StarDestroyer.Net BBS

All the Civ type games have a similar difficulty option. At one end of the spectrum of difficulty choices the AI is heavily restricted. On the other end the AI gets so much bonuses it takes Kasparov like intellect to beat the cheating bastards. Somewhere in the middle there is a option where both human and AI play by the same fair rules. It varies from game to game. For example in Civ 3 it was the Regent difficulty level.

Anyway know what is the equivalent for Alpha Centauri ? It's a great game so I would hate finding myself in 5 day long 300 turn games only to discover AI is cheating badly.

I think it's always the third one up where neither side has any cheats applied.

Can't remember what AC calls it though.

The AI will do it's best to cheat at all the difficulty levels, I really wouldn't let it bother you much. It's not cheating the way a player would either, the cheats it does are like extra money, less rebellious cities, units being created for free... stuff like that, which allows you to play an opponent who is not as smart as you but still have a challenge. Removing the computer's ability to cheat won't make it "fair" because the computer hasn't the intellect to account for all the stuff you can do to it. It also can't make use of any of the best tactics (like an overwhelming suprise attack with planet-smashers) because it is playing in good faith according to it's civilization rules. So long as you kill off most of the hyperviolent guys as you meet them, you should be able to overwhelm them technologically at the end.

Play at a level that seems fair and still offers a challange, slowly increasing difficulty as you get better. SMAC can be a suprisingly difficult game at times, but I find it's mostly due to the dense and obtuse mechanics behind it. Unless you have a specific way you want to win though, it's generally fairly easy to just annililate the rest of life on Planet just by carpet-bombing everyone with nuclear devices once you reach the endgame. Always keep ahead technologically and you shouldn't have an issue.

In order for any AI to have a realistic chance of defeating a human player in very complicated systems designed specifically for human interface and understanding, you either cheat and give it specific advantages, or actually a build a human equivalent AI.

We haven't been able to do the latter yet, despite a lot of effort in the concept. Kind of leaves the options limited.

Bubble Boy, shut up.

Anyway, the higher diffs have very obvious cheats applied (like faster production), but all the levels will feature more-or-less cheating like ignoring fog of war, always knowing where you start (and where everyone else starts in relation to them), things that Cov mentioned like easier going in subgames like rebellion, and the occasional army conjured from thin air just outside your view radius.

I'm not sure which Sid Meier game it was, but someone told me the AI knows what YOUR view area is, and will use a single dead square to sneak a unit way, way behind your lines to grab a single undefended city it can't even see.

I'm pretty sure the neutral difficulty in AC are Talent and/or Librarian.

Stark wrote:Bubble Boy, shut up.

Anyway, the higher diffs have very obvious cheats applied (like faster production), but all the levels will feature more-or-less cheating like ignoring fog of war, always knowing where you start (and where everyone else starts in relation to them), things that Cov mentioned like easier going in subgames like rebellion, and the occasional army conjured from thin air just outside your view radius.

I'm not sure which Sid Meier game it was, but someone told me the AI knows what YOUR view area is, and will use a single dead square to sneak a unit way, way behind your lines to grab a single undefended city it can't even see.

Seen it a dozen times. Got pretty egregarious in CTP, when I staked out the entire opposition's space infrastructure and all areas above their cities, and yet they still somehow get a fleet of cruisers swarming my orbital refuges.

The neutral difficulty is Librarian. Having said that however, the AI in the game really does need help to beat any determined human player. I highly recommend just playing on Transcend, and getting used to the difficulty. It also imposes additional penalties on you, which forces you to learn drone management much better, which is an essential skill if you want to start doing sub-100 turn games.

This is a different SMAC question: How do you get this game to work on Vista? I tried to install it, but my computer is not cooperating.

1123581321 wrote:This is a different SMAC question: How do you get this game to work on Vista? I tried to install it, but my computer is not cooperating.

Set compatibility mode to Windows 2000 or 98 or NT 4. One of them should work.

Also might wanna try both the 4.0 and XP / Win 2K compatibility patch.

Btw even with above tricks when I start the game I get a blank screen with what appears to be a dialogue box. The dialogue itself is invisible but faint outlines of two buttons is visible. Click the left one. This will start the game letting you play normally and hassle free. The one on right immedietly crashes to desktop.

Sarevok, it sounds like you're looking at the menu added by Alien Crossfire but only being able to choose to play the original game. The exes you want to use is "terranx.exe" to play the expansion. Make a shortcut directly to that and you can play without the SMAC/SMAX choice menu.

StarshipTitanic wrote:Sarevok, it sounds like you're looking at the menu added by Alien Crossfire but only being able to choose to play the original game. The exes you want to use is "terranx.exe" to play the expansion. Make a shortcut directly to that and you can play without the SMAC/SMAX choice menu.

Actually, it's probably just an error message telling him his CPU is unsupported. The button on the left is "OK" and the button on the right is "Cancel". In the Alien Crossfire menu, the buttons are one atop the other, not side by side.

Add the line " ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=0" at the top of the "Alpha Centauri.ini" file in your Alpha Centauri file. With that, yYou should be able to just click OK when you get that prompt and still play without crashes.

Covenant wrote:The AI will do it's best to cheat at all the difficulty levels, I really wouldn't let it bother you much. It's not cheating the way a player would either, the cheats it does are like extra money, less rebellious cities, units being created for free... stuff like that, which allows you to play an opponent who is not as smart as you but still have a challenge. Removing the computer's ability to cheat won't make it "fair" because the computer hasn't the intellect to account for all the stuff you can do to it. It also can't make use of any of the best tactics (like an overwhelming suprise attack with planet-smashers) because it is playing in good faith according to it's civilization rules. So long as you kill off most of the hyperviolent guys as you meet them, you should be able to overwhelm them technologically at the end.

lol! I had a Civ II game once where the computer spammed cruise missiles and nukes continously at my navy....... NUKES. I got so pissed I enabled cheat mode just to check. Yup, no subs, no "hidden" cities in the middle of the ocean, no mysterious underground naval/airbase.

I simply couldn't cross from America to Europe without being hit by wave after wave of cruise missiles, or nukes mysteriously appearing out of nowhere to hit New York or my transports that just made its way up from Florida.(well, the city was named Miami, but you get the idea).

Oddly enough, after I enabled cheat and then reloaded the save game, the spamming of cruise missiles and nukes(for the last, oh, ten to fifteen turns) stopped:D I lost god knows how many carriers, AEGIS cruisers and bombers....