Alpha Centauri thread

Been there done that. It's a great feeling to watch the University implode under drone problems. People really underestimate the power of a denial strategy.

Same here.

The Free Drones seemed rather interesting, from what I remember.

I was surprised there's a lack of Alpha Centauri Rule 34 out there.

Have you tried nervestapling the fuckers? I find it usually helps keep them compliant.
Alternately bury your cities underground, for extra defences and to help keep the workers in an isolated and controllable environment where they can be more easily controlled.
And you will certainly want to disarm them.
Can't have them running around shooting stuff when they should be labouring away in your sweatshops now…

Really now. I would have never guessed.

Nervestaple during solar events. We don't want the dissenting drones getting uppity and informing the other factions now, do we?

Research better weapons, put them on rovers and kill everything.
Spartans are all about fancy, fast elite troops fucking shit up. 4 or 5 particle rovers are enough to conquer everything that isn't yang or maybe miriam

Only against the AI.
Against players you'll need more.
More to the point, rather than using 4-5 particle rovers, try particle infantry. Cost half as much, and move like regular rovers when they're elites.
Throw in some armored infantry and move the lot of them as a stack into enemy turf.

They're honestly the only interesting faction from Alien Crossfire. All the others are retarded and some of the Crossfire factions (not just the aliens) are pretty damn broken. But even with vanilla factions, playing Alien Crossfire the first time around taints the game because they added shitty pulp sci-fi to the game.

Right, impact rover rush seems to be the best way to win the game as Spartans. I kinda want to see how I can make a builder game work as Spartans though.

You know, at least Believers can manage a builder game by fielding an army of terraformers with their high Support rating.

It's a very simple thing that AI can't wrap its' head around.

You do NOT go Power unless you're at war.

For fuck's sake.

Any proper mods for Alpha Centauri you guys suggest? I'm kinda looking for things like delaying Air Power and others as they completely tip the scale, even against highest difficulty AI it turns a doomed struggle into a easy victory.

Also, I suggest trying Impact Needlejets, should be half the mineral cost yet be more than enough in taking out enemy Formers, Colony pods and the like.

I'd suggest using Kyrub's patch for vanilla:
alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=260

Kyrub's patch only works for vanilla, incorporates scient's bugfixing patch, and a LOT of AI improvements. The AI should give you a much better fight with air power under kyrub's patch. There's also Yitzi's patch for SMAX only which has more bugfixes but much weaker AI:
alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=320

I appreciate it very much, I'll be testing it out soon.

You can run Power in peacetime if you have Cloning Vats to be honest. In that case you're mainly cashing in on the +2 support.

+2 Support is not a huge deal.
Not being able to pick knowledge is the problem here. Unless you are dealing with massive probe problems

Or you need to field a lot of units for say, terraforming or coloniser spam related issues?

By the way, there are claims that Yitzi's patch incorporates kyrub's AI enhancements… it doesn't, really.

Yup. Terraformer spam is key to Miriam's builder game. Terraformers, probes, pods. She leans on that support rating to field an army of these things without mineral penalties.

Another fun use is mindworm farming as the gaians. You can capture hundreds of the fucking things if you know what you're doing, but you'll need a lot of support if you want to keep them.

You used to be able to do that when Alpha Centauri first came out and it was horribly OP. Before long you would drown the world in an army of mind worms and declare victory. There's a capture limit on mind worms now so you can only have so many mind worms at a given time (this includes mind worms you created) until you can't capture mind worms anymore, and I think your odds of successful captures decrease with the number of mindworms you have too. On the other hand, you get a +10% bonus to psi attack for every point of Planet you have (and a penalty if it's negative, so Free Market is awful at fending off mind worms) so if you're not converting them you're killing them and making money. Gaian mind worm rushes are still pretty crazy though. You just have to replace them as they die off instead of having a giant army.

Any good alternative maps or is everybody playing with the planet map or random?

By the way, capture limit scales with high planet rating.

There's some maps here:
alphacentauri.us/maps_here.html
civgaming.net/smac/maps.shtml
fileplanet.com/62823/0/0/0/1/section/Maps
alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;cat=8
apolyton.net/local_links/links/c-map-174

There's probably some overlap across the sites. The top one is the only one with pictures of the maps though.

im playing alpha centauri for the first time and im a bit overwhelmed. Are researches random? or there is some way to choose what to research next? also can someone explain me what are probe troops for?

Sounds like you're playing with Blind Research on. Most people don't do that. When you start a game, click Customize Rules and turn that off.

They're spies. They can subvert enemy troops, subvert any bases, steal money, steal techs, sabotage, etc.

wooooo this game just got even more awsome ty

FYI, if anyone has 3 Probe (Miriam running Fundamentalism) or the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, they are immune to enemy probes unless you are playing the expansion and gave your probes Algorithmic Enhancement.

It's funny because it's true.

But boreholes are too strong, yes.

You can influence what category it's more likely to research with ctrl-r (or shift-r, I forgot which).

Mindworm farming is also underrated as non-Gaians. Killing mindworms is a good source of income.

Not spamming hybrid forests as well as boreholes which makes both even more OP

This has to be Alpha Centauri's biggest design flaw (beyond being cruel to the red/green colourblind). You have tons of seemingly interesting alternatives to develop your territory, but in the end nothing comes even close to competing with mindless Forest'n'Boreholes spam.

Crawling food/minerals and putting everyone specialists works too. Specialists flat out can't become drone or revolt, ever, and 2 food converts to 3-5 energy. Good for ICSing on transcend where Police quickly becomes a problem.

That's pretty much the way you go, yes. Honestly Gaians get a bigger benefit out of it thanks to their high planet rating. Sadly you don't get good benefits for low ecodamage though. You do get psi combat and mind worm benefits from high planet rating but otherwise it basically lifts your ecodamage caps and helps you build more ecodamage tiles. Not to mention Gaians are prone to finish Weather Paradigm and obtain early borehole access.

While forest tiles are a very good fire & forget tile, especially since they reduce your ecodamage (which makes the borehole+forest combo so important), other tiles can become quite strong when done right. Of course, the more ecodamage you are racking up, the higher the Planet rating you will want to stave off fungal blooms and mindworm attacks. Or maybe you'll want to trigger a few mindworm attacks for the money you get from killing them and to raise your ecodamage threshold for the next attack.

Nicee, hopefully I'll see a few decent Earth and Mars maps.