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I will be starting it later in the evening.

any advice for play?

Don't let those assfuckers build cities in your territory. Make alliances with the Morgans and the science-dudes, both are friendly and good allies.

Captive mind worms make great offensive units. They can easily conceal themselves in xenofungus, they can treat fungus as roads right from the beginning of the game, the seafaring variety (the Isle of the Deep) is the only transport unit with offensive capabilities, and the flying variety (the Locusts of Charon) is the only air unit that can capture cities. They're especially effective against enemies with low morale.

One word of advice: Don't offend the Believers. I often find one of my cities attacked if I offer to trade 'blasphemous' technology with them...gotta love fundie colonists. I usually just declare war on them right away, because sooner or later, they're gonna come after you. But it's pretty fun pissing off a nun and then nuking her empire. (Although the reason why they attack me early on may be because I play the University or Morgan Industries 90 percent of the time, and they dont like greedy secular bastards.)

Also, be sure to research technologies that have immediate use for you, i.e research military tech if your currently fightning a war, etc. And try not to expand beyond 50 bases or so, as after that number you'll have your hands full of riots and risk losing massive amounts of precious resources and time just trying to stop them.

Bah, the Believers are pushovers once you actually get some tech. And you won't even need to use it. I defeated two of their impact rovers with my Unity Rover and I had up to Chaos gun by then.

The Gaians are a good starter faction as they easily take care of the pesky native units. The University is also good. Morgan is actually pretty tough but ok once you get started. Spartans can take care of the native units early on as well as the Gaians but they kill 'em .

I had good luck with the Peacekeepers.

I conquered the planet as the Human hive *L* I just kept building and fortifying cities or taking cities from others

Just have fun, I've had this game since it came out and it's one of the damn finest games I've ever played. You might want to play your first game as the University and get a jump-start in tech against the other factions. A good thing to do is give every base at least one synthmetal garrison at first opportunity, I make this my priority at gamestart and not much gets past my base defence.

This your first time playing the game? Then I'd recommend playing as the Uni. I don't play below Transcend Level anymore, but what I have to say should stay true on any difficulty level.

1) Don't be afraid of Free Market. Credits are your friend, and the Drone worries from the lack of Police units aren't that hard to manage, even on Transcend (Where every 2nd Citizen would be a Drone with the Uni)

2) Pack your bases in tight. And I mean really right. 2 squares apart on the compass points. As the game goes on, you'll find you need less and less the actual base tiles, and for your resources you'll rely more on a lower number of speciality tiles (Farm/Condensor/(Soil Enricher) and Borehole), and on sats. The citizens you're not using to work the tiles can be made into specialists, which, depending on what you make them, will work to increase your labs, economy and/or psych.

3) Crawlers are your single most important units. If you aren't currently harvesting a square, stick a crawler on it (Especially with Forests in the early game, where you need as many minerals as possible). Alternativly, stick a crawler on tiles that are mainly only producing one factor of production (Such as Farm/Condensor/(Soil Enricher) tiles), and turn the worker into a specialist.

4) Beeline. With everyone except Uni, you should aim directly for Industrial Automation from the beginning of the game, to get Free Market and Wealth Social Engineering's, and for Crawlers. With the Uni, you may want to go for Secrets of the Human Brain first, but it's not always worth the hastle messing up that main beeline, and depending on how fast you've gone in the early game, you can often still grab it before someone else does anyway.

The Believers piss me off so much. I've never actually played as them before. If the Believers are in I'm on an immediate Jihad.

I recommand playing as the University or the Hive, though I love to go Imperial on the Believers.

Always had good luck with the peacekeepers.

Strangely I keep calling Santiago "Marina"

The Peacekeepers are the most balanced of the factions, making a political victory very easy (they gain more votes in the Planetary Council), while at the same time allowing for a good army to conquer the puny Morganites, University and (the Greens that I forgot the name, but has the hot Diedre Skye in charge!).
The good thing about SMAC is, the way each faction has its own advantages and disadvantages, making each game different (if you use different factions, that is).
Also, the discoveries and wonders are also important, specially when we race to build them, denying its advantages to the other factions.

I always played Gaians. And in every friggin game I had a bitter rivalry with Hive. In fact I cant play AC anymore without playing Gaians and my main objective in game being complete annihilation of that disgusting disgraceful disheartening disloyal distasteful disastrous disconcerting disturbing dismal disease which is human hive.

SHODAN wrote:I always played Gaians. And in every friggin game I had a bitter rivalry with Hive. In fact I cant play AC anymore without playing Gaians and my main objective in game being complete annihilation of that disgusting disgraceful disheartening disloyal distasteful disastrous disconcerting disturbing dismal disease which is human hive.

Damn psychotic computers...*mumbles*

Research is the way to go....when you have superior technology...usually you can claim the day..

Peacekeepers are a very good newbie faction. Their only disadvantage is -1 efficiency, which isn't that bad and is negated by their favored SE choice, anyway. In return, you get less drones, bigger bases and almost gauranteed position as Planetary Governor(veto powers and see what every other faction is building). Plus your starting tech lets you build Recycling Tanks, which is the most important facility in the early game when resources per tile are capped (IMHO).

Also, make sure you get the Weather Paradigm. This s a HUGE boon throughout the game, and getting the advanced terraforming that early is a ridiculously huge leg-up.

Plant lots of forests.

Build recycling tanks sparingly as domes do that plus protect against rising sea. Also, if you're in the water build the ORP, one of my inventions: Offshore Radar Platform. It's built of:
Foil chassis
Crawler module
no armor (if you have alien crossfire, put on resonance armor)
Spec 1: Radar
Spec 2: whatever gives a defensive moral boost

This baby should withstand minor Planetmind attacks with ease if it has good morale and it extends your sensor net far off to catch any sea invasions. If you're the Gaians, then it tells you where to hunt for isles of the deep.

Myadvice: Hack/Edit the game files. I set it so I had a +5 police rating, etc.

I personally like the University, having a good strong technological lead gets to to the wonders quicker, and gets you a good jump on everyone militarily. A few sufficiently advanced units, used wisely, can usually hold off hordes of screaming (Believer) barbarians. (who will, inevitably, declare war on you if you're the University, meaning you get to mince them in all sorts of hideous ways and no-one thinks the worse of you for it)

If you have Alien Crossfire, the Cybernetic Consciousness are good, for much the same reason as the University, as are the Pirates, although sea bases are weak starters, and never match the land based ones for output until you can start mass-churning satellites, the fact that you have an easy shot at controlling the seas means you can restrict your foes' movements, and later on, when you have big guns, bombard their coastal cities for easy beachheads into their territiory. (the Pirates are a good faction if you plan on being a bastard because of this)

Watch out for the Hive's latent ability to spam bases everywhere around their homeland, including the ocean. They're truely evil with base placement.

I created my own faction. Slanted more than the Spartans to a military mindset while still saying balanced.


Oh and use prode teams to wreak havoc with other factions. When you get away with it, framing other factions works great. I can usually roll over the other factions pretty quickly by playing them off one another like that.

Probes are one of Morgan's best tools. While money can fund tech research, money devoted to probing can buy tech AND make it look like that dickhead Mariam did it!

StarshipTitanic wrote:Probes are one of Morgan's best tools. While money can fund tech research, money devoted to probing can buy tech AND make it look like that dickhead Mariam did it!

Exactly. Nothing like stealing the tech and getting some one else blamed for it.

Especially if you're really rich, and well tooled for infiltration.

sparking revolutions is a great way to get hold of Secret Projects, as it always was with Wonders..