I am currently playing my first SMAC game, and I have some questions. I am playing on specialist difficulty to try things out. I'll describe the observations that puzzled me, I hope you don't mind the rather long read for rather simple questions, I just can't help it.
In the beginning of the game I put my labs to 100%, like I do in civ. I forgot about it and never put it lower afterwards. At some point I noticed I had 0 energy and an income of about -75. Lowering the labs rate slightly slowed my research, while income remained at a practical 0 until reaching a 50/50 ratio. Now how does my building maintainance get paid?
I tried to find out by looking at my base's labs output, and concluded energy (going 100% to labs) gets multiplied by (scientific) base improvements first, then maintainance costs are deducted from the bonus, then the -30% penalty I get by having labs at 100%. This seemed to be correct for most cities, but some have more maintainance costs than bonus energy output, and they still get a positive bonus! Also, when I got energy from pods, my reserves seemed to drop at a slower rate than my negative income dictates.
In short: I have no clue where exactly the energy for maintainance comes from, and I'd like to be enlightened on the subject. And what are the reasons I shouldn't keep my labs at 100% most of the time (apart from keeping the people happy)? In civ I usually only lower science to pay for units & buildings, but that doesn't seem to be needed in SMAC!
When trying to figure out the terrain, I (seem to recall I) encountered the following situations (I didn't take note of them then, I might be mistaken somewhere):
- after building a mine on a tile with already a farm on it, the farm bonus was removed
- building a farm on a rainy square had no effect
- building a mine on a rainy square made it produce 1 less nutrient until I build a farm on it, making it produce 2 again
- the information on a rocky tile stated a mine would provide only +1 bonus instead of the +2 stated in the data links
Later, tiles proved the "correct" recources. What did I miss? Is there some penalty like under despotism in civ?
Thank you.
In the beginning of the game I put my labs to 100%, like I do in civ. I forgot about it and never put it lower afterwards. At some point I noticed I had 0 energy and an income of about -75. Lowering the labs rate slightly slowed my research, while income remained at a practical 0 until reaching a 50/50 ratio. Now how does my building maintainance get paid?
I tried to find out by looking at my base's labs output, and concluded energy (going 100% to labs) gets multiplied by (scientific) base improvements first, then maintainance costs are deducted from the bonus, then the -30% penalty I get by having labs at 100%. This seemed to be correct for most cities, but some have more maintainance costs than bonus energy output, and they still get a positive bonus! Also, when I got energy from pods, my reserves seemed to drop at a slower rate than my negative income dictates.
In short: I have no clue where exactly the energy for maintainance comes from, and I'd like to be enlightened on the subject. And what are the reasons I shouldn't keep my labs at 100% most of the time (apart from keeping the people happy)? In civ I usually only lower science to pay for units & buildings, but that doesn't seem to be needed in SMAC!
When trying to figure out the terrain, I (seem to recall I) encountered the following situations (I didn't take note of them then, I might be mistaken somewhere):
- after building a mine on a tile with already a farm on it, the farm bonus was removed
- building a farm on a rainy square had no effect
- building a mine on a rainy square made it produce 1 less nutrient until I build a farm on it, making it produce 2 again
- the information on a rocky tile stated a mine would provide only +1 bonus instead of the +2 stated in the data links
Later, tiles proved the "correct" recources. What did I miss? Is there some penalty like under despotism in civ?
Thank you.
