How do you like to play?

[Bonapirelli]

Hey! I'm new here. I've been playing Alpha Centauri singleplayer for a while - it's my favourite game - but never joined a community until now.

I thought I'd start out with the most telling question: how do you like to play your Alpha Centauri?

Huge map? Small map? Easy difficulty, or hard? Lots of war? Diplomacy? Take your time to set things up? Or go for the throat early? Micromanagement or automation?

The great thing about this game is that you can do almost anything, so the most interesting thing to think about are the approaches that people take.

So, how do you like to play?

P.S.

What's the highest amount of money/energy credits you've had in your bank account ?

 

[Petek]

Welcome to CivFanatics and the Alpha Centauri forum!

I like to play on mega-huge maps, 128x128 or larger. Always play at transcend difficulty. The highest difficulty level in SMACX is much easier than, say, Deity level in recent Civ games. I try to avoid vendettas until late in the game. I build up slowly, with lots of crawlers and formers. I hardly ever automate units or use base governors. Most ECs in a game? Can't recall exactly, but probably more than 100,000.

What are your preferences?

Petek

 

[attackfighter]

I play on large maps, as I feel that the game is most balanced when there's a large distance separating the factions (otherwise rushing is too powerful). Also, I set the climate to "arid" and xenofungus coverage to high - I like the planet to be desolate and hostile, both for gameplay reasons and to add to the setting's atmosphere.

As for my play style, it is pretty balanced. Usually with 4x games I only find warfare to offer any sort of strategic or tactical depth. However with Alpha Centauri, the terraforming mechanics add enough depth for build oriented play to be fun as well. So I play a little bit of both a warmonger and builder. Diplomacy is really lame though - too easy to exploit, so I treat it as merely a narrative feature and nothing more.

I like the Spartan ideology the most, but I find the Hive, Morganites and University all offer funner play styles. Also I tend to roleplay my faction a bit, i.e. if I'm Yang I'll favour dictatorship and treat other factions with disregard, or if I'm Morgan I'll ruthlessly exploit the planet with boreholes, market economy and all that good stuff, etc.

 

[Bonapirelli]

I've always enjoyed winning more than being challenged so I've only played as talent. I came here and realised I was taking the easy way out so I tried librarian and it was no harder, so now I'll try thinker... seems I've got a ways to go yet!

I've noticed that most seem to find the transcend difficulty easy as well. What were some of the realisations or paradigm shifts that took your gameplay to a "next level" so to speak i.e. what are some of the obvious/newbie-style mistakes I could be making/ you made in the past?

I like average-to-big style maps, but I also enjoy huge if I have the time. I can't automate formers early-game because I need to make sure they build the right things in the right squares, but later on I try to automate anything that will behave intelligently enough to be useful.

Diplomacy can be easy to exploit... but then again, so can anything if you are good at it I'm more of a builder, but I feel like I'm missing out on the full game experience if I rush straight toward diplomatic/transcendence victories, so I try to fight a few battles here and there.

 

[attackfighter]

There was no paradigm shift for me. When I first started playing, I had never played a civ style game before and wasn't even sure what the difficulty levels meant (i.e. I didn't realise that transcend = hard or that talent = easy) so I just played on random difficulty levels for the first few games. Eventually I realised that transcend was the hardest and so I switched to it and never looked back. As far as I know I always capable of playing on transcend, even when I was a complete noobie.

 

[Petek]

For me, reading Vel's Strategy Guide took me to the transcend level. The site (www,weplayciv.com) that hosts the most recent version has been offline for several days. However, you can find Google's cache of the guide here.

ETA: I just noticed that the cached version of the guide is incomplete. I hope that WePlayCiv will come back online soon.

ETA2: WePlayCiv is online. This is the link to Vel's Guide.

 

[Kilkakon]

Do you know what is up with that Petek? Not to derail this nice person's thread, of course.

I personally play on Librarian, as it has no AI advantages or disadvantages, although I can play on Transcend easily enough (drones are a bit more of a pain though). As the others have said, playing on a large map is nice as there's plenty of room to grow without having too many problems.

 

[Petek]

Do you mean "Why is the Google cache incomplete?" No idea.

 

[Herfelt]

Usually I play on a huge map (random or planet) and transcend. My playstyle hugely depends on my faction. I can play (and enjoy) Peacekeepers, Gaians, Hive, University, Cyborgs and Drones (I dont play as Pirates or aliens). If I play as hive I am very aggressive, but as the other factions I enjoy teching up and killing everybody with Blink Wave String Copters.

I have a couple of mates I play with. They play as Cyborgs and Uni/Morgan so usually I go with Peacekeepers or Hive.

 

[Bonapirelli]

Petek: I think he meant "why is 'weplayciv' offline". Could be wrong though.

 

[Petek]

Petek: I think he meant "why is 'weplayciv' offline". Could be wrong though.

Oh yes, I'm sure you're right. Same answer though: No idea. (It's back online now, but their admins haven't offered an explanation for the outage.)

 

[Kilkakon]

Strange. Hope that the guide helps you Bonapirelli!