What is the purpose of farms, etc. after you get tree farms/hybrid forests?

Question

King
Joined
Mar 12, 2008
Messages
950
A farm in a rainy square only gives you 3 nutrients + neglible minerals/energy. A forest with a tree farm/hybrid forest will give you 3/2/3 which is much better. Even condensers/echelon mirrors dont help much.
 
It's partly a matter of playing style. As you observed, with Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, the "forest everywhere" strategy works well. On the other hand, building Farms, Condensers and Soil Enrichers (especially on nutrient specials) allows you to support specialists and work boreholes.
 
Even with forest spam though, i always end up with WAY more nutrients than i can use except for a new base that doesnt have tree farms yet. Given that every forest will eventually end up producing 3 nutrients, thats more than enough nutrients to hit the pop cap as every citizen eats 2. Then you have enough left over for a couple of bore holes for minerals/energy.

The problem with borehole spamming is the slope requirements and the clean mineral limits, assuming you can get rid of the eco-damage. Im not sure how eco damage works apart from the clean minerals limit...some stuff like pholus mutagen says that it reduces the effects of industry, is that referring to the clean minerals limit or something else? I read on another site that every borehole built increases the risk of global warming, but hybrid forests are supposed to eliminate all eco damage from terraforming, so...

I modded the game so that you get +2 CM limit from fungal pops and for every environmental building, and even then its quite easy to cause eco damage once you start factoring in gene jack factories, quantum converters, etc. And im not even trying to mass spam boreholes and crawlers (i typically use crawlers for energy due to the CM limit).

The only times i use condensers is when i manage to grab weather paradigm and i have a nutrient bonus square, in order to get +7 nutrients early on. But once you grab the cloning vats, nutrients and growth mods become useless. Theres hydrophonic satellites too if you really need extra nutrients.

Echelon mirrors are really uninteresting because they dont give much of a boost and takes too much effort. Coastal HQ, spam supply foils, easy +4 energy per shelf tile. In order to beat that with echelon mirrors you need to :

-Find a large part of land

-Raise it without screwing up your coastal improvements

-Spend god knows how many turns building echelon mirrors and solar collectors

-Keep it safe from mind worms, etc which is much harder on land.

vs Tidal harness spam near your HQ.

I find coastal bases are much easier because kelp farms are amazing. Up to +4 food with just one cheap facility, way before you can get hybrid farms and they are invaluable before you get cloning vats. They also give you up to 3 minerals per turn with all the proper bonuses.

But once you get established bases going with hybrid forests, theres very little reason to touch anything except boreholes for the advanced terraforming options. A rainy square is only going to produce 3 nutrients a turn with a farm...and typically only one energy with a solar collector because the map genreator doesnt like high elevations. Meanwhile a hybrid forest produces 3-2-3? That is so much better than a farm, and forests are so easy to plant.

On a related note, what is drill to aquifer supposed to do? It doesnt seem to create a proper river, just a single river tile. Whats the use of that for something that takes a lot of turns to terraform? Instead of wasting my time doing that i could just spam tidal harnesses and supply foils instead for +4 energy per turn...or +5 with the merchant exchange.
 
Even with forest spam though, i always end up with WAY more nutrients than i can use except for a new base that doesnt have tree farms yet. Given that every forest will eventually end up producing 3 nutrients, thats more than enough nutrients to hit the pop cap as every citizen eats 2. Then you have enough left over for a couple of bore holes for minerals/energy.

The problem with borehole spamming is the slope requirements and the clean mineral limits, assuming you can get rid of the eco-damage. Im not sure how eco damage works apart from the clean minerals limit...some stuff like pholus mutagen says that it reduces the effects of industry, is that referring to the clean minerals limit or something else? I read on another site that every borehole built increases the risk of global warming, but hybrid forests are supposed to eliminate all eco damage from terraforming, so...

I modded the game so that you get +2 CM limit from fungal pops and for every environmental building, and even then its quite easy to cause eco damage once you start factoring in gene jack factories, quantum converters, etc. And im not even trying to mass spam boreholes and crawlers (i typically use crawlers for energy due to the CM limit).

The only times i use condensers is when i manage to grab weather paradigm and i have a nutrient bonus square, in order to get +7 nutrients early on. But once you grab the cloning vats, nutrients and growth mods become useless. Theres hydrophonic satellites too if you really need extra nutrients.

Echelon mirrors are really uninteresting because they dont give much of a boost and takes too much effort. Coastal HQ, spam supply foils, easy +4 energy per shelf tile. In order to beat that with echelon mirrors you need to :

-Find a large part of land

-Raise it without screwing up your coastal improvements

-Spend god knows how many turns building echelon mirrors and solar collectors

-Keep it safe from mind worms, etc which is much harder on land.

vs Tidal harness spam near your HQ.

I find coastal bases are much easier because kelp farms are amazing. Up to +4 food with just one cheap facility, way before you can get hybrid farms and they are invaluable before you get cloning vats. They also give you up to 3 minerals per turn with all the proper bonuses.

But once you get established bases going with hybrid forests, theres very little reason to touch anything except boreholes for the advanced terraforming options. A rainy square is only going to produce 3 nutrients a turn with a farm...and typically only one energy with a solar collector because the map genreator doesnt like high elevations. Meanwhile a hybrid forest produces 3-2-3? That is so much better than a farm, and forests are so easy to plant.

On a related note, what is drill to aquifer supposed to do? It doesnt seem to create a proper river, just a single river tile. Whats the use of that for something that takes a lot of turns to terraform? Instead of wasting my time doing that i could just spam tidal harnesses and supply foils instead for +4 energy per turn...or +5 with the merchant exchange.

Agree with this 100% on strategy--Forests are overpowered relative to other terraforming improvements to the point where the only correct strategy is Forest Everything, with boreholes as possible for supply crawlers outside of fat crosses.

(Very late in SMAX, Fungus Everything is the right strategy if you're going Green-Cybernetic and build the Manifold Harmonics, but that's so late it's rarely worthwhile re-terraforming your whole empire.)

Drill to Aquifer might create a one-tile river because either (a) you performed it on a borehole (rivers disappear in boreholes) and (b) you performed it on a tile in a basin with no outlets. It should create a natural riverhead, no different from other rivers.
 
You mean elevation band? But ive seen rivers in more than one tile in the same elevation band...

Also i dont understand why you can raise/lower land but not dig a canal for the river to flow through?
 
You mean elevation band? But ive seen rivers in more than one tile in the same elevation band...

Also i dont understand why you can raise/lower land but not dig a canal for the river to flow through?

You can? Both natural and drill-to-aquifer rivers will shift course if you change elevations around them.
 
You can? Both natural and drill-to-aquifer rivers will shift course if you change elevations around them.

I mean why cant you make rivers flow to squares of the same elevation band? Just dig a canal. You an launch satellites but you cant dig a canal for rivers?
 
Farms + solar collectors are decent on rolling, rainy squares at higher elevations; for those times when you have one last colonist to put down and you want one mineral instead of two-- for avoiding the pollution issues. Plus as Petek mentioned, there are some cases where you might not want to build tree farms / hybrid forest in every base or pay for their upkeep right away. Or maybe you can't protect a food crawler to supply a particular base.

I usually play with a half-forest, half-coastal strategy myself in Alien Crossfire. Versus forests, I think tidal harnesses bring in energy a little faster in the early game, then later the kelp farm is slightly better food-wise when the Hab Dome restrictions come off (i.e. having extra food already set up means more specialists faster when you're running a pop boom).
 
You can place a river on all squares desired by simply initiating 'q' on all points with a former unit (of same speed@forming! (actually... need to check how vital that is)) same turn. This is a bug I believe. The only flaw is that you can't add to rivers already present as it stops you. When you do this, all rivers appear at once which looks bizarre but works. DON'T lay a borehole afterwards it will probably ruin the whole super-delta of rivers.
 
Something else I noticed about the echelon mirrors, though they might not be so great in the early game--if there's a faction you're about to conquer on another continent you could always blast them with tectonic missiles (reactor 3 and up). I fired off one just for funsies and it raised the land up to a 16 x 16 Sunny Mesa style grid. :O It's too bad they can't be detonated over sea tiles.
 
Top Bottom