To automate or not to automate

[Feyd]

Hello all,

I just cracked SMAC out of the box and reloaded it onto my computer and I've been having fun with it, at the same time though...I realize why I stopped playing it.

I like almost everything about the game from a conceptual standpoint. I like the way governmental setup works, the way environment is envisioned, how units are truly customizable to specific tasks, and so on and so forth.

Automation, however, and my micro managing nature really spoil things for me. My major gripes...

Automatic formers are D-U-M-B! I not a fan of the automatic former setup in SMAC. They simply go and mess up squares I don't want them to touch and they don't work on squares I want them to improve. A couple examples. 1) I had a 3500m mountain which four of my major cities had surrounded and the peak was the only square not within city limits. So, I went in and dropped an echilon mirror right on the top and got a pretty nice energy boost from all the high altitude solar collectors surrounding it. Things were good, but within turns of automating any former it would immediately go to this promontory and start building a sensor array! Now this is where you say Oh...well then automate them to improve the city they are in only...well that doesn't work either 2) I want maxxed out production and food in that order. I'm an early and especially later game fan of forests. I normally have a high food square that will offset the low food of a forest (at least until I get tree/hybrid farms). If it is any kind of flat, any kind of arid, or even only moist, I will build a forest on it. The automated formers, however, cannot be set to automate and not change improvements already in place though and so they're always making my moist/flat terrain squares into junk farms 3) Finally, even when I finally give up and just automate the formers and let them start ruining my land, they spend most of their time just moving around doing nothing

Next gripe...upgrading units...
When I have the game set to autocreate units I'm getting the text every other turn (when I get a tech) telling me to do this and do that...okay..I can turn that off...no big... but when I do, I still get this forced down my throat and I have to spend five minutes deleting my old units (retire if none, obsolete if 1 or more) and making the new one..and so on and so forth. At the rate I discover techs (see below) this takes a constant toll on my nerves and traps me in the minutia. So now I go back to autocreating my new units. Okay it saves me time, but then I wind up with a bunch of crap units I don't want. When I go to war I take a bunch of the same unit and just pound the defenders into a nice refined nanopaste I don't need 30 units clogging up my building list when I'll only ever use 10 or 15.

Finally...tech research...
Tech comes WAY too fast. I'm a tech junkie and by the start of the midgame I'm getting techs in 1-4 turns for the rest of the game even with tech stagnation. This makes me have infinite queues at my bases and the aformentioned constant outdatedness of my military.

Whew...sorry to semi-rant, but I had to get those off my chest. Does anybody have suggestions? Do you trust the automated systems in SMAC? What do you do when you have thirty items to build at your base all of which would be nice to have? On a side note, what do you do about blind research? Do you keep your priorities in line with your faction? Do you just click all of them like me or just one of them? I'm going to try playing one strength level up, but I'll look forward to what anybody here has to say.

Peace,

Feyd

[Lazerus]

1) Control the formers yourself. Limit yourself to 1/2 per base if you can't be bothered with too many. Better yet try a no former challenge
2) I never have the AI create units for me, completely disabled all those options, at most it upgrades the reactors for me when i get fusion etc
3) Gigantic map + tech stag + Hive/Believers + Intense rivalry + Blind research. If you can keep researching at a rate of a tech per turn around the 2200-2250 mark with this then please send me some save games


As for blind research, no chance at sticking to research conquer priorities or something like that, i take a rough guess at what will be available to me and then pick something like explore to get ecological engineering or whatever i want (hopefully anyways).

[Main_Brain]

I allow the Formers only to build Forests.

[T-hawk]

1. I agree with Lazerus, never fully automate formers. You can automate some for specific tasks, like roads or fungus clearing.

2. I agree again; always turn off auto-design. Even with that off, it still creates new designs with upgraded reactors, and that can be a bit of a pain to untangle.

3. Larger maps, tech stagnation, and an economically challenged faction will all slow down your tech pace. If you find yourself researching improvements faster than you can build them, swap from Free Market/Knowledge to Planned/Wealth to get faster industry.

Blind research will prevent you from just beelining to the techs with items that further increase your research capability (Fusion labs, Supercollider/Theory of Everything, etc.)

For blind research, note that selecting all the priorities does not result in an equal chance for everything. Not all techs have the same total weight from the four categories, so some techs are more likely than others. If you DEselect all the priorities, then every tech is equally likely (this is usually referred to as "double-blind research").

Finally, note that priority selections for blind research only apply when you *start* researching a new tech. The game picks a tech for you; you don't get told what it is, but the *color* of the bar in the F2 research screen *does* match the tech you're going to get. Changing priorities now will not change the color of the bar nor the tech you get, but the priorities will stay in place and affect the game's choice the *next* time it picks a tech.

[Feyd]

Lazerus wrote: 1) Control the formers yourself. Limit yourself to 1/2 per base if you can't be bothered with too many. Better yet try a no former challenge
2) I never have the AI create units for me, completely disabled all those options, at most it upgrades the reactors for me when i get fusion etc
3) Gigantic map + tech stag + Hive/Believers + Intense rivalry + Blind research. If you can keep researching at a rate of a tech per turn around the 2200-2250 mark with this then please send me some save games.

1.) Well see that was part of my problem. I want my city radius to be well tended, but starting in the midgame, I'm spending twenty minutes a turn going through former functions b/c I'm putting out about sixty formers (2 per city as I try to stay at or under 30 cities). During the late game I could just delete more of them, but I still wind up messing with 10-20 formers when I just want to worry about playing the game

I will look into the automation allowances for formers, but many times that wastes formers because if >I< want only forests in my squares the computer still wont change the tiles I want changed and will sit there doing nothing if it feels the city is fine.

2.) Yeah...I agree this is the best option, I just wish the upgrade screen wasn't such a pain. Do you know any hotkeys that take you to the front of the list? I normally have drop squads, marines, police garrisons, and speeder garrisons and I'm always upgrading them but I have to click on the left tool bar twenty times to get there to upgrade

3.) Heh, but I wanna play the University, Deidre, or Morgan! It's not that I don't like advances, I'm all for them, I just wish there was a bit fewer base facilities to worry about... Every turn I'm adding something to one queue or another and w/ all my gold that starts piling up I go through my entire network and rush stuff just b/c I can. Anyway, the big issue is I like the techs, I just get overwhelmed with all the stuff that you get with every tech...there are no "building mass" techs like in Civ (which is cool). Basically, how do you guys deal with this?

Thanks for the responses everyone and keep em coming.

Feyd

[johndmuller]

If the hotkeys you are looking for are ones that scroll you back and forth across the strip of units at the bottom of the Design Workshop, they you will be happy to hear about -Home-, -End-, -PageUp- and -PageDn- (I know I was grateful when someone clued me in about them).

I think you mentioned increasing your difficulty level - If so, that suggests you are not yet running on Transcend. If that is the case, you may find that the extra difficulty takes your mind off these problems, at least for a time. Then you can try PBEMs, where the competition will definitely give you something else to think about.

[Starfarer]

I personally like the computer making me units. I admit, I hate it when the computer sticks a laser onto a defending unit, but I can deal with it. Besides, I always have the final say as to what's building anyway.

Former use is part of, as you put it, "playing the game". A big part. If you end up on an alien and hostile planet, with just a couple thousand people who agree with you, and several thousand who would like to kill you, not to mention brain-eating worms with psychic powers, personally, me, I'd like to have a bunch of thinks flying all over cleaning the hell out of the world so I could make it work how I wanted as opposed to run screaming from worms that want to eat me alive. It is something of an important factor.

But see, I don't really care how long a turn takes me... in my opinion, the more I have to micromanage, the happier I am, because it gives me the sense that I really AM affecting the world around me, as opposed to passing it off to a bunch of usually-incompetant "assistants" who couldn't find their own arses with two ahdns, a flashlight, and an instruction manual.

I rarely use more than one former per base. That's usually all I need, since the formers from inner bases can help the ones in outer bases later on. And if the Former dies, another can always resume its work later, so there's no point to having a whole lot of them. Actually, I rarely have any units that require me to expend minerals to supply them unless I'm at war. i never see the point. If they're not clean, then you've got too many... 'least, that's how I see it. But then, I like being able to build complex base facilities in two turns. Heh.

My advice is to learn to enjoy micromanaging. And don't go through your unit list EVERY time you get a new tech. No, rather, only go through your unit list when you progress significantly... a new reactor, a powerful weapon, or hyper-powerful armor, with the weapons and armor being at least two grades better than the last time you went through yopur list. The computer really DOES make some decent units. All you have tyo do is add Police, Pulse/Res armors, and the occasional armor to an attacking Rover... and the computer usualklky automatically upgrades your older stuff to match newer models... specificially I mean that I made a 1-2-1 Police unit, and whenever i got new armor, all it did was make a 1-3-1 Police unit for me. Which iks what I would've done anyhow, y'know?

Anyhow... tht's it form me for now.

Ta!

[Barinthus]

I never fully automate my formers. They're too stupid. I do occasionally automate formers for road-building, that's it.

Re: governers, I don't use them until my empire is so massive and there's only one enemy faction left with only one base. Then I use governors but only enable them to build facilities only. I don't need 20 or so units churning out every turn.

[gwillybj]

I roleplay solo at Librarian, which is plenty challenging for me even after three years, and I am a micromanager to the max! I'm not in it to watch the computer play my faction. Here's my usual:

Two Formers per base up to 8-12 bases, then thin it out to only one (or none for interior developed bases). If I automate any Formers at all, they are only for Fungus Removal, unless I'm playing an all-Forest game, then Plant Forests is enabled, too. I never automate Road-laying.
Otherwise, I direct everything each Former does. Outmoded Formers are Disbanded toward the construction of new ones; I think of it as retiring the old operators and refitting the equipment.

Governors active in all bases, but they must get my approval for each new task. All their options are available except "Governor sets new units to fully automate" and "Governor may HURRY production".

Autodesign and Autoprune both active. Weapons and armor I can remember to upgrade, but far too frequently I forget to add needed abilities when they become available. Every decade or so I cull designs I don't want.

Directed Research, always with Techstag, and with one or two of the classes active (this affects the "wildcard" and influences the Governors). If I'm not testing something for someone else, I'm using my edited alpha.txt with a 50% research rate and playing on one of my giant maps. All those research settings together make the extra-long games I love (3-4 weeks; hours/day depends on how sick I am).
I prepare a chart with each tech scored according to its EDBC values and tech level along with the faction's priorities, and always select the highest-scoring tech available when it's time to choose, even if I would really, really prefer another. This effectively prevents beelining, and easily creates situations where the AI factions get access to Secret Projects unavailable to me.

And I don't finagle the Social Engineering. That's part of the roleplaying: I determine ahead of time which settings will be used, put them into effect immediately when available, and leave them there. If it causes me problems, whether from within my faction or from the others, well, that's all the more of a challenge, isn't it?
I do adjust the Econ-Psych-Labs allocation as necessary for rush-building, drone control, or temporarily boosting the research rate.