SMAX Scenario: Heah You Kids get Off My Planet!

Darsnan

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Foreword: Alpha Centauri was never meant to be played as the 8th Faction. As such I've had to make a lot of allowances in this game, as well issue a lot of warnings to the player: these are documented below and should be reviewed before starting the game.


Premise

A planet drifts through the void, endlessly circling its primary. Sometimes a companion star encroaches, adding its light to the circling worlds, only to slowly drift deeper into space once more. Millennia turn to eons, and eons to epochs, and still the planet continues its endless journey. Until one day one of the lesser creatures of this world encounters something that is different. The creature stalks the strange craft, and as its kind had been primordially taught to do, it attacked and captured the strange craft. Having accomplished the task its primeval drive had been programmed to do, the creature wasn’t sure how to proceed, until a voice it had never heard before but instantly recognized spoke, “bring it to Me”.


You are Eywa, all knowing, all seeing, and master of this world. As the lesser creature you had created eons ago escorted the strange craft back to you, you reach out to probe the strange minds within: at first you thought it was the return of the false prophets who had long ago claimed to be your creators, but upon closer examination these beings are different, and if anything even more primitive. As the craft nears you notice a lot of the creatures on the strange craft have succumbed to the fungus your minion used to commandeer their minds with: some you can barely recognize the outlines of their former bodies, the fungus having completely absorbed them. However one of the strange creatures seems less effected by the fungus than the others, so you sift through the creatures memories, and find they are from a world ruined by its kind’s greed and recklessness towards the cradle of their birth. You query the creature, “you would do the same to this world?”.

“Yes”, the creature’s fungus-addled brain answers honestly.

“No”, you reply, “this will not happen on My world”.



Objective: you are Eywa, and your mission is to rid Planet of the blight that is Humanity.

Game Settings

- Small Map.

- Abundant Native Lifeforms selected.

- Difficulty Level: Librarian.

- Planetary Council has been disabled due to a bug causing crashes.

- No Colony Pods or Seabases can be built.

- Intense Rivalry selected.

- Blind Research selected.

- Tech Stagnation is on.

- Game is played in Editor mode due to a graphics bug in regular mode.


Other Observations

- Cities belonging to the 8th Faction can only produce one unit, called a Wraith. Trying to change production in cities belonging to the 8th Faction crashes the game.

- Cities belonging to the 8th Faction do accrue ECs: these cannot be used to rush units, but can be used for probe actions.

- The Headquarters building will need to be disabled in your alphax.txt file, otherwise you cannot kill the defenders within cities containing Headquarters buildings (the game won't allow units to be killed). Directions on how to do this are listed below.

- A player playing as the 8th Faction cannot conquer other player's cities, and once a unit from the 8th Faction enters another player's city all adjacent 8th Faction units disappear. Workaround directions on how to a) kill other players cities, and b) how to replace your vanished units are listed below.

- Sealurks and Isles of the Deep are equipped with the Marine Detachment, meaning they can commandeer units from other Factions.

- Wraith units are amphibious, meaning they can attack from the sea.

- You can negotiate peace with the other players, for what its worth.

- Do not select the F1 - FX buttons, as this will crash the game.



Directions on how to "conquer" a city and replace units which disappeared

1. After destroying the last defender in a city take inventory of the units you have around the city, including morale level of each unit. Then invade the city with one of your units. Immediately all of your adjacent within two tiles will disappear from the map.

2. Right-click on the map and place the cursor next to the city.

3. Press Shift-F1, select "Player", then "Aliens", and choose "OK".

4. Locate the Wraith in the menu and click on that entry: a Wraith unit will appear in the cursor-marked square.

5. Invade the city with it, knocking the population down by one.

6. Repeat steps 3-5 until the city disappears.

7. Using the inventory you did in step 1, right-click on the map to place the cursor where needed to replace the first disappeared units.

8. Press Shift-F1 and place the desired unit onto the selected tile.

9. Referring to the morale of the unit as noted in step 1, right-click on the unit and select "Morale": choose the corresponding morale level from the value noted in step 1.

10. Repeat steps 7-9 for all additional units which had disappeared.


Directions on how to disable the Headquarters building

1. Open a folder window, and go to the Firaxis Games/ Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri subdirectory.

2. Open the alphax.txt file using Notepad.

3. Locate the Headquarters entry, and update as follows:

Headquarters, 5, 0, Disable, Disable, Efficiency

4. Save the update.

5. Once done playing this game, to re-enable the Headquarters building make the following change:

Headquarters, 5, 0, None, Disable, Efficiency

Directions on playing the game
1. Download the attached file, unzip, and place into your .../Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/ saves subdirectory.
2. Start Alien Crossfire, select "Load", and load HYKGOMP.SAV.
3. Game will automatically start up with the 8th Faction, and in Scenario Editor mode.
 

Attachments

  • HYKGOMP 2217.zip
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That's a pretty severe misfeature, having to use the editor to replace disappearing units. It would drive me crazy to have to do that many mouseclicks and manual inventory management, to get my units back. I would go so far as to say that's not actually playing the game, that's engineering a facsimile of playing the game.

To actually play the game, without driving the poor player crazy, I would advise not to finish off a city. Wait until there are none of your own units within the city's radius, except the one that deals the death blow. You'd want to attack cities with fungus or extensive road networks first.
 
Noticed an issue you might want to add to the list. All the other players are getting a free move if you save during your turn and then load the savegame. So bascially you don't wanna be saving and loading much unless you want to give away free turns to all your enemies!

This also means the AI's have moved 1 turn since you set them up so what we're seeing may not be exactly how you left them when releasing.

Interestingly if you use the 'Go To' command you trigger the pick up supply pod box although you get no rewards still and the pod appears to stay anyway.
 
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Hmm despite me following your instructions to disable Headquarters all the Civ's started building them anyway sadly. However that allowed me to experiment and it turns out you can destroy defenders in a capital city, the odds are just massively against you.

I killed the Civ's without Headquarters as quick as I could and then blockaded the capitals of the ones that did build one making sure that I blocked their best resource squares starving them out of food and minerals eliminating their ability to build lots of defenders. Then I assembled a huge force, started bombarding for a few turns with 4 spore launchers. Once the defenders had low health I struck. By this stage my Wraiths were large and high morale so I only lost a few. Once the city was empty I quickly retreated my forces out to beyond 2 squares using the closest fungas. Then I just cheat created & slammed new wraiths into the city until it was gone, Headquarters and all haha. I then created a Colony pod and built a city there with the exact same name as the destroyed one to create the illusion I'd captured it haha.
 
Ahh darn.. I was unable to achieve victory and win the scenario. When I killed the 2nd to last civ it triggered a crash. So I blockaded them and went and killed the other civ. Same thing happened. Maybe it's because once there's one civ left it tries to initiate the victory and end score sequence.

That's a shame as it was quite satisfying triggering the victory sequence as the Barbs in Civ 1 & Civ 2 but oh well.. It was damn fun conquering the world as the aliens and developing interesting tactics to beat everyone so thank you again for creating this for me. I'm gonna go do my your video asap! :)

PS interestingly if I use the cheat eradicate civ option it doesn't crash the game, however once I wipe out both final civs the game just goes on forever with no victory sequence. Just can't win haha!
 
Can you post a gamesave as well as your alpahx.txt file so I can review?

D
 
Sure thing!

I'm not a SMAC scenario maker so I haven't tampered with my alphax.txt file. So other than the disable Headquarters change your scenario required its just the default file.

If you load my save game and send a wraith into the empty UN Headquarters you'll hopefully trigger the crash that I get after it plays the faction death video. The crash happens in both my modded SMACX install (SMAC/X Unofficial Patch 2.00 and PRACX 1.11) and in my separate unmodded vanilla SMACX install.

Oh and you'll notice it looks like I captured all the enemy cities instead of destroying them. After destroying each city I created an alien CP and created a city in its place with the same name. I realise that's not how you intended the scenario to be played so I apologise. I just like spoils of war and reminder of all my conquests even if it did makes things too easy for me haha (plus a 'busy' map will look good for my barb tour video too).

EDIT: Oh and I also put a sensor drone, energy resource and bunker on each captured city square to make them stand out more since the cities are invisible.
 

Attachments

  • alphax.txt
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  • Eywa of the Aliens 2222.SAV
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Well that is annoying! So far I've tried repeatedly letting the bases build another defender in the hopes that killing the last defender will destroy the base, but that hasn't worked. I've also turned off the animations (in case the video was the culprit), as well as deleted some units (in case it was a memory allocation thing), and neither of those worked, either. Will have to think about this.
 
So I tried a couple other things, no success:

1. Tried changing the mission year back 100 years (thought it might be a hardcoded thing that won't let the aliens win).
2. Deleted the PKs, then placed a new colony pod: AI wouldn't plant the base!

Will keep experimenting on this and see what I can come up with.
 
OK did a little more experimenting by giving UN HQ to the Morganites: no crash happened when I conquered UN HQ. I then conquered Morgan HQ and the game crashed. So the issue is most likely to do with the terranx.exe not being coded to handle going to the victory cut scene when playing as the aliens (i.e. once the game is down to one remaining Faction the game declares that Faction the winner, but in this case its the 8th Faction, and there appears to be a bug here in that the game can't process the 8th Faction as the winner correctly).
 
OK did a little more experimenting by giving UN HQ to the Morganites: no crash happened when I conquered UN HQ. I then conquered Morgan HQ and the game crashed. So the issue is most likely to do with the terranx.exe not being coded to handle going to the victory cut scene when playing as the aliens (i.e. once the game is down to one remaining Faction the game declares that Faction the winner, but in this case its the 8th Faction, and there appears to be a bug here in that the game can't process the 8th Faction as the winner correctly).

Yeah that's what I predicted would be the case. Bit of a shame!

So I guess victory in this scenario is killing 5 of the 7 players and blockading the last 2.
 
Yeah that's what I predicted would be the case. Bit of a shame!

So I guess victory in this scenario is killing 5 of the 7 players and blockading the last 2.

Thought of a few more things this morning, as follows:

1. Turned off the "Victory by Conquest" game option, thinking the game would then not cut to the Victory splash screen (which seems to trigger the crash), but the game crashed anyways.

2. Contacted both the surviving Faction leaders who then capitulated to me, so by default I was able to win the game - FYI in case you want to go that route (and note - don't try to turn on Diplomatic Victory condition, as that will crash the game as well):
Diplomatic Victory.png
 
What happens after they capitulate? No victory screen?

Unfortunately nothing happens, as the Diplomatic Victory option is turned off. :( And if I do turn on the Diplomatic Victory option it crashes the game. But in the Diplo screen you do get to see each of the surviving human Faction leaders capitulate to you when you call them up, so you can imagine declaring each of their surviving human cities as "Terran Preserves" (i.e. the opposite of the "Centauri Preserves" in the game) where you can watch over the remnants of the human race, cuz, you know, your not a vindictive god, right?

D
 
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@Darsnan I forgot to post that I filmed a big video about this scenario back in 2019. However my video series got put on hold when I decided to get back into Civ2 modding myself (note all the cr*p in my sig haha) and scenario hunting (which you've been helping me with yet again haha) so the video series got put on hold. But now I'm back at it again so will let you know when my video on your work is on youtube! :)

My 'End game' screenshot:
AlphaCBarb.png


AlphaCBarb.png
 
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