathematicians and wrestlers do their most vital and essential work before their thirties and it's almost as true for artists. Alexander conquered the world in these years and he did it because he had excellent guidance of his youthful energies. We are doing the opposite.
Pardon the lack of examples, and the emphasis on broad language as I said, I don't have time to really get into it just now. If you want to get a bit of a better understanding I'd say, watch the first half of roger scruton's documentary on beauty. It should still be up on youtube. In the first half he asks the questions relating to this. In the second half he gives his answers to the questions and it's a lot less valuable, in my opinion.
It's true. I know the quote is met with eye rolls and demeaned as copium by the most educated. But for the average person - you go into college ignorant but capable of reasonable dynamism and able to apply your average intelligence to what little you know. You come out equally ignorant of anything worth while but with all the specialized knowledge you require to be persuasive in your stupidity. Thus, while there the last century has seen nothing that is both innovative and beautiful; (think roof of sistine chapel if you need a definition for beauty but have a job and don't have time to read Aristotle's Aesthetics - as long as you are able to see that beauty for what it is without getting mired in vulgar relativism, you instinctively have the gist of it), there is plenty of innovation in ugliness.
So you see new things in the 20th century like a crucifix in a bottle of piss sitting in a museum - ugly and without any meaningful deliberate commentary (ironically, unbeknownst to the creator, the only commentary is how we would not do that to a Koran, and that the existence of such a display is proof only that we live in a society whose decadence immune system is so weakened we not only allow, but celebrate it, whereas a healthy society would see judicial authorities race to try and execute the creator before the mob has the honor of doing so). While any attempt at beauty requires one to find a fringe artist recreating previous incarnations of beauty (neo-gothic, neo-clasical, etc) and met with zero acclaim by his peers.
Tl;dr: there is a reason the man who first properly defined morality as we know it today insisted that ethics is just half of the picture - with aesthetics the equally crucial second half of morality. Morale decline is as blatant in the arts as it is subtle in the institutions. And we have the unique pleasure of living in an era where "progress" happens at such breakneck speed, you can see this in action over the span of a single life time
I'm a schoolteacher, what you say is more true than most people seem to realize. The worst is yet to come, we're dealing with a generation that simply isn't willing to spend a couple of hours reading a book and improving their skills. They want everything resolved immediately like it's a tiktok video. Reading a dozen of pages from a book or watching a 2 hours and half movie is simply something that is becoming beyond their attention span. It's scary.
>simply isn't willing
Doesn't matter if they're willing. They're completely incapable even if they would be willing.
Their reward systems are so fried by ritalin, games and social media.
It's the aliens. They can't into philosophy.
Oh great. So in addition to moral decay they're literally getting stupider
I've witnessed the metamorphosis of 13yo girls who started the schoolyear wanting to become doctors and politicians and by the end of it they were casually discussing how to open onlyfans accounts as minors, how to land a rich sugardaddy and how to sell feet pics on instagram. China is going to eat us alive.
>Civilization that literally existed longer than your own is gonna win
Expected, really. What's unexpected is the strange death of the West. Nobody predicted this save for a bunch of people who were pushed into the fringes of society for having unacceptable views.
The whole "5000 years of history"-thing is a bit of a larp anyway. China has risen and fallen, been overtaken, mixed and so on countless times in history. The main constant is the name.
China completely destroyed their past numerous times and more recently than the west during their cultural revolution.
That's not the fault of the school-system, that's just girls going through puberty and meeting boys, this makes the inner prostitute come out. As in, you can't be a prostitute before you are sexually developed, but girls don't turn into prostitutes, the ones that become prostitutes were already prostitutes inside before.
you imply that girls who AREN'T prostitutes exist
Yes, my wife :3
>muh madonna prostitute complex
>t. homosexual feminist major
>t. incel who thinks he understands everything
hey homosexuals, no politics unless you're discussing the pros and cons of extreme, ruthless ideologies on an alien planet
>Gaians aka veganas
Deirdre is obviously a turbo-feminist bimbo and that is why she deserves to be nuked into the fricking ground she loves so much.
>Spartans
Santiago is unironically the least feminist character in charge. Can you do the job? Good, pick up the flamethrower and roast some mind worms. No? Get the frick into the children's creche or cafeteria and support the people who are actually going to help us survive.
>Believers
Miriam probably has something stupid approximating the female hypostatic in her belief system.
>Morganites
Feminism is good for business, fricking basedjacks from the U.N. cities will drop their "hard-earned" energy creds for every insipid e-thot that Morgan's society supports.
>Hive
Everyone is a troony. Enough said.
>University
The eggheads at Akademgorodok will have definitive proof that men are better at women in science, warfare, business, and basically anything that an early settler society will need on Chiron. But how do THEY cuck out? They'll be too afraid to release the data because then they won't be able to keep chatting with the Gaians on the hyperlinks.
>U.N.
Holy shit, Pravin is such a fricking SIMP that he carried the fricking genetic code of his dead wife just so he can reincarnate her, only to have her move to Morgan's cities for BBC and OnlyFans hyperlink vids.
>>Hive
>Everyone is a troony. Enough said.
yang is the opposite of sentimental, and troonyism is nothing if not sentiment
Yang will mess with your genetic code to make you whatever the frick he wants you to be. If he wants you to be a troony, you will goddamn be a troony and you won't ever even question it.
Now the real part that's a frick up is
>But how do THEY cuck out? They'll be too afraid to release the data because then they won't be able to keep chatting with the Gaians on the hyperlinks.
Imagine Zak's faction not following the science. If he won't release the data to the Gaians it's because they're his mortal enemy and he doesn't want them to know his research, not because he doesn't want to offend
you don't think those sweaty nerds won't try to get some nice stinky gaian puss puss? you might be right. now i just wonder how good their game is. University dude walks into a Gain bar, what's his opener?
>University dude walks into a Gain bar, what's his opener?
Wow, you girls are so swole, did you just workout?
>University dude walks into a Gain bar, what's his opener?
>Girls wanting to start an onlyfans as 14 year olds is just them going through puberty
I'm sure the surroundings are somewhat related to it as well.
>I'm a schoolteacher
Do they know you post here?
I've always kind of felt like when I was younger (late teens to mid 20s) I had a lot more whimsy and genuine interest in creative pursuits, but as I'm approaching 40, it's almost like I can't really get creative anymore, really just pulling evolutions of old ideas and writing a small spin on them. Sometimes I wonder if it's only really possible to think out of the box when you're younger and not exposed to the world as much.
Based. People forget you need both these days. Effort is just the threshold test. You automatically cannot have quality without it. It's the equivalent of showing up to work. Virtuous in the sense that getting up and doing the bare minimum every day is harder than it sounds.
But turning that to quality means understanding that and being okay with cutting something you put a lot of work into if it comes out bad. It's a sunk cost. And being okay with that is a rarer virtue.
Same here. Do you mean it's just the general decline in morality and the humanities?
Not him but it's easy to imagine how and why it happened. Writing a story is already difficult as it is, now imagine writing a story that is interesting, stimulating and captivating. Nowadays most writing in mass media revolves around quirky and funny lines and pseudointellectual crap.
Every single line in the SMAC tech tree is nothing short of gold.
no one values or studies writing / humanities any more. so we just have shit writers now.
even if you get a good writer, they're added to the game as an afterthought.
Member when they went full POZZED and got called on it?
>you can't play as the German side in historical FPSes, it will turn you into a heckin Nazirino!
Smart ppl made the game, Brian Reynolds was educated at UC Berkeley
Good artists borrow, great artists steal.
10/10
>Is it a good idea to let certain units like the formers and crawlers automated?
No, the AI isn't very good.
Here's a basic guide:
Beginner terraforming
This is to improve the tiles of your cities.
1. Forests.
If you have tiles with low nutrients (0), then at least until mid game, the best improvement is planting a forest. Forests spread automatically which is generally a good thing. They give a lot of production and they also give energy. The only problem with forests is that that they don't give much nutrients, which means a lack of population growth. In the early game, it can also be a good idea to plant forests on a tile if it has a nutrient bonus and doesn't give any production. You'll still get the nutrient bonus on top of the forest resources for working that tile.
Forests become OP in the mid / late game if you build the (expensive) forest base improvements.
2. Farm/road/solar, farm/road/mine. These are the typical tile improvements. Since mines also reduce nutrients by 1, the former of the two is more used.
3. Sensor arrays. They give extra defense to units and bases within two tiles and they help spot incoming troops. Just know that whoever owns the territory owns the sensor, so typically don't build them beyond 2 spaces from bases. Sensor arrays are particularly valuable in dealing with mindworms, because these ignore armor/weapon stats, making modifiers more important.
---
Intermediate terraforming:
This unlocks after building the weather paradigm or researching the relevant techs for improved terraforming techniques. Even then, most of them are not useful until you research certain techs that allow 2+ of resources from a tile (there is a specific one for nutrients, for minerals and one for energy). Without the tech you can only get more than 2 of a resource if that tile has a specific innate bonus. Like a nutrient resource symbol.
Boreholes, aquifiers and condensors are great. Echelon mirrors are okay.
>crawlers
Crawlers are the easiest to manage. Try to set them up on safe spots and just transport a resource of your choice to the base that built the crawler. Typically good for an area that is surrounded by your cities but your cities can't exploit. They can only bring home a single resource type per tile, so typically you build a great food or mineral tile for a crawler. Crawlers have some of the highest ROR for production spent, but they are vulnerable and can cause other problems (pollution by having too much production in a city). Still, it's always a huge boost to get out crawlers.
She won't need eyes where she's going.
So, I just beat the game with The Ascent to Transcendence, after playing for about 3 days.
In the beginning I had a little trouble with the menus but it didn't spoil the experience and I got used to it. What did take me a while to understand is what exactly are drones and how to have less of them, how to terraform, what are specialists, how to use them properly and how would I achieve the "goal" of my faction, the Gaians.
I didn't use specialists at all for most of the game, only figured what they did near the end. I got confused with terraforming, at first farms seemed the best, then I got tech that made forests better so I had to undo all the farms, then late game I got all this tech that gave me advantage in fungus and since I was playing Deirdre I backpedalled again on the terraforming by planting fungus everywhere, going with democracy, green, knowledge and cybernetic social engineering. I only used aliens as my army for most of the game. When I had many bases up and running I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing in order to achieve the faction's goals and beat the game, in fact, at the score rating screen it said "0 goals achieved - 1326 points". Is this a bug or something?
A few thoughts for anyone that cares:
The AI seems very aggressive and untrustworthy, including Lal. I saved Santiago from being annihilated twice, had a blood pact going with her for a long time and gifted her a bunch of stuff yet she still sent probes to some of my unprotected bases. What a b***h!
Some of these techs seem overpowered, like the Empath's Guild and The Planetary Transit System.
While some stuff is overpowered, there seems to be an answer for everything an enemy faction can throw at you if can prepare for it.
Having "specialized" bases for distinct purposes seems better than just have every base be the same thing with the same facilities.
Great game, I liked it very much. Some of those quotes and cutscenes add so much to the experience.
Specialists are really good to understand, but they take some time to fully grasp and unlock their potential. The biggest thing to know about them is that a specialist can't work tiles, but provides innate bonuses and cannot be a drone for riots. This is really the key to them, because you can abuse specialists and crawlers to create bases that won't riot and still have enough production to function. If you are lazy, letting governors run them isn't a terrible idea although you won't be able to really abuse them that way.
AI swings very heavily based on social engineering choices. Santiago would be fine with you early, but as you unlock techs and choose things like green/knowledge etc she starts to hate you because she tends to go more down a power route. This is why the AI becomes less trustworthy, because those divisions pop up as the techs come to allow them. Its a nice system imo, because it allows for naturally shifting alliances over the course of the game and makes some combat inevitable.
Secret projects are very powerful in general. Some of the early ones in particular, weather paradigm, human genome, etc can completely change the way you play the rest of the game. Its more of a design philosophy where the idea is that every faction has a good chance at getting one or two of these game changers, but its offset by the fact that if they get something OP so can you.
The quotes and cutscenes are fantastic, this is probably the only game where no matter how many times I play through I still listen to and watch all of them. Any particular favorites you had?
>Any particular favorites you had?
Ah, It's difficult to think of a favorite right now, so many great ones
I liked many of the philosophical ones because they don't feel, how could I say, out of place. The questions and implications proposed to the player make perfect sense in the setting of the game while being actually interesting things to think about.
I still couldn't think of a favorite quote, but now I remembered one that stuck with me for the entire game.
>"It is not uncommon to see patients undergo permanent psychological trauma in the presence of the Sphere, before the nerve stapler has even been strapped into position. Its effect on the general consciousness of the culture is profound: husbands have seen wives go inside, and mothers their children. Dr. Xynan left the surface of the sphere semitranslucent for a reason. You can hear them in there; you can see them. It is a thing of terrible beauty."
This quote did it for me, it really made me understand how dire of a situation was living on Planet. Every faction is dystopic in it's own way, through the entire game I felt like there's nightmarish horror lurking nearby and waiting to strike, be it the Planet or humanity itself.
>The AI seems very aggressive and untrustworthy, including Lal.
The peacekeepers are a sarcastic comment on UN peacekeeping missions. If you don't randomize faction leader characters (which I wouldn't recommend anyways), then Lal has an above average inclination to solve things with military.
>The peacekeepers are a sarcastic comment on UN peacekeeping missions
That makes sense. We made contact for the first time and he's like "Hi Deirdre, nice to meet you. I'm going to destroy you."
Speaking of contact, one of the things I liked was the feeling of isolation. I had to share a piece of land with the University whom I met very early, but it took a while to make contact with anyone else. The Hive, Spartans and Believers were in a big continent nearby and by the time I met them I had 4 bases already established. It took a long time to contact the Morganites and Peacekeepers because Morgan was alone in that northern island while Lal had the entire eastern continent for himself. No one had even sent troops on either continents yet, all factions only established contact with each other because the Believers finished the Empath's Guild and immediately called for a council meeting to elect a planetary governor.
The fact that I didn't know the planet layout since it was my first time playing probably contributed to this feeling of isolation.
For a while I was really scared because my first war, against The Hive, was very easy. I crushed him with a few worms, helped by the fact he had just fought The Spartans. So I thought "is this all the AI can do? this is too easy" and barely invested in military because it seemed like the AI barely raised troops, then The Believers started fricking everyone up. I tried to help Spartans by sending a few worms over with an isle of the deep as transport, and was completely blindsided when she had a large army and was starting to build aircraft. Taking her down was a huge effort that took a long time, The Spartans were on the brink of being eliminated and I lost a bunch of worms. If I had been invaded by someone else right there It'd probably have been a decisive blow. When I saw how huge was Lal's territory I thought I was fricked but he couldn't project his army at all. This was on easiest difficulty mind you.
Love it.
>The fact that I didn't know the planet layout since it was my first time playing probably contributed to this feeling of isolation.
Aww official planet map. I think I played that once or twice. I like it's design but I prefer the unknown.
I kinda wonder what settings people are playing with.
1. Do you steal tech when you conquer?
2. Do you have "blind research" on?
3. Do you turn on random events? (Protip: turn these off if you want to win economically or you get random economic crashes taking all your money)
4. Do you limit supply pods to starting locations?
5. Do you mess with weather settings?
6. How much native lifeforms?
7. Do you play waterworlds or landworlds?
>Aww official planet map. I think I played that once or twice. I like it's design but I prefer the unknown.
It was a "quick game" because I read somewhere that it's supposed to be the tutorial, and it's on easiest by default.
I think I'll play The Hive now, Yang is an interesting character. The Believers and Morganites seem very cool to play as well. I'm gonna attempt the highest difficulty, not sure if I go with Planet map again or attempt a random map. I think I'll try playing with direct research just to see how it goes because I just played with blind research on already.
I don't wanna build supply crawlers unless it becomes really difficult, I think they kinda take the fun away and the AI doesn't use them.
Planet map is a great one. The random creation maps are all terrible.
Start as Miriam on Isle of Deianira for a real challenge when you get good at the game.
>I think I'll play The Hive now, Yang is an interesting character.
Note that if you have the most recent version of the game, which is likely, yang has an undocumented ability. Impunity to inefficiency.
No matter the amount of negative efficiency from his social engineering, he'll always be at effective 0 efficiency (instead of -4 with police state and planned).
I remember playing yang and fricking it up somehow. It seemed like maintenance costs were too high and sucking up my credits.
>1. Do you steal tech when you conquer?
No, conquering is already snowballing and you can still get the techs once you break their back in a pity pact.
>2. Do you have "blind research" on?
50/50. It's much better to be able to pick, but that makes the challenges of blind research interesting sometimes.
>3. Do you turn on random events?
Never.
>4. Do you limit supply pods to starting locations?
Yes.
>5. Do you mess with weather settings?
No.
>6. How much native lifeforms?
Abundant, unless playing deirdre.
>7. Do you play waterworlds or landworlds?
Lots of ocean.
>Do you steal tech when you conquer?
Lately I've been turning this on, because I'm usually in the tech lead anyway and I figured it might help the AIs when they fight each other. It does seem to make the games more interesting. Granted it's exploitable in the occasional situation where Zakharov beats me to the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm.
>Do you have "blind research" on?
>Do you turn on random events?
>Do you limit supply pods to starting locations?
No to all of the above
>Do you mess with weather settings?
Yes, weak erosive forces and dense cloud cover.
>How much native lifeforms?
Usually abundant for score modifier, but I've set it lower occasionally in expansion games in the hopes that there'll be fewer spore launchers and towers that just distract the AI too much.
>Do you play waterworlds or landworlds?
I don't touch this usually but now I'm thinking about increased landmass for my next game just to see what it's like.
I usually play with all settings at default. I used to try "defeated players can't restart," which lets the AI commander respawn in a new city if you defeat them too early, but I realized that made the game a bit too easy if you lucked upon an enemy cursed with a bad spawn.
>1. Do you steal tech when you conquer?
almost always
>2. Do you have "blind research" on?
about 50% of the time
>3. Do you turn on random events? (Protip: turn these off if you want to win economically or you get random economic crashes taking all your money)
almost always
>4. Do you limit supply pods to starting locations?
almost never
>5. Do you mess with weather settings?
constantly
>6. How much native lifeforms?
average or abundant 90% of the time
>7. Do you play waterworlds or landworlds?
generally balanced, with a slight waterworld lean just because I like Pirates playthroughs
Its not uncommon for the guild to be the actual thing that brings everyone together. That's a part of why getting it is really helpful, but its a very powerful project outright.
I really like those kinds of quotes, the mundane sort of ones that reveal understated horrors are a lot of fun. Like Morgan annoyed by the PR nightmare of nerve stapling a bunch of civilians and not the fact that he committed an atrocity. Or Santiago musing about how building communal daycares is important because children are the future, and their parents will defend the city to the death if they know their children are right behind them.
Wrong, Lal's aggression is Erratic, which means he has middle aggression, he is neither Aggressive or Pacifist.
Remind me - does that cut scene play for every captured faction leader/does each faction have the same conquest of another faction cinematic? I won't be butt hurt if everyone treats conquests with the same cruelty/necessity.
I remember playing alpha centauri when it came out and was taken aback by the mechanical innovation (down to prototypes being superior because duh 9f course you aren't going to skimp on sensors for your proof of concept). But what really got me (and I am certain that this continues to make the game stand out even as the rest of the genre has adopted and perhaps eclipsed the mechanical innovations by now) is the quality of the writing. The short stories are dope and really set the theme. But even if you ignore them and jump right into the game - my God - the day to day writing is so fricking good. I didn't get the militant peacekeepers meme at the time but that's cause I was 8 when it came out and my parents weren't exactly broadcasting the civilizational betrayal of NATO/UN peacekeepers aligning with Islamists to aggressively intervene against Christians reclaiming Europe for Christ in Yugoslavia. But now that I'm an "old man" the writing has only improved.
I need to replay. I hated the believers for their anti-science stance at the time cause I was in catholic school and hated evangelicals. I wonder if they come off more sympathetic... gotta play
They do. Endgame Miriam is literally the voice of reason. Watch the self-aware colony project video if you want to open your mind.
Fricking based. The UN Peacekeepers opening quote really shows how madly the so called anti-authoritarians have diverged from their roots. I could see that same school of left thinking programmers also realizing greens are full of shit and only useful idiots pushing towards the destruction of freedom. And that the reactionary impulses of faith are actually the results of the hard won wisdom from 100,000 years of evolution; making them useful idiots and allies of secular groups pushing for freedom. That's fricking gnarly. I forgot how much smarter people used to be before identity politics.
That's the thing I like the most about this game: all factions are flawed in a way or another, nobody is right or wrong by default no matter the starting conditions and the player's personal ideas.
Morgan at the start of the game looks like someone from old Earth, hellbent on turning Planet into another poisoned shithole, but space mining will nullify any ecological damage, therefore the Gaians' stance will lose any kind of ground. Why would anyone want to join her insane alien worm cult?
Is it fair to say that the factions that begin the game seeming like lunatics are slowly revealed to be reasonable as time goes on, while the reasonable seeming ones (e.g. gaia faction saying "hey we are here cause we fricked up our last planet, let's not do that again, even if it means having to eat some bugs") are slowly revealed to be insane?
I always loved the chairman cause he had the highest pain tolerance and it was easiest to get shit done as a noob using his faction. Which made me think him pragmatic and reasonable. He only demands suffering that he could handle himself and chooses the strategy that is most idiot proof because, unlike a game set on high difficulty, they only have one chance to survive. But thinking about life under a competent mao sounds horrendous. Jesus if I didn't have so much work to do right now I'd drop everything and 0lay through each faction
That's very well said. Spartans are lunatics and Gaians are pure pacifists until you see several secret project videos of Spartan civilians being massacred by Gaian mindworms. Peacekeepers are all kumbaya peace and love until they use nerve gas against the Hive. Miriam sounds almost resigned to the fate of humanity watching the horrors of technology repeating the atrocities of Earth, her opening line being "but it was never the streets who were evil", the last one suggesting a mass suicide out of desperation.
I would just like to applaud the writing.
One, the quote there was great for establishing how the faction will not thrive on research but won't refuse the new tech. Times change, progress happens, but we cannot blame the inventor or invention of roads for how the streets are full of evil, anymore than we can blame the internet for all the porn and filth that exists on it. The tech is clean, the filth comes from sin. And only humans are capable of sin.
Two, the name of their first marine settlement. He Walked On Water. The writers understood who they were writing and what seems like silliness to the neck beard would immeasurably strengthen the resolve of anyone in the faction. Hard to describe why but having gone through the religious parents, to atheist edge lord, back to "frick the alternative. Plus while faith alone may not move mountains, men with faith do" faith; that really jumped out. That was either an easy catch phrase or a deliberate act of a great writer.
>Peacekeepers are all kumbaya peace and love until they use nerve gas against the Hive
Imagine reaching hard enough to use AI gameplay behaviour to justify your smooth brained everyone is equally bad take
>Imagine reaching hard enough to use AI gameplay behaviour to justify your smooth brained everyone is equally bad take
He's talking about what the datalinks show that is the canon of the way things resolved.
Really? Which quote?
I just went through all the tech, building and project quotes and I couldn't find it. Must have been in one of the books.
>books
Not canon lol
Yeah I was admitting defeat.
>Remind me - does that cut scene play for every captured faction leader/does each faction have the same conquest of another faction cinematic? I won't be butt hurt if everyone treats conquests with the same cruelty/necessity.
Yeah, though there is a female and male capture version.
>You guys lied to me, this is not a comfy space building game, this is stuff of nightmares.
>"Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours—the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers."
>—CEO Nwabudike Morgan
>People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers.
Plato meets Rand
Crawlers are cheating. They trivialize the game, create stupid behavior and the AI can't even use them.
I like it because it feels like I'm the protagonist of one of those shitty fanfictions where someone shows up and rocks a settings shit by applying common sense
MULTIPLAYER
Once you can make them without upkeep they are absolutely OP.
Does anyone have any idea that technologies introduced in Alien Crossfire represent?
Like, what the frick is Resonance? Flavour text makes it seem like a simple ability to sense and manipulate electromagnetic fields but then you have Cha using it to sense other planets and Aki making them sentient
Overrated nostalgia game
It has soul, but it's completely dated by today's standards. Go play something else
Like what?
bump
Your brain is so smooth you are incapable of even a single original thought.
Gentlemen, we have lived to see horrors beyond our comprehension. I present the frictionless brain.
Somehow I can see what every AI base in the map is producing, including factions that are at war with me, is this because of a technology that I developed and didn't pay attention to or something else?
1) You had a probe team infiltrate every single enemy base
2) You are currently Planetary Governor
3) You have the Empath Guild secret project.
I have the Empath Guild. Didn't pay attention to what an "infiltrator at every base" does.
Are probe teams useful?
>Are probe teams useful?
Yes.
They help defend your cities against probe attacks (particularly mind control). They let you buy enemy units for money (if they're alone on a tile). They let you buy cities (mind control). They let you steal tech. They let you steal credits. They let you destroy defensive buildings to allow conquering.
One of my favorite units to design is a probe - cruiseship (no armor, no special abilities). And then build a waterbase near an enemy who I want to steal from and use that to continually raid his bases for technology if I'm behind. Typically you can't keep hitting the same city, because they'll get an anti-probe defense boost for a short time.
Probe ships still get killed, but the high movement gives them a lot more chance to get by their military units.
I realized how I got the Empath's Guild, it was built by Miriam and it became mine when I conquered the base. This seems a bit overpowered.
you can get the same result by building 3-4 probe teams and infiltrating each faction's datalinks, which is much cheaper than a secret project.
You can still be caught by surprise by attacks in my experience.
Really?
With just one probe unit I can see what any faction is doing in all of their bases for the rest of the game?
This is broken as frick
Missions have to be succesful; they can fail. Also just getting your probe to a base of each of the factions isn't an easy feat; though knowing what someone is building on the other side of the globe is potentially not that valuable to know. Success rate isn't 100%, so it's likely costing you a couple of probe teams as some fail and get killed. Also, if they have a probe team in their city, you can't even perform probe actions against it like infiltrate, you'll instead have to fight their probe team with yours.
And there's a secret project that makes a faction immune to all probe teams, although it comes late enough, that you can get your infiltrations in before that.
In some sense it makes sense. If China mobilizes a fleet against Japan, it's detected before it arrives, even without espionage. You're also warned when a secret project is about to finish for an enemy, and if you have the money you can purchase it yourself and win the race.
>Anyone got any funny suggestions for RAPING frens for our first mp game (provided we can make it work)?
Just beeline for impact rovers. Try and build some command centers before you get the tech for impact rovers and then just steamroll the map.
Alternatively, create an unholy alliance to sweep the map, like miriam/zhakarov. Have one research all the military tech and the other use it to kill your other friends.
Success rate for infiltration for a newly built probe team is 100%, so yes it's way overpowered
Probability of probe team escaping is 50% by default
Probe ships are super broken. Its not uncommon for custom designed units to get banned in multiplayer simply because of probe ships.
I had no idea, I've never played multiplayer.
The problem with probe ships is not that they're uncounterable, its that they can swing a whole game in reliably unfun ways.
The problem is worse with cruisers, but even foils are fast enough that if you want you can easily slip them between your own bases on your turns, so you can move the force around without exposing them like normal probes or needing roads. And from there its not uncommon for sea bases to get close enough for someone to plausibly move from a friendly base to an enemy base in one turn, making cruisers often a gamebreaking tech advantage. Probe teams out of nowhere are frustrating enough, and you can't stop them with just building land probes for obvious reasons, so the net is that everyone builds a lot of sea probes and has to shuffle them between bases constantly, so they're a lot of micromanagement.
Sea probes increased movement relative to land probes also makes them one of the strongest sea defenses in the game for a wealthy faction, since they can almost certainly reach enemy units before they reach your base and/or force those units to stay further out just by potentially existing. Early sea battles tend to involve less units than land, because most people have fewer bases. So sea probes are even better because stealing one unit does even more to blunt an attack.
More annoying, however, is that sea bases can get cut off from reinforcements much, much easier in the early game meaning what often ends up happening is that one player will isolate an enemy sea base and then farm it with sea probes that the other person has very little chance of overcoming. They won't be able to do anything until air power at the absolute earliest, and the increased movement range means you can just hide probes in your nearby base before sending them meaning often they can only defend with planes, a terrible idea to begin with.
>Probes are bad
You aren't even scratching the surface. Probes are an abomination. There you are, sitting at a table having dinner, or lying down, just relaxing, then all of a sudden, a sneaky probe comes up out of the shadows and RUTHLESSLY JAMS itself up your unsuspecting anal passage.
Just about hit the fricking roof.
And then you cant walk straight for days afterwards.
They are terrible and should be banned.
>Probe ships are super broken
Can't your opponent prepare for it by simply leaving units stationed outside the base or moving in for an offensive on your base if he figures out you're going for probe shenanigans?
Probes seem to die very easily to actual fighting units. If you're building probes and most of them are getting destroyed, I assume you're wasting resources that would be better spent in other endeavors.
you can also garrison probe units to counter probe units, this usually results in the garrison probe dying but the attacker being dead in the water outside the city for a military unit to mop up next turn
Yes, although if you're ahead they're not particularly useful. The tech stealing is their most major and useful function. And of course bribing is OP as is usual in civ games, because you usually make loads of money.
>1) You had a probe team infiltrate every single enemy base
Isn't infiltrating each faction's datalinks enough to be able to see that?
I just saw Morgan do a backflip while bragging about how his industries monopolize the market
What the frick were they smoking when they made this game?
>tfw no MorganNet bloatware package on the compy
Also, I have to say that Morgan backflip really had me
Easily one of the best 4x ever. Learn the hotkeys.
what does Recycling Tanks soup taste like?
Which flavor? Deirdre's Summer Stew, UN relief package, Santiago's MRE, Morgan's Instant Soup or Chairman's Private Collection?
No Miriam or Zak's though, they aren't humanitarians.
1:19:40 Stockpile energy has a voice over?
Well, the data exists, Alpha CentaurivoicesFAC38.mp3 and "##Mass to Energy" in Alpha CentauriBlurbs.txt. The problem is that beyond Stockpile Energy having no prereqs (you don't have the ability to unlock it and hear the voice over), the hypothetical "Mass to Energy" tech isn't listed in the Datalinks either, so players wouldn't be able to encounter this voice or text quote in the game itself.
I love it but always lose interest in the mid game where i have too many bases to manage and it just becomes a chore.
I guess i could automate them but it my autistic minmaxing brain makes it feel wrong
Build less bases.
Use the queue to set up your production so you can forget about some bases for a long time and focus on others things.
After conquering an enemy and making them pledge an oath to serve me, I tend to give them back some of their bases I just captured if I don't need them myself. Less micromanaging, less worrying about Drones and efficiency, and the conquered leader can rebuild themselves and then follow directives you ask them to carry out.
I don't remember being able to subjugate other factions. But I may have started to ignore their dialog when I'm in full exterminate mode.
As you defeat an enemy and capture more of their cities, they start asking you for a truce. If you keep on attacking, they start to offer credits or research to sweeten the deal, but eventually they'll send a message starting with "I surrender..." and you can respond with either "You must swear a Pact to serve me" or you can refuse and totally eliminate them. A surrendered faction functions independently, but you can ask them to do things like hand over a unit or city , attack an enemy, or give you credits or research, and they'll never say no. I think it says somewhere that factions might refuse to surrender to you if you've done lots of atrocities or broke many treaties with them.
I find that its much easier to edit my governor settings early and then produce colony pods from that base specifically. It slowly you down a bit, but new bases inherit the same governor settings as the one they're built from, so in the long run it lets you functionally automate a whole shitton of your empire.
Deirdre is the best faction. Love the fungus, and fungus will love you back.
SMAC threads make me so happy. In case anyone missed it here is a blog another anon posted that furiously reignited my passion for this fantastic game.
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/introduction/
I hope anyone who hasn't read it enjoys it as much I did because it was a real treat to read through. Thank you to whomever posted it originally!
What are some unusual special ability combos I should try on my custom units?
Go full atrocity and equip infantry with nerve gas pods and blink displacers. They'll shred bases.
You can also do submarines carrier decks for air raids that come out of nowhere.
Ditto on the gas pods atrocity. Also, if you want to spice up the game a little bit abolish the UN sanctions and watch Lal and Miriam obliterate entire continents.
Deep radar + deep pressure hull
Repair bay + cloaking device on ground transports
Dissociative wave bombers (if the defenders have AAA)
I would do crawlers with that "no upkeep" ability and suck up every resource in sight.
I would also do "no upkeep" with the one that gives more policing when a unit was garrisoned and used that when the drones were getting uppity.
None of you play with Alien Crossfire factions, do you?
I have never played Alien Crossfire. I just have my original CD from 1998 and never bothered to get the expansion. Is it good? Does it add a lot to the game besides new factions?
well, the factions are arguably the worst thing that the expansion adds. There's couple of extra techs, secret projects, and alien units. But you would probably play it only for the bugfixes, with original factions (and thank gods it lets you do that)
It's worth playing at least twice with the new factions; once for the story from the alien side and once from the human side. There's a couple of interesting events, like the aliens doing experiments on humans, or the humans figuring out the alien communication.
The most notable changes are there are two new mind worm type units, new armor/attack upgrades (eg. resonance laser, which has 6 attack, but also boost against aliens) and a couple of interesting secret projects.
The water tile economy is also improved.
What the others said, maybe play once or twice with the new factions, but other than that it's better if you play it with with all the new content but original factions.
Tried the game out after seeing a bunch of nagging posts about it in civ threads - got it from friendly piratebay seeders.
It's not a civ game. It's a shit game. The initial learning shock is massive and makes the game look 1000x more complex than any civ and there is nothing that motivates you to put up with it. The countless UI tours don't help. The UI is utter dog shit. The graphics are shit. Once in the game you're locked in a 320x240 anus you can't Alt-Tab to desktop, no hotkeys work until you quit the crap. There is no quit to main menu either. Bases build units in a loop because there are no buildings in the game - until they can't build anything because the unit supply for built units reduces production to 0. You have no idea what to build, why, and what to do. After a couple pointless bases that production-lock themselves you just hit Enter endlessly for the rest of the game to skip turns, nothing ever happens, until you are bored enough and quit.
Just play civ 3.
>Not installing the patches
moron
>there are no buildings in the game
What the frick
>civ 3
Is this some early 2000's pasta?
f i l t e r e d
how can I get into this? reading the tv tropes page makes me want to get into alha centauri but the ancient gameplay is too much for my zoomer brain to handle
just keep trying, eventually things will start making sense and you'll be committing every atrocity man can dream up and then some, just remember to look through each menu
Early game goals:
1. Expansion. Build colony pods, and use them to build new cities.
There are better and worse spots, but easiest way to learn is trial and error. Nearby obelisk or landmark are easy good spots (landmarks are named areas).
2. Security. Undefended cities get conquered by enemies or aliens, so make sure every city has at least 1 unit defending it.
3. Development. There are four paths to growth: terraforming, building, conquering or building cities with colony pods. You need to build formers to terraform.
4. Diplomacy. Once you meet other factions you have to figure out if they're a threat. The more aggressive in demanding things from you the more likely it is, but every faction that you haven't become a pact brother with can backstab and attack you at any time.
5. Learn to manage bases. Drones are unhappy, talents are happy.
6. Unlike most games, there are a lot of menu items that are very valuable. Social engineering is a page that you must become acquinted with as you also set this game's version of a tax rate there.
7. Datalinks. You can learn pretty much everything about game concepts in the datalinks. Give basic concepts a read. After you played a bit, give advanced concepts a glance.
Transcend being a zoomer. Practising to do something that isn't immediately rewarding is a skill that will put you ahead of your peers.
it's not complicated, just civ2 + some extra things
you can even let AI to design units for you if you think using unit designers is too complicated
The only difficult part is that the UI is old and shitty. Once you memorize the keyboard shortcuts, everything is easy.
Unironically play the tutorial and don't expect to win right away. People come into this game often expecting it to be a civ clone they can play at max skill just because they know the civ games already, and the net result is frustration. Don't be afraid to use governors and other shortcuts until you understand the game, and be willing to accept that there are systems you probably won't grasp on your first or second game.
Personally, I would suggest just automating formers altogether and using governors on all bases past your core 5-10 depending on how much you want to manage for your first game or two.
I'm the dude that just beat the game for the first time and I didn't have much trouble figuring out the UI, never played a Civ game before.
I have played a few strategy games though, mostly KOEI games.
What do they eat?
nuts
This game came out in 1999.
A 23 year old game still blows most of the current shit out of the water. Incredible. But the most amazing thing is its AI is still comparable to modern games in terms of providing a credible challenge. Some might argue its still better.
The AI is incompetent at most things (still better than most games) but I always loved how strategies change based on certain human player actions. Use atrocities ONCE and you'll see the AI factions answering back tenfold, like they're holding a personal grudge against you. And opportunistic, erratic wars whenever they have something to gain out of it. Brilliant.
SMAC is easy even at max difficulty, AI is moronic, it doesn't even improve terrain properly. For comparison, Civ3 and Civ4 AIs are much more competent and challenging.
Be honest Black folk, which faction would you rather be born in if Alpha Centauri was real life?
Spartans, Gaians or Pirates.
They have the best sex.
Morgans have to pay for it and is transactional. Miriam doesn't have sex and neither do the cyborgs. I don't want to work 16 hours per day in yang's mines. Don't want to deal with the autists of zhakarov. And I live in europe so I already know the mice utopia that is UN controlled territory.
I'll take the easily manipulated greens, or conquer my own war brides for the spartans or pirates.
This post made me think way too much about the sexual proclivities of each faction.
Believers: The usual Christian purity culture has finally made it to the stars, and nothing has changed. Girls will give blowjobs and anal at the drop of a hat, just so they can say they're "pure" when they get married, despite how many pearl necklaces you may give them. 5/10
Gaia's Stepdaughters: Hope you like fricking in forests while the mind worms watch. At least hippie chicks are hot, if you can excuse the armpit hair and dreadlocks. 6/10
Human Hive: Sex is joyless and only available at all if Chairman Yang thinks your genes are worth spreading. Put your back into it; we've gotta out breed the Believers! 2/10
Morgan Industries: Everyone has an Onlyfans. Everyone. Upgrade to Centauri Platinum tier for a monthly handjob! Sex is just as joyless as it is in the Hive, but at least you only need money to have it. 3/10
Peacekeepers: Lal's faction is so milquetoast I don't think I ever actually played as them, and I think the sex would be the same. You've got a better shot at enjoying it than with the previous two entries, at least. 4/10
Spartans: Mostly a bunch of posturing "alpha males" who just want to be pegged by Mommy Dommy Santiago. Thanks to her required daily exercise regimen, though, everyone is hot and horny, even if your only option for fricking on is a granite slab. 8/10
University: I hope you're into furries, or at the very least willing to cosplay as an WoW night elf, complete with circa 2008 accurate gear, or the only action you'll be getting is from other guys in the ERP chatrooms (of which there are many). 5/10
(expansion factions to follow)
Data Angels: Everyone is non binary. I hope you like blue hair, piercings, and using they/them pronouns. 5/10
Cybernetic: Probably the worst one so far. This faction is clearly themed on the Borg, and as a result all I can imagine is just some fleshlight on a tube syphoning your jizz out before turkey baster-ing it into an artificial womb. Doing it myself would be more fun. 1/10
Free Drones: Everyone's fit from working in the mines and factories, and Foreman Domai is always ready to welcome new cannon fodder into the ranks, so sex is lauded as both a vital service to The People, AND as an expression of freedom from prudish, totalitarian masters who want to micromanage every aspect of your life, including your boners. The downside is that you're considered a prude if you can count your number of STDs on one hand. Overall I'd say the best pick. 9/10
Cult of Planet: Honestly all I can imagine is two people screaming and fricking while mind worms eat their brains. What is this, a Shintaro Kago manga? Somehow even worse than the Cybernetic Consciousness. -1/10
Nautilus Pirates: Their faction leader looks like such a tool that I can't imagine this faction being anything but an army of frickboys and the STD riddled harlots that tolerate them because it's the only attention they can get (castoffs from the Free Drones, perhaps). Said army effortlessly splits into tops and bottoms while at sea because the Village People didn't write "In the Air Force". At least you don't have to pay or get a permit for femboy ass. 4/10
As for the aliens, they look like fish so I presume they breed the same way: females leave a clutch of eggs behind and the male comes up and nuts on them. 3/10
STDs don't matter once I get research hospitals, bro. They're curing alien viruses instantly, you think they can't handle the clap?
>all I can imagine is just some fleshlight on a tube syphoning your jizz out before turkey baster-ing it into an artificial womb.
unexpectedly hot
>Lal's faction is so milquetoast I don't think I ever actually played as them, and I think the sex would be the same. You've got a better shot at enjoying it than with the previous two entries, at least.
Wrong. Much like Brussels and the UN it's a complete center of homosexuality and orgies.
--
Correct. UN Headquarters is likely a combination of San Francisco, Brussels and Dubai, just with more troons and asian prostitutes because freedom and civil rights.
I'd rank the Pirates higher, at least when they're on shore leave.
Definitely the Believers. There is something about committing the most heinous atrocities with a smirk on your face while reciting some bible bullshit. I like the fact that your victims will know not just the horror of their torture and execution but the fact that its being carried out by someone who is a batshit insane religious lunatic. Nice.
The Believers, since they are the least dystopian of original factions.
This. Everything else is just a freaky experiment. Europe went from agricultural to space civilization under this ideology. We spent most of it's existence under this ideology and was able to form the foundations required for prosperity without decadence. It was only after ww1 and the collapse of religion that everything went to shit in terms of long term civilizational stability.
Spartans are good for colonial civilization however but have no mechanism/outlet for the softness that comes with prosperity (see America after we got confortable).
Bruh how did dome and anal on request only get a 5 while unwashed hippies stank gets 6? Also peacekeepers can fit extra population which is code for Lal bringing Indian squalor to his bases. Lack of pop growth bonus is likely more due to infant mortality than lack of sex.
Everything else sounds about right though.
Drone idiocracy would probably be paradise for anyone who can count to 11. Just gotta get past the vacant stare of your chromosome deficient sex partners
Gaians and might have the research hospital tech but would ban curing the planet's gifts so curing stds would be like trying to get a believer abortion. Drones might aquire a proper hospital in a riot but would kill them shortly after determining the doctors talk like gays and their shits fricked up. So good luck with curing them stds
How can people shill for these fundamentalist nutcases?
Under this ideology scientists were burned by the church and science stagnated. Renaissance started after power of the church decreased and space technology was developed after ww1
The people in NASA were all religious and many were former nazis. They were the last great push of the old era and were not proponents of the atheistic version of science prevent today.
>burning scientists
Idk as much about protostants but the catholic church was responsible for at least half of all science funding til the 1700s. They remain the largest single provider of medical research labs. The church founded the universities that created the literacy boom that ultimately caused the Renaissance (1300s University building spree spread literacy from the monastery to the town). After the Renaissance that the church began entered ful swing, the church continued to sponsor science. The pope personally funded Galileo and took a great liking to his works (as a fellow astrologer before becoming pope). The conflict between the two was not about his research but because Galileo either deliberately or accidentally (I prefer this theory of autistic Galileo rather than shit headedness) published the findings (which was authorized) in a book that contained what everyone at the time considered a caricature of the pope as a moron. Since the pope was leading the fight for science against the reactionary elements, he couldn't take that hit lying down, otherwise his opponents would say he was a weakling who couldn't stop heresy (as opposed to the strong leader who chose to push for scientific progress that he was).
Between protestant copium propaganda trying to use whataboutism to cover up their intellectually shallow theology and modernism it's not your fault you fell for that meme. But look it up and do some research you owe the game and yourself that much
>ideology
>scientists were burned
>science stagnated
>implying Renaissance had anything to do with sciences
Please be bait.
if you'd ever met a scientist you'd want to burn them at the stake too
they're worse than artists, even
depends on their politics and religious beliefs.
their politics and their religion is invariably the same: harvard managerial communism
I'd say there is more diversity of opinion than it seems. That preening managerial class just knows how to hog the soapbox like any ascendant ideology. Although even so...you're probably right.
Mostly, its a whole lot of people who are convinced that if you just did things the "intelligent" way it would all work out. And, coincidentally, they're the smartest people in the room. Everyone who isn't in lockstep with them is just too afraid to speak out or have a contradictory opinion, and most of them get bounced from academia eventually because the whole hiring process is extremely subjective and mostly about the approval of peers who are already in the department you want to join. So if they get the sense you aren't in agreement with them they'll just find someone who is, so you have to either shut up or leave.
peer review is ultimately not a scientific activity, but a priestly one - truth is decided by the consensus of a committee, but doctrine certainly is
>truth is decided by
*is not
Unfortunately. Peer review is not science, mostly just examining the process and findings to see if there are any obvious gaps. However often they are not done with due diligence.
Replication studies are the true science but they have a bad name. No one wants to do them (they rather publish new findings than redo experiments someone else did) and half the time replication can’t even be done at all with the softer “sciences”... which just furthers how important replication really is.
Peer reviews are sometimes fairly shitty and in my experience its rare you get someone who only cares about examining for gaps and not editorializing on your work. Obviously there's the whole reviewer 2 thing, but really its not uncommon at all that someone will insist "you can't possibly be publishing on this subject without including all these citations from this one specific scientist who definitely isn't me," or some other shit.
I will admit I think the growing trend of trying to do special issues that are all just replications is a good one, and probably the single most effective thing being done on the problem. The issue is, ofc, that this takes away space from regular issues and makes the inherent problems they have that much worse because its the same number of people fighting for a now even smaller pool of pubs.
Anyways, to avoid derailing, how do you guys think Zak would deal with those issues? Part of me thinks he would have some level of institutional mandate to replicate and test findings, the other part thinks he would simply do away with anonymous peer reviews and make the entire process public so people could review other's reviews making it a vicious but hopefully more honest process.
Just like with Ganker, the whole point of anonymity is honesty and avoidance of peer pressure, you can say what you truly think, no matter how nasty. Anonymity is the reason why the idiot who posted
is completely wrong.
silence sacerdotal pseud
Peer review is very rarely actually anonymous. I've heard of editors outright telling people who their reviewers were when asked or just bringing it up for no reason at all, and for the most part if you write in a smaller niche there's really only so many people capable of reviewing your work to the point where its "anonymous" in the sense that it could be one of about five or so people. And that's not even getting into how many people are recognizable just off the way they review. I know one guy who uses a template for every review, starting every paragraph with the exact same sentence and so on.
no it doesn't, the aggravating personality transcends both those things
Back into cave with you.
Art*st spotted
>form the foundations required for prosperity without decadence
No, not without.
when I first picked it up as a kid, I would have said University or Gaians
nowadays I think I would probably prefer the Spartans or Believers
Adulthood is realizing Lady Deidre makes most sense
>wanting to prolong the failing ideologies of earth that destroyed everything and caused the need for the mission in the first place
>not limiting human population to share in Planet's abundance and work together with planet not trying to dominate it.
>Planet is literally conscious and will wipe out humanity if it wanted
>Lal is an idealistic cuck, couldn't even keep the unity together, what chance does he have uniting a planet of millions of people
>Yang gang treats it's citizens worse than drones for le greater good that is just going to piss off planet and repeat earth
>Spartans are fascist maniacs who would definitely get humanity wiped out if they don't wipe it out themselves
>Zhakarov is only other decent choice, understands planet and saves humanity, only problem is he treats his people like science experiments for the greater good, only needed because people like him pissed off planet in the first place
>Miriam is zealot nut, but actually treats her citizens decent, would still piss off planet terraforming it to be like Eden and populating it full of polluting christcucks
>Morgans literally want to strip all of planets resources in a generation so they can profit not caring about the future or environment (like real life neo libs)
>Deidre literally talks with the voice of planet learns what it wants and comes up with an ideology where we can co exist and not repeat the mistakes of earth
She's the protagonist of SMAC, not exactly a hero just a misunderstood anti-hero and ya'll deserve brain worms.
Not even going to talk about the expansion factions since they are just stereotype pastiches of subcultures, robots and dude aliens.
>Zhakarov understands planet
>"Let the Gaians preach their silly religion, but one way or the other I shall see this compound burned, seared, and sterilized until every hiding place is found and until every last Mind Worm egg, every last slimy one, has been cooked to a smoking husk. That species shall be exterminated, I tell you! Exterminated!"
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Lab Three aftermath
Hes just like me
sadly he gone full bonkers at the end.
I wish you could sterilize the planet from xenos, but alas. No such victory type
Insight +1
The creators have an obvious bent towards green ideology. That's why they invented a planet where pollution leads to rapid and immediate dangerous consequences, when in reality pollution is mostly a local and easily solved problem with technology (the first historical type of pollution being smoke from in-dwelling fire, which was solved with chimneys).
The international CO2 thing is a scam to control everyone's lives in a way that people are convinced it's good for them. The way king's were called "protector of the realm", the new rulers style themselves as "protector of the environment".
So in the context of the game setting, deirdre makes a lot of sense and I agree that she's the protagonist. But it's worthwhile to point out that the mentality does not generalize to earth.
This invented environment also allows them to solve the traditional flaws to green pacifism, and that's that it opens you up to being conquered. Deirdre is able to overwhelm and mindinfest the spartans, but only because of this unique world with unique almost magical powers to people that have an obsession with environment.
>not wanting to be conquered by the hot hippie b***h who inserts mind-worms up your anus and then has your anus stapled shut.
NGMI
>being a cuck
Your genetic line ends with you.
Whats wrong with wanting mindworms tickling your intestines?
hot
>The international CO2 thing is a scam to control everyone's lives in a way that people are convinced it's good for them. The way king's were called "protector of the realm", the new rulers style themselves as "protector of the environment".
cool idea, schizo
but politicians can just declare war, martial law, emergency state, etc. at a whim
CO2 IR absorption was known for over a century
the fact burning gigatons of coal will release CO2 and cause climate change was know for over a century
it's not that they invented this information to get rich and powerful
they suppressed this information to get rich and powerful
you wouldn't need BP/Exon/Gazprom/etc. if everyone has solar panels that run for free, forever (or close to it), you wouldn't need massive state infrastructure to supply you with electricity
Yeah but so late in the game, only the human hive and peacekeepers benefit from the advanced factions deindustrialization. And Morgan seems to be making frick tons of money off of the deindustrialization of the advanced and industrialization of the later. So food for thought. Keep following the money. Good thing the game isn't irl and gaia faction has access to mind worms otherwise we'd all be fricked
Speaking of, I wish one of the victory conditions were returning to Earth. Something like Planet at some point becoming too dangerous to live on because of constant swarms of mindworms and locusts and on the verge of awakening. By the end of the game, humans have the capabilities to just frick off back home and use the technology to terraform their own homeworld back to livable standards. Living under domes in a toxic world that isn't trying to murder you with psychic terror.
That's a great point. At first I was gonna call you a smooth brain cause everyone on earth is dead by now. But viewing the expedition as a means to give us another 100 years of time to find a solution and then frick off back home to implement it is based. We only have one true home. Momento mori for it remembers us.
...or we can just stop being terrified of nuclear power, especially since radioactive waste has been a solved problem for years upon years at this point
BUT MUH CHERNOBYL, MUH FUKUSHIMA
Two problems that don't exist if you're not 1: a communist dictatorship where reporting problems is frowned upon or 2: building nuclear reactors on fault lines next to a coast
>a communist dictatorship where reporting problems is frowned upon
It's not even that it's frowned upon, problems aren't reported because just the acknowledgement that there is a problem to begin with, means someone is going to be executed or sent to a forced labor prison for life.
It's very likely that Mao died without realizing just how many people his Great Leap Forward starved to death.
>solar panels
Which require manufacturing processes, with chemical byproducts, expiration means recycling, local environmental disruption killing birds and disrupting temperature flows depending on operation, and ultimately just plain insufficiency to cover ever increasing energy demands.
Worry not about the planet or high tech and energy industries, the former will outlive you regardless, the latter, should it go into proper directions, will outdo you in all possible ways whilst turning your fears of climate change into dust with new terrors of its own.
>So in the context of the game setting, deirdre makes a lot of sense and I agree that she's the protagonist. But it's worthwhile to point out that the mentality does not generalize to earth.
You are correct, the game obviously has deliberate and intentional eco-utopian themes that are maybe analogous to certain issues but exaggerated for the game's story and so not directly applicable to real life
>The international CO2 thing is a scam to control everyone's lives in a way that people are convinced it's good for them. The way king's were called "protector of the realm", the new rulers style themselves as "protector of the environment".
Meds, schizo, etc.
>t. Gaian drone
BASED
>b-but she k-killed the Spartans with mindworms
Is that supposed to be a negative? Little cuck Lal would never have the balls to do it. Meanwhile Deirdre sits in her comfy command center sipping tea watching Santiago get her brains eaten and dispassionetely comments the scene like she is talking about how flowers bloom
List of complaints people have with Deirdre:
>she worships mindworms
That would be Cha Dawn who leads a cult of suicidal bioterrorists who live in horrible primitive conditions. Deirdre's stance is coexistence and nothing supports her putting Planet above her people. In fact Gaians enjoy good if not opulent lives
>Pholus Mutagen
I see no indication she forced her people to undergo gene treatments to become better suited to live in Planet besides given Gaian inclinations I do not see many of them disagreeing to go through with them
>stupid hippie b***h
They probably do dance naked in a forest but that does not mean they are not also top class biologists who beat even Zak in life sciences and who figured out the workings of the Planet before anyone else
>telepathic matrix is literally mind control
Not supported by lore. Though ultimately this depends on your interpretation of mind control
>using mindworms as a weapon
I can see that but hey enemy is an enemy. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive and I am sure Santiago would agree
The weather paradigm is the gaian acolyte's prayer to the planet. That's extremely early, and she has early tech quotes with her speculating that there is some kind of mind behind the planet.
The most charitable interpretation is that Miriam is openly setting up a religion, but one that she intended to be a love and harmony wiccan thing with no teeth. It just happens that her limp-wristed wiccan style worship planet for self-affirmations and hippie love turns out to accidentally be worshiping a giant sentient planet that uses mind worms liberally and speaks to people. From there it rapidly spirals into something she can't control, the worst offshoots becoming Cha's cult while she tries to reign it in to still being about love and harmony, but now with psychic mindworms and actual mental connection.
The clinical almost cold way she describes the devastation her mindworm boils caused in Spartan settlement adds nuance to her pacifistic tendencies
She prefers cooexistence whenever possible but in the end it is gardener's duty to rip out the weeds before they spread
>The clinical almost cold way she describes the devastation her mindworm boils caused in Spartan settlement adds nuance to her pacifistic tendencies
Yeah, faction leaders don't fit their stereotype as clearly as one might be inclined to think they do.
When Morgan talks about how energy is the Planet's major source of power and whoever controls the Energy Banks will rule Planet like an Emperor, you realize that he's not the freedom loving libertarian that he seems to be otherwise.
the stereotypes are just stereotypes. Deirdre was never actually some strict pacifist hippy, she's just religiously devoted to ecology and not disrupting the native planet life. Morgan is not some libertarian freedom lover, he's a corporatist wanting a monopoly. When he talks about having control of planet he's talking about strategy to win out over the other ideologies.
Are you that naive? "freedom loving libertarians" wants to have freedom to exploit and abuse their dominant position
Real freedom of choice is bad for them since it cuts in profits
t. Morgan Nwabudike
None of the factions are actually opposed to violence, power, war and control of people to get their way.
Morgan is still a freedom loving lib, the point is that the free market has chosen. There's nothing wrong with survival of the fittest and most profitable, it is ofc only more proof of how successful his company is that he can literally compete everyone else out of existence. Freedom is a wonderful thing, and those companies and factions were free to find a way to survive, but they didn't. Its not Morgan's fault that they can't keep up, its just what the customers demand.
"Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes; our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us."
>
"Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes; our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us
Morgan is about as honest here as when zhakarov's spokeperson says he has no retroviral engineering and no you can't check his personal lab.
He's being honest, because in the free market anything is allowed. Morgan might have strongarmed competitors out and maybe he's lying about customers expecting no less, but hey he is a monopoly and its because the other factions couldn't compete. It's not morgan's fault if that competition involved military force, because a wise corporate leader would have invested in security. Its not Morgan's concern, his concern is doing whatever it takes to get people to buy his nodes, after all the customers expect no less.
>because in the free market anything is allowed
Why do people insist on talking as if they are some authority on things they clearly do not understand at all? This is WRONG.
You don't know anything about what free market means.
You are probably just a commie though.
Because you're just calling it haram without reasoning.
There are different ideas about how free a market should be, but morgan is pretty clearly about free meaning whatever isn't illegal is allowed. And he writes the laws. Sorry for not adding a disclaimer that I meant only the conditional 99% free "free market," but I assumed most people weren't so stupid they needed that disclaimer or would be so pedantic as to quibble over such a pointless detail.
Hey man, if you're the subject of a hostile takeover that's just proof you should have done more to prevent it. After all, any decent corporation has security. Customers need to feel like their goods will be protected and delivered safely. And all those security forces just sitting around eating paychecks are a waste of resources, so the only thing a fiscally prudent leader could do in good conscience would be to use them, might as well do a little horizontal integration and make sure your customers are protected and living in a state that believes in customer first ideals like the morganites do.
imo the retroviral thing is an iffy example, not only does it come with the tech for it but its also Zak claiming to do a thing his faction would never do. It would be like morgan professing the values of charity and corporate giving. ofc, Zak is only doing the right thing. If people don't study retroviral engineering then what will they do when someone releases a horrible disease? Studying something doesn't mean its going to be used after all, and there's no reason to fear knowledge. The only reason someone wouldn't want to study something is probably because they already know and want to keep it a secret, so the only reasonable position is to study it yourself.
>its because the other factions couldn't compete
Morgan has a military force as well. And hostile takeovers aren't called that because they're peaceful or cooperative.
Yeah, and it's not Zakharov's fault that other factions are letting the threats supposedly posed by retroviral engineering cloud their eyes from its scientific potential, but that doesn't mean that the Vice Provost is lying about not studying it.
Morgan absolutely sought to become a monopoly. Why wouldn't he? If you can become a monopoly, it's obviously a good idea.
By that logic the government seizing all of a company's assets is also just the free market, the company should've bought the govt so they can't do that. And a communist dictatorship conquering the McNation is also the fee market, a truly competitive corporation would've McNuked the threat before it began.
As long as its legal, yes. That is, ofc, probably why morgan is also the government. Horizontal integration taken to an extreme.
It saves his company costs on lobbying too, so its just him being more efficient. The free market encourages such efficiency, a company that falls behind will inevitably get swallowed up by another. Morgan only does this because his customers would be upset if they saw their money going toward wasteful things like lobbying after all. Really, when you think about it, he had no choice. If Morgan didn't turn the government into a division of his mega-corp some other company probably would have. And those guys wouldn't have had the best interests of the customers in mind like Morgan does.
Also its not communism, what a horrible accusation. In communism the government takes over businesses. In the free market a business can take over the government. There is, obviously, a massive difference.
No you silly. When the government seizes the assets of a corporation that is communism. When the corporation seizes the assets of a government that is free market. When a communist nation conquers McNation that is communism. When the McNation conquers a communist nation that is free market.
It is not about intellectual integrity in defining ideological terms. It is about tribal identity with others who publicly signal their adherence to the ideology. If you make the mistake of taking this kind of extreme laissez faire thinking seriously you discover it devolves into anarchy from which then re-emerge normal governments.
I love how Gaians are basically just a bunch of mind raping telepaths Eventually they don't even need mindworms anymore they start frying brains on their own
It is much more eco friendly to shoot soldiers if they are paralysed in fear than if they are moving and shooting back after all
Every faction can use mind worms, Gaians are just better at it.
Cant wait to have mind worms inserted up my rectum and my anus stapled shut.
>still no effort to save past history or culture
>ultimately wasting true potential of humanity on drooling asceticism
>compromising planet mind with one's own
All of them make sense, and her approach to things is just pitiful.
Also "not repeating the mistakes" will not work because historical process doesn't work like that, and life is extremely complex thing.
And the whole "failed" ideologies idea is just wrong, because ideologies don't work that way.
Does Santiago really have any advantage comparable to the other factions?
It seems like the weakest no matter what
I have never played her but my guess is she is good for scouting and rushing the opponent since she starts with speeder. +2 morale helps against mindworms too.
She is one of the most flexible, as the only denied society model is wealth, which kicks in later than politics or economy models.
At higher difficulties you get a lot of drones. But she starts with police which is helpful. Take police state and you get double police per unit, meaning you never need to build anti-drone facilities, allowing you to build more colony pods and recycling tanks instead. This more than offsets the industry disadvantage.
Your units with +2 morale is really good. Add a command center and either an obelisk or fundamentalism and your units start out as elite, giving them extra movement and insane edge over enemy units.
The rover and starting with doctrine mobility is great as well. They're one of the two factions that can have impact rovers after only researching 2 techs (zhakarov being the other if they get laser as their free tech).
It's ridiculously easy to just start conquering right from the get go with spartans.
Wealth comes quite early since the tech is needed for crawlers
Police state sucks for non-Yang since it gives horrible efficiency, which decreases your income and increases drones
Aki can also get impact rovers after two techs
If you're going for crawlers then SE doesn't matter anyway. Just channel all the energy in the world to your HQ and you can have a runaway economy even in planned + police state
Huh. I never thought of that. You'd only have to build the boosting buildings like network node once.
The drones are a non-issue with the amount of police it gives, particularly for spartans, because police powers are doubled (or quadrupled for police scouts after that one tech that also gives the citizens defense force).
The extra support means you get to field a crazy amount of units per base without having to pay minerals for it. Essentially it trades a lot of energy for minerals. Once you conquer one or two nearby neighbours, you can transition out of it after using the surplus minerals to build some anti-drone buildings.
Maybe go into planned democracy for growth affecting much more cities than it would have otherwise, or even green democracy if there's not much room for pop growth currently.
Her biggest issue, imo, is that she's not particularly aligned to the playstyle of most humans. She's strong early because getting rovers right away is quite good, but most humans don't set out to immediately kill and exploit the first faction they meet, and you have to be willing to pop out military before there's a clear use for it which players tend not to do. Optimizing to take advantage of her morale bonus is slightly difficult too, and while its fine to just keep it and be happy trying to do like
mentions and get to elites is really powerful, but this isn't always obvious to players. And the easiest way to get to elites is often to abuse SE while producing a bunch of new units before swapping to something else, but most people in my experience tend to just sit on a SE choice all the way through.
In the AI's hands, she tends to look weaker than she is because the AI often starts in a position to actually get along with most people. Its not until the SE choices kick in that combat is guaranteed, and if she delays she loses her advantage. She also is a lot worse on bigger maps or maps with more water, anything that reduces the chances of her spawning near a target, and I think most people tend to play on those kinds of maps.
she's my goto faction pick. you will wreck anyone's anus if they spawn close to you but you peter off mid to late game without generous circumstances. long wars of attrition can hurt, even with your veteran units. better to go for short stabs of guaranteed victory.
By the way is there any mod that upscales the cutscene videos? I always loved them, but my modern LCD monitor really does not like rendering in 4:3
Just recently started this. I always wanted to do so, but never managed to actually put effort.
Blog below seems to elaborate a lot on their interpretation of stuff in the game, it's interesting to read it along since there isn't much discussion material around online. Isn't it a shame Reynolds went to making facebook games later in his career?
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com
Will very much give this a read given the number of pleasant narrative surprises.
I just started (should be working lol) and noticed the small details really make this game. The crazy religious types have a negative to planet cause divine manifest destiny says hippies can frick off. And once they are able to implement their fundamentalist government they get a bonus to morale cause certainty etc.
But the way morale is implemented builds on this. The mind worms - the planet's attempt to make us frick off - only use psychic attacks. So the faction based on religious certainty is not only gimped from refusing to acknowledge the planet's sovereignty/can't capture and use mind worms, but this is uniquely offset not with some clumsy faction bonus to killing aliens, but via the universal mechanics of psi-attacks. Since mind worms only use psi-attacks and psi only cares about morale - the same faith that requires rejection of the xeno also uniquely empowers one to destroy it.
The mechanics all flow rationally from the flavor text; rather than the flavor text existing to cover up sloppy rock paper scissors combat with some post-hoc flavor text justification. Very nice.
Kek the quote for achieving clinical immortality is genesis 3:22-23. A celebration of apotheomorphis? Or a reminder we were never designed with the capacity to eat from both the tree of knowledge and life? Based
The quote for the Universal Translator also talks about the Tower of Babel. God's curses can't stop progress.
I think there is a lesson there. While universal culture meant everything was within our grasp, without the diverse panoply of human cultures with different perspectives we have (or had) today, it is very easy for an inorganic top-down ideology to take hold of the entire species. And if everyone is on board with some moronic directive, not only will the breadth of the harm encompass everyone, but it will be implemented with such thoroughness that the depth of harm can easily rise to an extinction event.
The tower of babel for instance was a moronic plan. Perhaps as a superorganism man was capable of divinity. But the individual nodes of that superorganism - the individual people with their persuasive but limited understanding, were not gods. Even if someone has an IQ of 400, they are still incapable of absorbing and synthesizing the full scope of humanities knowledge. If anything they are uniquely burdened by being able to grasp at the big picture and the ego can mistake their fumbling for understanding. If mankind built the tower, only a single man could sit at it's peak. As we know, the type of person who is willing to do what is necessary to sit at that peak would be more akin to Trotsky than Buddha. That would have been a disaster.
I'd argue old testament God did not curse humanity, he was just a father disciplining a toddler old enough to understand rules exist but not clever enough to understand why. It was only after aristotle and the greeks gave us reason that, just like an irl dad, God was interested enough in our abilities to sit down and explain things.
And in game, we know the relevant tech is unlocked by thinking it's a good idea to merge our brains with computers.. so as with many of the quotes, I think it was chosen both for an obvious optimism about progress but while also invoking concern as our most ancient beliefs and fears gnaw away at us.
>The tower of babel for instance was a moronic plan.
It was successful, in the end. The heavens are no longer barred to man.
I remember getting confused by how turns work in this game. Does your turn end when every one of your units has made an action, or do you only get a certain number of total unit actions per turn? For some reason I was never sure.
The default setting might end your turn automatically after you've moved all your units. Go into preferences and check "pause at end of turn". It's good to have it on since you might want to do city management after moving your units.
That's probably it. I'll keep it toggled and double check. Thanks.
Reminder: Progenitors
Gay : Disabled
Best thing about SMAC is the cut scene where you take Miriam prisoner and see her writhing, naked, in some sort of force field. It gets me so hard, thinking about what I would do to her nubile hot Christian body. Day after day.
>tfw no Miriam, Deirdre and Santiago sex slave trifecta
Three times the hotness!
Which faction has the weakest idealogical basis and why is it Cybernetic Consciousness?
Which in universe book you would like to read, anons?
Lady Deirdre's Big Boog of Recycling Tanks Humor
(brapp)
fanging out for I Have Tasted The Fruit and We Must Dissent tbh
Probably this one.
>we must consent
seriously tho, the endgame books are such underrated humor its kinda insane, like the writing is really great throughout but holy shit some of these shitty puns are genuinely fantastic. Idk, its just kinda crazy to me that the game has such good writing and then on top of that can make fun of itself so easily in the endgame easter egg books.
We Must Dissent, Spartan Battle Manual and Conversations with Planet
Was Yang a troony?
>"Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and boners, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your chromosomes outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace natural order and the self of birth. The goals of the chromosomes and divine truth are transcendent, and to embrace them is to go to your chromosomal bathroom."
– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Trannies and how to have a nice day"
for real tho, look at some of his pictures
https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/Sheng-Ji_Yang
Ha. I get what you're saying. But he was the most capable individual on the ship according to the lore, and there's not a chance that a woman would be.
>We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
>Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.
>I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength.
Shit he was pro-troony all along.
kek
Help
I planet busted Morgan as Deirdre and now everyone hates me
Always build enough planetbusters so there is no one left to complain after you fire them all.
So how do Spartans, the most militarily disciplined people on Planet, lose to mind worms? Shouldn't they be torching every worm without batting an eye? And why were they the big Gaian target instead of Morgan or Miriam? This never made sense to me.
Because environment > all in the designer's minds.
Yeah, it made no sense to me either. Feels like Deirdre's favoritism, pure and simple.
Deirdre and Santiago's ideals don't even clash directly with each other like that. One wants to survive using the Planet, the other wants to survive using weapons. For me, it's intuitive to think that they'd end up cooperating most likely.
That's why Gaians won in the game.
Because as Citizen defense secret project shows flamethrovers do not do much then you are too busy being in terror to pull the trigger
As for why I always assumed Gaians and Spartans landed near eachother
Because the game lore revolves around opposing ideologies and personal experiences of the faction leaders being creeped out by each other. The citizens' defence force, network labs and another tech I don't quite remember mention specifically that Santiago and Zakharov are genuinely concerned about Deirdre growing an army of mindworms. It's perfectly plausible to imagine that having a neighbor cultivating alien boils terror would make your faction immediately consider a surprise attack to stamp it out as an act of self-defense.
Personally, I liked that ending for her because if you think about it the military faction losing a war to anyone in the conventional way would make less sense. The only other way for her not to win out was to do a much less military focused canon run or have her die to a rain of planet buster nukes.
Santiago getting rolled by a worm rush that cripples her early seems like the only way she would really lose, since she's fighting at that point a truly unknown enemy under completely unique conditions. And I admit I prefer the interpretation where Sparta Command falls early and then she fights a long war that she had no business even being in for a few hundred years after it should have been over before finally losing.
>tachyon field
>early on
Can't remember, but isn't it mid game at least?
Yeah but I got the sense its right after they build it and possibly one of the first. Dedire is engaged in her secret war per the citizen's defense force and winning pretty well, so I figure the timeline roughly looks like most people focusing on non-military tech early. Santiago does, but weapons prove to be useless against worms so that just makes her life harder. They get rolled early on and take crippling losses, limp to the loss of sparta command right when tachyon fields arrive, perhaps rushing the first in sparta command in a last ditch attempt to save it, before getting kicked to the oceans as a weak and mostly irrelevant faction for the rest of the game/until they die. If you incorporate AX timeline, then maybe santiago was on her way to recovering before sven defects and cripples her navy, costing her any chance of victory.
Because Santiago ran police/planned/power, and the -4 efficiency trashed her economy. They torched a lot of worms, but Deirdre had twice as many bases and could just produce more.
>why were they the big Gaian target instead of Morgan or Miriam?
pre-game story has Santiago holding Deirdre and her entire hydroponics team hostage during the events on the Unity so probably held a grudge
Deirdre wont have sex with Santiago, so she gets super sexually frustrated
Is it cannon that artificial wombs were widely used in Chiron because of high likelihood of failed pregnancy and lack of available manpower or am I imagining things?
no you're thinking of rl, ca 2030
which leader would put out the best music album?
>Life is the jazz.
The aliens. The reverberating basslines are otherworldly.
This but unironically
Alien resonance sense makes each of them a natural musical genius
>And I stood before him, and I sang unto her, and it appeared to listen. His very countenance rippled like the sea, and the sound of my own voice came back to me, distorted. For a moment I thought she was mocking me, or it was nonsapient and mimicking me. Then I understood: the sounds were not important; it was how I affected his sounds and how she affected mine that transmitted the message.
— Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "One Future"
>The Progenitor race appears to sense, and possibly even manipulate, local fields an untrained human cannot percieve without mechanical aid, including at the very least electricity and magnetism. This sensitivity creates entirely new worlds of artistic endeavors for the race—or it may be developed into a powerful combat awareness that can foil any attempt at surprise.
— Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "Alien Analysis"
Morgan
why? wouldn't he produce market-pleasers rather than true art?
>implying there's a difference
of course there is - true art is more expensive
i've been told that yang is, in fact, not just a head without a body, which frankly makes him a lot less cool
I really don't mind that there is a "canon" story of how the game plays out (in fact the little hints dropped in tech and project quotes are pretty neat) but the interludes just fricking BLOW. like, the only part of the game where the writing is trite. i wish they couldve done different interlude stories for each faction instead of "lol youre not playing deirdre? well uh... lets imagine that you were.."
This is a very good point. Morgan's reaction to learning that Planet is self-aware should be radically different, to name one example.
I gender swapped zak and you can't stop me
it's happening. It's the future
Keep going
oh boy she was always a crusty hippie
that's some big heda.
would, ngl
we're all troonys now, the free market demands it
unfortunately for Miriam and Yang, the app I'm using already thinks they're trans so it won't gender swap them correctly. this was maybe the next best thing
Best I could get for a "male" miriam, since the facial recognition app already thinks she's a little boy
Or maybe something like this, tho it's more of a caricature
>looks exactly the same, only eyes are more widely open
>it's more of a caricature
???
That's just the style of art it's going for, a caricature portrait. notice the skinny neck
Here's another one from the same set for example
I think it's less obvious for Miriam because she just has really bland facial features, there's nothing to exaggerate. A real artist would probably focus on a tiny eyes and thin lips maybe, but this is just a facial recognition app running a toon algorithm.
The AI basicly did exactly the wrong thing and untooned her. An artist would focus on her beady eyes and create a perfect circle head.
Feeling major Ziggy Stardust here.
I guess we really do live in the age of terror.
>you can put colony pod on aircraft chasis
Does that actually work?
of course it does, that's the beauty of unit designer
Except it does not. It only allows you to found land bases, naval can only be made with a ship or cruiser one.
Well of course how you gonna land a colony on water, that’s just silly
If I want to colonize late game, I prefer to use jump pods. You can orbitally insert them anywhere.
Anyone else use stealth probe copters?
What about resonance copters and grav formers to deal with mass worms if you're polluting a lot?
>Favourite faction and why?
Morganites because his AI is broken.
>grav-ship terraformers
>air chassis colony pods
>probe team anything
The automatic AI isn't good for the flying terraformers but they are quite good if you manage them yourself.
One thing I haven't done is grav-ship supply crawlers. Losing a war often means the enemy will air raid your supply crawlers. If they are flying then the enemy would need interceptors to kill them which also have less range than bombers thus making them more safe.
if you had spent the minerals on troops instead of flying supply crawlers you wouldn't have lost the war
I should have mentioned I never worry about them dying because at that point in the game since I am usually ahead.
What's inefficiency and what's its connection to number of cities i have? The only thing I know is social engineering have "efficiency" in it and the tooltip says that children creche alleviates it.
you playing a patched version? i vaguely recall there being a bug involved with the Creche
These are 2 distinct "inefficiecies"
the first one you mentioned is related to number of cities. It's basically a balance to prevent the player from getting too many bases. The huge amount of drones is almost never worth a few extra cities. It's also know as "bureaucracy" and you can google it to find the formula for the number of cities before you encounter it.
The second is just a byproduct of your social engineering choices and represents the natural inefficiency of any government. It is a drain on energy affected by distance from your capital.
>The huge amount of drones is almost never worth a few extra cities
Wrong. It's almost always worth it to keep building bases.
For how I play, it would be very wrong. I play very liberal factions and use the massive energy bonus to keep ahead technologically while building up. At -2 police, you can't use military units or nerve stapling, so drones can be a big problem
You're just not using all the tools at your disposal if that's the case. There's so many buildings and wonders that reduce drones directly, and with all the modifiers you get to psych output, setting the slider to 10-20% can pacify enough drones to let you hit pop caps in all your bases even if you expand several times beyond the bureaucracy limit. If you still have some bases with low energy and high populations, there's specialists to abuse.
I use those wonders and buildings to minmax my cities so they're the biggest they can be without riots while also getting the most return on infrastructure investments. It's better to have citizens working tiles where there are banks, network nodes, etc. that multiply their output. Any benefit you'd get from new cities and citizen (besides increased territory, which you can just get by placing cities intelligently) you can get from supply crawlers, which will then get those aforementioned bonus IIRC.
I don't find psych much of a tool to this problem, more like a sledgehammer. Just 10% of your energy output is a huge sacrifice to building infrastructure and getting research. Once you hit fusion, you're doubling the output at all bases. I could understand using it if you're building wide like the hive, though.
If you're using crawlers for your income, then building bases to an arbitrary number in addition is basically just roleplay. Crawlers are completely game-breaking and they can either make up for any shortcomings in your strategy, or be the entirety of your strategy. The game's more interesting without them, I recommend giving that a try - the AI doesn't use them either.
Anyway, the point is that it's always profitable to build more bases, whether or not you're using crawlers. 9 crawlers in a 3x3 piece of land can send a lot of energy to your HQ, while a base can work all those tiles for their full yield, and also employ a huge number of specialists to surpass that energy output, produce units, and contribute to diplomatic votes. If you're expanding beyond the inefficiency limit, you get penalized by 1 drone in 1 random base (which you might not even notice if it gets negated directly by buildings), absolutely worth the output of an entire base. Roleplaying is fine, but to argue to someone that it's not worth expanding is ridiculous.
>It's better to have citizens working tiles where there are banks, network nodes, etc. that multiply their output
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Compared to what? Specialist yields are multiplied by buildings as well. Try building an energy bank and filling that city with technicians, it's great if you haven't broken the energy limit yet.
What AI mods does everyone like? They provide a different challenge, but I still finding it lacking. Maybe I should play a different faction? I used to do university, but went morganite after finding it too easy. I don't play on the max difficulty setting because it doesn't change the AI much, only gives them more bonuses and aggression
A game that will probably be hard for you to get into if you didn't grow up playing it back when it was new
interesting, did you grow up with it? Alpha centauri was about the 4th civ game I got into, and did so about 5 years ago. While the UI is a bit clunky, I found it to be surprisingly modern and very fun
Not true (obviously, or nobody would have been able to enjoy it) - it's a hard game, but it was new to us veterans back in the day too and we all love it. It kicked my ass when I first played it at age 7 (4X games were way too complex for me - Red Alert was more up my street) but it's perfectly manageable if you're grown up and not stupid.
The best way of describing it is that it's kind of... obtuse? When I was new to it, my civilizations stalled and failed quite a lot due to poor management and I didn't understand why until I'd put in several playthrough attempts and picked up what I was doing wrong.
If you're not familiar with games of that era, it will seem very hard because the initial learning curve is steep. It holds your hand a little bit with tooltips/advisor suggestions or whatever but there are a lot of mechanics to learn if you've never played a Civ-like game before. It came from the era where you were expected to read the manual before launching the game and not be told everything through an in-game tutorial so if you just fire it up without reading how to play it, you will probably get frustrated.
btw have you guys played with randomized leaders personalities? Does it actually work? I think I tried it once or twice back when I was a kid but didn't see any difference, I was still roasted by other factions for making the same incompatible social engineering choices as before. Maybe it was SMAC bug that got fixed later, or just my distorted memory?
personalities changes their aggression not their goals, randomised social agendas is the one you're thinking of
I plug it in sometimes, it's good for shaking out of routine responses to each leader and knowing exactly what you're gonna get, but it's often kinda schizophrenic
I haven’t done it because it feels like it would ruin the characterization. Like, what, I play a game where Miriam values wealth and gets mad I’m running power? Weird.
yeah I guess thematically it made more sense in civ where you wouldn't be that invested in roleplaying. Still, I think it might be fun with custom faction names and portraits to avoid cognitive dissonance it might be better than having a game with alien crossfire factions
I've been playing with all factions on random, which has been interesting. Sometimes it's cool and unique, like a lot of the human factions band together to fight the aliens and you have a really diplomatic game for a while. No balance in a lot of games, but that's kinda fine and par for the course in a lot of ways.
maybe we should get custom factions going in these threads.
you mean, like, brainstorming/sharing ideas or playing together?
Ethical Calculus, Social Psych and Secrets of the Human brain are hard technologies to wrap your mind around
Few years few thousand people in a virgin planet stuck in cramped bases because the atmosphere in unbreathable and these people figure out the motherfricking mathematical formulas to explain morality and human behaviour and physical basis for how consciousness is formed
Two things.
It's called thinking.
And Unity expedition already had considerable tech base to work with, they went into Centauri already considerably prepared.
the unity was loaded with top of the line technology so whatever scraps the colonists have are cutting edge and the crew was the best, brightest, and biggest brains of all of humanity
but yeah the sudden and extreme technological development within a few years of surviving the mutiny of their ark from earth with the loss of most of their supplies with a divided population is a bit out there
A lot of early technological advancement in the early stages comes from Monoliths and supply pods though. What I find more unrealistic is the massive population boom. Were the colonists incentivized to have 12 children each like families of old?
>he wasn't born in the cloning vats
This is one area where gameplay and story differ very much
Early gameplay is new base spam meanwhile in story early colonists struggled to expand their population
From GURPS book:
>Human populations had always grown slowly on Planet, constrained by
hostile conditions. Despite all the advances in genetic and medical science,
it was still more difficult for women to conceive children and bring them
to term than it had been on Earth. Most factions had invested in techno-
logical surrogates, using ectogenesis (artificial wombs) or other techniques to
bolster their birth rates
>Populations grew slowly, at an average of less than 2% made rapid population growth feasible. Even in this final
per year.
Yes. Obviously.
Miriam: fundy christians who don't believe in birth control with a whole lot of crusading to do. Better mount your wife before you mount a turbolaser battery and go off to convert your neighbors.
Lal: democracy demands more voters. Best way to get more voters on your side is to breed them. You are, ofc, free to simply not but as the americans learned so painfully in earths final century, minorities who breed more will elect more presidents.
Santiago: a strong woman births more soldiers, probably earning a medal in the process. After all, if you aren't a soldier then the next best thing is to make more soldiers. And ensure they're trained as quickly as possible. I hope you're not familiar with the concept of child abuse, or maybe its better if you are so you can train them faster.
Yang: lol spread your thighs and pray you aren't breeding genejacks, and if you're lucky you might even lean the name of the man the state decided should impregnate you. Don't bother naming your kids, they're off to a collective growth center. For the good of the hive, obviously.
Morgan: more people in the laborforce means cheaper labor costs, so obviously more children is better. The best way to subsidize that is probably with prostitutes. Lots and lots of prostitutes. Its not exploitation, its just the market logic suggesting that any CEO who wants lower labor costs should do their part and frick lots of prostitutes so more kids are born. Its really just your civic duty to have a mistress, a wife, and a girlfriend.
Zak: if you want more people on the 99th percentile of IQ, you simply need to breed more people. Its just plain stats, get more people and you're more likely to get more outliers, specifically more brilliant scientists. And the failures make for good test subjects, how convenient.
Deidre: Planet is ready to flower and burst into growth, aren't you? If you aren't, don't worry the mindworms have ways of making your wiener hard.
>free to simply not but as the americans learned so painfully in earths final century, minorities who breed more will elect more presidents
I'm fricking dying.
didn't think i'd get turned on by the post jokingly ascribing breeder fetishes to alpha centauri, but here we are. god damn i wish that was me
>what is cloning
A secret project, only one faction can have it.
Other factions may also have cloning, just without the industrial and societal set up to take it to the extremes that the cloning vats gives.
yes
Within the first few decades they are just recreating some Earth tech if i remember it right. You only really get to something not found on Earth after the first "Secret" tech or something.
The Longevity Vaccine and Clinical Immortality technologies suggest that people live very long lifespans and and after a while no longer die of natural causes in SMAC. Even if growth is only 2% p.a. a colony of 1000 will grow to 380 million within 300 years if nobody dies.
Technology allowing biological immortality already exists at the start of the game but at that point it is only available to faction leaders and talents. Longevity vaccine represents being the first faction to make anti aging technology cheap and available to middle class citizens and Clinical Immortality is made available after researching matter edition so it makes me think what exactly it means
Everyone being stuck first on a spaceship and then in a tiny cramped base with mind worms outside gave a lot of new data to the people studying human behaviour.
The secrets of the human brain were always within mankind's grasp, but it took a change in environment before anyone started searching in the right direction.
>Brian Reynolds went on to make mobile phone games and has only made casual shovelware since 2007
Feels bad
Miriam is probably my personal favorite faction, she gets a support bonus which was probably meant to allow you to spam cheap military units, but I use it all on formers to build up my industry rapidly and destroy as much fungus as possible. After you've eclipsed the other factions, you just buy out their cities with probe teams instead of fighting them.
Morgan is second on my list just because while he's a more direct version of this, his weaknesses are more pronounced since his focus is on wealth while Miriam's ability to pump industry hits all sectors equally. He does get tech faster though.
I love using an army of formers to build a mountain range and dry up the AI’s land.
Clear fungus, plant forests and eventually the forests do the improvements for you by making more forests on their own sustainably, leaving my formers more free to do silly stuff.
I had fun time watching THX 1138 last night and pretending it was the story of a drone set in the SMAC universe. Possibly in one of Yang's bases
Is there any good mod for different factions ?
Bit of a weird question but where's a good place to find guys for multiplayer? I'm not good enough yet but I'm curious for when I get better.
Well if you want to dive right into good players Apollyon usually is a place where you can find games (for a game this old that is), otherwise probably just some friends. imo, having done both, id say start with friends + AI. The main thing imo is to just make sure they play at least one solo game before they do multiplayer, and then make sure you pick a faction/playstyle you arent invested in so you don't feel bad if you lose.
Sorry to out myself as a complete newbie, but what's Apollyon?
https://apolyton.net/
Ah, thanks.
Zoomer question:
How to set multiplayer for this game? I'm using the GOG version. And can you set up a hot-seat or maybe there is a mod that allows just that?
Took some fiddling with .ini tweaks and trying different unofficial patches but I finally got SMAC working on modern 64 bit Windows. And it is glorious.
Still, what I wouldn't give for a remaster of this game with native widescreen support and upscaled cutscenes. Shit would be so cash. Firaxis needs to do this and take my money.
May I ask what those tweaks are? I'm used to the GoG version working out of the box, but I'm curious in case I ever want / need to get my SMAC CD-ROM running.
ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1
Video Mode=800
directdraw=0
That plus scient's patch
INDIGENOUS LIFEFORMS
I wonder how practical it is to do a "no reseach" Miriam. Put all energy into credits and psych, at least once probe teams are unlocked. Get all research from conquest, probes or purchase. Would it be easier or harder than the usual way? I think I'll try it tonight.
Played to 2250 with no research miriam.
I had a slow start. No tech in the beginning means no formers or rectanks. It was an island map and I didn't get a commlink for a long time (no tech also means no boats). But I had a lot of money, so when I finally got a commlink I was able to buy the rest and trade my way to the top of the tech tree. I spammed formers and gatling rovers and went from last place to first, subjugating the previous leader Lal in a few turns.
I am in constant golden ages in non-conquered cities. Golden age + democracy + planned gives 6 growth which means your pop automatically grows by one each turn. When your bases are full you can go back to war or econ socials. With the former spam you should have 7 good squares ready at each base. You don't need to build any labs so you can focus on building rec centers, hologram theaters, energy banks and retanks.
The biggest downside is that I haven't completed a single secret project. Uni has hunter-seeker and they're in 2nd place now. Very annoying.
>Favourite faction and why?
Spartans.
>Post-capitalist
>Best of communism and fascism married together
>Egalitarian but still strong
>Well-prepared for survival
>Won't shed humanity because the Planet said so
>Communal but not sociopathic 1984 like Yang Gang
>Can defend themselves from the collective autism of every other faction
>Probably still the most democratic faction because Peacekeepers are hypocrites that will recreate the old world and its dysfunction (note that even though Spartans are a stratocracy, everyone is militarized, so it doesn't matter)
Childhood is playing with Zaharov and Deidre
Adulthood is realising that Miriam is actually the good guy and that is why it is the hardest faction to play with.
No, that's being edgy teen and/or perpetual manchild
And you better be underage than that.
>spawn next to yang
>decide not to instantly club him
>builds 20 bases on 5 tiles and rapes me
>spawn on the other side of the world from yang
>he rapes the spartans and UN
>builds 100 bases and just spams nothing but quantum choppers just as I research Secrets of Planet that I can do nothing against because Yang somehow managed to out research, produce, and build me and the university.
Is the only fricking strategy against Yang to bum rush him?
>builds 20 bases on 5 tiles and rapes me
To be honest if the anemic AI can beat you at any part of the game, you're just bad and need to git gud. Yang is a pain because of automatic perimeter defense, but any human player should have no problem beating the AI at even their own specialties.
Not all players know the game inside and out and have everything 100 % mastered.
The only game I've ever lost was one where I tried mass planetbusting for the first time and got raped by rising sea levels and massive mindworm swarms (apperantly you get mindworm raped if you commit attrocities before repealing the charter)
PB and jelly causes massive eco damage, it's nothing to do with the UN charter. If you revoke the charter it will just prevent everyone going permanent vendetta on you.
I think planetbusters might actually be a special kind of atrocity, and you get vendettas even if you repeal the charter first.
Could just be it's a massive opinion penalty for everyone, so they'll end up declaring a vendetta even if they're not hardcoded to do so. Either way, I seem to get a lot of enemies for planetbusting.
That is true. You get perma-vendetta with everyone, charter or no charter, if you use planet busters.
I always thought it was for the 1st reason you mentioned but I suppose the 2nd is possible too. Either way the result is the same.
we call these casuals. they are disgusting.
Nice strawman. It doesn't take much to be better than the AI, just a couple of games to learn how the game works even if you're completely new to the 4X genre.
The most foolproof strategy against yang is to be yang
That's disgusting and I can't wait to try it when I finish all my work for the week.
Remember, the Hive lives underground so all that ecumenopolis is just the "surface" of a deep Yang iceberg.
What are the ghettos in Zak's faction like? I imagine sprawling blocks set-up like an open air prison where the guinea pigs are farmed. Every extra drone of his is this neighborhood
They're trashy college dorms filled with danger hairs all competing for the same assistant TA position.
>faction explicitly has extra drones as a game mechanic due to treating its citizens so poorly
>it's just like living in a trashy college dorm and fighting for a place in academia
silver spoon detected, ya'll need Domai
Domai is the only expansion faction that makes sense.
Everyone is a grad student, getting paid less than minimum wage to work more than 40 hours while going to school and getting every shit research job thrown on them by the professors. Half the group flames out before graduation. Half the graduates flame out not getting the job they want and ending up as teachers on barely more than minimum wage. A fourth of the original group gets to academia, where most of them fail to be anything more than exploited teachers who work 60+ hours and barely get published.
But the ones that make it get to work on the universities black hole generator, fricking around with data from the singularity and developing teleportation devices.
>Everyone is a grad student, getting paid less than minimum wage to work more than 40 hours while going to school and getting every shit research job thrown on them by the professors. Half the group flames out before graduation. Half the graduates flame out not getting the job they want and ending up as teachers on barely more than minimum wage. A fourth of the original group gets to academia, where most of them fail to be anything more than exploited teachers who work 60+ hours and barely get published.
But you just described modern academia. Would've at least hoped Zak could streamline that culture in the future while experimenting on the rest of the population
>but you just described modern academia
yeah... its not from firsthand experience I promise
>zak could streamline things
tbh I think he'd actually be much less likely to than anyone else. The thing is, people who benefit from systems like that tend to romanticize them once they get out, its like the frat bro who thinks hazing is great because he's not a freshman forced to drink until he passes out seven days in a row or, maybe more applicable to the general population, how shitty high school is for kids while they're in it and how adults often look back on it as the best years.
Zak might be a reformer, but I actually think he'd be pretty likely to create an education system that was even more exploitative and top heavy than modern academia, but probably with a more streamlined administration.
not smart enough to cut it and never given a real chance or arbitrarily fricked over is a startlingly thin line when you get to that point though. Sure, the druggies and dropouts probably are the drones but there are a lot of smart people that academia chews up. Getting a PhD doesn't require much more than the full agreement of the committee, and those people are free to set whatever standards they want within reason. There's a reason sexual abuse and routine impositions such as forcing grad students to do menial labor are pretty rampant by professors, and its because they have almost all the power. I've heard stories about profs that made people act as their personal chauffeur, babysitter, walking their dogs, etc. And I've heard/seen people get screwed out of tenure or lose publications for extremely petty reasons like not recognizing a senior scholar at a conference or criticizing someone's favorite theory.
Zak's drones are the guys who aren't smart enough to cut it in academia. Dropouts, adderall junkies, and people who'd be respected blue-collar wagies in any other society but are destitute because the University doesn't give a frick about blue-collar wagies.
I'd imagine it'd be just a normal cyberpunk ghetto, without much in the way of special branding. All the SCIENCE gets done by the smart people, in the glistening chrome spires rising above the slums.
Miriam is so weak it's kind of ridiculous.
>25% attack bonus is strictly worse than the Spartan morale bonus
>-1 planet gives a malus in psi combat too
>research malus is crippling especially with Fundie SE (40%!)
>probe morale bonus is only about a marginal +12% chance of team survival
I actually don't mind the huge research malus because it makes her different, but she needs some better bonuses to compensate. Keeping with the religious theme I would give her advantages in Psi combat and a growth bonus.
Miriam is fun since the research Malus promotes a different play style.
You want to always be on the aggressive for that huge attack bonus, using the support for cheaper massed units to keep people busy while you prove their butts. Make Zak your research b***h and try to avoid or eliminators Gaia however possible as they’ll be your worst nightmare.
>Saw a certain bearded Canadian did another SMAC run
>Get strong urge to play SMAC after watching him while eating lunch
frick
I'm confused
When i storm a base, the base doesnt change to my hands but gets obliterated. whether its a 1 pop base or 3. I didnt raze it with a unit or get an atrocity.
I didn't install any mods beyond the PRACX patch
Nevermind... i didnt realize cities depop upon killing units inside it?
So upon reloading i see it dropped several times down to 1 when i took it
thats brutal man
>Transcend difficulty gives you 2 colony pods no matter the circumstances of your start location
Given the snowbally nature of 4X as a genre that's kinda a big deal
Why do people say defending is worth less than attacking?
For the longest time i thought it was because the attack stat is only used on attack and defense stat is only used when BEING attacked but thats not the case?
Is it just because for the amount of minerals invested in a unit you get half the amount of defense points than attack points?
Does that mean garrisons on border settlements with creches and point defenses or whatever can benefit way more when you burn the minerals on a defensive unit? but why do i keep seeing units with un-upgraded weapons but heavy armor? is that just to save minerals? or would a determined defense actually need both attack and defense values? if thats the case why bother with 1 attack garrisons at all if they are needed to fight?
>I thought it was because the attack stat is only used on attack and defense stat is only used when BEING attacked but that's not the case?
It is exactly the case.
Well. This feels moronic.
So field armies just stack attack and garrisons just stack def and i guess only units that make it to Commando or Elite are worth giving both for any incidental counterattacks...
Does that mean to counterattack enemies assaulting your base you should park your units with +attack *outside* the base because theyre trash on defense and they dont lose HP for defending?
Yes it is, Panzer General combat is much better: both units attacking and defend during the combat and they use attack/defense values for that and combat doesn't last until death
>Does that mean to counterattack enemies assaulting your base you should park your units with +attack *outside*
No, you should put them inside the base, only one unit defends and best defender is automatically chosen
Correct. Your high DEF units tank the incoming attack, then you sally forth and counterattack with your high offense units.
Unarmoured choppers are good for attack and counterattack. They're so OP they're almost broken as they can attack as many times per turn as they have movement points (or until they die). Long range fire (artillery) is kind of wank unless you can stack lots of it, as each salvo only does like 10% damage which the defender will heal in their next turn.
You see, on a tactical and strategic scale, both against the AI and a human, attacking is better because you get to pick when to initiate combat to your advantage. Even if you are on the strategic defensive, attacking is still usually better because stacked units will all die if one of them loses the combat, and it's unlikely there's a convenient path of completely defensive terrain leading to your bases. Attacking technologies come "earlier" than defensive technologies too. You'll still need defensive units though, they have their uses, both on the attack and on defense. For example, if you're on a shoestring budget, than making defensive units and parking them in bases and terrain with lots of defensive bonuses is a worthwhile strategy. With air technology, the balance decisively and heavily swings to attack. Choppers and paradrops are just that good.
Honestly its really not worth it to give units both, its usually better to just stack a couple of garrison units in your offensive army to protect against counterstrikes. Specialization is generally stronger than flexibility in SMAC.
Combat in SMAC is the attacker's weapon strength vs. the defender's armor strength, with special abilities, conditions, and modifiers applied to each side as appropriate. To be explicit: if an enemy unit attacks your unit, your unit is only fighting back with its Armor value, your unit's Weapon value is 100% irrelevant for that fight. The exceptions to this are PSI Combat and Probe vs. Probe Combat (these ignore weapons and armor, Morale is the key factor), and Air vs. Air combat (this actually uses the attacker's weapon strength vs. the defender's weapon strength).
>but why do i keep seeing units with un-upgraded weapons but heavy armor?
If you keep a unit to guard a city or bunker and never attack anyone with it, a 1-4 unit is equally strong at defensive fights (ie. the enemy unit attacks him) as a 2-4, 3-4, 4-4,5-4, etc. would be. If you're never going to use them to attack, giving a defending unit anything more than the basic lvl 1 weapon means you're just wasting minerals / turns building a more expensive unit for no benefit.
>Be Morgan
>Free Market economy too scary with aliums trying to rape your face
>Going Green lets you spam several small Morganite bases, and small base sizes mean its growth penalty is mitigated
>tfw hypercapitalist synergizes best with green economics
Morgan is made for Green, because his innate +1 econ means he can get +1 energy for every worked city tile just with Wealth. Everyone else needs Free Market for it.
>tfw hypercapitalist synergizes best with green economics
They fricking knew.
I don't know what I've been told!
Deirdre's got a network node!
Like to press the on/off switch!
Dig that crazy Gaian witch!
say what you want about Gaia's prostitutes but they do have some comfy looking colony
They really do.
The Stepdaughters are probably the colony I'd most like to live in, worms or not.
>tfw citizen of Gaia's High Garden
>tfw can't get a sunny lover's tryst anyway
i'll shove the mindworm into my ear canal myself
>see some hippie girls doing yoga in the rec commons
>the empath in the group looks at you
>says something to the others
>they all laugh
damn where did you get that high res faction base pic? I remembered all of them looks blurry as hell
Huh. that pic is huge.
are there vectors of all of SMAC's stuff? imagine an HD rework of all the secret project vids...
some guy on reddit remastered all the icons
https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/aoo4ng/svg_file_of_rebuilt_icons/
not sure how the game engine works but maybe by making the game open source, we can implement this in-game
that looks really good actually, now we just need a way to implement that in the game
this FMV is upscaled too I think, the FMV in-game are all pixelated
I put in on an automatic upscaling software, it doesn't look as good as it can be with manual touchup, you can see the pic becomes more waterpaint-y the more you zoom in.
HD reworks of all the UI and FMV assets would be nice, need to be done by hand drawn touch up otherwise it wouldn't look as good.
I made another one, enjoy HD Deirdre
This is very nice
Her right eye could use some touching up, though
Looks like Gaians build their bases into the terrain. You know, like plants
was Santiago's AI legitimately lobotomized or something or what could possibly hamstring her expansion no matter where or how the hell she spawns
She gets owned so easily by other AI
It's because her economy is trash. Her bonuses are only good for combat, and her AI pushes her to social engineering choices that are more combat.
It's 4X, not 1X. Fighting isn't everything.
I only play with just the classic factions on but im thinking of switching someone in for Santiago if this keeps up. Maybe Domai is one of the least egregious of the new factions to have instead.
I feel like Miriam is at least way more competent in expansion and she's just as fighty as Santiago anyway
The Spartan's bonuses are trash, especially in the hands of the AI. The only faction more anodyne than them are the Peacekeepers. Their aggression is erratic (i.e. neutral), which might be characterful and keeping with lore, but doesn't do them any favors in AI hands. While a human player can really leverage the Spartan's starting rover especially if Unity pods are enabled, the other bonuses are simply not as strong or defining as the other factions.
All the factions are like that, the best use of their bonuses are to mitigate the penalties of their opposite ideology, instead of stacking bonuses.
>All the factions are like that, the best use of their bonuses are to mitigate the penalties of their opposite ideology, instead of stacking bonuses
Except Yang since he gets to ignore negative efficiency. A pretty cool way to steer him but perhaps over-reaching.
I like Yang's efficiency thing. What it hints at is that his ideal society flat out cannot work unless the guy at the top is an incorruptible Ubermensch. Every one of his ideal social engineering choices stacks up the penalties, and if someone like Santiago tries to emulate him, it'll collapse into a pile of rampant corruption. Chairman Yang is the ideal philosopher-king, and all his theories are obsolete without him.
The bonus exists without any lore jexplanation that I know of, there's nothing saying that Yang has to be the guy at the top.
There's no "lore explanation" for what efficiency even is. Do you have a better theory?
On the contrary, the manual makes it very clear what (in)efficiency is. There's no reason to suppose the Hive's bonus is any different from any other faction's bonus, and is not an inherent part of the society being set up. It's as daft as claiming University's free network nodes are due to Zakharov's genius, or Spartan's combat bonus is due to Santiago's leadership. If you need an alternative explanation, Yang has obviously thought about the flaws of an autocratic society and associated systems, and have set up countermeasures on a cultural, technological and legislative level.
>muh canon
canon is whatever your game wound up being you fricking morons
The dumbasses who read paentosmac and credulously gobbled down every last word are here to stay, sadly.
It was hilarious to see him wax philosophical of the deeper meanings behind the dirty limerick about deidre’s network node, completely missing the obvious.
Correction, it was a dirty military poem about ‘network nodes’, the dirty limerick was about Ace the Cyborg. I’m frankly embarrassed I misused the word limerick.
Yeah, that's one of the more egregious ones. Even in the worst case scenario, has he never seen a war movie before or gone to the men's toilets? He must be doing it on purpose since admitting they're just dirty jokes would go against the spirit of his analysis.
There's also Zakharov's University, stacking research works since you can get a science win out of it and the synergies from choosing the opposite philosophies can't outweight that. Morgan is indeed the most noticeable one out of that general trend though.
Canon is whatever is in the SMAC novels. People will cope and seethe but it’s true.
No, canon comes from in game quotes. In game. Also Gurps book but only because that book does not disagree with anything in game only adds to it.
The novels were not written by people who wrote the game. Heck, the Alien Crossfire novel was written before the expansion was even released and it could not even get Aki's name right
>Tumble around in the Xenufungus as Deirdre
>grab worms
>worms have no home base thus no support cost
whoa
Tech stagnation on huge maps, y/n?
Ive always been a fan of Marathon type settings but does this frick the AI or is it a neutral effect?
Its a fun game but also a solved one. Once you know the meta for each faction winning just becomes a pointless chore. In fact you dont even have to follow an exact meta. Basically you just roll your immediate neighbors, then turtle for a bit while you develop air power. The moment you can build air units you have won, under practically every circumstance. The AI cant cope with air power and so building just a few needle jets will ensure you can begin snowballing your way over whatever enemies remain. This works for any faction.
I just realised that Starship Troopers is probably what life in the Spartan Federation is like, although Spartans are probably more brutal, way less pretty people and no co-ed shower.
god I'm sorry bros I want to love this game I know it's got soul but the interface and UI is just too jank for me
How does one play Spartans as a long-game faction?
Police and Support means you can burn minerals on cheap public order units, which i guess would be like a cheaper hologram theater with no upkeep
strong troops means you can cull or shake down other factions for tech and money?
Go Democratic instead of Police State. Pick your economy based on what you need and how many bases you have. Build the Clone Vats to remove the penalty from Power. Conquer the world later so you can see other toys than usually. Your initial access to Rovers and the better quality of your troops means you can usually stick your bases a little further apart to claim the best real estate. It probably (definitely) is not the optimal way to play but it can be a fun detour.
Spartans that don't fight are probably the most vanilla faction out there. You can do anything, all those little modifiers aren't going to stop you from pursuing any particular strategy.
If i'm in the middle of researching something and a pod or a faction gives it to me in the meantime does the research get prorated to something else?
nevermind, it seems it does
research points are just points built up to the next breakthrough year and i guess at that point you get a tech
i've not once been able to get a probe team mission done without detection, even when they successfully return to base
am i only supposed to use these on someone im already at war with
>tfw treaty with yang, and miriam, but vendetta with fricking lal
>Be Deirdre
>Spawn next to Manifold Nexus
W O R M S
INTO THE TANKS