Alpha Centurai scores: whats the possible highest

[sendos]

After clocking a certain game, I got 159% and my score was about 2500 (i'm assuming its good but can be better). Oh, and the difficulty was librarian. tell out percentage, score and difficulty.

 

[GooglyBoogly]

Two years ago or so, I was a SMAC fanatic.

This game is the best score I managed to achieve , I was just looking for a tough game - not to maximise my score from the get-go, I picked mariam becuase I LOVE teching up and i thought I would be hit hard by her tech penalty- which i was. It just turned out that the game went so long that I had quite a few turns of booming in the sattelite age before the vote came up (all of my cities were 3 or 4 pop, when over about 20 turns they all hit 15 or so - talk about quantumn leap!).

 

[sendos]

yes...I've clocked Miriam too, but slightly easier. All factions in talent, scores were pretty good. But I tend to finish the game quickly. So what was your score? (both percentage and that overall score counting how many points you made from projects, etc.)

 

[vyeh]

According to the attached thumbnail, the percentage was 922% and the overall score was 9838.

 

[GooglyBoogly]

That game went pretty long. I was lucky enough to get the Weather Paradigm secret project, but all the other factions beat me to the rest (and they were all on different landmasses, so it took AGES to take any back)

The worst one was missing out on the hunter-seeker algorithm against the morganites, who were the main techers for most of the game - no probe team tech stealing for me

 

[vyeh]

Long game, your probe advantage negated by the HSA, satellites achieved.

It sounds like it was a great game.

Did you deliberately turn off victory by transcendence?

If so, would Morgan have been able to beat you if you hadn't?

 

[GooglyBoogly]

I wasn't even the first player to hit sattelites. Both the Morganites and tha Gaians had orbital power transmitters before me. But they had only built a few before I managed to research it, and since I had >3x as many cities as them, i was able to get much more out of the sattelites.

The beginning and middle bit of the game were great, however it got pretty boring around the end as the morganites also had the cloudbase, so I couldn't leverage my new economy quickly enough for a military victory (which I was aiming for). The only reason I had a diplomatic victory over transcendance was that I hadn't even researched the transcendent techs by that point - only had lvl 12 tech in most fields when the vote occured, and I wanted the victory ASAP.

When that game was over, I reckoned that I'd pretty much clocked the AI, and so decided to go no further - but I couuld definately have had had a 50% or so higher score if I had milked it, (over 1/2 of the cities on the map were below cap) but that wasn't the goal when i started. Just to beat the game on the hardest settings

 

[vyeh]

You may have thought the end game was boring, but I think it is great when the AI is good enough that you can't win a military victory easily. (With the greater number of bases, you could have eventually worn down the morganites.)

 

[GooglyBoogly]

Oh it wasn't the battles that were boring - the military aspect was most fun. It was microing all those cities on the other side of the world and their associated superformers and crawlers that became so tedious.

 

[vyeh]

Yeah, a former's work is almost never done. I've had games where formers are first planting forests and cultivating farms, then drilling boreholes in those forests and then finally filling in those boreholes and cultivating farms, soil enrichers and condensors (when six nutrients plus unlimited satellites becomes more effective than a borehole because you can get six mineral, six energy and six specialists).

 

[sendos]

Yeah, a former's work is almost never done. I've had games where formers are first planting forests and cultivating farms, then drilling boreholes in those forests and then finally filling in those boreholes and cultivating farms, soil enrichers and condensors (when six nutrients plus unlimited satellites becomes more effective than a borehole because you can get six mineral, six energy and six specialists).

heh, in my view, if their work is done, they rest at a base until more work is need. I hate it when enemies target formers, theres no need.

Anyway, great to hear your story and score. I'll try to get perhaps 300% in my current game.

 

[GooglyBoogly]

If you checked the thumbnail you would see that 1/2 of that score is due to running the game under "iron Man" mode - which quits the game when you save to prevent reloading abuse. If you can finish your game with it you'll have 2x the score

 

[sendos]

ah, interesting...but I don't wanna play a game for like 10 hours non-stop without saving. What if some random crash occurs? I don't really get 'em but certain people will be pissed off if it happens.

 

[GooglyBoogly]

With Iron mod on you can save the game. It just exits SMAC when you do so. I had a little timer by my comp and saved every 60min when it went off, it's also a good time to get some grub and have a stretch.

 

[Dharma Punk Dan]

With Iron mod on you can save the game. It just exits SMAC when you do so. I had a little timer by my comp and saved every 60min when it went off, it's also a good time to get some grub and have a stretch.

Does the game auto-save in Iron Man mode, in the event of a CTD or other error?

 

[GooglyBoogly]

It has been so long, I am not sure- you will need to test for yourself - or hopefully someone else with a bit more recent experience can enlighten us.

 

[NwabudikeMorgan]

I just played an iron man game, and it crashed twice, during the secret project movies, so I hurries over to the autosave folder thinking: Oh crap it won't have autosaves because that's the point of Iron Man. but sure enough there was one autosave from the turn it crashed on. I figured I got insanely lucky, but it crashed a second time about 40 turns later and there was another autosave, so i think it does autosave when it crashes, but not all the time.

 

[vyeh]

It is kind of hard imagining an application autosaving as it crashes.

Maybe it when it autosaves every turn, it deletes the previous autosave. This would be in the spirit of Iron Man, while protecting you from CTD.

 

[NwabudikeMorgan]

true. That seems more likely.

 

[sendos]

Righto. I've started an Iron Man game as Gaians. game has gone well so far: no wars and a pact already with the Pirates, but since I got knowledge, tensions are growing. So you can save your game: great.
Looks like my Morgan game didn't have an impressive score: 95%. Had to go for a dimplomatic victory to avoid auto-retiring at 2500AD.