EPTHopefully it will help you out a little bit, or at least probe to be entertaining!
Alpha Centauri - Page 7
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Warmonger
United States69 Posts
Hopefully it will help you out a little bit, or at least probe to be entertaining! | ||
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Hagen0
Germany765 Posts
On November 23 2013 14:56 Nightmarjoo wrote: Miriam would be cool to see, as I've had no success whatsoever with her at transcend. If not her, then Yang or Morgan would be neat too. I won't dictate the strategy, but I'd certainly be interested in seeing your lategame tactics if you don't mind. I feel like I at least understand what I need to be doing in the first 100-150 turns, I'm just not doing it efficiently yet; but I still feel fairly lost once the techs start going over the 5th level. When I was playing at lower difficulties my strategy was either win with clean chaos rovers or afk-build until Space Elevator and end with mass clean drop-pod units. Those kind of cheese tactics don't seem to have any merit at transcend. Miriam is somewhat challenging to play. You need to abuse your neighbours to keep up. Steal and/or extort their tech and money. Kill them once you have sucked them dry. Repeat until no enemy remans standing. Regarding fighting techniques, honestly, I don't think they are what you need. Smac is at heart an economic game. If it is played correctly, you can eventually kill the AIs by any method you chose since you are simply 10x as powerful as all of them combined. Even playing against other humans this remains partially true. Most Smac multiplayer games are won by the player with the best economic management. | ||
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Warmonger
United States69 Posts
On November 26 2013 10:28 Hagen0 wrote: Miriam is somewhat challenging to play. You need to abuse your neighbours to keep up. Steal and/or extort their tech and money. Kill them once you have sucked them dry. Repeat until no enemy remans standing. Regarding fighting techniques, honestly, I don't think they are what you need. Smac is at heart an economic game. If it is played correctly, you can eventually kill the AIs by any method you chose since you are simply 10x as powerful as all of them combined. Even playing against other humans this remains partially true. Most Smac multiplayer games are won by the player with the best economic management. This is dead on the money. | ||
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Nightmarjoo
United States3360 Posts
Randomly and inexplicably Lal declared war on me while he had absolutely nothing of worth. I wasn't really ready for fighting, but had enough infrastructure and wealth that it wasn't long before I was pumping out Shard needlejets, Shard marines, and Shard silksteel destroyers. The war most benefitted Deidre, who jumped on the chance to go to war and crushed Lal. She probably took at least half his cities. The war drug on a while despite Lal putting up almost no resistance whatsoever because of a combination of inconvenient sunspots and Yang being his pact-mate. Yang didn't mess with me, but he afk'd needlejets in a lot of Lal's cities and I just wanted to finish the war and go back to building so I didn't declare war on Yang. Sunspots ended when Lal was on one puny island base, and he refused to surrender despite it being surrounded by the best boats on planet. A couple years later Yang finally declared war on me and started spamming me with his 30+ conventional missiles. The missile spam destroyed the bulk of my previous invasion force and it took a long time to make and get the troops to Yang's bases (large map, I was in the north, he in the south). I destroyed most of his missiles with a small needlejet fleet, a few boats, and a couple marines in a transport by attacking a single base for at least 10 years. Once I finally started to get traction as far as taking Yang's sea bases (missiles prevented me from ever landing an invasion force on his continents) Morgan started giving me shit and when I refused to bend over he declared war on me. This was also inexplicable as he had a pathetic military. However his continent was even farther away from me then Yang's, so I stopped making marines and switched to drop-pod infantry while I built the space elevator. Not long after that Santiago decided she wanted in on the action and tried to bully me just like Morgan, so I declared war on her. Lal died the moment Yang declared war, as I could finally finish his last base with Yang's needlejet. He still wouldn't surrender. Santiago proved a great nusance, as she actually had choppers which she used to decimate my defenders and formers in the cities I took from Lal and Yang. Lacking a significant number of interceptors to deal with choppers is one of my biggest mistakes, not that it ended up mattering. I took out Santiago's islands with destroyers and needlejets; I started backdooring her and Morgan's cities with drop infantry as well. The bulk of the planet's cities being marine meant that I was still spending a lot of my production on boats and planes though, which were getting obliterated by Yang's missiles. I was still making progress though on the island cities. The rammification of all that though meant that I wasn't producing enough drop-pod infantry to get much done on the land-invasion front. Finishing the mineral projects pissed off planet despite my high number of tree-farms (all started after the 2nd fungal pop), the ecology project, and my relatively few number of boleholes (mostly used by convoys for energy rather than the minerals anyway), and my war-effort was further weakened by having to deal with some minor worm-rape. Furthermore the seas started to rise and I had to cut off production to work on pressure domes in some of my coastal cities. In the end I just got bored and bought the first transcent project, started the second, then gave supreme leader a shot and won handily despite being at war with 3 factions. I didn't really do too much different this game. The biggest differences were that I turned off random personalities/social choices, that I was aggressive early rather than just afk-building, and that having subjugated two factions early I was out of proximity of the other factions so my formers and convoys never got raped by choppers. I almost feel like the win sprung from luck rather than my actually playing better. In the end the actual victory was pretty easy. I bought myself some time, and the other factions happened to leave me alone long enough that my potential war machine was too great for them to handle. I didn't get many early projects, but I was able to get the critical virtual world. However actually obtaining a research lead helped me secure some very important midgame projects, such as the probe defense and cyborg factory. The former meant the fact that I'd omitted to make many probes didn't matter, and the latter let me respond to Lal extremely quickly, as I didn't bother making command centers or naval things. So basically I just magically got ahead early and never really gave up the lead. I was never behind on tech, and by being ahead I wasn't bullied very much for techs either. Research lead secured projects-- whereas normally I get almost none. Projects let me cut corners, establishing an insurmountable lead that let me fight three fairly large and developed factions, as opposed to not even being able to fight one faction. I just feel like I cheesed basically. Deidre ended up being an essential ally who helped me against Lal and Yang, and a little bit vs Santiago as well. She would actually have been a threat if I'd needed to fight her for some reason. Miriam was useless the entire game, and on one occasion got in my way by having a conventional missile as the sole garrison of a city belonging to someone I was at war with. I dunno; I just don't know what to get out of this victory. I don't feel like I can just go start a new game as any faction with any start and win yet. How often do you mess with the social sliders? I saw you using them in the exhibition match, and in a transcendence speedrun I read the guy put 10% in psych very early on. When I tried the psych thing it gave me more drones rather than fewer, so I didn't bother with it. The other guy on tl who did a couple exhibition matches had many more than 6 cities fairly early on as Deirdre in the monsoon, do you know how he was dealing with the drones? I'm always too scared of drones to make more cities than the first 6 until I have both ~16 minerals from convoys as well as a condenser for every base and am thus comfortable with removing workers if I need to. Additionally I don't like pop-booming until I have treefarms at every base for the forest nutrition, which I only make after I get a few fungal pops for the ecology mineral limit. This is why I end up usually having a weak midgame I think, as my bases are too small and too few. Am I overreacting? | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
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Nightmarjoo
United States3360 Posts
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Warmonger
United States69 Posts
1. Your energy income is low enough the inefficiency losses get rounded to zero (usually very early game). 2. Your efficiency is high enough you don't have losses (running demo/green for example). 3. You are running energy into psych for drone control or talent creation reason. 4. You are Miriam in the first 10 turns. Psych is a weird mechanic: every 2 points of psych will change an angry drone to a regular drone, a drone to a worker, or a worker to a talent. All angry drones need to be taken care of before regular drones are controlled and all drones need to be removed before talents are created. Psych is the first measure used to handle drones by the game, and it is the only mechanic that recognizes the angry drone counting "double", so it can be very difficult to actually control drones with psych, let alone create talents unless you have a very high energy income. In my opinion it isn't worth it unless you are trying to dope a golden age (which doesn't work unless you have the expansion) and you have to be very careful in order to do so. As far as growing beyond your bureaucracy limit (it changes with map size: it is 6 bases on a standard/large maps, 9 on huge) you definitely want to fill your continent, and the sooner you can do that without harming your empire the better. You'll notice in the exhibition game I went to 6 bases and then paused for a few turns to build up an army before expanding my empire again (this time by capturing bases rather than building them). The same concept works as a builder faction on an isolated continent: you pause your expansion to get your crawler fleet going, then you start making colony pods once again. You really only need one thing for expansion early game: a +2 nutrient square, and the reason for this is several fold. First it allows the base to quickly grow to size 2 so it can actually produce a Colony Pod. Second, assuming a garrison for drone control, you will have one worker which must provide enough nutrients for 2 population (because the other is forced to be a doctor once bureaucracy drones kick in); the base square provides 2 nutrients so you will need 2 more to keep the base from shrinking. Ideally, after the base is size 2 you either rush a Colony Pod so you can start working a forest square again or you have a crawler army already setup so you don't care what the worker is doing so long as the base isn't rioting (although in that case you may want to crawl the nutrient square and work a forest). I would encourage you start a game and make a save after you get your initial 6 bases down. Then just play the next 30-40 turns through a couple times, trying different things until you get the hang of judging when to expand horizontally and when to grow vertically. You won't have that many units to give orders to so the process should be fairly quick. You touched on something that I've taken for granted as well: submissive pacts are amazing, especially early in the game. It will take the AI a few decades to get back into the game, but they will almost always be worth more than the bases they had left at the time (although I do agree, Miriam would be much less useful than the rest). Also, if you are at war with someone and your pact mates aren't, you can always ask them to join the war, which they will likely do if they are submissive. As far as multiplayer goes, I have a 9-5 job but otherwise I should have time to give it a shot if others are interested. I personally think ~4 people would be the best if that is possible. | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On November 27 2013 19:58 Nightmarjoo wrote: How do you actually coordinate a multiplayer game? Just decide on an hour or two per day to play as many turns as fit in that time window? I suppose I'd be interested in playing multiplayer even though I'm not that good. I'd think playing with just one other human would be boring though. Same way we do any multiplayer game. Except that Alpha Centauri is very picky about who it lets play together. You can set it up through hamachi, a virtual LAN. It actually is fun to have another human in the game. | ||
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turdburgler
England6749 Posts
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sharkie
Austria18402 Posts
Happy to see other fans.  Imo this beats any civilization game. I love Deidre! | ||
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Warmonger
United States69 Posts
On November 28 2013 04:13 turdburgler wrote: but if you have more humans who will keep sending you messages demanding you give them technology or else? That would be me! | ||
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sharkie
Austria18402 Posts
On November 28 2013 04:13 turdburgler wrote: but if you have more humans who will keep sending you messages demanding you give them technology or else? humans can interact with each other in this game too! | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
But uh, send me a PM with your skype if you want to play, cuz I definitely want to play. My skype is: ninazerg Hit me up, yo. | ||
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deth2munkies
United States4051 Posts
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Nachtwind
Germany1130 Posts
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bo1b
Australia12814 Posts
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deth2munkies
United States4051 Posts
On November 28 2013 12:26 bo1b wrote: Any one not choosing Zakharov has chosen wrong. Here here. Also, yes, this is the best Firaxis strategy game solely because of the worldbuilding, faction identities, and the awesome quotes that range from hilarious to super deep. | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On November 28 2013 11:23 deth2munkies wrote: My friends and I played a game of AC over LAN one time. Went on for 8 hours and we were barely 50 turns in. It can take quite a while. You can save the game and come back to it later... | ||
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bo1b
Australia12814 Posts
On November 28 2013 17:14 ninazerg wrote: You can save the game and come back to it later... Only if you're a pussy. Man up and play on a custom sized map thats like 300x300 70% water and tech stagnation without taking breaks. | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On November 28 2013 17:20 bo1b wrote: Only if you're a pussy. Man up and play on a custom sized map thats like 300x300 70% water and tech stagnation without taking breaks. I'd do it, but all of these guys are scurred. | ||
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