Forest vs solar, mine

[Evil Beejeebers]

Been playing again recently, why should I build solar panels, echelon mirrors etc, and mines when I can just grow forests?

They become really powerful when you have the hybrid forest and tree farm?

Playing as Gaians obliviously

 

[Bibor]

Been playing again recently, why should I build solar panels, echelon mirrors etc, and mines when I can just grow forests?

They become really powerful when you have the hybrid forest and tree farm?

Playing as Gaians obliviously

Disregarding food, forests yield 2M 1E per tile. Up to 2M 3E with the costly Hybrid Forest colony building. Mines really scale up on rocky terrain: base yield of a mine on rocky terrain with a road improvement is 4M.
If you carpet everything in forests, both your production and energy output will suffer if you're not constantly investing into new buildings to multiply the yields.

The real winner is the Thermal Borehole with its 6M 6E that also takes into consideration natural resources and special terrain. Thus, a a Thermal Borehole on a minerals resource and on Uranium flats would yields 8M and 7E.

With forests, your biggest bottleneck for powerful colony output is population. With Boreholes, it's the number of terraformers.

 

[Agent Miles]

Less is more

This is one plan for efficiently using a small number of Tiles to get a core of strong, productive Bases for your Faction in basic SMAC. Each Base will only ever need an additional 5 Tiles to work, so you can place your Bases close together for better defense. Have your Terraformers plant at...

forums.civfanatics.com

This is better still.

 

[Evil Beejeebers]

Ah I see. Using crawlers and condensers, to free up specialists, and then working boreholes for the extra energy and minerals, it's really powerful.

 

[Bibor]

This is better still.

If you play with Thinker's AI mod, which I think should be baseline for playing SMAC in 2024. (it's just that good), too tightly knit cities means more targets for AI airforce. Crawlers and condensers still work as advertised, but it's just too many targets for AI airforce to snipe. By the point you can affor to grow beyond pop-3 you either have large swathes of terrain or are playing tic-tac-toe with an AI in a 9-square block for the last 30 turns.

 

[Agent Miles]

Whether you use that mod or not, dealing with lots of air strikes is not a problem really. I often encounter lots of enemy aircraft. I garrison every base with a heavy artillery unit that has the SAM upgrade. The arty can shoot up a stack of aircraft. A speeder SAM unit can be used as well. Finally, a copter interceptor can shoot down lots of aircraft that were weakened by the SAM units.