Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri

Archaic` · Post by **Archaic`** » 2007-02-19 08:01pm

*chuckles*
ICS was probably what ended up killing competitive PBEM SMAC/X, as far as I'm concerned. It got to a point where the strategies were so refined that, barring unfortunate landing sites where the ICS player was overrun by a momentum player before they could get themselves set up, everyone had to use ICS to have any shot at winning. Rather than skill at the game itself, most games ended up being decided by whoever was better at diplomacy.

...which in itself, I suppose, wasn't a bad thing. But when you add several hour long turns into it, from the micromanagement of dozens of bases, and hundreds of crawlers, it's a real pain.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2007-02-19 08:04pm

Archaic` · Post by **Archaic`** » 2007-02-19 10:02pm

Infinite City Sprawl. Seperating cities by only two tiles, and using crawlers and (in the late game) sats to grow them, getting your income from economies of scale, with the fact that a base tile was more productive than a non-base tile.

Thirdfain · Post by **Thirdfain** » 2007-02-20 01:18am

Precisely! I never played online, only played single player, but I'd spam a shitload of cities, all 2-3 spaces away from one another. Lots of crawlers and sats, and my population would be much, much higher than that of the AI players. War was never an issue- if I had just a moderate number of my cities mass producing rovers or, later, hovertanks, choppers, and droptroops, I would be able to massively outnumber the computer and tear 'em to peices... it just wasn't fair. I'd have 50-100 cities, and most computers would have about 20 or so... just not fair!

Archaic` · Post by **Archaic`** » 2007-02-20 05:42am

There was a point of diminishing returns for the strategy though. Typically, when you got to 25 cities or so, you had enough that you should simply concentrate on building city improvements towards economy and research in a majority of your cities (typically your inner core, plus a few bases that for some reason had advantages towards research, like those supplied by sea based trawler farms), to transcend as early as possible.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2007-02-20 06:27am

It seems lame to me to do something that so obviously breaks the game.

Isolder74 · Post by **Isolder74** » 2007-02-20 12:55pm

That seems like a lot of extra work for minimal gain.

You can interlock your cities so each one has full use of its land, makes for lots of productivity, and still use most of the space. A few hole are inevitable, but generally, the cities grow faster if they have more space to build.

Right now I am in the middle of a nasty war, but my garrison troops are tougher that theiir main line units, with the Beleivers.

Red · Post by **Red** » 2007-02-20 01:41pm

So. I introduced my mate to SMAC.
She plays Guild Wars with me, and enjoys the occasional Lunar or Final Fantasy console RPG, but she'd never played anything like this. The closest she's gotten is Starcraft (which she enjoys but kinda blows at...)

So we set up a multiplayer game across our home network, second-lowest difficulty, that her and I would remain in Pact through while I taught her all the game mechanics (original rules). I like playing Lal for the votes and talents, and I -thought- she would go for Gaia for its planet-style and ease of growth.

She picked Miriam as soon as I told her about the 25% bonus on attack.

Of course, this has worked wonderfully for her. Miriam's weakness is, of course, technology which she almost must acquire through probes, conquering cities, or diplomacy. As we're playing, we're sharing all techs we get, so I've effectively eliminated her negative effect.

o_o so she has very highly developed cities (as believers!) and then decided that she was FINALLY bored of growing. So she made a massive amount of missile launching infantry and rovers, and a few copters because she seems to like flying around, and completely demolished Gaia.

Of course, the whole time she's all "what do I do now!" and "what does this building do in my base?". So when Gaia offered the Pact of Submission, my mate was torn on whether to accept or annihilate her.

Me: So, having stomped her to the ground, will you put her to death, or make her live in shame?
Mate: .... PACT OF SUBMISSION! BE SHAMED!!!!!!

This was last weekend. She spent the first half hour complaining about the complexity and how she wished we could just play StarCraft.
Now she's bugging me at school when I'm on my laptop, poking at me to hurry and come home so we can finish our game.

Vyraeth · Post by **Vyraeth** » 2007-02-20 03:02pm

After reading such interesting accounts of the game, I'm dying to know, where can I get a copy of this?

I'm fairly sure it's not being published any longer, but Home of the Underdogs doesn't have it either, and now I really, really want to play it.

Please, tell me there's a way!

Isolder74 · Post by **Isolder74** » 2007-02-20 03:04pm

You should check E Bay.

It can be hard to find a copy of an old classic game sometimes.

Vyraeth · Post by **Vyraeth** » 2007-02-20 03:05pm

Yeah, not to take the thread to off topic, but of course, 5 minutes on Ebay, and I've already found a copy to purchase.

Thanks, although I'm wondering if the game comes built with a tutorial? I don't really anticipate struggling to operate the game, but it may be helpful to have an overview of all the units, etc.

Isolder74 · Post by **Isolder74** » 2007-02-20 04:52pm

if you play the lowest level full tutorial screens are enabled when you first open them.

Isolder74 · Post by **Isolder74** » 2007-02-20 05:04pm

List of units(memory as i'm not at home0

Infantry
Speeder
Needle jet
Foil
cruiser
hover tank
gravship?

The chassis makes for how much hit point movement ect the unit has. units have slots for special abilities. later you can have two of them only one at start

Atillery has distance attack no close in. High Moral makes good mind worm hunters. CLEAN Reactor A must. For naval units subs are useful as are carriers of you are stuck on an island away from everyong else, though a sea base is better.

Colony pods make new cities, sea colony pods make ocean cities.

Formers improve land. Prode teams do spying

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2007-02-20 05:52pm

I've been trying to 'scale up' on that game; i.e., beat the first level of difficulty with one faction, move up another level of difficulty, beat that one with another faction, and so forth; all on the Map of Planet.

I got to the third level before I ran into some rather irritating problems. Namely, that asshole Yang, who ended up on a continent next to Zakharov, and promptly conquered Zakharov (right after I made a Pact with the University, no less). I ended up losing because the sea levels got lowered, and suddenly Yang could easily send hordes of guys, and tens of thousands of planes, over to hit my bases.

Incidently, how do you guys get to Transcendance so quickly? Do you turn off "Blind Research", then do a specific tech order?

Archaic` · Post by **Archaic`** » 2007-02-20 05:56pm

Stofsk wrote:It seems lame to me to do something that so obviously breaks the game.

When you're at the point where the AI has ceased being even a vague challenge, and the real contests are in how quickly people can reach certain milestones, there's not much else you can do, except my imposing artificial limits on people and their strategies.

Isolder74 wrote:That seems like a lot of extra work for minimal gain.

It's hardly minimal. It'd be pretty much impossible to manage the sub 100 turn transcend on highest difficulty and huge map without this (assuming it's just you and AI's, no other human players). Heck, you'd be hard pressed to do it in 200.

Isolder74 wrote:You can interlock your cities so each one has full use of its land, makes for lots of productivity, and still use most of the space. A few hole are inevitable, but generally, the cities grow faster if they have more space to build.

The problem is, you lose several turns of production as you move your Colony Pods out to those further base sites, and that adds up dramatically.

Isolder74 · Post by **Isolder74** » 2007-02-20 07:12pm

if you play with time limits on the turn you will never finish everything.

No one like to wait an hour for you to finish your turn

Thirdfain · Post by **Thirdfain** » 2007-02-20 08:07pm

Isolder74 wrote:That seems like a lot of extra work for minimal gain.

You can interlock your cities so each one has full use of its land, makes for lots of productivity, and still use most of the space. A few hole are inevitable, but generally, the cities grow faster if they have more space to build.

Wrong, they'll grow just as fast as a city with very little space to expand- they'll just stop sooner. It's better to have a shitload of 10-12 pop cities than a handful of 20-pop cities.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2007-02-20 08:51pm

Vyraeth wrote:After reading such interesting accounts of the game, I'm dying to know, where can I get a copy of this?

I'm fairly sure it's not being published any longer, but Home of the Underdogs doesn't have it either, and now I really, really want to play it.

Please, tell me there's a way!

Do you have a 'gametraders' type store that sells used computer games or even rents them?

If so, know this: SMAC does not require the disc to play. You simply do a complete install, and if you wanted to you could throw the disc away. That said, if you happen to find the game at a store it shouldn't be too difficult to get it at a reasonable price.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-02-20 09:29pm

Archaic` wrote:When you're at the point where the AI has ceased being even a vague challenge, and the real contests are in how quickly people can reach certain milestones, there's not much else you can do, except my imposing artificial limits on people and their strategies.

You know, I just stop playing. In Civ, once I'd invented genetic engineering before the birth of Christ I just walked away. All Sid Meier's games have worthless unimaginative suicidal AI, so this point always comes sooner or later.

Archaic` · Post by **Archaic`** » 2007-02-20 10:01pm

Isolder74 wrote:if you play with time limits on the turn you will never finish everything.

No one like to wait an hour for you to finish your turn

They're play by email games, commonly taking months. No one minded. ^^;

Stofsk wrote:If so, know this: SMAC does not require the disc to play. You simply do a complete install, and if you wanted to you could throw the disc away. That said, if you happen to find the game at a store it shouldn't be too difficult to get it at a reasonable price.

Um...yes it does. There are cracks commonly passed around the PBEM community though, because it was inconvenient for many to carry around the CD's with laptops. And considering that the sites hosting them were ones that Firaxis grants interviews to on occasion...it's safe to say that the company doesn't care if players use them either.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2007-02-21 12:04am

Ive just started experimenting with ICS. My current S.O.P. is to build a former, have it road/forest two tiles, and then have a pod build at the end of that road. Rinse, repeat, till I have a 8-10 cities (pop 2-3, since I'm morgan), in 2150.

I have a hunch there is a better way to do this.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2007-02-21 12:29am

Archaic` wrote:
Stofsk wrote:If so, know this: SMAC does not require the disc to play. You simply do a complete install, and if you wanted to you could throw the disc away. That said, if you happen to find the game at a store it shouldn't be too difficult to get it at a reasonable price.
Um...yes it does.

Um...no it doesn't. How else can I go upstairs, boot up my crappy 10 year old Aptiva which has SMAC cleanly installed, without the disc in the drive, and still play it?

HSRTG · Post by **HSRTG** » 2007-02-21 01:31am

Archaic` wrote:
Stofsk wrote:If so, know this: SMAC does not require the disc to play. You simply do a complete install, and if you wanted to you could throw the disc away. That said, if you happen to find the game at a store it shouldn't be too difficult to get it at a reasonable price.
Um...yes it does.

Dude, you're thinking of AC.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2007-02-21 05:53am

yeah SMACX doesn't install all the way on to the HDD, but SMAC basic does no problem.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2007-02-21 03:45pm

You guys inspired me. I reinstalled and am loving the game again. I wish I had SMAX.