We Must Dissent: Futurism for the Faithful

[Sareln]

"The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil."

-- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "A Blessed Struggle"

Table of Contents

• Turn Reports
  • The Early Turns (T0 - T29)
    [SPOILER]
    • T0
      
    • T1
      
    • T2
      
    • T3
      
    • T4
      
    • T5
      
    • T6
      
    • T7
      
  [/SPOILER]
  
• Welcome to Planet
  • Tech Tree
    
  • Civics
    
  • Leaders
    
• Strategery

[Sareln]

No food, and surrounded by Xenofungus. What a crappy start. The Red resource up top is something called Fungal Gin and is a commerce resource. Monuments need to be improved in order to get their 2/2/2 yield from SMAC. Looks like we're going to have to wander a bit before settling.

Nothing the believers haven't been through before. What's a little bit of wandering in the desert of xenofungus compared to a 100 years spent in cryro-stasis anyways?



Well that's a little bit better I suppose. I'll need another tech before I can work the gold mine, but it'll be a 1/3/3 tile so my initial base can build and tech at the same time. I'm thinking I'll probably need more units than a normal start since if it's anything like SMAC that mindworms are going to be coming for us rather quickly.

[Sareln]

Nope, still terrible.



I'm going to settle 1N of the gold tile and just run with that. Getting out of the fungus is important to me though, since Believers don't play well with planet.

[Sareln]

I forgot about 2 moves on a colony pod, so I'm able to settle this turn. Joy. Only what? 3 turns behind Bob from the start?



Right off we see a number of interesting things in the city screen.

• Governor's Office:
  
• Believers Headquarters:
  
• Planet Rating:
  

The HQ is my faction palace, and the Governor's Office appears to be a building that carries all my faction benefits. As you can see, I get a base +10% of my food stored and my psych chaplains (Artists) get +1 Hammers.

Also, we see that I take a -1 planet rating straight off from my faction ability. C'est la vie. Let Bob hug the fungus, we're going to turn this place into a new home if it's possible.

I start production on another flamer squad. I plan to keep my 2 flamers at home in case of mind-worms. From SMAC the believers tend to piss off planet and garner that sort of attention, so I'll prepare for it and figure out the mechanics later.

I plan to upgrade my starting supply unit into a rover for faster scouting and better psi-defense (it starts with +40% or something like that, so on the psi attack if things work like in SMAC it's going to be very useful indeed against native life). Also, my faction gets a bonus to building formers, so I lose fewer former turns (that and my starting tech only lets me clear fungus...)

There's a pod to my south that I should grab w/ my flamer squad before settling in for the long defense.

Finally, for my tech decision I start teching the ability to build mines. After that I'll tech Network Nodes since I'll get a free one in my HQ and that'll let me hire a librarian w/ my free specialist and get some more tech rolling. I'm going to need a lot of the basics as I start terraforming the place up.

[Sareln]

A quiet turn.

I've been poking around the datalinks for a bit now, and I think I might actually begin to be developing a clue as to how I'm supposed to play this game...

[Sareln]

Let's see what we can learn from just looking at the tech tree...

10 Levels deep. Looks like techs on the same level cost the same number of beakers. Hmm...

In the datalinks, the first two tiers of techs are: 125/250 Beakers, but in our game they are 80/162 respectively. I'll focus my thoughts on our game setup naturally.

T1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10 -> B80/162/326/653/1306/2351/3396/4442/5356/6532.

That series looks like it tails off.

Yeah, So Tech levels 1 - 6 double in cost between levels (roughly), but in the end game (T6 - T10) it's a linear increase of ~1000 Beakers per level. So we really need to scrutinize the bottom levels of techs to see if it's worth our effort to beeline (is there some T3/T4 tech that gives huge advantage) or should we spend our relatively limited early tech power accumulating worker techs etc.

[Sareln]

I think this stitch turned out rather well personally...

[Sareln]

Oh hey, look at that. I can convert 100% of my production into research early on. It's making my mining plan almost seem like a good idea!

First things, though, I need a former to capitalize on that.



Hard to separate out what's the result of free culture form high planet rating in the demographics right now. Maybe I'll take a stab at it sometime. We can safely state that I'm losing though!



That loss might come much more quickly if I lose against the incoming mindworms though...

Can this count as the rush for this game please? :neenernee

[Sareln]

I think my odds are better if I attack out rather than play defense, so I go ahead and do that.

Still only 70% that I win. Otherwise at EoT I get another flamethrower and get to try again.





Hey, I'm not dead. Can't really complain about that result now can we?

Overview:

[Sareln]

Twiddling my thumbs here...

As you can see from last turn, the pod to the south of my capital popped an alien artifact and I upgraded my supply crawler to a unity rover. Might as well get out there and compete for all those pods that Bob keeps snapping up.