Back at Action

[LouisXII]

SMAC/SMACX used to be one of my favorite gaming duos since I was 10 and played the Demo. Now I'm back at action, and fresh; I have a couple of questions for more seasoned players:

1 - Alien factions - do you ever play with them? I found them always difficult to please and sundry, and they're always mad at me for some ridiculous reason. The good side is that I've never met with sanctions for using nerve gas against them, and doing other such dirty things. Are they really worth putting into a game, or should I just stick with the humans?

2 - Free Market - An option that gives me an obnoxious amount of free energy, but destroys the environment and makes war almost impossible without great skill. I've always loved the tons and tons of energy, but I always chose something else because my improvements would suddenly blast into Fungus, and lots of enemy critters would attack me. Any tips on how to succeed?

I have my plans set for two types of game - either an aggressive, militaristic The Hive or Spartan game of expansion, or a more turtling Morganite economic and plutocratic centered game. I'm thinking of course of specific methods of play: as Morganite, I would try bribing and conceding cash & tech more often in the name of peace, and in the name of extra favours like trade that would bring me money. Any tips on this, also?

 

[civac]

It's possible to use Free Market in peace time and switch into Green or Planned if you need to fight. Build an all specialist base or a base with Punishment Sphere to rehome your military to. In this way you can support some aircraft for reconnaissance/defense even while running Free Market. The military base can be supplied with crawlers (food and minerals).

I don't like the Aliens myself. I just can't stand having them close to me in the early game.

 

[Petek]

2 - Free Market - An option that gives me an obnoxious amount of free energy, but destroys the environment and makes war almost impossible without great skill. I've always loved the tons and tons of energy, but I always chose something else because my improvements would suddenly blast into Fungus, and lots of enemy critters would attack me. Any tips on how to succeed?

Running FM increases any existing ecodamage, but doesn't cause it (excess mineral production and some atrocities are to blame). Here's how to eliminate ecodamage from all your bases: Crawl minerals into one base to increase its mineral production to 40, or so. After a few turns, you should get a fungal >pop<, but no native life forms should appear. Now build Tree Farms in bases. Each Tree Farm (or Hybrid Forest, Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet) built at any base increases your clean mineral limit (= the number of base minerals before ecodamage occurs) by one. After building enough of these eco-friendly facilities, your bases should no longer have ecodamage. (You probably want to wait until after you discover Environmental Economics (which allows you to build Tree Farms) before you force the fungal >pop<.)

An alternate strategy is to embrace ecodamage: Garrison mineral-heavy bases with Trance defenders and Empath Song attackers. Harvest native life forms for large amounts of ECs. This strategy is more difficult to carry out while running FM because of the attack penalties against native life.

 

[LouisXII]

Thanks! The impressive thing is how the Morganites with Free Market can quickly become a powerhouse. All that I know is that I had at least 70% of my bases occupied by Talents, and I had circa 15k energy credits! I was building every Wonder as if they were recycling tanks.

Some of my bases, though, reached the Mineral production cap and began shurning out eco-damage at an astounding rate. I had to bring in Super-Formers and lots of mil units.

In the end I just cornered the global energy market and won.

 

[Kilkakon]

Hope that you enjoy your games.

 

[Peck of Arabia]

Free market is always a tricky one for me, I know it's good for me and, once I switch to it my game shoots off and I generally never look back (even when at war I choose to abandon democracy first before free market, and build brood pits, lot's of brood pits) trouble is I never time it right, I'm either early so I have to give up exploring and mindworms cause real problems with the whole -30% planet thing, or I'm too cautious and too much time is wasted in simple economics; with an opportunity cost that makes me shudder