So I tried a game as Morganites on Transcend and...

[sendos]

...it is indeed hard.

I played on 50-70% sea cover game, following the advice of submitting to every demand. What did work was that I avoided any vendetta with any faction. What didn't work was that some factions will demand another thing like tech after you give them something and I still haven't got any pacts. And I only have 2 treaties, both of them required bribing the factions to sign it.

I'd like to congratulate those who do beat transcend without cheats. It really is a challenge.

Looks like I'm going to stick to thinker for a long while.

Tip: always build up some sort of empire. Without one, even the good factions like Lal threaten you, even twice in a sitting. Try and make yourself as less of a "minor" faction as possible.

 

[harmonic42]

Is saving and reloading a million times before getting unity pods cheating? That's one sure fire way of getting a huge advantage in transcend.

 

[Wolf Dreamer]

Playing with Unity Pods in the game turns it from a strategy game into a dice throw.

If you produce more military units other factions won't bully you. You can instead start pushing them around and demanding things. Some factions are just led by total asses(aggressive setting in their personality traits).

Remember, if you have their favorite setting in the social engineering menu, they'll see you as an ally. If you can choose something that will help make friends, and not piss off anyone you aren't at war with already and is close enough and strong enough to cause you some problems, go for it!

You can have a difficult start if you are playing on a small map, or just end up building a base close to others.

I played with all factions being the same before, to test that out, and found that those with the lowest military might rating eagerly joined a pact with me, while those higher up just blew me off not caring. Note that if you try this, everyone has the same team color, so its hard to tell everyone apart. Also, rename everyone, since if they have the same name its hard to keep track of who is who.

 

[Kilkakon]

I played with all factions being the same before, to test that out, and found that those with the lowest military might rating eagerly joined a pact with me, while those higher up just blew me off not caring. Note that if you try this, everyone has the same team color, so its hard to tell everyone apart. Also, rename everyone, since if they have the same name its hard to keep track of who is who.

Interesting, a mirror match. I should try that one day.

 

[JH24]

Yeah, it's definitely hard and sometimes you really need some luck to make it. Like said above me, some factions can really be very mean and unreasonable. (Yang/Miriam/Santiago)


It's hard to submit to all the other factions demands, I know. I usually try to think whenever that happens how my empire will look later on in the game and try to continue with my strategy. (For Morgan all economic techs like Weather Paradigm, Biogenetics, Gene Splicing, Environmental Economics, Planetary Economics, Bio-Engineering, Industrial Automation, Bio-Machinery, etc. and building a lot of Tree Farms/Hybrid Forests)


I usually don't have many friends either in these games. And to be honest I don't like to commit myself to a Pact or deeper friendship until I feel I'm strong enough. I often notice then that factions are becoming more friendly. It's usually also around this time that I start picking targets, especially factions who threatened me before. I tend to avoid signing pacts unless it really benefits me. I'm not sure but factions who I ally with seem more eager to declare war on others and then proceed to drag me into it.

 

[Volcanon]

Go Police State and both Yang and Santiago will ally quite easily with you. Gaians will hate you, but then the Gaian AI is only really strong in the beginning of the game when she has the same tech as you plus an army of mindworms.

Seriously, you can ride Yang to a "ultimate leader" victory very easily. He's very loyal if you are exactly like him.

If you have good timing you can take more of the cities than he does too. he gets the AI bonus, you dont, so just send a couple rovers with his armies and grab the cities that he leaves undefended.

I find it much harder to boom on Transcend because the AIs will almost always be richer and smarter than you AND have a bigger military. But thats the same in every 4X game's hardest difficulty.

Maybe try turning on "steal techs when capture city".

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

Morgan is really powerful in the hands of an expert (which I'm not), particularly if he has some space to build early in the game. He has an advantage in the early game with ICS, where he can get more energy in the base tile than most factions get for their entire base. He has to run FM and Wealth to get this, though he can run only Wealth and still get the +2 econ rating.

Expand thin, beeline to formers and then to crawlers. Use armored infantry probe teams in lieu of scout patrols to protect your bases, as they have better morale under wealth and are effectively "clean". Build forests and crawl minerals to your bases. You can snag a good number of early SPs this way if you don't get interrupted by a hostile faction, especially if you use the crawler upgrade trick.

You probably want tight base spacing because of Morgan's hab limits, difficulty pop booming (can't run planned) and the high energy production he gets from the base tile. I suggest a density of from 1 base per every 8 tiles (aka 2 on the diagonal, Blake, Yang or Sikander spacing) to one base per every 4 tiles (aka maximal spacing).

Maximal spacing sounds crazy, but it actually is quite powerful. It works best with the HGP and the Weather Paradigm and high level terraforming. Each base has a minimum of 3 workable tiles, 1 borehole and two condensor / farms. Work the borehole and crawl the farms. You should have a minimum of 10 food, enough for 5 population. That's one borehole worker and 4 Librarians. Once this one gets rolling it's hard to stop. You end up with a former army and can raise land to keep expanding. You are mineral poor, but have a ton of potential support from all the bases you have. You will also be very wealthy and should have a good tech lead pretty quickly.

Another amusing Morgan possibility is the Mean Green Army. If you aren't depending on base tiles as a high percentage of your energy you'll find that you will eventually make more income from running Green (for more efficiency) than you will from FM (assuming that you are running Wealth). If you are running Demo / Green / Wealth your economy is great, but your military will be weakened by low support and morale. If you need an army (and it's still fairly early in the game) try building a worm army and moving through the fungus to attack your enemy. This has several advantages:

1) Worms don't care about your morale value.
2) Worms don't cost support if they end their turns in fungus
3) Worms move 3 tiles per turn in fungus
4) You can get decent worms without having to research military techs.

This works better earlier, particularly before the enemy gets a lot of empath etc., and definitely before he gets air power. But it's a good counter to an AI that attacks early in the game, especially if there is a lot of fungus between you. You can get to him quite quickly across fungus and turn the tables on him.