Details pirate faction pirate faction

Details early kingdom early kingdom

Details safe haven safe haven

Details early SPs early SPs

Details politics politics

This is the first After Action Report I've written with an audience in mind. Previously I've imagined someone tripping over my work in an archive somewhere, and hopefully learning a thing or two about how to play SMAC as a result. But this one is intended to be viewed by hundreds of people, as a baseline for why it's been written. What does anyone else want to know about a game I'm playing? What do I want to tell about it? Well, only the things that would interest a ~20 year veteran, to be honest. And so this is the logical conclusion.The pace will be slower than previous AARs I've done. Long periods of time will pass in the game, and perhaps in real life, before new installments are added. In the past I've done blow-by-blow reportage, of every conceivable minor thing that could be interesting. That approach offers tactical meat, but is not sustainable. Gets bor-rring! to write those up, and I don't know if people want to read those either. It remains to be seen if my present "long snapshot" approach results in more satisfying work. Games by themselves do not have to be satisfying, and that is part of the investigation.What is of interest? The AI. It can challenge a new player; it can even challenge an experienced player if one starts next to an Alien faction. But left on its own, it tends to spin its wheels. The typical problem is it builds too many military units and runs out of minerals to support its efforts. To compensate, I will try to give it room to grow. I'm playing on a 256x128 square map, which is 4X the size of a Huge map. 4X, ha ha, get it? I call it a Giant planet. I minimized Erosion and made cloud cover Dense, to give the AI more resources to thrive in. Helps me too! I don't like starting on scratchy dry land.It should be noted that I'm playing stock SMAC: Alien Crossfire, Good Old Games version with all official patches. No unofficial ones; in particular, no Yitzi patch. He did impressive work in the community, heroically creating binary patches for the game in assembly code, which may have helped the multiplayer experience greatly. But none of it in my experience makes the AI play any better. I believe he proved it can't be done in the real world. There is only so much you can do if you don't have the source code, basically would have to write a new game.Someday I will look into how others have tried to help out the AI, at the level of doing mods. But it already gets pretty goofy resource advantages on Transcend as is, like 60% to 50% production costs for instance. The equivalent of +4 or +5 Industry, respectively. After that, the increase in Industry is capped. It also gets research advantages that I don't even know how to calculate.I'm playing as the Pirates. Other opponents are random. I'm interested in the idea of the Pirates trying to drown everyone, or at least, they can survive Global Warming better than other factions can. I tried to give myself less ocean so that the land factions would have a lot more land. The AI definitely does better on land, particularly when trying to conquer anything. Unfortunately the world generator didn't cooperate and there's a fair amount of ocean on this map. But the map is so big, that there's still a lot of land. Some of the AIs will have enough room to do whatever they are capable of.Another reason for the Giant planet, is I don't like being bothered early in the game. All it does is create stress and put me behind when I'd rather be building roads, planting trees, and building Secret Projects. That's my preferred play style. That feeling of progress that you've banged out yet another SP. I've done all the other play styles at some point, I can win any of them; it's a question of what I prefer. If I wanted to get into immediate skirmishes, I'd play on a Tiny map. Haven't done that in years, as they're way too trivial to win.A final, important specification, is I'm playing without supply pods everywhere. They're a crutch. I guarantee that on such a map, the winner would be the faction that gathers the most pods and Alien Artifacts. Which would be me. The AI doesn't know how to do it. Rather than a giant game of Pac-Man, I'll play SMAC. Although, this does make a much drier game. Why explore continents when there's nothing valuable in them?Here is what I've managed so far. Note the power graph. Theoretically I'm better than even the Usurpers left to themselves. Outperforming an Alien faction at the beginning of the game, says either I'm great, or they got a really bad start.My capitol, Safe Haven, I managed to settle in a lot of shallow water on an energy resource. Without wasting too many turns to find it. Port Svensgaard, my 2nd city, I put next to a sea minerals deposit that needed fungus removal. So it didn't immediately benefit me, and I cannot be said to have been handed a great start on water. The surrounding land was tasty though, so I used it. Un-Pirate-like, but in extremes of environment, we have to adapt.I eventually had enough Formers and Sea Formers working my squares. I eventually went Democratic, offsetting my -1 Efficiency and -1 Growth faction penalties, to net +1 Efficiency +1 Growth -2 Support. My budget, I've jacked to 30-40-30 because I don't have the usual SPs to keep people happy. Somehow I resent the idea of building Hologram Theaters just yet, although it'll surely happen. I have built Children's Creches for efficiency and growth. Now everyone is working on Network Nodes, for lack of better to do.In all this time, I was unable to build even one Secret Project. I believe the Pirates are not a good faction for early SPs, because they take too long to get their seaborne infrastructure up and running. But it's powerful once they do, and they're a good Builder faction then. Will I belatedly enter the SP races and finally dominate? I don't have the crutch of lifting Artifacts out of the water with Transports to help me. I do have the small consolation that the power graph consideres me Unsurpassed, so clearly my growth algorithm is better than the AI algorithm.Lal built The Emapth Guild and called an election. Surprisingly, even with his 4X voting advantage I could have beaten him with help from other factions. Their price, however, was too high. Lal must have had a crummy tiny island start to come up with such low numbers. Roze also got shafted that way, but at least she managed to build The Virtual World while all cooped up. She's my ally now, so I won't be taking it away from her anytime soon.I have Domai and Roze's maps; others are unknown. Deirdre declared war on me and I don't know where she is. She's unlikely to be near me, as I've swept a wide perimeter on both land and sea. Marr is a silent mystery.