The Return of an Old Newbie

[Aabraxan]

I posted this over at Apolyton, but haven't gotten a response, so I thought I'd try posting it here. The AC forum here seems to have picked up as of late, so I'm hoping that I can get some advice.

Several years ago, I picked up SMAC. Actually, I bought it at about the same time I bought Civ III Complete and GalCiv. I played SMAC for a while, and (IIRC) even beat it at Transcend once. (Truth be told, I probably only beat it because I played as Yang and got a starting position on a river in the middle of the Monsoon Jungle.) I drifted off into C3C for a couple or three years, but decided to dust off my SMAC disc a couple of weeks ago. Man, oh man! I'd forgotten just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Having not played for several years, and never having been all that good with any faction but Yang, I decided to start at the lower levels again. I want to re-learn this game, so that I can play it competently with factions other than Yang. Somewhere along the way, I picked up Velociryx's strategy guide as a .txt file, (and I'm busy reformatting it for easier reading as I go), but I've still got some questions, and I'm hoping to get some answers here, while I work my way through Vel’s guide.

Let me also add that my playstyle (regardless of the game) has always been simple: I’m a warmonger. To paraphrase a post from another site, for which I would dearly love to be able to claim credit:
I’m a builder at heart.
I build bases, so that I can build units.
I build Network Nodes, so that I can learn to build better units.
I build Energy Banks, so that I can build units faster.
I build formers, so that I can build roads.
I build roads, so that I can move troops faster.
I build colony pods, so that I can build more troops.

I know that SMAC isn’t really a war game, and I’m trying to get in touch with my builder side, but it’s tough. Bear with me.

Early game/sliders/research – In the early game, Centauri Ecology seems very important. I seem to recall learning that beelining Industrial Automation is a good thing, for the crawlers. As I’ve been looking at it lately, I feel like I really need to get CE early so that I can build formers and unlock the Weather Paradigm. Do you guys just trade for CE? It seems to me that the return on investment in the Weather Paradigm is enormous!

Also, what do you do with the Economy/Psych/Labs sliders in the early game. I don’t like leaving them at 50-0-50 (perhaps a holdover from C3C), but I don’t really know what else to do with them. Do you adjust them early on?

Screenshots – How do you get a decent screenshot? I’ve tried time and again to get a screenshot by just hitting PrntScrn and pasting into MS-Paint, but the colors are funky.

Minerals and energy – I seem to recall someone (CEO Aaron, I think) telling me that I needed to spend more time farming energy, and less time focusing on minerals. But I also recall that I need to get some certain amount of eco-damage to get the first fungal pop to eliminate mineral (?) restrictions. Am I remembering this right?

The Pod Factory – This one may also be a holdover from C3C, but I have this urge to build a “colony pod factory.” That is a city, or perhaps more than one, that does nothing but grow, build a colony pod, and repeat. (By the way, how many colonists does a base lose when a pod is produced?) I know that if I succeed in building one of those, I will hit that efficiency limit very quickly, but does the benefit of having lots of bases outweigh the efficiency hit?

Crawlers – I know that using crawlers (both for speeding up Secret Projects and crawling nuts/mins/energy) is a very powerful tactic. Now I’m wondering: Does anyone use the “crawl nutrients from A to B” setting? It seems to me that this could be quite useful in building up a specialist city, but I never see it mentioned.

Thanks in advance for any help I can get here. I know that these are your basic, garden variety newbie questions, and I’m sure they’ve been asked before, perhaps even by myself.

Cordially,
Aabraxan

Also, a quick question about combat: I'm used to putting everything in a stack (from C3C), but I'm getting the impression that doing so is a bad idea in SMAC. What say you? Stacks or spread out?

 

[Petek]

Howdy!

I'll try to address some of your questions:

1. Vel's Guide -- You can find an html version here, in case that suits you better.

2. Centauri Ecology -- This is always the first tech that I go for. If you're playing directed research, then you should be able to make that your first tech. If you're playing blind research, then set your research priority to Explore. Most of the time (but not always), your first tech should be CE. You can then change your research priorities to something else, if you wish.

3. Minerals and energy -- Energy-based strategies and mineral-based strategies are both valid ways to play. For a mineral-based strategy, use crawlers at one base to create eco-damage of around 40. You then should get a fungal >pop< within a few turns. That will increase your clean mineral limit (= the number of minerals before eco-damage appears) by one at each base. Thereafter, each Tree Farm, Hybrid Forest, Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet built at any base will increase the clean mineral limit by one at all bases. You can even disband these facilities and rebuild them for an additional increase in the clean mineral limit. This strategy allows you to have bases producing high minerals with no eco-damage. (An alternative strategy is to embrace eco-damage and harvest the resulting native life for lots of ECs.)

4. Screenshots -- There's more than one way to accomplish this. One way is to add the line DirectDraw=0 To the [PREFERENCES] section of your Alpha Centauri.ini file. That will cause the game to run at your native Windows resolution and fix problems with the PrtScn key. (If you're running SMAC, make sure that you are patched to v5.0 (AKA the Windows2000/XP Update) for this to work. See here for the patch, which should be installed even you're running Windows 7 or some other version of Windows.)

5. The Pod Factory -- Early in my games, all bases crank out CPs. At some point (depending on which faction I'm playing) core bases start working on Secret Projects. Fringe bases continue to build CPs. What you call the "efficiency limit" is, I think, usually called the "bureaucracy limit." Sometimes I stop building bases when I reach the limit, other times I keep going. It depends on how good my drone control is (and my mood during the game!). Drones are fairly easy to control, so it usually pays to keep founding bases, unless other factors take precedence. As far as specializing bases to produce CPs, any base that produces sufficient nutrients is suitable to build CPs. When a base produces a CP, it loses one point of population (except at the two lowest difficulty levels).

6. I don't think that anyone has ever found a good use for the “crawl nutrients from A to B” tactic. One reason is that you can only transfer one nutrient per crawler by doing so. It would be more efficient to rehome A's crawler to B and then crawl nuts. That way, base A doesn't lose any nuts and base B can (potentially) receive more than one nut from the crawler.

7. Stacks -- I'm not very good with combat tactics. I'll let someone else comment.

8. Same goes for early game slider tactics.

HTH

Petek

 

[Aabraxan]

Thanks, Petek. That all makes sense, and clarifies a few things.

I didn't realize that crawling from A to B only carried 1 nut/crawler/turn. I've been rehoming crawlers to whatever base I need them to serve, so I guess I'll just keep doing that.

 

[civac]

If you have very good land (lots of 2-1 tiles + rivers) and a fastteching faction you can forego Centauri Ecology until after you have researched Industrial Automation. However, in most situations taking CE as one of your first 2-3 techs is vital.

Sliders in early game can be set to sligltly favour research (50/10/40; 60/10/30 or even 70/0/30). Having good a high Efficiency rating in Social Engineering helps. Favouring money in the same way does not work as well but it useful at times. It depends on your overall situation and strategy.

Start Paint first, then Smac. Screenshots taken will look weird while Smac is running but return to normal when you quit the game. This works for most people but not all.

Prefer minerals in the early game, energy in the late game. Energy focus is better late game since it also drives your research. You can build expensive units by building a cheap shell and the upgrading it.

Pod factories are fine. How long you should expand heavily depends on your faction and the settings. More bases are always good. But from a certain point onward vertical development is superior.

Combat in Smac is kinda weird due to the unusual role of air units. In the early game you'll have combat with impact speeders, plasma defenders, probe teams and transports, not unlike combat in other Civ games. Once Air Power and Mind-Machine-Interface come into play combat between humans appears to detoriate to an exchange of raids on each other infrastructure with nerve gas planes, helicopters, probe teams, amphibian assaults on coastal cities, covert operations and planet busters. (My experience is limited, though. It's possible I'm completely wrong here. )

General rules:
Don't stack more than 3 or 4 units. You'll get owned by stack damage.
Don't even put large numbers of units close together. You'll get owned by self destruct damage.

 

[Aabraxan]

Thanks again. I'll put these into practice when next I play.

 

[d72]

While the guide is excellent and a must read i find somethings lakking. Maybeee thats just me or not. Why not hop over to my post about nut usage in wonder thread eh how to link.