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[Loud Whispers]

Unless I'm mistaken, it's called Drop Pods and he already has them.

Yep. Doesn't matter now because Santiago framed me for a probe action against Deidre and all those drop pod infantry got massacred, isolated so far away from friendly territory.

I know. I just always thought it was weird there was no faction that preferred Planned Economics and opposed both Deidre and Morgan.

Yang?

[EuchreJack]

I know. I just always thought it was weird there was no faction that preferred Planned Economics and opposed both Deidre and Morgan.

Yang?

Yeah, I always think of Yang as gravitating towards Planned Economics, but in reality he just loves police state and hates democracy.  Yang and Lal rarely get along for long.

[Vgray]

I definitely remember Deidre not liking my Planned Economics. She won't settle for anything less than a Green economy.

It's not something I think either Deidre or Morgan are likely to go to war Vendetta over though.

[Myroc]

I definitely remember Deidre not liking my Planned Economics. She won't settle for anything less than a Green economy.

It's not something I think either Deidre or Morgan are likely to go to war Vendetta over though.

That's just how diplomacy works in this game. Faction leaders will dislike any social model in a category that is not their favorite, even one they can use themselves (although not as much, I believe). So while Deidre hates Free Market, she still dislikes Planned Economics, if not as much.

Miriam and Zakharov are a bit weird in that aspect, since as far as I can tell, they don't hate anyone who uses their opposed society model if it's in another category than their preferred one. Miriam won't hate you for using Knowledge, but she will hate you for using Police State/Democracy, despite the fact that she can make use of both.

[Loud Whispers]

Aw yeah, game done. Smashed the Gaians thrice and broke the back of the hive, taking all their land bases. 757% AC rating, highest score for me yet. One crawler, never built anything but roads, mag tubes, sensors and forests. FEELS SO GOOD, IT IS OVER NOW.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Spartans attacked every base on space Australia, the believers attacked every base on space Australia and Zhakarov was heard pressed fending off the Hive so couldn't help in any way possible. Sanctity base was close to Gaia's landing, both with a road running through them - but were also far enough that offensive air cover was impossible for both sides. A whole Gaian horde descended from the Northern pass while the Western pass was contested with. The Leap of Frog, the isolated base that was supposed to be the key from which a thousand drop pod infantry were supposed to operate began rebuilding. Colony copter pods, interceptors and more drop infantry. The Hive sued for truce, keeping no less than 40 various infantry on the shores to fend off the drop infantry while contending the Gaians for air superiority. Where previously Peacekeepers had been kept at bay by fungal mountain, now neat roads led to Gaian and Believing base, the battles were bloody. One by one the Gaians took the Western bases until only 3 small isolated Believer's base were left to their own devices, vulnerable only to locusts and the frequent Gaian infantry drops. They were so thoroughly beaten that their garrisons never once rose above 1 unit, and frequently changed sides.

Slowly, pressure from the South-Western pass was beginning to increase. Infantry, rested after fending off many mindworms in the shelter provided by the fresh copters. The trio of bases pressed the roads with everything they had left, and begin to push the invaders back. The Spartan-Believer war had progressed with both sides trading bases, the borders of both factions a motley of black and orange as the mobile armies danced around poor infrastructure and the clustered coastal bases. The bulk of the Believer expedition arrived and began taking the coastal cities, capitulating on the skirmishes. The defeated Spartain faction, now bankrupt sold its small bases to the Believers, turning the motley into an orange amoeba, enveloping two Spartan pockets. A Peacekeeping force was left behind, a portion of the expedition was given to Zhakarov so that he could retake one of his bases from Yang, the rest turned their eyes upon the Northern and Southern front.

At this point the Believers were actually losing. Their bases were being overrun by mindworms and the highly mobile Gaian drop infantry. The Believing bases were cranking out copters and infantry, but it would take a prolonged probe subversion campaign that undermined the right army at the right time to win the entire war. Sanctity base held the Northern road, and the newly captured Gaian bases isolated the entire south-western continent from the home Gaian cities. The Believers left everything North of the pass untouched, only repelling attacks and raiding targets of opportunity. Copters swept the roads and wastes for Gaian probes and soldiers after the undermanned bases were on occasion captured by commandos. The long road, the lost bases, the U.N. headquarters, all were liberated by the Believers. Rovers and infantry captured the outlying small bases to the South, cutting off chances of escape. The coastal cities, where once Believer had existed in peace with Gaian were retaken after decades of air raids as drop infantry descended from the skies. Before long, the big cities were besieged and taken. All that were left was another large group of four bases, too far away for offensive air cover. Once the rest of two armies had positioned themselves, the blitz and the constant stream of reinforcements secured the offending cities. Once the armies began taking North-Gaian bases, Deidre sued for peace. One city in the Northern Gaian corner was bought and stacked with peacekeeping troops along with Sanctity Base, and attention was turned to the next most powerful contender: Yang.

From the four captured cities, a path to the Hive existed. Falling sea levels had created a large expanse of fungus riddled land connecting the great continent and space Australia to Yang island. Yang appeared content with keeping the main bulk of his armies on his island to fend off the ever frequent raids. Gaians and Hive ships fought in the small channels, Believing air raids occasionally sparred with the AAA soldiers on the coast. The host crossed the fungus at a snail's pace, capturing and falling to Demon boils along the way. The home bases begin producing a new generation of formers and soldiers to solidify Believing superiority. The pact with the Gaians was revoked after they were caught trying to steal tech from Believers. The three outlying Hive bases captured were the only bases used to reinforce the advance into Yang island, and spent most of their time building special tactics units to break the siege.

The Demon boils and the host blunted their way through a storm of aircraft [the trick was there was more of them than the aircraft could kill, and there were enough SAM infantry that the aircraft could be shot down the next turn] and took two bases past the neck, the narrow impasse from which two squares connected the land bridge to Yang island. The brutal aspect of passing this grinder was that it was a grinder, the center of it was a Hive sea base.

The first special tactics mission was a horrendous defeat.
Eight marine shock troops in one cruiser, they were one turn away from assaulting the sea base when they were spotted by a coastal bunker guard and shot down by a foil. The sea base was later taken by marines travelling by land.

Mag tubes were being built everywhere, connecting every Believing base together to every other faction's HQ [barring Yang]. Any more treacherous dogs would be put down. Even the bases on Yang island, at least the ones at the neck were connected by mag tube. The Spartans fought the Gaiains yet all fought the Hive. The mag tubes were really only for the benefit of the Believer's allies though, as no reinforcements were coming from the continental cities, those stayed at home watching the underlings for signs of an upcoming revolt, having already been betrayed multiple times by friends and also the notion of sending all the Believing armies onto an island where rising sea levels could leave them trapped was not an appealing notion, the drop pod disaster proved that even a superior army can be torn apart if isolated.

The fighting continued with bases on Yang's island traded here and there. An endless stream of Hive shard troops battered the beleaguered invaders. Here's where the next special tactics worked far better than anticipated. Demon boils acted as shock troops to attack and hold frontier bases while the infantry assaulted the prize bases, but there was simply no way of advancing further without spreading the Believing forces too thin, and vulnerable to simply being worn away by the superior numbers of the Hive army.
Grav tanks and rovers had not been used for many hundreds of years, since just about every faction had an abundance of ECMs and so such units were only good in niche attacks. Four grav tanks with troop transports and med bays were constructed with the best armour available, alongside four shock troops with the best equipment available and AAA capabilities.

At first the expeditionary force was successful in dividing Yang island in two, but everything was undone in the counter attack as the invasion force was too few to take AND hold the bases. The neck was blockaded by the Hive, but the first grav tank made short work of that as the shock trooper on board destroyed multiple shard and photon infantry squads. To top it all off, an air strike on the grav tank failed when the tank shot it down. One important base containing the command nexus was surrounded by Hive soldiers and the grav tanks ferried enough troops to not only repel wave after wave, the tanks themselves helping by being mobile blocks from which none could pass, but they also brought injured invaders back to base and were invaluable in special operations.

The two factions had very different strategy. The Believers' probe teams ran amok subverting army after army to reinforce the invasion before sabotaging the nearest Hive base. These armies would then take over the nearby bunkers or bases, or attacked the remaining Hive army, relishing in collateral damage. The Believers were maximizing damage against the Hive, so that for every one Believing soldier dead as many as 10 and at least 2 Hive soldiers were gone. Base infrastructure was torn apart by probes so that even if the Hive were to retake it as they did, it would be just that more worse off than before. Even taking a Hive base was little to do with building on Believing strength. By taking the base it allowed a much quicker and profitable scrapping of infrastucture and it forced Hive artillery to destroy their own external infrastructure. Alongside the terrible psych or food production, starvation and war wrecked the bases to the point where only war production was possible. The hive sought to retake everything at all cost, and the Believer strategy maximized that cost while making many of their troops near-invincible by advent of repairing. The sole mag tube system in the Hive was overrun or else rendered unusable by probe teams, subversion and blockades. The endless waves of Hive soldiers became no less endless, but their bases did.

The Gaians, in their treatsied state tried blackmailing the superpower faction into giving them technology. After denying them, they attacked a tiny fledgling base with a demon boil of mindworms, leaving no survivors, stealing the tech they wanted.
Deidre moved all of her armies against the Vale of Wind, the base I bought off of them and asked for a truce, presumably assuming to avoid bloodshed by appealing to the noble Miriam.
The truce was accepted.

It was broken.
The entire Gaian army was torn apart, none of the other bases were even needed - the mag tubes and the Vale of Winds' garrison alone was enough to storm through Gaia's landing and the feeble base defences in between.
That was the last Gaian insurrection. They weren't eradicated as they were a useful tool to point at the Hive, having already paid the price for their crimes at the judgement of the now 'scrupulous' Miriam.

At the same time the Leap of Frog finally played its wildcard. A hole in the Hive coastal defence had appeared, colony copters descended down onto the island and created a beachhead base from which 6 drop shock troops and 2 probe teams followed suit. As part of their defeat, the Gaians paid 23,000 credits.
The probe team subverted the Hive base with the largest garrison on that island. The next turn, many of them were disbanded but they had already succeeded in clearing the landing zone and reaching the borders to the other bases. The sole mag tube was overrun by probe teams, infantry and the surviving mind worms. At the south, the only surviving Grav transport ferried no less then 4 troops to the border of the last defiant major land base after the bunkers and roads were cleared by drop infantry, and it brought one last soldier close enough. Each soldier had two attacks and cleared the garrison, where a single failed attack could have meant failure of the entire stack. That last soldier sealed the assault, and by then the rest of the island was either falling to the onslaught or was gearing up to attack the coastal cities.

Even this wasn't necessary, as at that point the Hive sea bases could no longer harvest from the island and began crumbling under their own weight.
With 15 years until mandatory retirement, I was satisfied and called a diplomatic victory.

Who to play next? I love how each faction embodies their personality and expresses it in game so well. I feel like trying out Zhakarov, to do some tech-heavy speshul takteks. Is it possible to have a submersible aircraft carrier full of airborne troop carriers full of troops?

[Loud Whispers]

Oh now here's a fun thing: Create a world where every major landmass is connected to one another by a mag-tube line. It changes the dynamics of the game incredibly well. Exploration completes on year 1 with the central nervous system mapped out by a single scout, the outlines of all faction territories are known. Territory changes on the line happen instantaneously, swapping hands frequently and violently. Even total annihilation does not mean the end, as a victorious army from the line may find itself immediately vanquished when it tries to further advance into more treacherous terrain, and before long the defeated army reclaims it all and more to fight the other victor, the ally who ambushed their competitor in this moment of peril.
Wild Mindworms cause terrible damage to the line, chewing their way through near-irreplaceable infrastructure, every gap has to be plugged with a base. And from these bases form power blocs, areas of control easily enforced, easily bypassed. Warfare does not practice as a contest of attrition or who has the better soldier, it becomes a trial of who is most formless. Every stronghold becomes a weakness, a single former holds off an army. It's quite fun.

And special tactics; ocean crossing. Every now and then you have to cross a body of water, and to make matters worse it's straight into heavily fortified territory. Sensors, patrols and air attacks endanger your transports at every turn. Making it to the coast is not enough, an army waiting for you there will shut down any attempts before they began, making the cost getting there made in vain.
Successfully taking a base is also not enough to secure victory, they will most of the time have air, land and sea superiority whilst being capable of resupply.
The first assault should consist of a screen of foils or cruisers followed closely by the transports holding the shock troops, heavily armed and armoured. This assault should focus its entire strength on one base, while making it as brutally difficult for the enemy to reclaim it by destroying roads and speeders.
From there you can just keep ferrying troops into the grinder, but it'll cost you loads. This is where the speshul taktics diverges from the norm.
If you're lucky, your enemy is now squandering or amassing troops by your beachhead's borders to prepare their own counter attack or to fend off your own incursions. Here's where it gets fun: Dragoons. Cheap land based transports + cheap offensive infantry + cheap sea transports = ocean bridge.
You can literally line up a string of transport boats and have your troops walk over them [1 tile a turn] but it's so slow that you'd probably just be better off sailing them there instead. Plus it takes a lot of boats up and can very easily be destroyed.
But if you put your infantry in a land transport and tell that transport to move from the coast into a sea transport unit in the ocean, something strange happens. The loaded land transport moves onto the ocean tile without embarking onto the foil or cruiser. This means that a single one of the lowest tech foil can transport 8 units across 4 tiles at a time where it should only be able to transport 2. The units will be spread out so they cannot be taken out by one sole strike and when they arrive, they'll be able to attack the entire coast. Not only that, but since the land transport will spend its move instead of the infantry within, it'll be able to attack on the same turn it lands giving little time to redeploy against this massive assault. You can then use the land transports as garrisons [upgrade their armour if needs be] while also using them to move around the bases, testing the enemy's defences, rapidly overrunning weak spots with the infantry and withdrawing where it becomes too fierce.
That's the low tech solution, the high tech one I have yet to test:
Air transports ferrying troops through an aircraft carrier. It would need a base or beachhead to transfer the troops onto land... Unless another aircraft carrier was at hand to ferry troops onto land. A mix of the three can tie down their resources, nullify their defensive superiority, guarantee the ability to ferry large amounts of troops, exploit their everything and bring great joy to your face.

And seriously, offensive helicopter bases are the best.

[pisskop]

Wow this predates me.  Still...

Looking for a way to remove the nutrient bonus from the jungle entirely.  I'd want to be able to tweak the tile yields in general, but I want to remove the extra nutrient from jungle squares.

Anyone know how or where I go to do that?

[Great Order]

You know, I remember having bought SMAC a good while back, didn't realise that was 10 whole years ago.

[pisskop]

I just disabled the jungle.  Wasnt what I ultimately wanted but it did the job.  I just refuse to accept landing on top of it, and any ai who does  goes nutters with the ai tweaks Ive got.  Im talking 3x my score within 75 turns.  The discounts they get for difficulty are already good, now they just slap down forests and cities in alternating  formation and  spam colony pods.

Nothing better than a designated bully.

[askovdk]

For all lovers of SMAC/SMAX, this is a nice compilation of all cut screens and voice acting, - I sometimes put it on just to remind myself what a great game this is without actually playing it. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aUcvswVJ58

[Loud Whispers]

I just disabled the jungle.  Wasnt what I ultimately wanted but it did the job.  I just refuse to accept landing on top of it, and any ai who does  goes nutters with the ai tweaks Ive got.  Im talking 3x my score within 75 turns.  The discounts they get for difficulty are already good, now they just slap down forests and cities in alternating  formation and  spam colony pods.

Nothing better than a designated bully.

I usually run into the opposite problem - I find when you have an overwhelming score lead diplomacy becomes all but impossible since everyone will be threatened by you, which sucks when you're Morganites trying to make some treaty money. But conversely you can have a weak score as the Believers whilst in reality being ridiculously powerful since all of your strength is focused in military & colonisation so the AI routinely underestimates your dominance whilst fearing/valuing your military, allowing you to have freer diplomatic options.

For all lovers of SMAC/SMAX, this is a nice compilation of all cut screens and voice acting, - I sometimes put it on just to remind myself what a great game this is without actually playing it. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aUcvswVJ58

But I'll never forget the chills I got developing the dream twister at 3:00 a.m.... Decided to finish my run then and there xD


Also it's amusing to see my own posts from 2013 here. Each and every time I think I've mastered this game I end up managing to find another way to push my skill ceiling higher. I swear by random tech now - I think it's the more fun (outside of island games) when you have to deal with the cards you've been dealt rather than being able to squeeze out a "meta" list that denies the AI any chance to get secret projects and builds a ridiculous player eco-advantage. It's also ridiculously fun as a Miriam player to really set yourself behind everyone in the first 100 years and feel like the tech backwater you're supposed to be, rather than the player-led 40k Imperium she becomes when you're capable of spamming infinite terraformers/crawlers with democratic/free market/wealth.

I've spent a lot of time theorising what the "best" terraforming/society strategy is and after years and years of playing/testing, I'm pleased to say there isn't one. This is down to the ingenious and simple way Alpha Centauri changes the "optimal" development/base layouts dependent on certain soft thresholds amidst the game's timeline.

Game start
In the game start, the optimal layout is imo one where your bases each have two nutrient tiles to work from, or at the very least one nutrient tile. A start-game base working a nutrient tile with a forest gains significant cumulative advantages over any comparable base. E.g. one nutrient tile with a forest takes 4 turns to set up and provides 7 resources straight away, a terrain improvement that removes fungus and spreads on its own, including the all important +3 nutrients which will carry your early game base into pop 3 with nothing but forests. Your output will just absolutely mog a base being set up with farm/solar/mines on the same ground.

Early game
At this point of the game how you've laid out your bases and terrain improvements really matters insofar as how you intend to run your mid to late game. Certain playstyles benefit immensely from having more bases, e.g. Believers/Spartans get more support per base, Morganites have limited ability to work their early game tiles and so benefit from more base sprawl early game. Others like Gaians/Peacekeepers really benefit from having fewer, but better bases. The only one constant in the early game is the moment you get crawlers, start pumping them out and saturate your mineral allowance until you generate eco damage. Unless you're doing a gaian no eco-damage run YOU WANT TO CAUSE EARLY GAME ECO DAMAGE. Fungul pops are calculated with a moving threshold which factors in how many fungal blooms you've had before. If you spam loads of fungal blooms in the early game you can massively increase your per base eco-damage allowance in the late game without getting drowned in worms, as the early game fungal blooms are trivial to deal with. Late game... Not anymore. And if you're going for no eco-damage run, spamming crawlers on energy tiles and food tiles is still worth it.

The mid to late game
This is where you can really see how the game makes it so there is no true "optimal" base layout because of the way the soft thresholds operate. The first soft-thresholds are reached when ecological engineering/gene splicing lift the resource collection limits beyond 2. At this point if we compare the maximum energy you can get per tile (not even counting bonuses from special terrain/merchant exchange/social policies):

mine with road: 3 resources
base tile: 5 resources
rainy farming, rolling soil, solar collector: 5 resources
condenser enriched farm supply crawler: 6 resources
tree tile with hybrid farms: 7 resources
base tile with recycling tanks: 8 resources
kelp/tidal with base facilities: 8 resources
4 echelon solar mirror supply crawler with river: 9 resources
condenser forest with hybrid farms & river: 9 resources
borehole: 12 resources
rainy farming, soil enricher, rolling soil, solar collector, 4 echelon mirrors, river, >3k altitude: 14 resources
gaian fungus with secrets of the manifolds: 16 resources
base tile with 99 pop and max satelites: >500 resources

Especially with random tech on, the game presents a little masterpiece of strategic decision making. The best uses of your tiles in the late game are mediocre in the early to mid game, or require considerable technology/forwards planning (fungus) or considerable investment in terraforming time and credits (echelon plateau farms). Whilst the kings of the mid game (the forest & borehole) remain potent and useful from the moment ecological restrictions are lifted... The option to squeeze out more resources per tile is always there for those with the terraforming capacity to spare, especially since boreholes do not play nice with rivers/terraforming up. Whilst theoretically the best base layout is just bases packed as close together as possible, in reality you won't be able to get enough satelites out and you'll end up with less output than someone who spaced them out better, and the game will end long before you reach that theoretical ultra-boom. So the optimal layout is truly not one which envisions maximum exploitation, but one which has a place for its bases in every early, mid and late phase of the game.

More money than GOD

[N.b. click on the images to view them in full zoom]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A supply crawler being limited to just one resource type is really not that big of a deal. As per above, mines only have one resource to collect, condenser/farm tiles only lose out on one potential mineral & can't have solar collectors anyways, and the solar farm becomes one of the most apocalyptically wealthy tiles when it's up and running. When you begin concentrating all the multiplicative buffs, regularly breaking the UI becomes trivial to accomplish.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In this run I got one of the godliest starts ever with a high concentration of rare resource tiles on a high mountain and a monolith that sailed me through the early game. I decided to use such a blessed start to do a two base challenge. First the forests, sensors and roads came up to deal with infiltrators/worms/fungus. It's also a nice bonus that when you begin chopping the forests down for solar panels you get a bit of a mineral refund!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

By exploiting the principles of "transitional phase economy" I was able to soldier on ahead with just two bases (but could have even done this with just 1). With the two nutrient tiles and the monolith giving me an easy head-start (practically no terraforming required) I was able to focus my terraforming output on doing silly things like building a river on every tile. You can't order a river to be placed next to an existing one, but if you plant all the orders simultaneously you can create these infinite river loops that feed into themselves.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I spent very little time building anything I didn't intend to use. Which meant very efficient terraforming!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My only ally was Yang... Which was rather awkward, as it forced me to keep running Police State despite desperately wanting to run democracy. I was especially scared of Yang as he started dropping planet busters but I managed to keep him friendly long enough to buy the world :]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And that's because once I set up my ring of high-altitude worker tiles I could then begin working on my insane solar park, bringing in thousands upon thousands of energy credits a turn. Note the little airbase where my r-laser jets could patrol to catch migrating worms before they attacked my solar boys. Recon rover rick was a hero! Once you concentrate your economic output into specific bases you can get crazy outputs. E.g. your base that has +300% labs and 50 energy on labs has an effective output of 150 energy resources.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Besides concentrating all resources into a small number of bases, the opposite works really well for Yang. Because of his lack of inefficiency penalties you can spam lots of bases together and no one can really stop you at any point in the game because all of your bases start off with perimeter defences. Here I was messing about with a forest -> solar farm enricher transition and although I was unstoppable, I also found it to be rather slow in expanding across the map. Not only that, but it was incapable of transitioning from the early-mid to the late game economy quickly enough. It took far too long to actually begin reaching maximal tile outputs and reach the >3k altitude or get max satelites in place.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Other fun ideas I had was one where max base-layout was used, with no overlap. Shifting the bases orthogonally by one square allows for a slight reduction in non-worker harvested tiles, and this kind of base layout works really well for Miriam who likes to expand, colonise and assimilate vast swathes of territory. This kind of layout also has the great advantage of being really easy to designate and light on micro compared to the Metropoliyang hellscape. Note as well that these are not just forests - but condenser forests. As far as I can tell no one else has documented condenser forests, so with tentative humility I claim its discovery. Forests spread into tiles. They even spread into tiles that are normally exclusive with forests. E.g. building a borehole/echelon mirror over a forest will remove the forest. Yet a forest can spread into a borehole/echelon mirror. The effect of this is a minor reduction in eco-damage from infrastructure, but is otherwise just cosmetic. But in the case of a forest tile spreading into a condenser - you get bonus food from tree farms/hybrid farms.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

With tree farms, you're effectively getting the food output of a forest tile with hybrid farms. With hybrid farms, you're getting +4 nutrients per tile. It's super easy to set up highways of condensers and "seed" forests, and when the condensers have been seeded, you just replace your original forests with more condensers until every tile is a condenser-forest tile. This allows you to squeeze a bit more life out of your forests and justify keeping them into the later game, allowing your terraformers to focus on claiming yet more territory instead of trying to optimise your core bases.

I put all of my theoretical know-how together to come up with my worst idea yet: I wanted to create the most optimal phase-transition economy, whilst also producing the most hellish dystopian base layout possible. I wanted this to be a dehumanising sci-mess that you would just find insufferable to live in, if you had enough free will left to hate it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For the food economy, it was a mixture of condenser-forests and condenser farms. This struck a balance - in the early game when I had limited capacity to colonise continuously but had great capacity to terraform, I could afford to wait for forests to expand into condensers. But once my production kicked into overdrive, it was far superior a choice to just build condenser farms than to wait for a theoretical maximum output to be achieved. Condenser-forests would be worked by a worker drone, whilst condenser-farms would be worked by a supply crawler for maximum efficiency.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Most base-layouts balance the considerations of defence, tile overlap, aesthetics e.t.c. but in this case I made the choice of making the entire base layout revolve around borehole placement in order to maximise ECONOMIC TRANSITION SPEED. So from the moment I unlocked ecological engineering and the weather paradigm I went crazy with the most boreholes per tile possible and condensers on everything in between. Bases were placed in a kind of T shape formation, which I found was the most amount of bases you could stack in close proximity whilst ALSO having the absolute maximum amount of boreholes possible. This sheer concentration of boreholage rapidly makes Yang's frightful industry a horrifying world-devouring serpent whilst his one weakness is obliterated by the infinite energy credits works.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The results were successfully dehumanising, and probably the closest I've gotten to a true optimum output phase-transition economy. Hilariously at one point a meteor impact smashed into one of my Hive clusters, wiping out several bases (including one of my secret projects sadly). It took about 3 turns for my terraformers and colony to make it look like the meteor impact had never happened.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's a happy day when your bases are pulling in hundreds of minerals of output each with no eco-damage.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

These two images show how much terraforming could be conducted in just one turn. Latest generation hovertank terraformers lay down the roads/mag tubes and older generation terraformers then branch out to do the actual future base tiles.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But really once you begin to "get" these principles you can get away with some very fun and very silly strategies. Here I tried a pure fungus boy build as Deidre. Nothing but fungus. Only allowed to plant fungus. Fungus every day. You will eat fungus porridge and like it. Early-game you can get away with just farming mind worms for economy.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Early to mid-game you get 2 nutrients per fungus square. So you can just pop all of your crawlers on fungus, rake in that food and turn all of your labourers into engineers. Each pop is giving me +3 eco +2 labs before bonuses are applied, and once your bases are mature enough to go 100% specialist you can start recycling all of your rec commons/hologram facilities because you have no drones and no drones = no drone riots. I had no minerals but also had no need of minerals. My specialists produced all the credits I needed for facilities and mind worms attacking enemy units on fungus get +50% psi so you are literally untouchable until the enemy gets air units... By that point however you're also starting to unlock your fungus potential, and can transition from your blue-sky hippy economy into your blue-collar fungus power as you switch your crawlers from grabbing fungus food to grabbing fungus mins/energy.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've tried other builds, this time placing more emphasis on "aesthetics." This one was a central-park challenge where I wanted to create a Believers' edenic parkland

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The morganites got incorporated :]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is something really refreshing in focusing on aesthetics over maximalist output. It really feels like an accomplishment when you design a place that looks like you'd want to live there and not just another generic urban hellscape.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My little pastoral valley kingdom in the stars... <3

[Robsoie]

I wonder, is there any other 4X in which the WMD is as impactful and powerful as the Planet Buster from SMAX ?

I remember having a game in which i had stockpiled more nearly two dozen of them and changed the map so completely after usage. Something i never experienced in the Civ series with the nuke/icbm

[pisskop]

In civ iv I managed to nuke the entire world to the point I could just elect myself governor.  But it was kind of lackluster in actual damage done.  Even a thorothly nuked endgame city in CIV can usually manage to keep enough food to grow back to 10 or 12 ish despite the radiation.  And no terraforming, oc

[IronyOwl]

Those are incredible and I had no idea there were econ strategies other than getting as many bases as possible and going from normal improvements to forests to fungus forests.

Curious that you don't seem to have experimented with water much. I seem to recall kelp + tidals being very strong if you could get the minerals from somewhere.

I wonder, is there any other 4X in which the WMD is as impactful and powerful as the Planet Buster from SMAX ?

I remember having a game in which i had stockpiled more nearly two dozen of them and changed the map so completely after usage. Something i never experienced in the Civ series with the nuke/icbm

Nothing I've ever seen. The ability to wipe out entire bases is strong, of course, but the sheer visceral impact of reshaping the map is hard to beat. I'm not aware of any other 4Xs that allow that level of map modification, so it shouldn't be too surprising I've never seen one with that level of devastation either.

Honorable mention goes to Warlock 2, which has a lategame volcano spell that permanently transforms a tile into an impassable mountain and surrounding tiles into lava that wrecks income and causes minor damage to units standing on them. Not surprisingly, it features robust terraforming options, but no such thing as height. Somewhat amusingly, it also allows wrecking the place on accident- magic attacks or spells have a chance to burn tiles or reduce them to raw magic hellscapes.

[E. Albright]

I wonder, is there any other 4X in which the WMD is as impactful and powerful as the Planet Buster from SMAX ?

It's arguably more wargame than pure 4x, but Shadow Empire's nukes are pretty gamechanging when you get them, just because of how important proper logistics are, as well as the impact high levels of radiation have on troops. When you shift from tac nukes to ICBMs and can suddenly make your enemy's capital not just empty, but also unlivable AND much harder to defend, you're going to rapidly have downstream effects on their ability to support troops on the front as well.