whats the best group?

[weird god]

well, we got a bit off-topic - but isn´t a diplo or economic win the easiest to get unless you play one of the monomentum fations?

[mark13]

Not necessarily - a diplomatic victory can only usually be obtained if no-one defies the will of the council - that seldom happens unless your reputation is good. An economic victory I always find troublesome, because everyone declares war on you - 20 years can seem an awful long time! that is, if no-one PBs your HQ first....

[weird god]

maybe i shouldn´t be that truthworthy to the AI....but a diplo win is always the first i can "choose" from when the game is decided. well, i´m still not playing on trancendent level, only 2nd highest......

[Imperatus]

I've only played a few, but what the heck, here's my $0.02:

Peacekeepers: Definitely a faction to play if you don't want to worry about drones. Big advantage in the voting (I go for governor or the Empath Guild project relentlessly - that infiltrator is just too good a deal).

Cha Dawn: Strikes me as a "sneaky" faction. Seems he needs to either recruit a big mind worm army quick and get into position to demand tech from others, or do some fast trading and stealing.

University: Give 'em a chance to get a fair sized empire going and it's katie bar the door. Just get used to F4 to keep an eye on the unwashed masses (I'm currently playing the University in SP just to refine Drone control strategies).

Spartans: I think you should take lessons from their ethos: Find a nice quiet corner (heehee) and lay low. Buy off anyone who gets pushy, but STOMP anyone who invades. Patience is a virtue.

Yang: Haven't played him, but seems to require a very aggressive strategy.

[Sikander]

The Pirates are a very fun single player faction, especially for builders. I played my first game of SMAX as the Pirates (Librarian), and had a very interesting result: I won a diplomatic victory without once ever seeing another faction's units or bases. Needless to say I have never been able to repeat that feat.

The biggest difficulty to overcome with the Pirates is certainly mineral deficiency. This is not too hard to overcome, but it must be an immediate priority. Fortunately, one of the Pirates early game advantages can really help with this, which is moblity. Use your gunship to scout for specials, especially minerals. Don't be afraid to take a couple (or even a few) of turns looking for specials and empty islands or continents. Build sea bases abutting small empty islands (so you can mine, forest or borehole squares within your production radius) and don't be afraid to take to the land when you have a free medium to large continent.

Yes, all of this means that you will get off to a slower start than some other factions, but keep in mind that you can virtually ignore defense for a good deal longer than most of the land factions. Early on you will tend to be behind, as you will be busy building transports, formers and expensive sea colonies. Therefore it will take awhile to build up your own research capacity. Fortunately, you have two key early advantages. Firstly, you can really rack up a lot of pods by building transport ships and collecting pods turned up by your scoutship. Secondly, you are more likely to run into other factions fairly early due to the superior movement of your ships. Since you will tend to be a bit lower on the power graph, they tend to be willing to trade tech. Thus it is not too hard to become the early game tech broker and take the tech lead early on, even before your own research kicks in.

Once you get started, the other problems to overcome are the -1 growth and efficiency. These are not small problems, but neither are they crippling. Both can be offset by one strategy, which is to build hybrid specialist cities, and then use Golden Ages to pop boom. (A hybrid specialist city is one where half or a little more than half of the population are workers.) I have never built a sea mine or a subsea trunkline. Between boreholes, mineral specials, and crawlered mines (and the mineral bonus the Pirates receive in the shallows) I have just never needed to do it. I find the 4 food and 4 energy available in the sea (with minimal former time) to be too valuable to pass up.

Some other adjustments are necessary from my usual style, and probably one of the most important is the SPs I build. Normally I go balls to the walls for the Weather Paradox. With the Pirates, I am much more interested in the Hermann Goering Project and the Merchant X-Change. The Super Science Base (at your HQ) is a much more important tactic due to the crummy -1 efficiency, and the fact that I am often having to run Planned to get my bases booming. As for the WP, I find that my extensive terraforming needs on land are lessened enough by doing so much at sea that I don't miss it that much. Much later the cloning vats are great, as you can finally rid yourself of the growth problem and keep efficiency high.

One final note. In the game I mentioned above I found a lovely tactic which really helped me. I started in the Southern Hemisphere, about midway to the South Pole and between a small and a medium sized continent, both of which were empty. The Pole was one of those rocky ones. After I splashed about four sea bases in between the continents, and landed some seed colonies on Continents proper, I hit upon an interesting base placement strategy for the Polar area. I lined sea bases near the pole two squares apart, where their southernmost squares were two rocky polar ones. Then I sent a small army of formers to alternate boreholes and mines. This gave every one of these bases 10 minerals, which was enough to make them quite productive. They were so far away from everyone else that I never worried about defending them, and they were able to add an enormous amount of population and production to my empire.

[Enigma]

Back to the original topic I highly reccommend that you try to play at least a few games with every faction, so that you can learn to think like them. Play as Yang and see what police units can do. Play as Miriam to understand probe teams,Lal for pop booms, Deidre for efficiency/worms,Santiago for morale, UoP for tech, and, of course, Morgan for economy. Basically playing as each of these factions will allow you to become good at a specific skill and more or less specialize in that skill. But (this is one of the great things about SMAC) because of the versatile SE system it is quite possible you may need to play using a different set of skills than what you are used to. Morgan can't build a massive economy when he has neighbors all around him, he needs to combine several skills to survive. When Santiago is isolated she needs to pop boom and research to survive. Do not get caught in doing the same thing every game, the game can get dreadfully boring playing as Zack and transcending.

My personal faction favorite is Morgan, he can expand faster than any other faction under certain circumstances, (Preferably directed research) if you hurry recycling tanks and run FM/W, and once you cover your area with a film of bases the money really starts coming in. When I play with other factions I feel starved for cash all the time. In one of my favorite military scenarios as Morgan I used the versatility of Green economics to run a higher labs allocation for a while, once I got the techs I needed to turn the tides of the defensive battles that were happening at my borders I turned to high economy allocation and literally bought an entire army in a few turns, and beat all the factions at once. Even if you do not like Morgan at least try to learn how to use your economy- this is just much easier with Morgan since it is natural to the faction.

[Christantine The Great]

the University of Planet is the best, in my opinion. They can put alot of valuable techs under their belt at the start of the game, which are good to use to extort the Believers and the Drones. Their probe problem is solved with the HSA project. If they run Demo/green/knoledge/cybernetic they get killer research, great planet benifits, and a magnificent economy. They can use mindworm troops to attack and mechanical troops to defend. They get gas pods faster than any other faction to use aganst the Progenitors. They can field a good enough army to keep the Spartans away. They can crush the Gaians and/or Cult to keep a monopoly on green troops. If they can get the Empath Guild and have Lal as a Pact Brother, than he can easily get his way in Council meetings. And they always have Chaos weapons while the rest of Chiron plays with Impact toys. Thank you for your time.

[mark13]

quote: the Hermann Goering Project

LOL!!!!

There is a lot to be said for both UoP and Morgan - however, they also have some sever disadvantages. Take Zak, for example - in SP he is, very probably, the best faction in the game. However, he must get the Virtual World - Zak has to build Hologram Theatres before his bases hit size 4, and the VW is the easiest (and cheapest) way to do that. I believe the VW is undervalued for any faction in any case - not least because Holo Theatres have a 3/turn upkeep cost (ouch!) which can really cripple your economy if you go overboard.

Morgan has one big problem (well, I find it a problem at least) in the early game - support. This can be overcome by going straight to Ind. Auto and churning out the crawlers, but even up to that point, the support can leave you a fair way behind industrially. His second main disadvantge is the fact that he needs Hab Complexes at size 4. Again, the answer is to go to Ind. Auto, the prereq for hab complexes - but it is 70 minerals which could easily be spent on something more useful if you are another faction. Also, they have a 2/turn upkeep cost, which can begin to hurt your above-average economy if you build them unnecessarily.

However, their advantages are something special. For Zak, that +2 research and a free Net Node at every base is a massive boost to your early game research. For Morgan, +1 economy. He also gets a useful commerce bonus, very handy if he has powerful friends. But he is a builder through and through, and must be played as such for any real results. If he doesn't have friends, he will be tough to play with.

Mark13

[Enigma]

However, both Zack and Morgan can get submissive pact partners. The difference is that Zack can not wage war and research simultaneously, whereas Morgan can with green/wealth.

I have been in a 3v3 MP game (with Mis Otu) where *Lal* turned out to be the best builder. The factions were Zack, Morgan (me), and PK (Mis).

Essentially we all pacted together and realized that it would be impossible to wage war on such a tiny map and win. Everyone researched like crazy. The SP's were split up somewhat evenly, I got the WP, Mis got quite a few useful SPs, however the UoP was behind in SPs.

The PK's are not really able to get technology on their own very quickly, however with such good pact partners she got all the necessary techs and pop boomed massively. I had more cities and more pop for a while, but she just surpassed everyone. Mis also built a science city very effectively, and almost got both of the science city SPs (I barely convinced the UoP to give me the tech for the 2nd SP so that she would not get it).

The end of the game was amazing, I was getting somewhere around 2-3 techs per turn. Mis was getting lower research but had a lot of energy. But she had no problems keeping up with us becuase of her specialists. Now I will not pretend that there were not skill differences: Mis certainly played a better game. But, in my opinion at least, they were slight.
She broke pacts in the end and this slowed down my research enough that she managed to with the game- by a nose. The PK's are extremely good builders so long as mindworms dont show up on their turf. But as Morgan if I forced her to go out of FM with a mind worm army then I could still have the great energy while everyone else has bad energy... I have found that Morgan is best played as a pacifist in the early game and move into hybrid later on. Since pop booming is so hard he needs to use his advantages...

What am I getting around to? I dunno. It would be nice if Mis would comment on that game though...

[This message has been edited by Enigma (edited November 24, 2000).]

[mark13]

Yeah, Lal can often be a very good builder, and he also has the flexibility to switch to a war footing when necessary....but we are talking about Misotu here....

The thing about Morgan is that his early game development can be hampere somewhat by the support costs (in my experience, at least). This is why I hate them so much, I can never seem to get going....

But still, I would concur with the opinion that his late-game research can often be better than Zaks. When you get up to +5 or whatever economy, and you have pact brothers, you don't really need any sort of research bonus to soar ahead - a nice side-effect is that you get loadsa-money at the same time....

[Gothar]

The Cyborgs are my favourite. Most of the time they are getting the best research, unlesss Uop are in the game. I go for the planetery datalinks then don't worry about the crappier techs (The ones with no sp's attached) I just go for the high level ones with good sp's use their massive ecconomy bonus with lots of orbital transmitters to rush buy anything. While the ai does all the research on the lower techs for me. Of course this doesn't work with blind reesearch.

In non smacx I use Morgan.

To go off topic for a sec I was just wondering are any of the sp's made obsolete like the wonders in the original civ (never played civ2). For instance the colosus is maded obsolete by electricity. As far as I gather from the manuals and my experience with building sp's it doesn't happen in smac.

[mark13]

No, wonders will never cease in SMAC, which is a shame, because IMO it overpowers some of the lesser SPs, making them effective through the whole game.

I love the Cyborgs. The usual game-plan is to go for PlanNet (after CentEco, of course) and switch straight to planned. +2 growth, +1 industry, and the natural +2 efficiency off-sets the penalty. Also, it negates the need to run Democracy (for the support penalty). However, the real disadvantage is the inability to pop-boom unless you have a GA in place - not easy whilst running Demo/Planned. They can also switch to a war footing pretty quickly - running FM you can buy units, and running Planned you get that handy +1 industry.

Mark13

[Chowlett]

quote: Originally posted by mark13 on 11-26-2000 06:46 AM No, wonders will never cease in SMAC,

Just so this doesn't count as spam: In SMAC, I usually go as the PK, the efficiency hit isn't drastic, and I'm usually content to run Dem/Green anyways (an odd combination, I know). Behind them come the UoP and Gaians. I've only played one SMACX game (well, playing still, but it's won. Very odd position, but more about that when I finish), and have already fallen in love with the Consciousness - bloody hell, they can crank the research! I don't tend to boom anyways, so not a problem there. Next I think I'll try Roze for a bit of a change, then maybe Sven.



------------------
The best way to avoid errors is not to do anything - Dr Beardon (Maths)

[mark13]

Chowlett, glad you liked it

Roze I have found to be a very strange faction to play - they don't have many inherent disadvantages - the probe advantages can be useful, and they can be a very useful faction whatever your playing style. They can pop boom, they can research, they can run FM. The -1 police means you can't nerve staple, which is no big deal.

Sven is great fun to play, but there is already an analysis of them earlier in this thread - I won't bore you all with another one.

Mark13

[Velociryx]

For my play-style, give me the UoP any day of the week. Being able to race through the early game tech tree faster than anybody is HUGE beyond compare. Mostly that depends (as has been mentioned previously) on your playstyle, but I don't see built-in support or industrial boons as being nearly as important as the raw flexibility that a greater number of techs gives you. The ability to get crawlers and start working on the PTS somewhere around turn 10 or 11 in the game (a thing no faction but Zak's can do consistently), if I need more minerals for support or to compete with a more mineral-poor, but Industrially blessed faction, all it takes is a few more crawlers and voila! Their bonus vanishes, at least in a direct comparison to my economy.

::shrug:: but, that's just me....

-=Vel=-