HYPERSMAC turn reporting and discussion thread

[Googlie]

Visit The Recreation Commons

Your password (as the Gaians) is forest

[Minute Mirage]

So we're playing the Gaians, goodbye dear free market.

Does anyone have a lot of experience with this faction? I'm certainly not an avid Gaia player, but I've read some strategies regarding them, so I've made an initial game plan suggestion:

- explore the seas with the foil we get at start, and try to capture some IoDs
- fungus troll with the initial scouts and try to capture some worms
- beeline to IA, switch to planned/wealth ASAP
- SP targets should probably be HGP and PTS, respectively.
- by mid-game, we should be running demo/planned/wealth + GA, netting us the +1 energy/square and a constant pop boom
- if there's a reasonable amount of fungus, we should be able to achieve a good early pop boom by building crawlers and making them harvest the 2 nutrients from fungus

We should also be wary of the AI in the beginning, considering what Googlie said of them. Hopefully the worms we capture will help in defense if we land close to one of the AIs.

[Archaic]

I have no professional experience playing the Gaians whatsoever. It's been a long time since I've played an SP game with them too (One of the CGN challenges earlier in the year I think it was). I'm going to have to follow the majority plan with this one. Without my Free Market, I'm rather dead in the water on how to balance the economy.

[AdamTG02]

In general, my strategy as the Gaians (in single-player, as I have yet to play a competitive multiplayer game) is to run Demo/Green/Wealth, get +2 ECON through Golden Ages, pump everything into Research except for enough Psych to keep us in Golden Age, and break even through loans and worm farming. However, this has several disadvantages:

- Worm farming is an uncertain source of income, meaning that ECON has to be upped for periods when you need money quickly or have run out. This slows research past the FM norm.

- ECs will quite simply be scarcer than under a Free Market, even with a constant 10% Energy income

- If we can't get either the HGP or the Virtual World, the Psych expense might give us less than we actually get from a Golden Age.

I propose that the HGP be our first priority tech, that we play initially with enough Research% to boost our tech rate (much easier with +2 EFFIC), we beeline to SotHB, and we switch to Demo or Green as soon as possible. We'll have stiff competition from the Pirates/Uni as far as SotHB goes, but in general I don't have trouble getting it when playing as the Gaians on Librarian. We start with formers, after all, and our first priority should be making some solar collectors.

I'm running low on time, so I'll cut this short here. Any other thoughts?

[Minute Mirage]

Now that I think of it, Demo/Green/Wealth + GA does sound really good. +6 efficiency is great, and we get a pop boom in the cities with creches. However, we really, really want the HGP for this, and I don't see how we can do this without crawlers. Therefore, I suggest this for our initial plan:

- Get to IA ASAP. If we are forced to pick a non-beeline tech, we go for Biogenetics. Otherwise, we research Biogenetics right after IA.

- Switch to planned to help growth and to reduce mineral costs.

- When we get IA, we switch to planned/wealth and start building crawlers in almost all of our bases.

- We use all the AAs we might find popping pods to build the HGP. We should be popping a lot of pods with our worms, so we have a chance of finding some AAs.

- We use all our available cash to rush the crawlers.


This would give us a pretty decent chance of getting the HGP. Opinions?

[AdamTG02]

Based on my testing, we likely have only a 50/50 chance, at best, of getting Secrets first. If the Pirates/Uni run Free Market, that probability shrinks to marginally above zero. Therefore, I endorse Minute Mirage's plan -- go for Industrial Automation as fast as possible. We start with Centauri Ecology, so we don't have to detour for that. Due to the increased growth, we should research almost as fast with Planned at 50% as we would in Simple at 70%/80% -- but we'll want to run the higher ration (the minimum that gives us a research boost at any given point in time) until we reach Planetary Networks. (Or do we want to build up cash to rush the crawlers? My instinct is that speeding research is more cost-effective as far as time goes, but I'm open to argument.)

If we follow the same path being planed in the ACPSG, Planetary Networks should be our third tech, following Indutrial Base and Info Networks, and followed by Industrial Economics and IndAutomation. Does anyone know if we're more or less guaranteed to get that beeline as an option? It worked up twice in my single-player tests, but that might have been a fluke.

[Minute Mirage]

Originally posted by AdamTG02
(Or do we want to build up cash to rush the crawlers? My instinct is that speeding research is more cost-effective as far as time goes, but I'm open to argument.)

I don't think we should be building up money before IA. We'll have to rely on worms to bring us cash.

Originally posted by AdamTG02
If we follow the same path being planed in the ACPSG, Planetary Networks should be our third tech, following Indutrial Base and Info Networks, and followed by Industrial Economics and IndAutomation. Does anyone know if we're more or less guaranteed to get that beeline as an option? It worked up twice in my single-player tests, but that might have been a fluke.

Given that Gaians are slot 1, and assuming that Googlie has used CTRL+F2 to set up our tech, we could get this beeline:

Inf. Net. -> Plan. Net. -> Ind. Base -> Ind. Econ. -> Ind. Auto

However, I'd say that we can only be sure of the beeline when we see the tech choices. If all the choices are available the first time, we'll know the path we're on for certain only when we pick the second tech.

[Googlie]

Originally posted by Minute Mirage
and assuming that Googlie has used CTRL+F2 to set up our tech

yup - I used the scenario feature "edit technology" which has the ctl+F2 as its hotkey

(and that first turn you're researching "none" until you found your first base, when you'll be given your tech choice to research next turn (unless you activate Shift+R to change the research goal)

G.

[AdamTG02]

Let's go with your proposed beeline, then, Minute Mirage. Do you know if we'll receive Biogenetics as a choice afterwards?

[Minute Mirage]

Originally posted by AdamTG02
Let's go with your proposed beeline, then, Minute Mirage. Do you know if we'll receive Biogenetics as a choice afterwards?

We should be able to receive Biogenetics as a choice after Industrial Automation in any case.

[Kody]

What happened to this?

[AdamTG02]

Not sure. On the University side, if I recall, we lost interest as no one seemed to be posting about it in the public forum.

[Illuminatus]

Active PUTer?

[AdamTG02]

Yep. I've come back for the 3rd democracy game. Not deliberately, but I happened upon the site again recently and decided to stay because of the new demo game.

It was my hope to get approved for Cycon before the end of the second one, but that didn't work out. No hard feelings, just when my consciousness is reactivated (upgraded with newest cybernetic parts), it will be shocked to realize that the Hive has forced the Consciousness to surrender. I'm thinking my conjsciousness might have been encrypted in a data core, launched out to sea with the destruction of the final PUT base, and salvaged by the Pirates, then recovered when the Pirates were gloriously assimilated by the Consciousness.

I was going to post an RP thread about the above, but with the end of the game there seems little point to it. If anyone's intereted in it, though, I might write something up.