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Surprises are always nice! (yes)

6 (75%)

Indifferent

0 (0%)

Two words: Prototype Flood (no)

2 (25%)

Total Members Voted: 8

[Hanzoku]

For some reason, I always tended to run into the Cult very early in the game, and the psychotic little brat immediately starts rushing me with piles of mindworms before I'm really ready to defend myself.

[Splint]

Alright, scratch any updates for this. I'll try again when I have the ability to not be flat broke 99% of the time and avoid death by jetspam.

I tried to keep up with this, but obviously I either need to remove aircraft altogether or I'm not allowed to build base facilities. Ever. I'm going to have to play in "No fun" mode to even have a vague hope of doing anything with this game.

"Oh, you spent the time building these facilities to boost their industrial capacity and prevent drone riots and whatnot instead of hordes of units you'll never be able to upgrade because your researchers will outpace that? Have fun being zerged into oblivion with jets and foils."

To those who actually liked this, I'm truly and deeply sorry. I'll probably start a new thread after powergaming for a while with the express intent of "FUCK YOU AND YOUR APPARENTLY INFINITE UNIT SUPPORT AI"

[Shadowlord]

Crawlers might help.

[Nirur Torir]

When you reboot this, could you show more pictures of your territory and general strategic situation?

I generally build a former in every base as soon as they're garrisoned, and spam forests everywhere early on. Even late game they can be effective, once you have the base facilities that improve them.

[Patchy]

Take your time and learn the game, there is a good bit of depth in game. And can take a practiced hand at getting everything you can out of your workers. I'll echo the building of a former per base and planting lots of forests to start, those forests will help jump-start your economy quite a bit. Also when building units, use a best weapon/no armour approach to start for offense and vice-versa for defense. That'll save you a lot of build costs on military. Later on when your industrial strength is higher you can do best/best units. If you can manage it, try to fit your units with an appropriate ability, to defend against your enemy. If you equip AAA or SAM abilities on your infantry, you can really make the ai pay for that needlejet spam.

If you still want to do a LP, give it another shot then. Take fewer turns per session and try to post a few more picks of your tactical position and bases. There are a couple really good SMAC(X) players here who can give you solid advice for your situation.

[Shadowlord]

I personally found needlejets too weak to bother using, by which I mean they can't single-handedly empty a city of troops in a single turn because they're not psionic helicopters.

[Splint]

Well I'm trying to make a decent story at the same time, not just do an LP with hard data. No fun doing it that way for me, and certainly not very entertaining in a text-picture format. Some research and the enemy having more jets than they have any right to bitchslapping me or crashing constantly makes for a shitty story.

Lessons have been learned though.
Usurpers = necessary evil to keep the other jackass aliens in check. Just wish the game allowed more than 7 factions.
Full fun (actually getting a chance to replace damaged formers, getting base facilities up to stop plagues or infrastructure damage, and just taking care of house keeping around my territory = Not really allowed.
AI Can't be allowed any breathing room. If a war starts, they get taken out. No mercy.

I generally build a former in every base as soon as they're garrisoned, and spam forests everywhere early on. Even late game they can be effective, once you have the base facilities that improve them.

Forests never seem to do enough for my bases. WHen I have bases surrounded by forests partly or mostly one industrial/agricultural collapse costs me 90% of the units based out of there until I get clean reactors to remove the threat and constant messages of workers being too hungry to finish the damn units needed to do silly things like, I don't know, defend the fucking base/territory from invaders.

Spoiler: May come off kinda ranty or something (click to show/hide)

I had actually learned how to play, but I try not to play with, for lack of a better term, powergaming in mind. Feels like cheating against the AI when I do that since even a little further up on difficulty I tend to roll over them when I stop having fun and actually go after them with full intent of making them knock off their shit.

I don't have fun doing that sort of thing, even on other games. But I'm also used to the enemy being bound by silly things like unit upkeep (especially considering even well developed bases I had would all for some reason have industrial collapses all at the same time - just plain unlucky with that but it seems to always happen in multiple bases at once - and disband all my jets, or formers, or whatever,) so getting a backhand to the face with hordes of units that ran the gauntlet from shitty rifles and lasers up to chaos guns, shard cannons, and fusion lasers was a bit of a shocker, especially considering that the AI isn't really that.... Effective with its land and base management, just some forests, solar collectors/farms, and sensors and not even bothering to clear fungus half the time by the looks of it. Last game I actually checked and they don't seem to even bother with anything except defensive buildings and secret projects, which makes me wonder how they maintain their ridiculously huge militaries.

As to units, I don't design them. The fucking engineers do and I don't know how to stop them. I don't like comm jammers (why does a jet geared towards killing garrisons going to need that exactly?), I don't make use of artillery (nothing against it, but it tends to not be very effective when used on anything besides improvements in the countryside,) And I don't need three different rovers with deep radar, psi defense, and artillery when the ones I have with just some decent armor and a big gun are more than capable  of killing whatever I need killed.

I will admit I tend to armor my infantry but it's mainly so they can defend whatever they just seized until the MPs are ready to take over.

As far as position goes, each time it was less threat of invasion (controlled most or all of the west landmass where the Unity was downed with enough rovers to drown the scattered landing forces in sheer numbers if I wanted,) and more just not wanting to put up with the jet/chopper spam and not having the time to build a large enough naval corps to weather the constant attacks and the marines/drop troops needed to clear landing zones and such. The constant noise from them either hitting the ground or attacking things with varying ability gets old pretty quick as well; hell I got sick of seeing helicopters do nose dives for half a minute straight every turn when I had the jerk using them on my side.

I personally found needlejets too weak to bother using, by which I mean they can't single-handedly empty a city of troops in a single turn because they're not psionic helicopters.

I tend to use them to target enemy ships, sea bases, formers, wreck or at least severely impede counterattack forces, and to thin out the size of garrisons rather than clear them entirely, though sometimes things work out better than expected and two needlejets and some infantry/rovers get you a base or two. Weak on their own... Kinda. Good for being a pain in the ass? Extremely.

[Shadowlord]

One you get the output boosting techs you would need additional stuff to make forests better. Tree farms or something like that? I forget. Personally after the early game I roll out fungus output boosting stuff, terraform all my land back to fungus, use policies that raise my planet rating, and basically out-Deirdre Deirdre, with additional psi-military rollout, especially when I get choppers because they can dominate an entire city full of conventional troops; they just lack the ability to capture it after they've single-brainedly killed everyone guarding it.

I usually play Lal, and of course this is easier as Deirdre, but then who would ally with me for most of the game only to later spring a sudden but inevitable betrayal?

[Patchy]

Yeah, there are 2 base facilities that boost the output of forests to 3-2-2. Takes awhile to get to that though, don't remember the best b-line for them either. I usually b-lined for crawlers first, followed by impact rovers/plasma guards or lifting the production caps depending on the situation.

[Shadowlord]

I never actually used crawlers in single player. vOv

[Splint]

I never actually used crawlers in single player. vOv

Neither did I to be honest.

I think the forest boosters are the Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest, but I never bothered with particulars there, just wanted to clear the Eco-damage. Mind worms seem less inclined to pick on you when you do that.

Been playing with blind research so rushing for things generally isn't viable, and with the AI being how it is I'm pretty sure they have military tech prioritized when it's not. Granted I do the same thing out of necessity to overrun the enemy quickly but still.

[Shadowlord]

Well, you can rush for things with blind research, it just requires a tech tree to track what's available, and changing the research type goal before you finish techs to have some control over the next one to be researched.

[Patchy]

Ah, ok blind research does make it kind of hard to b-line for things. As for crawlers in sp, you don't really need them, but on the 2 highest difficulties they do a lot to close the gap with the AI's cheating there.