You guys won't believe this...

[Luis W]

I just discovered that supply crawlers can harvest stuff.

Played SMAC for the first time in my cousin's home back in 1999; but really started playing it around 5 years ago when I had a decent computer and Internet to obtain SMAC/X and play it.

And I'm no noob in this game. Had a 2370AD ~1500% (13336) transcend victory on transcend level with the drones on a huge planet map, iron man, blind research, lots of fungus, against Marr, H'minee, Roze, Miriam, Hive and University. It was my hardest game to date.

Now it feels like I just rediscovered this game again, and I start to see all the possibilities involved in a game with harvesting, but at the same time I feel like a total douche for missing it, specially because today I have little free time available to play it...

Do you f**** believe it?

[magic9mushroom]

I imagine single-player will not be a challenge to you for much longer, if you can already beat Transcend without crawlers.

[Luis W]

I have only beaten transcend with a far lead using Domai (industry and drone bonus kind of cripples the AI bonus). Havin little time to play, there's three games I want to make on transcend that I think will be the most challeging.

Huge map with islands. It's always challeging, and you have to make sea colonies to win. So there would be 2 conflicting objectives with blind research: explore/conquer and build/discover

Huge map with Miriam. Tech stagnation until Crawlers and the risk of starting alone making her offensive bonus irrelevant.

Mixing both. That's the hardest challenge I can think of with standart game rules, and of course deadliest enemies - maybe 3 marrs and 3 h'minees - and the typical Iron Man, tech stagnation, agressive AI, no Unity scattering, lot's worms etc etc.

Anyone care to help with increasing in-game difficulty? Not counting custom factions, different rules etc. Just to make sure I'm not missing anything else

[magic9mushroom]

I have only beaten transcend with a far lead using Domai (industry and drone bonus kind of cripples the AI bonus). Havin little time to play, there's three games I want to make on transcend that I think will be the most challeging.

Huge map with islands. It's always challeging, and you have to make sea colonies to win. So there would be 2 conflicting objectives with blind research: explore/conquer and build/discover

Huge map with Miriam. Tech stagnation until Crawlers and the risk of starting alone making her offensive bonus irrelevant.

Mixing both. That's the hardest challenge I can think of with standart game rules, and of course deadliest enemies - maybe 3 marrs and 3 h'minees - and the typical Iron Man, tech stagnation, agressive AI, no Unity scattering, lot's worms etc etc.

Anyone care to help with increasing in-game difficulty? Not counting custom factions, different rules etc. Just to make sure I'm not missing anything else

Well, the most common self-imposed challenge is "no crawlers". :P

Apart from those, the "hardest setting" is probably the Cha Cha Challenge - Cha Dawn, blind research, huge map, rare lifeforms.

[gdijedi7]

Yeah...I've never used crawlers. At all.

[magic9mushroom]

Yeah...I've never used crawlers. At all.

Because they're easy modo, or because they look fugly?

[gdijedi7]

Because even though I intellectually know that Alpha Centauri is pretty much the same system as Civ2, my brain doesn't really believe it and so refuses to do the normal stuff I do in Civ. But I'ma beat it. I'm going to see exactly what they can do for me, because unlike my last game, in this game, some other factions actually like me.

[magic9mushroom]

Because even though I intellectually know that Alpha Centauri is pretty much the same system as Civ2, my brain doesn't really believe it and so refuses to do the normal stuff I do in Civ. But I'ma beat it. I'm going to see exactly what they can do for me, because unlike my last game, in this game, some other factions actually like me.

But... crawlers aren't in Civ. Oh, sure, you can use them like caravans, but the abusive potential is in their resource harvesting (because it means you can effectively build people).