Sid Meier's Alpha "We've Fucked Up the Earth, Let's Go Ruin Another Planet" Centauri

[cheeba]

damn, was i the only one to simply right click on terraformers, and select "autoimprove homebase"?

listening to you guys, sounds like I was p lazy with the whole resource management stuff.

[Steph]

Naw it's cool, I used to fully automate formers all the time. I only started running them manually after picking this up again recently.

I still run two or three formers on automatic fungus removal of course.

[Sandslinger]

Removing fungus ....No love for planet !!!

I always tended to play as Gaia and RP my way through it by showing as much love for the planet as possible, Think I enjoyed the terraforming aspect most of all.

Played a game last night on Thinker and basically bullied the University into giving me all their tech the whole time. then about 40 turns in Morgan cornered the energy market, while yang already had covered half the map with bases coming out of the yazoo.

Forgot how scary hard the game could be at times especially when you play it with a RP mindset lol

[dotfortun]

Removing fungus ....No love for planet !!!

I always tended to play as Gaia and RP my way through it by showing as much love for the planet as possible, Think I enjoyed the terraforming aspect most of all.

Played a game last night on Thinker and basically bullied the University into giving me all their tech the whole time. then about 40 turns in Morgan cornered the energy market, while yang already had covered half the map with bases coming out of the yazoo.

Forgot how scary hard the game could be at times especially when you play it with a RP mindset lol

I recently played as University, researched up to psi weapons and defense asap, and did what I could to encourage fungal growth everywhere. Between my psychic soldiers, mindworms, locusts, and water mindworms that I just blanked the name of; I was the reason people wore tinfoil hats.

[Vortex]

damn, was i the only one to simply right click on terraformers, and select "autoimprove homebase"?

listening to you guys, sounds like I was p lazy with the whole resource management stuff.

Its not bad for late game when you CBA to micro every former ever (sea formers in particular you can basically ignore after early game assuming they don't do anything too derpy), but early on its really important to have strong terraforming. Any natural resources (which are key base building locations) need to be capitalized on ASAP, farms need to go up early game for population growth (on higher difficulty settings you lose a pop level building colony pods, so you need high food income so you can build more bases), sensor beacons are really important to build for early warning + modest defensive boost, and of course you need to spam the shit out of roads between your bases and future base sites.

If you get the weather paradigm, you should have as many terraformers you can afford + get away with, and just abuse the shit out of that project's obscene early-game power. Even if you can't utilize all the raw stats of the land, the -50% build time reduction means you can very rapidly build roads, clear fungus, drill rivers (don't underestimate this option!), adjust land elevation (huge options here - build a land bridge to invade, cut a land bridge for safety vs. another faction, increase height for energy bonuses, etc). Remember that terrafomers can all work on the same project - an 8 turn operation with one former is a 4 turn project with two of them and a two turn project with four of them! A team of formers + weather paradigm can get a high-quality base going in practically zero time at all if you focus their efforts (this is an esp. good idea to do when removing fungus and building roads (often go together), sense the formers are very vulnerable to roaving mindworms).

Forest spam is a decent option so long as you have enough farms to stay positive growth. Once you get the +forest resources going, forests become VERY strong. Plus, they expand on their own like fungus does.

Mid/late game, uh, fungus can be one of the best tiles for you if you nabbed the right secret projects. You can treat it like a road, get hybrid-forest equivalent resources out of it, and not give a shit when eco damage causes xenofungal blooms. Plus, all the other factions are a severe disadvantage in your space now because its just regular old fungus to them. Of course if you lose the bases with those projects, you could have just had your empire dealt a crippling blow as your mastery of the fungus suddenly vanishes into thin air...

Oh, it should be mentioned that in mid game its a good idea to start phasing in more advanced formers than your T1 terraformer. Rover-terraformers are a lot more expensive, but they get to their location at twice the speed, and can begin a project the same turn they arrive at the site (infantry terraformers will ~usually~ move into the site exhausted, and work will then begin next year). This is a really, really big bump in your road production speed. Terrafomer-specific upgrades are fairly mid/late game, but you could always slap armor on them (removing non-combat penalty) and defensive special abilities to make them much harder to lose to random shit. Hell, in a multiplayer game it might not be a bad idea to make them encrypted less some asshole probeteam buys a 5 stack of your formers for nothing and :trollfaces: them away.

[shoki]

fuck you all
installing smacx...

[cheeba]

+ rep vortex.

have to fire up a new round now.

[Dahak]

Resistance broken, have installed on my work laptop for lunch-hour goodness.

[Sandslinger]

Might be obvious at this point but worth mentioning as well

due to the way the game-mechanics work min/maxing cities for different purposes is really beneficial.

If you create a very high city then make it your uber energy generating location. likewise you can create production capitals.

Easiest way I found was to focus on growth initially, then convert each city to be either a production or energy base. generally i would have energy creation in middle of empire and production at the edges.
Two reasons for this. One i wanted my military building as close to enemy as possible for reinforcements and more importantly if there is going to be pollution and mindworms going crazy I do not want it happening behind my fortified lines.

Attack is generally much better then defence in the game so having your outer border covered in fungus serves a few purposes. It tends to slow enemies down so they are forced to a halt in front of your base. And also any subsequent mindworm spawns can give your units experience and also have a dual chance of harassing attacking enemy rather then you.

Perfect if you have a fast attack response unit.

Once you can build supply crawlers spam your borders and empty space inbetween your cities with them, they are fantastic for denying enemy space to build bases and deny worms spawn points in the middle of your empire.
And also with Psi or Deep Radar they can work as defence units.

If your playing a long game with large map then you might really want to think about creatign a high ridge all along your coastal borders. Later in the game the oceans tends to rise as poles melts and having half your cities suddenly submerged and all your boreholes covered by ocean can suck donkey balls.
Works to your benefit if your gaian and have fungused everything though


Actually really wish they would remake this changing nothing though except updating UI to civ V standard. Moving stacks and more specific former automatiion like route to would be sweet.
Keeping the exact same videos but perhaps animating the leaders and the ability to force weak enemies to accept border changes would be win !

Saw on Wikipedia that out of the entire Civ series Alpha Centauri had the worst sales though. even with awesome reviews

Planet Interaction in Eve Should be a SMAC mini game !!

[Seamus]

Only just picked this up cos of this thread and ripping up super easy game in order to familiarise myself.
Anyway, intended to say to u slinger, formers can route-to, ctrl+r/ctrl+t

[Sandslinger]

Only just picked this up cos of this thread and ripping up super easy game in order to familiarise myself.
Anyway, intended to say to u slinger, formers can route-to, ctrl+r/ctrl+t

omg missed that + rep !!

Oh and condolences for your evenings now being sucked dry

[Frug]

Supply Transports were so fucking uber once you got the dual rig mod you could make them Psi resistant too and with high morale basically create a border around your own space that would not only fend off mindworms en masse, but also feed your cities twice what they could gather with direct resources.

I never used echelon mirrors or boreholes much simply because I would have every square filled with supply transports that slowed down enemy advances, prevented planet busters from reaching my cities and deprived mindboils from having spawning points within my regions.

OK supply transports were always good but this is ridiculous.

Sounds like something that needs a balance hammer. Though I guess in an MP game it'd be pretty easy to slaughter them.

[Frug]

Actually really wish they would remake this changing nothing though except updating UI to civ V standard.

Please no. I acknowledge that the AC UI is a nightmare to figure out at first, but it's quite usable once you know how to do it. Specifically civ V has a terrible setup for queuing up units whereas AC is more like civ 4. I like some UI things in civ V (the prompts for giving new orders mostly) but definitely not all of it.

Moving stacks and more specific former automatiion like route to would be sweet.

Stacks can be grouped with iirc ctl+g and they behave as one. I always had a duo or trio of formers grouped for manual forming later in the game. They really really need to add the ability to queue up former actions though. AC does have the whole "Farm+solar+road" option but it's not enough.

Saw on Wikipedia that out of the entire Civ series Alpha Centauri had the worst sales though. even with awesome reviews

This thread proves it's a beloved game, though. Lotta fans out there. But as mentioned earlier in this thread, none of the original team members responsible for AC being what it is still work at Firaxis so there's almost no hope of getting what we want.

[shoki]

Planet Interaction in Eve Should be a SMAC mini game !!

lol who'd drive spaceships than?

[Vortex]

Supply Transports were so fucking uber once you got the dual rig mod you could make them Psi resistant too and with high morale basically create a border around your own space that would not only fend off mindworms en masse, but also feed your cities twice what they could gather with direct resources.

I never used echelon mirrors or boreholes much simply because I would have every square filled with supply transports that slowed down enemy advances, prevented planet busters from reaching my cities and deprived mindboils from having spawning points within my regions.

OK supply transports were always good but this is ridiculous.

Sounds like something that needs a balance hammer. Though I guess in an MP game it'd be pretty easy to slaughter them.

Supply crawlers are tied for the #1 balance problem the game has, alongside nerve gas pods. They should really cost supply and be much less efficient at what they do. As it stands, once you get their tech, there isn't much reason for your inner bases not to go full-tilt production on them until they need to build secret projects. Hell, they even decommission for 100%, so you can even just build a stockpile and then 1-turn a key project as well.

[Sandslinger]

Supply Transports were so fucking uber once you got the dual rig mod you could make them Psi resistant too and with high morale basically create a border around your own space that would not only fend off mindworms en masse, but also feed your cities twice what they could gather with direct resources.

I never used echelon mirrors or boreholes much simply because I would have every square filled with supply transports that slowed down enemy advances, prevented planet busters from reaching my cities and deprived mindboils from having spawning points within my regions.

OK supply transports were always good but this is ridiculous.

Sounds like something that needs a balance hammer. Though I guess in an MP game it'd be pretty easy to slaughter them.

Supply crawlers are tied for the #1 balance problem the game has, alongside nerve gas pods. They should really cost supply and be much less efficient at what they do. As it stands, once you get their tech, there isn't much reason for your inner bases not to go full-tilt production on them until they need to build secret projects. Hell, they even decommission for 100%, so you can even just build a stockpile and then 1-turn a key project as well.

Yah was gonna say about that had nearly forgotten it myself.

Basically you can 1-turn nearly every wonder by turning all your cities into scout mass production. most decent cities will produce a scout every turn and a scout that is decomissioned in a wonder city will take 1 turn off its build cycle.

Oh and supply is pretty OP, if your attacking a whole mess of them then even with low HP setup they will make a mess of a attacking fleet before too long. So by the time the fast attack response unit gets in your screwed.

[Frug]

Never knew about decommissioning units to reduce build times. That's lame.

Nerve gas pods are an atrocity at least.

[Ort Lofthus]

Yeah you can make max armor hovertank supply transports with the worst engines and most expensive abilities. Stockpile them then send them to new bases and buying all the most expensive city improvements off the start, or just feed them into your secret project factory.

Question though, isn't pollution a function of mineral production versus base population? IIRC crawlers cause extra eco-damage but it might be that abusing crawlers puts your eco-damage up freaking high really early game. I rarely saw locusts until I learned about crawlers, now they start showing up mid game intent on ending my blight on the planet.

[Ampoliros]

Never knew about decommissioning units to reduce build times. That's lame.

Nerve gas pods are an atrocity at least.

The atrocity thing is only a minor drawback, really, considering how easy it is to repeal the UN charter in most games. A nerve gas chopper could probably kill most bases in a single turn if there were enough defenders; the only thing that saves you is psi defense.

Question though, isn't pollution a function of mineral production versus base population? IIRC crawlers cause extra eco-damage but it might be that abusing crawlers puts your eco-damage up freaking high really early game. I rarely saw locusts until I learned about crawlers, now they start showing up mid game intent on ending my blight on the planet.

Pollution is a function of mineral production (everything but orbital production) and terraforming. Basically, there's some behind the scenes limit on per-base mineral production; building certain facilities after the first fungus growth effect relaxes the limit. Minerals that would be crawled in would count as produced in the base, and so would probably count against the ecological damage if they took you over the limit.

[Sandslinger]

Never knew about decommissioning units to reduce build times. That's lame.

Nerve gas pods are an atrocity at least.

The atrocity thing is only a minor drawback, really, considering how easy it is to repeal the UN charter in most games. A nerve gas chopper could probably kill most bases in a single turn if there were enough defenders; the only thing that saves you is psi defense.

Question though, isn't pollution a function of mineral production versus base population? IIRC crawlers cause extra eco-damage but it might be that abusing crawlers puts your eco-damage up freaking high really early game. I rarely saw locusts until I learned about crawlers, now they start showing up mid game intent on ending my blight on the planet.

Pollution is a function of mineral production (everything but orbital production) and terraforming. Basically, there's some behind the scenes limit on per-base mineral production; building certain facilities after the first fungus growth effect relaxes the limit. Minerals that would be crawled in would count as produced in the base, and so would probably count against the ecological damage if they took you over the limit.

Yes they do count against pollution. This is why it's so important to have them with PSI defence and to have specific production cities which are well defended, preferably on the outskirts off your space. If you've gone gaia and built all the planet type wonders then you don't care when the fungal blooms go out of control anyways

Then Any planetlife that results from the pollution will spawn at the border and be as much a hassle to your enemy as you.

Also if you've raised your land beforehand then sometime late game when the sea's start rising from all your crawler pollution basically all your enemies except Yang gets wiped off the map for you.