Sid Meier's Alpha Centaurior SMACPicked it up recently and really enjoying it even if it takes a lot to get into and the unit designer is a chore.Anyone have any advice on economic victory? The other ones seem to be 10x easier, at least with their designated factions, but the fact that mind control costs double with bad relations, and everyone but the UN hates the optimal social policies for money, hurts.
>>2462073Play deidre and sell bathwater. You'll be flush in no time.
>>2462073Try and make early contact with everyone. Factions are usually more willing to sign treaties and pacts early on before SE and power differences really kick in. Make friends with peaceful factions that share your SE goals. Declare war on the asshole factions if they start to murder your allies. Rush planetary economics to unlock your victory condition and then just set yourself up to hoard energy credits till victory.Above all don't wait around to corner the market, mind control costs get ridiculous in the late game even with more energy sources like satellites and transcendi. Also be careful about growing too large/powerful, other factions are fickle and may end up hating you if you or they skyrocket ahead in power ranking, even if you're friends.
MAKEMORE BOREHOLES
>>2462379>spartans declare a surprise war>needlejet blows up your former>put AAA troop on next former>finish borehole>ecological damage: 85!!!>18 mindworms appear>colony destroyed
>>2462394SUCKSTOSUCK
>>2462403I haven't researched that technology
Is it a good idea to play with the Thinker mod if I've never played Alpha Centauri before?
>current year>still no organic superlube
>>2462412That mod sounds intriguing but play it vanilla first.
>>2462073>Anyone have any advice on economic victory?Secure the planetary governor position. It'll give you consistent extra income for your trade routes, and gives free view of everyone's bases.
>>2462201Early tech trading is almost a game in of itself. Basic principle is that you start with tech A, can exchange with other faction that starts with B (so you both have A and B) but then you exchange with other faction that starts with C (so you have three techs while the AI factions have only two.)This means the seemingly fraud AI offer to sell you some other faction's comm frequency can actually be a great deal because you can sell/flip stuff to them as well. Although there's a risk you run into their units the next turn anyway, I guess.Since OP asked about economic victory, I'll mention this just in case: Morgan can seem extremely weak faction. At least I remember just looking the amount of numbers and not realizing that Economy is much more impactful than the other SE modifiers (or at least it gives flat yield increases that can be extremely powerful) and one of their main downsides is very punishing at lower difficulties (default city pop cap is 4 instead of 7) but becomes nearly irrelevant in higher difficulties where you actually don't want the cities to grow bigger than that (in the early game/if there's not enough happiness buildings yet) because of the drone penalties.>>2462394Was it true that because of the way ecological damage is modeled, you want to pollute as much as you can in the early game to get a bigger "quota" for the middle/late game?
>>2462619>Was it true thatAccording to the wiki's formulahttps://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Ecological_damage_(SMAC)... yes but no?The short version is every attack gives you budget for 8 tile improvements, bearing in mind a citizen working a road + solar + farm counts for 6, unworked it'd be 3, and any budget excess spills over into a quota for minerals.If you had, say, 3 tall cities with a tree farm and hybrid forest in each (all tile improvements will have zero impact), your quota would be 16 + attacks you suffered, which could afford all the minerals of those cities.Offworld minerals apparently don't count.Any preserves, temples and nanoreplicators effectively double, then triple, then quadruple, and so on, your quota.... but antagonising the planet early would mean using Free Market, which -3 Planet score hurts your Psi Attack by -30%, doubles your eco damage... you'll need either Morale for psi combat or Support to literally support a large if cheap army, so you'll be building a lot of uneconomical stuff and looking at social engineering... you'll need to constantly reform tiles lost to fungus and walking into fungus occasionally spawns worms... and very late on Green economics + Cybernetics you eliminate your eco damage entirely, which means even illegal ICBMs are A-Okay according to Planet if you're a vegetarian cyborg who composts his grandmother, recycles his refrigerator gases, drives a hybrid and offsets his needlejet air miles!What this has taught me is I want to stop building roads everywhere, use rivers as roads, and to consider building road mines out of sight and out of mind because Planet can't connect the dots even if it can see the minerals, but you need to build and protect a supply convoy so it's not great.Borehole spamming outside cities is probably not worth it for the time investment + global warming issue as you lose the dual income.I'd build more condensers and mirrors outside my cities if the AI didn't found on borders.
>>2462796oh and as a further point to make,Each forest within an early game base effectively provides budget for 1 tile improvement, or more realistically 6 forests are needed for a rolling mine farm. Wow that's not efficient at all especially in time taken to plant it! A tree farm, which would be post-mineral limit tech, would probably mean a rolling road mine farm needs 7 forests to counteract entirely, maybe 6 for a rocky road mine? But then again you're not supposed to be immune. Oh and there's also the negative that you need these forests in your polluting bases, Planet does care about pollution density.
>>2462796>https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Ecological_damage_(SMAC)Btw I generally recommend https://alphacentauri.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_PageIt's an older and fuller wiki.
>>2462882>exact same textI miss when games only had one wiki and the layout wasn't terrible, but at least adblockers solve the worst problem.There is less information on this one such as differentiating between if you have the expansion or not as to mines reducing nutrients, but then I don't know if it has things the other doesn't.
>>2462619In addition to halving eco-damage from terraformed squares, each tree farm increases by one the number of 'clean' minerals bases can make without causing eco-damage. But this only happens after your first fungal pop (square explodes with fungus and you get a story popup). So the strategy used to be redline eco-damage until the pop before building tree farms. Thinker mod removes this check so you can build tree farms whenever.>>2462796What is this schizo nonsense?General terraforming advice is to build ~2 boreholes and 1 condenser for mature bases, then forest every other tile. Forests plus tree farms have decent yields and reduce eco-damage. If you have rocky squares and want extra minerals then build mines and use crawlers on them. That should be more than enough production for normal play, and if you bump up against the eco-damage limit just build some Centauri preserves or hybrid forests to tamp it down again.
>>2463478>What is this schizo nonsense?Anon asked if you frack the planet early on to get fewer worm incursions later... which is unnecessary like you said, forests, tree farms, and one centauri preserve are how you dip under the threshold.>tree farms give you clean minerals...? There are clean minerals besides orbital mines?
>>2463800>There are clean minerals besides orbital mines?Yeah, it's the amount of minerals you can take in before causing any eco-damage. The default is 16 but goes up with every tree farm, preserve, temple, etc.https://alphacentauri.miraheze.org/wiki/Ecology_(Revised)This page makes it clearer.
>>2463893This is extremely different to the usual formula.How do people find these formulae?
>>2463962It's the same formula as in the above wiki pages, just restated more clearly.Probably datamined from the game files, if it isn't in the configs in plaintext.
>>2464137>It's the same formulaIt has at least one difference.The normal formula considers each base to only mitigate its own damage and if an arbitrary limit (16 + blooms) is not exceeded, that gives you free minerals.The revised formula does not consider trees to be local.It also points out that planet cannot be below 1, which I wish was said elsewhere.
