Your faction is indeed a mighty one, Holla Forums...

Your faction is indeed a mighty one, Holla Forums, but my forces are yet strong and I shall not allow you to plunder the wealth of this planet without cutting me in for a share. My price is your data on High Energy Chemistry (C2).

Other urls found in this thread:

alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Difficulty
alphacentauri2.info/official/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.htm
alphacentauri2.info/official/journey.txt
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Organic superlube?

You want data? Too bad I will liberate your planet anyway, idi nahuj suka))))))

Hi. Elliot Rodger here.

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All it's fun and all until Yang starts being a shitty neighbor, regardless if you're playing pacifist, DELETE HIS ASS

WE MUST DISSENT

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We have more men then you have prototypes suki))))))) we world master at rush (b)erlin 1945)))))

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Why I'd be more than happy to provide you with the data, just as long as you can provide 2500 Energy Credits to cover my expenses, I'm sure you'll find that quite reasonable.

Real Talk: Believers are stronk builders on large maps with stagnant tech/blind research. +2 support is by far the best bonus early game. Yang gets it too but can't pop boom effectively so he sucks.

I could never bring myself to build that many cities. Or play Miriam for that matter.

Main thing of importance is to use the save/load template feature, which takes care of being bothered for new buildings constantly. You need to do terraforming yourself but once you get a consistent setup that fills the workable tiles all extra citizens become specialists just like you want so you don't need to micro them.

Blind Research is the real way to play, and playing Yang means no AI Yang which is half the fun of SMAC. But large maps + ICS just gets tiring, I can't micromanage that hard anymore and find it fun. Just give me Lal instead, being able to sustain pop 2 on transcend + free market as soon as you hit the tech is extremely good in its own right, and a wider settlement pattern with more forests and worry-free popbooms is more relaxing to me.
Did you go checkerboard ICS from the get-go or did you go wider and backfilled later? And why is there no garrison in most cities, aren't you scared of drop pods or something? When did you get probe tech, and how heavily did you use them?

Superior training and superior weaponry have, when taken together, a geometric effect on overall military strength. Well-trained, well-equipped troops can stand up to many more times their lesser brethren than linear arithmetic would seem to indicate.

Is that really the optimal layout? I always put everything in a + type grid layout

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I went semi-ICS from the star, prioritizing lots of scouting to plant forward bases around nutrient resources (get to pop 5 for specialists which get me researching decently) and minerals (pump out formers and/or special projects), with most of the rest of the bases sitting with recycling tanks and pumping out colonies or (slow) growing and pumping out formers.

Do note that I'm not full ICS, only 50% city saturation. Each city works 7 tiles rather than max ICS which works 3 tiles.

Cloudbase Academy prevents drop pod abuse, and I'm not sure the AI is smart enough to do that anyway. In any case I've pretty well decimated every AI that's vendetta-d me. Only the Hive sits at the south edge of the map with my forward bases annihilating their shit whenever they come. Also a 2 base Santiago that I ran out of my island next to the Hive. Lal and Morgan make up most of my borders and are good friends.

Not too early and very little actually. Since the only one in my area was Santiago and her +morale sucks to probe, I only stole like 3 techs. Most of my tech acquisition outside of my own research was trade with Morgan and Lal.


You'd have to show me your layout so I know what you are talking about, but the nice thing about the layout I did is that you only have to build one road between diagonal bases. Minimal roading and overall wasted former turns helps. Even moreso for other factions that can't support 3+ formers per base.

Full saturation ICS is possible but doesn't make sense unless you're extremely choked for land. Half saturation otherwise just does everything that full saturation does but keeps making sense beyond the early game, so when I think about ICS I just automatically think about half saturation.

The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear.
But it was never the streets that were evil.
– Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"

Miriam is best girl.

Like pic related (It's been a while so number of tiles might not be correct but the basic pattern is right) is how I spaced my colonies out so they didn't overlap.

Overlap is good in most civ-like games. You really don't want to have squares sitting there doing nothing for 3/4ths of the game. This goes double for SMAC where you can crawl resources and specialists are so powerful.

As soon as you hit 5-pop and can use specialists a 4-food tile effectively gives you 6 energy-equivalent invested in your choice of labs or income at 100% efficiency and no drone problems. Then when you unlock Engineers you're getting 10 energy-equivalent and by the end game a 6-food tile is effectively generating 12 econ, 24 labs from pops and a further 6 minerals and 6 energy from satellites.

When will we get a worthy successor? Beyond Earth was just a sad game that no-one liked.

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I forget if Holla Forums hates this or not

no, but also the game isnt good for single player because the AI sucks, so it just goes into irrelevance when its brought up

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Nah

(checked)

It does though. It works well enough, but it rubberbands like crazy, though. Shoots straight into mid-late game faster than should be possible, and stays there limping forward at a snail's pace.

Yeah but your haircut is stupid.

Are we allowed to post lewds anymore?

nice

Does the game intentionally do this? Why can't I ever meet Lal or Zhakarov

Become Miriam, become unstoppable.

AI on harder difficulties is permanently on "pay me to not attack you" mode. At least unless you pact them and match their SE choices.

I was just reminded a couple days ago that Beyond Earth exists. It was so mediocre that there is like a collective amnesia around it. It was completely forgotten like 3 months after it came out.

Looks like the bullied becomes the bullee.

A lot of the issues between factions in Alpha Centauri would be solved with good dickings.

and spankings.

I have told you that punching in "Heaven" produces out-of-bounds invalid destination coordinates for a Psi Gate. Haven't I, you numbnut?!

That's the power of the Believers.

But that's bull.

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Half the beauty of the faction design is that nobody's entirely agreeable or disagreeable, and different people have different favorites.

No game has yet managed to surpass the thought put into SMAC. Beyond Earf tried and failed miserably, just like Firaxis tried and failed to copy Civilization miserably twice in a row now.

This.

These games arent even remotely comparable, although i like the factions in es2.


Miriam is the biggest bitch in the whole game, she's always the most satisfying leader to capture.

…post some and find out?

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It's a good game but not similar enough to AC

The game is fine.

how the fuck did they manage to create such interesting factions and all those little details such as nerve sttaples during solar flair and options and wrap an interesting story around all that?

The devs put a modicum of thought into their design.

Designer also took philosophy in university before the social sciences became a circlejerk.

Mods have recently been purging anything remotely lewd even when it's been on topic.

What would you do if you captured her anons? :^)

Let's put that to the test

this should be deleted because its fugly tho. btw do you have that picture in full? I want to add it here

Got one better

it has to have open mouth, the first pic would be perfect

found it

No, user. Had you found the exit I wouldn't need to reply and the board quality would rise.

The guy who invented the Glorantha setting (i.e. the one used in King of Dragon Pass) is an anthropologist I believe. There is a use for social sciences when you aren't a total cucklord.

of course there is, but they wouldnt have to be pozzed to hell and back in the first place

How the flying fuck can this even happen on Transcend?

Heh, I hope he never forgets Ghostbusters 2016.

ENDLESS HEAD PATS

He got blacklisted by Sony for the fuckup that was Cisbusters.

Has anyone got the screencap from last year regarding all the issues that have happened thanks to ghostbusters?

Endless torture.

Spartans are worse overall, by far according to the short story in the manual. Everything is their fault.

Whatever happened to Beyond Earth?

see

There are special tiles on planet that gives lots of commerce, right? That plus lucky random tech allotment, I guess.

That's very generous. I think it's just a bad game. The developers were clearly talent-less hacks. They had an opportunity to create something truly great, a worthy successor to one of the best games in the genre, a game that is still beloved to this day, and such a great game to draw inspiration from. They probably had a massive budget as well. SMAC's creators could only dream of the opportunity that these guys got. And what do they create? One of the most empty, bland, lazy, soul-less, derivative games I've ever seen. Truly, fuck those incompetent bastards.

The more surprising part is that no one else got it before 2149.

Believers are strong builders in general thanks to their support rating. Not just in tech stagnation/blind research games. If you get good at terraforming, the Believers' ability to have an army of terraformers without incurring support costs will do amazing things for boosting productivity.

Also, Yang can still pop boom through GAs and Cloning Vats, although his econ is kinda shit to invest into psych for GAs. Lategame when it's harder to GA, you can just go Planned/Eudaimonia for pop booms, but when you have Eudaimonia that is probably the only time you may want to go Free Market over a Planned economy as Yang.


Solar flares are a perfect time to use nerve gas pods imo. If you nerve staple your drones during solar flares, your psych probably needs help. Maybe you play Zak a lot, I dunno.


Install PRACX. Won't improve the video quality any, but will fix color, screen resolution, and modern windows compatibility issues.


Miriam is the biggest bully in the game, tbh. She's the most blatant warmonger in the game and will frequently demand shit from you. Santiago and Yang are downright reasonable compared to her.


Miriam is also the best friend you can have. If you take Fundamentalist politics and avoid the Knowledge value she will be rather friendly. Going Dem/Market/Wealth as Zak and pouring your econ into research while gifting Miriam techs and shit all the time is also a great way to win the game since she'll love you and be your pact sister as she happily starts wars with everyone else and destroys them with the superior tech you're gifting her.

Yang can pop boom just fine. The trick is to get Human Genome Project and use doctor specialists to golden age your bases into pop booms.

what does ES2 has to do with SMAC

The problem with all wonder-based strats (if you are playing against other humans) is that they might deliberately deny a critical wonder to you.
Would you allow Zakharov to have the Virtual World?
Would you allow Morgan to have the Ascetic Virtues?
Would you allow Yang to have the Human Genome Project?

Yang's special sauce to deal with domestic problems seem to be specialists. He is going to have huge support and industry and that can be turned into a horde of supply crawlers which in turn can feed bases running pure librarians and similar setups.

The game's pretty good but the AI has fucking brain damage and I have nobody to play it with Also,

Anyone ever

want to try SMAC multiplayer? GameRanger supports it.

The audacity of this bitch

Zak is the only one with a serious must-have Secret Project. If he doesn't get the Virtual World (or the Human Genome Project), he will be crippled under his drone problems, which can make all the difference in preventing his usual crazy tech sprees. Zak also really loves getting the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm to cover his awful probe rating. Morgan usually needs Planetary Transit System more than Ascetic Virtues, since base spamming is generally Morgan's key to making up for his low pop bases. Yang benefits from the human genome project but he can Golden Age fine without it too, especially if he's doing his trademark borehole ICS.


You'll enter war anyway when you try to corner the global energy market. It takes a few turns during which everyone is supposed to try to kill you or otherwise stop you from succeeding anyway.

Nothing special in energy output as far as I recall and Believers aren't good at making something from that anyway. Main reason was that I accidentially left research on full Explore for way too long, I think? Still absurd Deirdre or Zakharov didn't snipe the tech themselves.

Primarily the Uranium Flats, Pholus Ridge, and Geothermal Shallows, yes. There's also Mount Planet which is more awkward to develop and The Ruins which early on just gives you 8 adjacent monoliths to pump for energy.

An Alien Artifact found early and used for research?

The question is, who had the colony mothership sabotaged and its captain assassinated?

If only I could go back to when I was an edgy kid spamming zak and make myself understand.
So many wasted years.

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
— Comissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

Hey Lal whacha dreamin of!?

A planetary governorship followed by uniting Alpha Centauri behind me as the supreme leader, of course.

Just started plaing this game as Yang. What would you guys say is the recommended difficulty? Currently on specialist while I learn the ropes.

kill gommies

Librarian is the "fair" difficulty. Specialist is fine for a first game, but assuming you understand in general what to do you'll want to move up quickly

alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Difficulty

If this didn't raise the hair on the back of your neck the first time you heard it, you have no soul.

this yangism is the one that first got me
SOYLENT GREEN

Quick FYI: Almost no one plays with Blind Research on. We usually disable Blind Research in the custom rules. Also, you should consider installing Kyrub's AI patch for classic (I hope you're playing Classic first, the expansion pack really drags down the writing and their factions have terrible balance, and yes, the writing in classic Alpha Centauri is legit fucking good and worth your time to experience in its proper glory) and yitzi's patch for Alien Crossfire. You'll probably also want to install the PRACX resolution patch just to fix any annoying incompatibility/resolution/color issues on top of those patches.

It's fine to play without kyrub's AI patch the first time around, as the AI would be a lot cleverer and thus more likely to kick your ass with the patch installed, but I would just play with the patch on since you're on a low difficulty anyway and it includes all the bugfixes from scient's patch.


Might help to read the background info then:
alphacentauri2.info/official/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.htm
alphacentauri2.info/official/journey.txt


Yang isn't really commie. He's more of a Chinese collectivist legalist leader than a commie. Alien Crossfire's Free Drones faction though is straight up "Worker's revolution: the faction." It's also the one SMAX faction I thought would do well with the original 7, aside from the balance issues.


Personally I preferred the Self-Aware Colony. I assumed it was one of those philosophical models of future social self-governance. NOPE. I also liked this conversation:

Forgot to include the conversation I liked:

You are the children of a dead planet, earthdeirdre, and
this death we do not comprehend. We shall take you in, but
may we ask this question–will we too catch the planetdeath
disease?

– Lady Deirdre Skye,
"Conversations with Planet"

Zak spamming is one of the most popular choices. That science boost lets you leapfrog over the competition with ease. Other factions like Morganites and Gaians can also crank out extreme research, but the University's the easiest for it, as long as you get Virtual World, which is not hard.

Morganites feel like one of the worst factions, and I have a creeping suspicion I only like playing Believers because there's you can only tolerate playing a -support faction with tiny bases and no popbooms for so long.

Both are the same thing, giving up free will and individuality to be dictated by the hivemind. The Free Drones are simply still in the transitional revolutionary stage. Yang is in the theoretical "what if communism actually worked" stage.

Domai's favorite engineering value is Eudaimonia. His ultimate goal isn't collectivism, it's a society where every worker can be happy.

Ironically Morganites are best suited for forest spam since their easy +1 energy per tile makes it ideal to work lots of multi-resource squares with your own pops rather than crawl specialized squares. Also the tree farm strurctures give a huge economy bonus. This also makes the -support far more bearable since forests are easy to plant. Downsize is that working energy rather than getting energy from specialists means huge drone and efficiency losses with larger bases and higher difficulties, so they don't scale well.

The real life goal of communism is a society where every worker can be happy. That hasn't stopped communism from being implemented and doing the exact opposite.

Very true, but Alpha Centauri is a game about utopies (and dystopies) where the traditional communist vision fits very well and could even work out.


That's about the idea I believe. Space out bases for ~11-13 tiles, don't go over double your bureaucracy cap for most of the game, slap tree farms and hologram theaters everywhere and lock your psych slider at 10~20%.

Morgan is hit or miss. Sometimes he feels weak, and sometimes he feels stupidly overpowered. You have no idea how fucking powerful money is in Alpha Centauri where your income also determines your research. Morgan also has the crazy ability to reach +2 econ with just Wealth, netting you that precious +1 energy/square.

Support is good, yes, but past a certain point you discover Clean Reactors and can field an army of maintenance-free units. Living Refinery also gives you +2 support later on. You can also rehome units to a single base (and cripple it with unit support) to keep your other bases at 100%.

You could get Ascetic Virtues to fix the tiny bases, and you can also pop boom with golden ages. Unlike poorfag Yang, Morgan can pop boom off of psych allocation pretty easily. As a matter of fact with golden ages his bases reach +2 econ without any social engineering at all.

That's kind of the point of a boom-focused faction, weak early but becomes strong as he gets the techs to work around his limitations. Sometimes I just don't feel like being forced into booming as much as Morgan is, since he's more or less forced into rushing Industrial Automation and a bunch of crawlers before he can really start making choices.

Pop booming through golden ages does really suck though. You end up needing to devote 20% or more of your whole energy income, even if only a small portion of your cities need to boom at any one point of time. At that point you're basically becoming Miriam in terms of research by nuking your income, except Miriam beats those penalties through being bigger while you just sort of… suffer. It's fine if you can get all of your cities timed to grow together for a few turns but otherwise is just awful.

Also, even once you get Clean Reactors support is beneficial in terms of being able to build units with other special abilities. You really do *need* special abilities to do any kind of effective fighting with an equal-tech opponent. Clean Reactor only really helps IMO if you want a huge amount of formers as a non-Miriam/Yang faction.

No, because 80% of Morgan's income is typically more than 100% of the next highest faction's and any base under a golden age gets +1 econ, which means it makes more money. For a normal faction, going from 0 econ to 1 might not be meaningful, but Morgan's bases will be going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 econ (you get the picture) and that +1 econ will seriously boost your energy output when you've got a large bunch of bases in golden age.

You can always mix in a few non-clean units if you want, and you can use probes to steal enemy units from under their noses. That all said, Morgan should be out-teching his enemies if he does his job right. He just has too much money to pour into research. When Morgan is on top of his money game, he out-techs Zak because 20% more research is less science than 30%+ more energy.

you can not censor the truth. YOU CAN NOT SILENCE THE VOICES OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. people deserve to know that the corruption is real. TRUTH IS JUSTICE. mark and his biased and corrupt abusive moderatorship should step down and hand the board off to responsible people who do not abuse power and censor people. they are playing with the ability to ban people like a game for their own enjoyment.
save this before it's taken down. they don't want you to find out what is going on
media.8ch.net/file_store/c5f87bca63f40686ea3368c1fa79b5b732db3d3da1fa322cb7554fb88e09618c.png
http s :/ / me d ia . 8 c h .n e t/ fi le _ s to re / c5f8 7bc a63 f40 686 ea336 8c 1fa 79 b5b 73 2d b3d 3d a1fa3 22c b75 54 fb 88e0 9618c .png

Morgan is usually assumed to already be at +2 econ, which gives +1 energy per tile. Past that there isn't as much benefit in 2->3 or 3->4 econ like there is 1->2 econ. So it's actually everyone else who benefits way more if they have golden ages. Morgan's main advantage in SE is being at +2 econ without running Free Market (RIP fighting psi or anything offensive), not getting to +3 econ. This isn't an economic bonus, this is a flexibility bonus.

This depends a lot on the comparison. Morgan loses a lot to inefficiency if he's working tiles, won't have as many bases due to worse starting conditions (support), won't be running Knowledge, and so on.

anyone got a DL link? i lost my physical copy ages ago and gave up looking for a cracked version a few years ago. in exchange, a story

Its on the vola

Didn't you post this story on this board before? Or was that someone else, or some other board? I remember reading this before.

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If he has cloning vats to regrow, it's a legitimate strategy. He probably got 20k energy from killing all those.

No energy from killing Mindworms on defense and he surely lost a shitton of buildings from them too. Another reason why offense is the best defense against fungal blooms, just drive a bunch of empath units in there and enjoy the collateral damage.

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Oh fug, I never thought of that. Opportunity cost of tiles not being worked until a certain pop reached.

Really gets the networks noded.

pottery. nicely done user.


thanks, will check it out.


maybe? i've posted this story in SMAC threads back before the halfchan exodus in '14 but i don't recall posting it here on hatechan.

I think you completely overlooked the commerce bonus you get for each point of econ past 2. Maybe you end up in lots of wars or you get sanctioned a lot and perhaps you're also bad at finding pact buddies, but commerce does some crazy shit as an income multiplier.

If you don't build lots of bases as Morgan, you're just bad. Base spamming is a key part of the Morganite playstyle because that's how you make up for low pop and it's another way to cash in on high econ (if you have market+wealth each base is getting +4 energy on the base tile alone, so spamming is very profitable). And Morgan can run Knowledge just fine, fyi.


Gaians really don't need vats. They can just go Dem/Planned and stay there. Intentionally triggering fungal blooms to harvest worms for cash is an actual strategy, btw.


Offense is the best defense because the offensive unit has a 50% advantage in land-based psi-combat (no such bonus for water/air combat) and you get money from killing them. Plus he was playing Gaians and likely had Green economics, meaning he would've gotten another +30% bonus to psi attack from his planet rating alone, and the collateral damage means you wipe out a lot of mindworms in one go.

Y'know, chances are some of the devs were good and had a pretty solid idea of what they were aiming for, but you can't be pure to your ideals in a corporate setting like that. Tons of fuckers who don't know shit about good games but do know shit about what's marketing well at the moment, etc are dictating what you do in the game since your boss cares more about what the marketer has to say than what the people actually making the game have to say.

Forests also spread on their own, so they are a very turn-efficient means of terraforming.

Better yet, they spread into and get rid of fungus.

They also lower your ecodamage score. Planting forests everywhere is probably the laziest and easiest way to terraform your SMAC game and it is damn effective to boot, until you can borehole anyway. Morgan planting forests is probably the best way for him to handle his earlygame terraforming needs.

Ironically it's Gaians who are best suited to borehole/stripmine/etc. the planet, because they have a higher ecodamage thresholds, they can handle mindworms and fungus better, they can't run Free Market for +2 econ, and they tend to get The Weather Paradigm early making their terraformers sickeningly powerful.