Shortly after planetfall, you could review reports about surrounding terrain. There is abundant plant life, fertile soil, rivers and sea coast. Not only you grabbed with Deirdre more landing pods from U.N.S. Unity, but also will be able to establish a colony in a very good location.
Other mission officers could not be reached by radio. They have either equipment malfunction or they did not survive this emergency landing. While regretting loss of life, you are not that worried about getting all those wrong ideas for future of this human colony out of your way.
Just last corrections on the tabview and report will be ready for Lady Deirdre Sky. Living these past days in almost constantly moving escape pods has become unbearable to large portion of the crew. Decisions needed to be made.

This is vanila SMAC game. No expansion!

Installation:
Unzip the folder "gotm-2014-gaian-luck" to the "scenarios" folder inside the game folder.
Play:
Start SMAC game, choose:
Scenario > Play scenario -> and find the folder as described above. Select "Deirdre-2101.Sc" file.

About game settings:
Standard size map.
Dense cloud cover (more rainy conditions).
Abundant planet life (mindworms).
Transcendence - the only victory condition enabled.
No restart of eliminated factions.
Random events are ON.
Librarian difficulty

How quickly can you transcend? To complete this scenario discover all technologies and complete Ascent to Transcendence Secret Project in the smallest possible number of turns.
In case of a tie, Victory Points will decide the winner.
Save and submit your game the turn before completion of the Ascent to Transcendence SP.
Attach your save here in this thread for standings on Apolyton.
Deadline: March 31, 2015
After this date, you can submit your game for consolation standings.

This scenario is the December 2014 Game of the Month on another site, where it can be downloaded:
Link


For After Actions Reports, please use other thread and keep this one for standings only, thank you!
When doing AAR, please remember before March 31, 2015 to write spoiler warning to players, who are going to play this scenario. They should not read such AAR before submitting.

Good 'Gaian' luck!

= = = = = = = = =
Standings
......

After nearly 20 iterations in slightly over a year, Yitzi's .exe patch for Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, the Alpha Centauri expansion, has become a must-have for many SMACers.

Yitzi said the project, incorporating previous patching from scient and kyrub, arose from a desire to better balance AC gameplay.

"The main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.

"It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

"As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside," he said.

He got involved for the same reasons all modders mod.

"I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, [AC2] and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself," he said.

For a changelog of the patch: http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_...itzi%27s_patch Plans for the future of Yitzi's patch are extensive. "Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again. "After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings. The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months. This time will hopefully be substantially shorter. "After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead: "-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms. My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage. Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other. (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.) "-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6. "-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.) "-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents. As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that. "-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable. If zero, it will use the current system. "-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0. I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all. "-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0). "-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of cours...

On and off for the past few months I've been working on a wiki for Alpha Centauri, since I like wikis, building things, and Alpha Centauri. It's probably about time I announced it properly. Here it is.

Currently it has:
A full set of datalinks, based on the datalinks update with many improvements by me, Guv'ner, and others.
An archive of factions which currently contains 132 custom factions, searchable and categorized by everything from factions opposed to Police State, through factions with a Planet bonus, to Progenitor and factions with energy interest.
Information on the various unofficial patches.
A versioned set of core text files (alphax, helpx, etc).
...

As Petek posted it at AC2:


As I said on my own forum, and at CFC AC, we've gotta do something to protect the SMAC(X) nexii out there - get in the habit of checking by regularly, and looking for reasons to post. A dead forum that's still up has useful content to browse as long as it stays up, of course, but the nature of forums is that there's a certain amount of people coming and going, and a healthy community needs regular newb infusions - which don't happen much where there's no activity to begin with.

This 'poly AC folder has looked like a reasonably live part of the Greater SMAC(X) community lately, and it's good for everyone if that continues. Engaging/encouraging new members is a start. And if everyone, wherever their primary hangout is, suppresses their natural partisan instincts and supports the other places, the general quantity/quality of conversation will increase everywhere, more help/playing/stategy advice, more MP games, and more modding goodies will be available to everyone.

A single match burns out quickly; a whole book of matches makes a flame you can't ignore - and add fuel regularly, and you've got a group of campfires that people can gather around forever, beacons to guide future new friends in out of the dark....

Good old Games rereleased earlier this year Alpha Centauri, but Good old Games did not release Alpha Centauri's expansion Alien Crossfire with it. However, Good old Games released it as a Christmas present to all those who bought or will buy it from Good old Games. Note from the editor: GoG could have put it more cleary on the their SMAC games card, like putting it into the title otherwise I wouldn't have missed earlier. ...

The November 2012 Game of the Month - Nomads - was built around a custom faction made by Torvald Normann (Cytroll) with art by Robin Pirez and BUncle, who added his personal touch for the new leader portrait. Your mission, as the leader of this faction, is to fight your way to a Conquest Victory. Estimated time of play: +/- 4 hours, depending on your skill level.

Background
After the tragic death of Ahto Ilmar, ex-Colonial Marines Officer of Unity and leader of the Nomad faction since Planetfall, you, Steinar Vog, as his second-in-command and newly-appointed Companion, finally have the means to achieve your goals.
The scenario starts in MY.2181 and your faction is a well-established one. The Nomads have built the Virtual World and explored part of the world map while building some infrastructure. Contact was made with the Morganites and the Nomads have started conducting business together with them. Everything was in place for a long prosperous peace period, but this is set to change shortly.

Your mission:
All you will have to do is let yourself be driven by your nomadic inner nature. Steinar, invading the lands of the other six factions is what you were secretly aiming to do for so long. This is your moment! The time has arrived!
Reaching a Conquest Victory is the only way to finish this scenario. Still, this must be done in a pure nomad way: you are not allowed to build additional colony pods. If you need more bases, you will have to conquer them...

Directions:
1) Download the zip file from the AC2 GotM page and place it into your main game directory. Usually this is: C:/Program Files/Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
2) Unzip it there.
3) Start up SMAC (not SMAX), then select "Scenario", "Play Scenario", and then go to the subdirectory "1211NomadsGotM" and choose the scenario.
4) The game will automatically load with the Nomads faction.

Restrictions:
No additional bases can be built (you're starting with 5 bases at transcend difficulty level). Even though you have the possibility to build colony pods, doing so will invalidate your submission.

*Notes:
You can check at any time the objectives using the '=' key.
The scenario ends when you get the 'Mission completed' popup. Please save before taking the last base!
Don't forget to inform us on the moves needed to complete the mission (if any).
The rules of the 2012 GotM Competition can be found here: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?spage=gotm

Enjoy!...