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[EuchreJack]

I'm really saddened nobody has attempted to make a clone of Alpha Centauri, perhaps something even more focused on "political utopias". It's something I would love to see Paradox pick up and develop with some of their interesting grand strategy mechanics. I suppose they'll always be more history focused than futuristic social-science.

Please don't ask for this.  Especially from Paradox.  They're a great company, I love their games, but they don't do turn-based.  This just isn't the sort of game they would have any chance of doing well.  Please, just let it be.

Besides, I'd rather Paradox (and every other game company in existance) focus on giving me something NEW to play, rather than create some cheap knockoff.

Now, if you instead are saying, "I wish Paradox would run one of their grand strategies IN SPACE", then I would support you completely.  Crusader Kings In Space? Yes Please!

[Catastrophic lolcats]

My statement was rather vague. I said i was surprised that nobody has made a clone of Alpha Centauri and then went onto saying it's a setting that I would love to see Paradox handle not that they should clone the gameplay of Alpha Centauri. I can see why people could easily mistake that however.

[EuchreJack]

Oh, in that case, I agree with you totally.  I'm glad you clarified that.  I'll admit that the beer may be hindering my ability to comprehend fully.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Nah, it was extremely poorly written. I'm a little bit embarrassed by it's vagueness to be honest.

Back on the topic of this thread I got a really bad urge to play this again. Might fire it up after I finish my errands tonight. Might go for a nice blobby Hive empire.

[Aboth Ber]

Now, if you instead are saying, "I wish Paradox would run one of their grand strategies IN SPACE", then I would support you completely.  Crusader Kings In Space? Yes Please!

Yes I absolutely agree... We need more Grand Strategic Games In Space! The most recent 4x game was about blowing stuffs up, I really more enjoying strategical gameplay. You know, using Batman Gambit and Ridiculous Over-elaborated Plan against your Rival Empire.

[sambojin]

The only problem with grand strategy games in space is travel times. Even if they're fast and convenient enough to take colonists to other planets, the question remains of why you didn't just send a bunch of intersteller nukes instead of people.

On one planet, it's fine, it's reasonable. It was really, really hard to get to that one planet, let alone heaps. The moment the game universe portrays lots of people going everywhere easily, I always wonder why they didn't just use lightsaber-tipped hyperdrive missiles instead of ground troops. Space technology would be so much further advanced if humans lived on two planets rather than one, for the simple reason that we'd like to be able to attack each other in a reasonable timeframe. Paradox tends to do at least plausibly believable games, which SMAC (or at least the basis of the "We went to Alpha Centauri" idea) is somewhat, no matter how whacky the characters involved are.

No lightsaber-tipped mega-nuke hyperdrive missiles? Then it's probably not realistic enough to play as an enjoyable grand strategy game that encompasses more than one star system. One alien system would be fine though. I hope EU4 will be moddable enough for that

[Sharp]

It's been a while, but I usually play Lal (UN) and out-Deidre Deidre. She seems backstab-happy, too, for whatever reason. Jealousy?

In my games, the believers and spartans were always the first ones to get wiped out. I usually took out the believers myself just because Godwinson annoyed the heck out of me.

It depends on your social engineering policies, if you go green democratic then she seems quite happy and won't generally back-stab you. This is also why Believers tend to constantly be agressive because hardly anyone chooses fundamentalism, and she is freaking crazy.

"I warn you Zakharov my new 4-1-2 Impact Rovers have rendered my forces invulnerable"
"Fuck you Miriam! Say hello to my Planet Buster and watch New Jerusalem become New Atlantis"

Believers are only deadly if you have the misfortune to be stuck starting close to them otherwise that they are not deadly at all unless they sign a pact with someone with tech.

Easiest way to win as well is to go Morgans and keep a self defence force of Psi defending troops, get millions of credits and just bribe/mind control everything, the only thing you need to make sure you get is Hunter-Seeker Secret Project, even if you don't manage to get it built you just have to bribe the largest army you can and take that base.

[jhxmt]

I had not realised that GOG had this game.

...

Bought, downloaded, installed and off to play!    Man, I remember sinking so many, many hours into SMAC way back when.  I never got Alien Crossfire, just had the simple, plain SMAC.  Lal was always my nemesis - always.  Didn't matter if I played University, Gaians, Hive, Spartan, or Morganite, he always hated me.  Always.  I never played Believers - for the same reasons that others have noted.  Miriam just wound me up something chronic.

[Levi]

As kids me and my brother used to play this a ton.  He's either take Deirdre or Science guy(I forget his name) and I'd almost always take Morgan(but occasionally Yang).  Eventually he swore off the game after I bought out the world energy supply relatively early in the game, which he thought was total BS(which it probably was.).   

[beorn080]

Who are you playing as? University is handy for their free tech (I think you can get a rover chasis or an armour/weapons upgrade early if it's not blind tech) and Gaians can sometimes get a pretty decent mindworm swarm if they're lucky. Like most civ-style games, early expansion is key. Grab the wonder that gives you size 3 colonies if you can, chuck some cheap police units about and watch the pop boom happen.

Or you could save-scum the hell out of a group of crashed pods, but you may as well just use the cheat menu if you do that.

Corporation. Sometimes the university.

My best success of late was terraforming my tiny defensive island into a mountain and using nukes to cause enough global warming to drown the rest of the world.

Build The Weather Paradigm. Make Terraformers and Supply Crawlers. Build thermal boreholes out past your bases and drop a supply crawler on each to bring back energy or minerals, whichever you need more of. If you build them high enough, you don't even need nukes as the land will flood over them eventually. Until that point, enjoy your massive army, even more massive if you have clean reactors.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Protip: Supply crawlers effectively let you build up minerals on a base that you can immediately dump into any secret project you need, at no waste. Even if you're JUST keeping up with the research runs, you can pretty much instantly get any new secret project that opens up. Whats more, if you armor them well, you can actually make a force of fairly potent defenders, I think, which can STILL be dumped into secret projects instantly for even more minerals, since it costs more to make them.

[EuchreJack]

I had not realised that GOG had this game.

...

Bought, downloaded, installed and off to play!    Man, I remember sinking so many, many hours into SMAC way back when.  I never got Alien Crossfire, just had the simple, plain SMAC.  Lal was always my nemesis - always.  Didn't matter if I played University, Gaians, Hive, Spartan, or Morganite, he always hated me.  Always.  I never played Believers - for the same reasons that others have noted.  Miriam just wound me up something chronic.

I've only ever won as Believers.  While their tech stinks, they're troops are awesome.  If you can grow to the point where you're twice as big as everyone else, that tech penalty doesn't matter, and the best way to do so is rapid early expansion, at which the Believers excel.  They're a rush race, and need to be used as such.

[Sharp]

I've only ever won as Believers.  While their tech stinks, they're troops are awesome.  If you can grow to the point where you're twice as big as everyone else, that tech penalty doesn't matter, and the best way to do so is rapid early expansion, at which the Believers excel.  They're a rush race, and need to be used as such.

The one time I tried out Believers I had the misfortune to start on 6x4 island, took ages to get naval tech and by then Santiago had me surrounded with a superior force.

The new factions is SMAX aren't as fun as the original but there are a few bug fixes especially with AI. There is some new tech as well which can make for some interesting unit compositions depending on what you want to do. I don't really like playing with the new faction's in SMAX but stick to the originals.

The main difference between SMAC and SMAX is that you will need Hunter-Seeker Algorithm and Cloudbase Academy as they are both totally over-powering.

[Fikes]

I found the key to SMAC being constant unrestricted expansion. I agree, quantity is the new quality.

To that end, I loved the race that had increased production. I think there was one in base game, but I loved the drones in the expansion.

I have enjoyed every iteration of Civilization on one level or another, I don't see why they couldn't do that with SMAC.

I don't know if I posted it in this thread, but the most amazing thing about SMAC to me was Planet Busters. I had played Civilization and Command and Conquer when SMAC came out, so I knew a thing or two about video game super weapons. They were always underwhelming.

The first time I launched a planet buster I almost shit myself. It left a CRATER!

The next game I played I hid out on an island and focused on building a huge fleet of subs and a huge cache of planet busters. I literially destroyed every city in the game in a single turn. The next turn sea levels went crazy but it didn't matter. I had already won.

[Tellemurius]

yea once you researched anti-matter planet busters everyone's fucked (was there a defense system inplace against those? i dont remember)

[MonkeyHead]

Pretty sure there was a high tech defense sat type thing... though I used to play as the Spartans and go all blitzkrieg crazy with hovertanks by midgame, making utmost effort to befreind the university to bleed them for tech.