Editing AlphaCentauri
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, or SMAC. The third, or fourth depending on when Call To Power was released, game in the style of Sid Meier's Civilization. You begin the game in control of one of seven factions, divided by ideology. Play proceeds as it usually does in the series, gaining money, new bases, and technologies, with several different winning conditions. I'd write more, but I don't have time for a full review. The multiplayer is ridiculously buggy, and I get the impression that it went almost entirely untested. Whole units diappear, bases get skipped and fail to update, and units mysteriously do things that should require abilities they don't have (a speeder caturing a base from a transport comes to mind). However, while this is annoying, it seems to be equally buggy to all players, and so doesn't affect the balance in any direction. Over spring break 2003, a large-scale multiplayer game occured in the lounge, with a spectacular tangle of power cords and network cables making passage all but impossible. The cast included (I think): * RobinBaur as Lady Deirdre * CalPierog as Chairman Yang * BrianYoung as Provost Zakharov * WillShipley as CEO Morgan * JeffBrenion as Colonel Santiago * StephGrush and NickJohnson as Sister Miriam, teh [[PI2i3570v1337||O|2!357355 0v 1337]] * EvilSouthie as Brother Lal The game only proceeded through 100 turns of a possible 500; halfway through Cal acquired Brian's surrender, but after a misunderstanding near the end most of the planet had declared war on him. ---- Later that semester a game of similar scale was attempted by email, with a different permutation of the same cast, except AlexBobbs replacing Steph and Nick. In order: Southie, Brian, Jeff, Robin, Cal, Will, Alex. '''Timeline''' * 2140: War breaks out between the Believers and Peacekeepers. * 2142: The Believers accept the Peacekeepers' suit for peace. ''Shortest war '''ever'''.'' Also probably the longest suit for peace ever written in a game like this, even if you don't count the passages from the Bible I quoted. ---- Current Email Game Info: * CurtisVinson, Gaians * NickJohnson, Hive * BrianYoung, University * WillShipley, Morganites * AlexBobbs, Spartans * RichardGarfinkel, Believers * MicahSmukler, Peacekeepers Current Turn: It's dead, Jim. * I disbelieve. ** It eats you. How do you play an e-mail game of Alpha Centauri? If you play over e-mail instead of in the game, how do you determine random things such as the world map and the placement of the colony pods? Or is there some function of the game I haven't realized? ''There is a function from the Banana Nebula you haven't realized...'' *The game has a feature (possibly added in a later patch) that lets you play by "hotseat or email" in which players take their turns, save the game, and then send the saved file on to the next person (turns are password-protected to prevent cheating). This is obviously extremely slow, but makes for a rewarding long-term gaming experience. **I must commend you on the speed of your answer. (~30 minutes, I think) ---- Spring break 2004 (aka Survivor: Planet): A smaller game occurs in the lounge, with only three players. In order of appearance: *ErikShimshock as His Jockiness eShock of the Northies (Spartans) *RichardGarfinkel as Sir Treehugger of the Whaleshavers (Gaians) *BrianYoung as Comrade Vrable of the Bubble (University) Game commences with Vrable, Treehugger, Lal, and Morgan on one island, others elsewhere. (Erik, fill in details as desired.) Approximate timeline: *Treehugger attacks Lal, forcing an escape from the island. **It should be noted that I did this AFTER taking the long way around Brian's territory, amassing a force of two rovers and two mind worms along the way. *Vrable attempts assault on Morgan, fails miserably for a while. *Coalition of Whalan and Mudder forces kick Morgan off the island. *Newly-developed Mudder air power turns upon Whalan forces, swiftly crushing all resistance. At game end, entire Whalan faction consists of one colony pod on a transport. Quotes: *"Richard, you've about outlived your usefulness." --BrianYoung *"Did I mention I hate you?" --RichardGarfinkel BrianYoung (singing): "Why can't we be friends, why can't we be friends?" RichardGarfinkel: Because you fucking reamed me! ---- See also GameChallenge: Beat the game without controlling more than one base. (Commentary moved from that page --BrianYoung) *I tried this on Citizen (the easiest difficulty) and found it surprisingly easy to pull off. If you play your cards right, you can avoid war the entire game (especially since it took them a long-ass time to even find me), and put everything into maxing out your production, labs, and wealth. What you end up with is a kick-ass city that can grab any secret project it wants before your rivals, so you grab all the research-boosting projects and compound them to shoot your lab output up exponentially (cloning vats also help you achieve massive output if you can support, say, 20+ transcendi with hydroponics labs). At the end-game you basically just buy a victory condition through transcendence. Anyway, this experiment made me wonder if it's even worth colonizing on the low difficulties. -- AlexBobbs *This is doable on Transcend (the hardest level) as well, most likely. I came within 1! turn of building the Ascent before getting vaporized by ~100 missiles, but it's extremely hard. Play the Gaians. Use your early mind worms to beat the crap out of everyone. Do your best to cover the planet in fungus. Use supply crawlers to feed your city extra energy and production. Near the end, you'll want at least 20 or so AAA Sentinels in your city for defense as you build the Ascent. If you don't get the Merchant Exchange, you should probably just give up and start over. If you don't get the Cloning Vats, expect whoever gets them to kick your ass. Between Civ 1, 2, 3, and SMAC, the Vats are easily the most broken Wonder, with only Leonardo's Workshop in Civ 2 coming remotely close. --Ejwu *I've also done it on transcend with University. Agressive technology research and terraforming for building capability so you get the wonders you need/want is a must. I usually get Merchant Exchange and choose 1-2 of the other early wonders, plus more from there. Supply crawlers good. Actually easiest on large maps early on, but small maps limit enemy str in the end game. Its too bad you cant raze cities when you conquer them, because i've had to sit around empty cities waiting for them to build a defensive unit so i could destroy it and so on to reduce the city to rubble. The best defense is a good offense - Mel, the cook on alice. --NickJohnson. *Just tried this with the Free Drones, with Tech Stagnation on, to see what would happen. Despite the Drones' tech penalty, thanks to hyper-agressive probe teaming I managed to keep on top of the tech race. Unfortunately, I had no warning when Conqueror Marr hit me with a planet buster. Game over. --BrianYoung *Dang, I decided to do this today too (Gaians, on Citizen). Anyway, what Alex said. At one point, I went after the Believers for fun, but immediately turned over conquered bases to whoever I was feeling the most sorry for at the time (does that still count?). Size-50 bases are fun and easy (as is being able to hurry-build the Ascent in one turn). Never appreciated the Space Elevator so much before. Also, the very first mindworm I captured ~15 turns in was still sitting in my base by the end. Go me. --JulieWortman (going to bed) *And since it wasn't research for my campaign, I just tried a one-city challenge as Morgan on Librarian, and won with some consternation. The map polarized into Gaians vs. Hive, with everyone else fighting each other randomly--around the midpoint of the game I was at war with everyone except Zakharov and Lal, and was forced to frantically defend my holdings with Needlejets. My conflicts ended when someone rammed a "Melt the Polar Icecaps" lobby through the Council, and I found myself alone on a comfortable little island. By the end of the game, everyone decided I wasn't a threat and gave me either a Treaty or a Pact, and I fulfilled the role of global arms merchant until it was time to Transcend. Final Score: 146%. --WillShipley addendum to challenge: Do this (only one city) when its vs real people, not computer opponents. (Depending on the people, this could either be trivial or really frickin hard). '''Not in ''this'' crowd you don't. Yikes.''' Another challenge states to not do any micromanagement of cities, i.e., let all your governors do the work. *Zakahrov, Librarian difficulty, with the additional constraint of no micromanaging formers either. I got an island with Pholus Ridge on a huge map all to myself, and by manipulating governor goals, got tech advantage really quickly. After crushing the Believers with fusion power and securing the Gaians' support, I pulled a diplomatic victory quite easily. Final score, 81%. Course, I've always found governors more helpful than not. --BrianYoung More stupid challenges! Rationale: Now that we've seen there is a cap to the size of a base, what are the other hard limits? These are probably all doable, sadly... Really Silly Challenges: *Max out future tech. ie, Find the number of future tech where either you cannot research any more or the numbers wrap to negative or otherwise breaks. (my guess is its 1047, but who knows) *Find the cap on energy. I imagine its in the billions. *Wrap the total score. Because of custom map sizes, this should be theoretically possible. Get to the point where you are increasing you number of bases exponentially by 2300. On a large enough map, this should allow enough doublings that your summed base sizes is on the order of 2^20 (assuming you havent run out of space to build bases! - hence custom map size). Since pop score is probably summed base sizes, this will almost certainly wrap the score. The real question is, when does this occur? Does it make your score negative? etc... Hint, use drop colony pods. ---- Because the different factions have distinctly different advantages and disadvantages, often times the play style of the factions are so completely different that players who can play one faction decently well won't be able to handle another. Certain players (or factions) will consider Free Market a lesson in suicide, while others will gleefully take up the massive penalties because it won't matter for them anyway. This section of the page was added with the idea that players would comment on either their play style, their preferred factions and why, or how they think the various factions should be played to be done optimally. Feel free to change what I've written if you play the faction as one of your primary styles, I'm certainly not the expert on most of these. EvilSouthie: I tend to play Lal or Dierdre (Peacekeepers and Gaians), the first because the doubling of council votes combined with bonus talents is amazing, and the second because of the chance to capture mind worms in the early game. I can manage as Zakharov or as Morgan, and could probably fake Santiago, but I wouldn't even know where to start with the Hive or Believers (I'm an economy and tech whore). As Lal I tend to throw up a couple early cities and then rush for the Human Genome Project- once Democratic and Planned are up, golden age will give population booms, and once you spread out enough cities, your double council votes will allow you to command everything fairly well. Admittedly you then have to survive to the "elect planetary leader" tech, but you've got spies in every city and get an economic boost from all trade, plus the cities are still booming through the lower population levels. Generally a Pact with Zakharov is a must, but he's usually happy to do so. As Dierdre I tend to explore more, and put on Green as soon as possible. Other then the troops defending bases and airplanes once they're available, all my ground troops tend to be mind worms, and I'll usually be able to keep them alive enough to get them to Demon Boils by the time I'm done razing through other factions. In general I tend to prefer playing a more peaceful strategy, as I enjoy the management of bases and building of projects and such, but the computer doesn't tend to leave the player alone (especially when it comes to building bases that interfere with your base's reach, grrr...), and players tend to realize that they'll need to conquer me sooner or later, so I'll tend to strike back pretty hard, usually with allies. NickJohnson: I play them all. Now, there are some strategies that are strictly better than others no matter who you're playing... and oftentimes you want to social engineer to compensate for your flaws rather than magnify them. I've found that Zarkarov and Morgan play fairly straightforward and don't mind becoming even more narrowly focused on what they do. With Miriam i often dislike going heavy tech-penalty longterm, though in shortterm the moral boost from fanatic is awesome. With Yang i often dont specialize politically, because it hurts. In the endgame, everyone wants to either go cybernetic or telepathic - there is rarely a reason to go Eudaemonic unless you're playing in character except perhaps with Morgan, who actually benefits quite a bit from it, or Yang, who loves the industry (+5 industry? Oh boy!). It also depends on which opposing factions are dominant. If you're mainly taking on Zarkarov with Miriam, tech screwing yourself is a poor idea unless you're in a position to go straight for a kill (and then we can all feel pity for Zarkarov). If you're primarily facing Santiago as Miriam, tech screwing yourself is necessary, and an alliance with Zarkarov a potentially lucrative deal for both of you. I think either Miriam or Yang are the hardest to play well. Faction advice: Lal / Peacekeepers- Get your population up, however you can, and attempt to get somebody to have all the faction frequencies as soon as possible (if you get the Empath Guild, all the better). Once you're planetary governor (you should be, unless something odd happened to stunt your growth), take advantage of your trade bonus and extra spies. Diplomatic victory should be fairly easy as long as you're making sure to be pacted with at least one, preferably two people, and keeping your vendettas to a minimum. If you're playing against humans and diplomatic victory seems unlikely, playing the Switzerland strategy is still not horrible. If you're obviously not going to threaten people (playing the Peacekeeper philosophy), people will usually leave you alone to deal with other more active players, and you can enjoy the benefits of multiple trade treaties while everybody else squabbles with each other. Morgan- Morgan's main strategy consists of getting to the point where he can survive going Free Market. This generally involves having no military troops outside of bases, and a decent fleet of formers to fix up any fungus problems that might pop up. Morgan benefits hugely from treaties and pacts- generally Morgan will be getting twice, if not more, times the value the partner will be getting. If you're feeling brave, put on Wealth as well. Since your bases will end up being relatively small, focus your base placement and terraforming prospects on areas that have three or four really good squares. Having an ocean base in the late game strictly for tidal flats will be a great boost to your economy, and you should be able to buy most of your enhancements straight up, including secret projects. Economic victory against the computer is usually not very hard, as they tend to spend themselves out, especially if they're fighting each other in a war. 6000 credits or so or whatever it'll take is usually not all that bad to get when you're getting +300 a turn. Just be careful, economic victory takes 20 turns to resolve and you'll need to survive that long. It's usually easier to just buy your way to one or two uber-powerful bases (since you'll be able to keep up on the base production when the tech rush of the late game happens) and sprint to transcendence (which will cost 25,000 or so credits to hurry, but is possible and has been done). If a war breaks out, Free Market is likely not going to be useful, since you won't be able to attack without clean reactors. You'll still get the +1 energy every square from Wealth, though, so you can play with the other social agendas if necessary. Morgan tends to enjoy loaning money or selling technology to both sides of a war while sitting neutral himself, however. * WillShipley would like to point out that it is entirely possible to go Free Market right out of the gate with little ill effects: in fact, he has been tempted on numerous occasions to direct research toward [the tech that gets you Free Market] first, even before Centauri Ecology. The multiplier on your starting-game resources more than makes up for the initial lack of infrastructure, in his opinion. The difficulty, of course, with pursuing Free Market is that Planet will not like you (Empath Scout Hovertanks, anyone?), and you have to be '''very''' careful not to accrue Pacifism penalties when it isn't strictly necessary (sometimes, public opinion be damned, you really '''do''' need that Shard Copter for base defense, though you might want to consider making a push for Aesthetic Virtues first.) Zakharov / University- Virtual World and Hunter Seeker Algorithm are both must-haves. Any of the +Talent specials or Telepathic Matrix once you get there are also really spiffy. Your job as Zakharov is to beat everybody to any of the various "I got this tech with a head start, thus I win." techs, such as Air Power. Grabbing the various Secrets techs will make this all the easier, and if you get a few good trading partners that you can trust, giving them the occasional higher tech in exchange for lower techs can help you out in keeping both a tech advantage and having your friends happy with you. Of course, you should be trading the same higher tech with each of the other factions as well, so if you're good at it you can get 3 or 4 lower techs for just one higher. Being the first faction to get your lab output to the point where you get techs every two turns is vital and also quite doable. Spread out so the bonus network nodes help you out more, and grab as many alien tech objects as you can. Dierdre / Gaians- Dierdre is one of the more balanced factions with respect to diplomacy. You can play her as either a peace or a war faction. If a peace faction, she's going to manage to have a huge Efficiency bonus and so be able to focus social choices on growth. Most mind worm troops will end up being Independent so not require minerals or cause drones from poor Support or Police, and psi combat means that she won't care if she's behind in combat tech until the bonus to psi combat abilities start cropping up in the mid-game. She's one of the hardest factions to take out early, since she should be able to capture a mind worm or two by the time she runs into anybody. Because of the Independent mind worms, if she's left alone by everybody she's likely to end up with a huge army by the end, especially if she went Green and was specifically looking for mind worms to capture. Miriam / Believers- Kill whoever you meet first. Take their stuff. Winning an early war will give you twice the breathing room and base of operations when you move to middle game. * Says WillShipley: One word -- momentum. Never stop expanding. If your horizon is ever completely limited by another player, take pains to remove the limitation. If your horizon is even ''partly'' limited by another player, expect to be trading blows before endgame. The Believers are terrifying on the offensive; the Spartans have a good chance of holding them back, but everyone else will fear you. On a definitely-not-related note, your research penalty will become insignificant if you learn the ways of the probe team. *In fact, if there's anyone else on your island (barring continents so large that they arent interfering), kill them and take their stuff. No unit (that can attack) is too poor to be a combat unit - your 25% bonus when attacking is awesome. In the early game, even your scout patrols make good warriors! Be an eco-terrorist (green) so planet doesnt hate you - you dont want to be fighting 2 wars at the same time! With aggressive conquest early, and liberal tech trading with people you're not fighting, you can expect to be on top of the tech tree in the early game. By mid-game its actually possible to outresearch computers, and depending on how aggressive you've been (and how much other human players factions are hurting) you can even outresearch people. Probe Teams not required. Play Miriam in character - be a bastard. My integrity rating always plummets when i play her, its fun. --NickJohnson Santiago / Spartans- Kill whoever you meet first. Take their stuff. Winning an early war will give you twice the breathing room and base of operations when you move to middle game. *I disagree. Santiago is easily capable of playing a variety of strategies, as her disadvantages don't make a build a research strategy unplayable. Just never back down, and if someone is annoying you, kill them, take their stuff, and forget about them. Be a hard ass. But don't feel like you're playing Miriam-light, you're more versatile than that. --NickJohnson Yang / Hive- You are a wall. Ignore people who complain about your bases being in their way, and just build more of them. Build a couple defensive troops per base with your high industry, and laugh with amusement as people try to do anything about it. *Consider making up for your disadvantages rather than magnifying them. Also consider competing with Lal for political dominance by expanding quickly and going for appropriate wonders (empath guild, etc...). Get cloning tanks. Don't worry about inefficiency, you're 'capped' below at 0; you can't have negative efficiency. Take advantage of this early (you'll probably want efficiency in the late game). Wonders that police for you are also good. --NickJohnson No matter who you're playing, if the map is larger than about Standard, population is ''everything''. The computer players slow down their expansion after a certain point, so if you can carpet the planet in bases, you'll have quite the easy time. More bases means more economy and tech income, and more minerals to turn to weapons when the other factions inevitably hate you. And of course, once things get far from your headquarters, efficiency will be your best friend - I've played games where switching to Free Market from Green would have given me a net loss of energy. --BrianYoung
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Editing AlphaCentauri