T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[T-hawk]

It's just the same as how all units can rehome, which dates back to Civ 1, move it into a base and you can set it to be supported from that base. I'm not sure what you mean about future rehoming, when I realize I want to rehome something I just start moving it there. Sometimes I will have a crawler follow a colony pod in order to rehome to the new base as soon as it's founded.

[Modo]

One last question for the Believers game. At the end you scrapped the hab complexes for credits (I assume that doesn't affect existing pop) and that reminded me of a similar trick in Civ5 where you'd sell and rebuild to make use of production multipliers; only here production was not a big factor so would it be worth for credits alone to do this repeatedly?

[T-hawk]

The Civ 5 trick doesn't exist here, there are no conditional production multipliers in SMAC, any multiplier on one item is the same on the next item, and also overflow is capped at 10 minerals.

I could hypothetically see it being profitable to build something every turn just to sell it. Industry bonuses can make that better than simply running Stockpile Energy, since the sell value stays constant ignoring industry discounts. (Plus building the facility also invokes the Stockpile bug.) I really can't think of any situation where I'd go to the effort to actually do that, though.

[Modo]

Onward to the Sparta game

1) "the Ironman setting doesn't work for me, I'd just endure letting the program quit and restart every time"
that cracked me up, even after all these years of playing the game? i don't know if this is worrying or encouraging but I'll go with the latter, this way it sounds like some Bushido type of perseverance.

2) "I did adhere to that throughout the game....and yes I did restart a few times until one of the first few pods yielded that."
Bushido....Bushido....yes, I can see the consistency in those actions.

3) "I'm doing it that way for the sake of saving sanity: the alternative is that every time you pop a pod, you should change the nearest base's build item for the possibility of this result."
Ahh, you failed the Bushido...sanity is no excuse.

4) That former / lab analysis though, I would frame that if I were you and put it on an achievement list or something. Funny how playing a bland faction allows the time to focus on more basic / fundamental stuff like this and find new gems, I guess the more interesting ones offer too many distractions.
So....how would this improve all the other faction runs you did before Sparta?

[Kofiman]

I was reading your Believers playthrough again, T-Hawk, and at the end when you were mineral crunched and full of formers, why you stayed in Democratic SE?

Since you didn't need the growth, would, say, Police State/Green done better? That would have given you a lot more help supporting that host of formers.

[T-hawk]

Needed the Efficiency rating from Democratic to keep the labs slider up, once fusion engineer specialists were producing all the money.  With any less than +2 Efficiency (and that is marginal, +3 with Knowledge is significantly better, but the Believers can't use that), the unbalancing penalty eats any marginal labs past 60% slider.  There wasn't enough time left for it to pay off to let the slider run near 50-50 and use the money to buy labs multipliers.

Instead of Police State, how about Frontier + Green? That's the same Efficiency as Democratic + Free Market. The support saves 2 minerals per base... but no, Free Market was more than 4 energy per base for more minerals than that.

Gaia is the faction that could run Police + Green most effectively.  (And even favors Knowledge more since Wealth is only half as much economy when it reaches +1 compared to when it reaches +3 on top of Free Market.)  It didn't come up since my design for the Gaia game was to need as few formers as possible.

It's not that the Believers were the ideal faction for the concept; it's that the concept was the best way I could think of to justify doing a Believers game to transcendence.

[Kofiman]

You're right. That only comes out to two minerals/turn per base, doesn't it? That's not enough to override the extra energy and reduced slider losses.

[T-hawk]

Have one more. http://dos486.com/alpha/university/

[LKendter]

These are mind blowers.

I don't feel like I am playing the same game as you.

[induktio]

Somehow it annoys me how that red-base-tiles-outline looks on the map. I never tend to play with that setting on. Is the purpose just to see the bases inside fog of war? Anyway, that's a relatively minor thing.

The value of a former is not how many improvements it will build during the remaining duration of the game. It is how many turns those improvements will be worked.

This means the value of formers declines throughout the game not linearly, but exponentially. There are two factors that each decline linearly -- the number of improvements that the former will build, and the time remaining for each of those improvements to be worked. Two factors that each decline linearly, that interact multiplicatively with each other, give an overall result of quadratic decline.

Not sure if I missed some other consideration here, but a linear, quadratic, or cubic function is still a polynomial function. They are not exponential functions because they are still defined by a polynomial.