Fast Transcend Questions

[RedFred]

Hi gang.

I am interested in speeding up my transcendance times on SP games. But I am not interested in the ultra fast games possible on small or tiny maps. I play random factions SMACX, transcend level, regular sized random maps, all victory conditions enabled, pretty much default settings except that I now use "fully visible" research. Otherwise the results are too random. I don't quite ICS but I usually wind up with enough cities that a few are the Greek alphabet city names.

My best time so far is 2273 so far, playing Morgan of all people. (.sav available on request) I stuck with Dem Green Wealth and Thought Control SE as a means to easily fight wars while maintaining decent income. I have found that a peaceful building strategy is not as effective for me as a series of wars. Ideally the wars happen with one opponent at a time to maximize my submissive pact revenue yet minimize the disruption from building in the core of my empire. I typically like to see my submissive pactmate with only about half a dozen cities so that my science cities get the trade but the other conquered cities remain mine to maximize my production. I have several energy parks depending on where I have some free space.

First question is on commerce. I know that it is related to the non-specialists' energy production in the city. But the reallocation of submissive pact cities to mine is confusing when the number of workers are equal when I reach the pre-Hab dome limit. Can anyone tell me how the rules work exactly? Am I right in assuming that energy production before crawler energy is considered for commerce?

I typically load the build queue and thus do not exploit the SMACX stockpile energy cheat. How much of an improvement can I expect by using "stockpile energy" after each unit? Likewise I did not fully exploit the crawler upgrade cheat although I did a little because at some point in the game I needed some air drop crawlers.

Next question is on the final five to ten years. I had my research cranked up to two techs a turn and decent cash flow besides at that point. I think I moved too slowly to end my production of base or unit production and start up stockpile energy or build crawlers. How many turns before Ascent tech is optimal to make the switch? For that matter, my formers build regular improvements until the point when fungus was better than anything else. I figure that on account of the lag time to make a former improvement I should have switched a few years earlier for optimum. Is there a benchmark tech where other players start switching?

Finally what would the best number of sats to launch? Given that it took forever to get hab dome tech after I had the prerequisites, 13 was the point where I shouldn't go past given that I had Morgan and the Ascetic Virtues and Cloudbase Academy SPs. (and most others). But I never seem to get that many sats launched. I try to balance their usefulness against the risk of losing them in a storm. And the +1 minerals sats comes so late as to be almost useless anyway. My experience is that if I do overbuild sats (anticipating building hab domes) even by a small number that the chance of a storm taking them out increases rapidly. Is this the case?

Thanks for your patience for reading this far. Any other helpful hints or players benchmark transcendance times under the same conditions would be appreciated.

[WhiteElephants]

I haven't play SP in quite some time and your transcendence time sounds pretty good too me, but I'll try and help.

First of all I'm unclear as to how many bases you've actually built. 20? 30? 40? On a standard sized map I would think you'd be looking to have between 20 and 30. Some would say more. I think 20 is probably fairly conservative though.

As far as running demo/green/wealth you might seriously considering switching to free market during the years you're not at war as you're missing out on a decent amount of commerce income, since as you say, you gather submissives. That being said I would probably rather use Zak instead of Morgan to make a run at your fastest transcend time because the obvious reasons of his +2 research and free nodes, but also because he can run free market and can pop boom relatively easily, whereas Morgan can not pop boom with as much ease, granted that after you nab the coloning vats those are problems of the past.

Using the stockpile energy bug would indeed improve your time as well as the crawler upgrade trick. Some people find these "unethical",others do not. The effect is that everytime you finish a unit or building you are also stockpiling energy for that turn, so if you're pumping out crawlers every turn your also, in effect, stockpiling energy every turn as well. The effect is cumulative meaning that you won't see much of a change right away but over the course of 100 turns you're likely to see quite a difference.

I'm confused about your switching over to stockpile energy and crawlers in the last 5-10 years. Like I said it has been a while since I've played SP, but I distinctly remember having plenty of crawlers lying around that I could shuffle them to the final ascent project and finish it the turn after it is available. That means one of three things to me, you're either not building enough crawlers, you're not pulling them from the mines and what not to finish the final project, or you don't have the mag tubes laid out to easily shuttle them to the project city.

I would think that given you have the Cloudbase Academy and the Ascetic Virtues you'd be aiming for at least 16 satellites, not 13. Typo? I find that the only two types worth building are the nutrient sats and the energy sats. Nutirent sats in order to pop boom or take workers out of the field to make them engineers (transcedi?) and the energy sats to supliment your energy production. Given that you have 20 some cities one satellite is going to bump your raw energy production by 20 before being factored through your facilities. You may want to consider turning off the random events as these can really affect your game and more often than not it is negatively because you tend to be in the lead. It would be a shame to see your science city crushed by an asteroid strike. Which makes me wonder if you've bothered to build all those science secret project in one city or not? It would be a good idea if you haven't.

First question is on commerce. I know that it is related to the non-specialists' energy production in the city. But the reallocation of submissive pact cities to mine is confusing when the number of workers are equal when I reach the pre-Hab dome limit. Can anyone tell me how the rules work exactly? Am I right in assuming that energy production before crawler energy is considered for commerce?

I think you've oulined the way commerce works, but I don't know what you mean by the "reallocation of submissive pact cities"? If it means what I think it means I wouldn't bother too much giving your submissives your well built cities. Some might even go so far as to say you shouldn't have any submissive and keep those bases for yourself as you will ultimatley run them better. So much better that the little amount of commerce income generated by them will be more than made up for.

I wish I could give you so benchmark numbers to work against, but I just haven't played SP to the conclusion of a game in a long while. Like I said earlier your transcend times sound pretty good to me though.

[Sikander]

Red Fred,

The best terrain improvements for productivity is not fungus, but Condensor / Farm / Soil Enricher once you have hab domes and satelites. The six food produce 3 Transcendi, +3 (food, energy and mins) from sats. Those three food produce another Transcend (with a lefover food) and in turn this produces +1 (food, energy and mins), and two leftover nuts from steps 2 & 3 above yield yet another transcend, +1 (food, energy and min). All of this assumes that you crawl the square to maximize your transcend output.

Total = 5 transcendi, 5 energy and 5 mins

Two such squares will of course produce 11 of each, transcendi, raw energy and minerals.

This beats the snot out of fungus, though it is late in the game. You could pod boom to take advantage earlier though.

[Blake]

Sats are dirt cheap to buy (about 120 IRC), so the optimum number is the size of your largest base.

Sikander is right on with the specialists, but start early, build/steal the WP and build&crawl condensors, pop-boom bases to size 16 and convert most of population to libarians/thinkers/transcends or Engineers (Make sure to have 4 or less workers, to save on drone control, this was a holo theatre (VW) and rec commons takes care of drone control) . Crawl minerals or work boreholes. Working boreholes does give some trade, which is always good.

This strategy works for any faction, obviously some are better, Zak gets to crawlers much quicker, which will help you support a legion of formers and snag the nessecary SP's. Lal's (drone control) and Dees (efficency) bonuses are mostly lost on specialist bases. Factions which cant pop-boom are obviously slower... this actually pretty much leaves Zak as the best choice...

[RedFred]

Thanks for your comments.

WE, I am guessing that by the end of the game I had close to 40 cities of my own or that I had conquered. Too many for my tastes.

When I spoke of 'reallocating pacting cities' I was not referring to giving additional bases back to my submissive pactmates. Rather, when one of my cities surpasses another in homegrown energy production the city it receives commerce with will change. This becomes a problem if your science city is crawlering a huge amount of energy but not taking in quite as much from workers as another non-science city. This was a big problem for me when my hab dome limit was reached. My HQ which was (unusually) not a port city was getting reallocated down and then dropped altogether from commerce with other factions. The energy from the port cities received by the workers prior to crawlered energy was greater.

Morgan has a different hab restrictions (another reason for picking Zak, I guess): 4 before a complex and 11 before a hab dome. Ascetic Virtues is still +2. Your point about Zak or someone else being better than Morgan is well taken. I play random faction games and I was surprised as anyone that Morgan has been best so far. An easy pop boom faction would be better.

Agreed that random=off would speed up things a bit. But that uncertainty makes the game a bit more interesting for me. Also agreed that food and energy sats are the only ones worth building in large numbers - if only because the mineral ones come too late in the game.

Despite the risk of an asteroid strike, I did go with the loading of ToE, SC and Network Backbone SPs in my HQ. That was the primary destination of my land energy park crawlers. Several other lesser science cities received a lot of sea crawler energy. Unfortunately someone else got the ME on me early. It was almost the endgame before I captured that city - far too late to make it pay off.

Regarding switching to crawlers or stockpile energy at the end of the game I did it the turn prior to getting Threshold to Transcendance tech, not earlier. As you can't build the Voice and the Ascent in the same turn, this was two turns prior to the end of the game. My concern is that all the sudden switches from building something to stockpiling energy were not efficient. Tons of minerals were lost as I abandoned normally scheduled production. I should have started winding everything down earlier in many cities to avoid all the waste. Might have sped up my Transcendance by a turn.

Can't argue with you that I would receive more energy with FM. I have successfully conducted wars of aggression against the AI in FM although it can be a pain. Part of the problem was there were a couple factions with FM aversions in the random faction game that I didn't want to annoy until much later in the game. (The "ideally only be at war with one faction at a time" concept. ) The other thing is that I do manage to generate considerable income by using my free native army to kill wild worms by running Green.

Sikander, I wound up underutilizing specialists in my science cities, preferring instead to work all the tiles I could for big time commerece income. At one point I had to increase the specialists in the non-science cities to preserve the commerce income to the science cities. Do you regard the specialist approach as more effective?

The "after hab domes" premise of an alternative to fungus was a problem for me. Despite beelining for domes it took forever to get them. The game was over when my biggest cities were size 19, or eight years after domes.

Fungus is a quick terraform that can boost production quickly in the late game. Condensers take more time. I tend to go with quick terraforms like forest and some mines and not many boreholes unless I am totally caught up in terraforming. But the information I failed to give you was that I am a Green specialist. Running Green, capturing the nexus and getting the Manifold Harmonics SP made the fungus wonderful.

Blake, I agree that 13 sats of each type is optimal for Morgan pre hab domes post AV SP. I was curious if people actually maxed out on them and it seems that the consensus is that most do.

Drone control was not a huge issue since I had the drone controlling SPs and a smaller hab limit. It would have been more of a problem if I had tried to run FM.

I see you are also recommending the specialist approach. I will try using them more in non-science cities, but the commerce income for the science cities is just too big to ignore with four submissive pactmates and the PEG SP.

[WhiteElephants]

Morgan has a different hab restrictions (another reason for picking Zak, I guess): 4 before a complex and 11 before a hab dome. Ascetic Virtues is still +2.

I always thought Mogan could go to 14 after bulding hab complexes. I guess that show how much I use him, or perhaps how much I pay attention.

Sikander, I wound up underutilizing specialists in my science cities, preferring instead to work all the tiles I could for big time commerece income. At one point I had to increase the specialists in the non-science cities to preserve the commerce income to the science cities. Do you regard the specialist approach as more effective?

The is more of an opinion than a fact, but I'm just not a big fan of commerce generated form other AI's as I feel they just aren't capable of building bases that are well developed enough to warrant the switch from specialists to workers in order to get what little energy you do get out of it.

Fungus is a quick terraform that can boost production quickly in the late game. Condensers take more time.

I'll grant you that fungus can be nice in the late game, but that's the late game. You could build farm/condensors long before fungus is a viable option, especially if you're not Lady D.

It sound to me like you've got a lot of this already worked out and are doing quite fine. Good luck.

[Sikander]

"Sikander, I wound up underutilizing specialists in my science cities, preferring instead to work all the tiles I could for big time commerece income. At one point I had to increase the specialists in the non-science cities to preserve the commerce income to the science cities. Do you regard the specialist approach as more effective?

The "after hab domes" premise of an alternative to fungus was a problem for me. Despite beelining for domes it took forever to get them. The game was over when my biggest cities were size 19, or eight years after domes.

Fungus is a quick terraform that can boost production quickly in the late game. Condensers take more time. I tend to go with quick terraforms like forest and some mines and not many boreholes unless I am totally caught up in terraforming. But the information I failed to give you was that I am a Green specialist. Running Green, capturing the nexus and getting the Manifold Harmonics SP made the fungus wonderful."

I agree that the hab domes come very late in the game, and thus all of that free growth is somewhat wasted when you only can sustain it for 8 turns (!). As I pointed out though, you can still pod boom your bases, which is a PIA, but will give you the ability to make use of those nutrients.

My premise is that specializing maximizes the performance of your available land area in terms of energy production, and with satelites all production. Hab limits have to be gotten around somehow though. The best two ways to do that are pod booming and building your bases fairly close together so as not to waste nutrients early on. For instance by packing your bases close together each base could have an area of nine squares (block formation) or ten squares (border formation). One square contains the base, while two of the other eight could be boreholed and worked. That leaves 6 squares for crawled condensor / farms for a total of 24 nuts, ie 12 pop, or 13 with the base square. When soil enrichers come on line the maximum population rises to 19, and with satelites something like 38. Once your mineral satelites come you can form over your boreholes for even more population / production. If you are pop booming or have the CV you don't need to have bases dedicated to producing colony pods, any base which is at the hab limit can do so. A road or mag tube network will speed the population to it's destination until one by one your bases are maxed out.

As for whether specialist income is greater or less than commerce income I have to give a qualified yes. In my experience I have never been able to make a truly significant amount of energy through commerce. IMO there is almost no point in the game (using directed research anyway) where commerce+workers can rival specialist production. Once you can make citizens into librarians the competition is over, and with crawlers it is even better.

For instance, consider a normal rolling moist square at 2000 meters. Many players would put a farm / solar collector on that square, which would yield 2 nuts, 1 min and 3 energy. With +2 econ that square would produce another energy for a total of 4. Thus you have a worker who is self reliant for nuts, and you are netting 1 min and 4 energy. Now imagine the same square with a condensor / farm and a crawler. It only produces a profit of 4 food, but when the food is converted into two librarians the square produces a total of 6 energy equivalents. While pure energy is subject to efficiency losses, specialist production isn't. Nor do specialists require any drone control measures. I'm not sure what best case early game commerce is like, but I doubt that it can produce enough of a boost to make up for the 1 FOP lost in direct competition with specialists in addition to that lost to both efficiency and drone control. As better specialists become available the advantage for specialists becomes greater. What is a marginal advantage for librarians is a solid advantage for engineers and an overwhelming advantage for transcendi.

Your Green strategy offers many advantages, not the least of which is fast terraforming. Once you have all of the pieces in place you also gain a good degree of security. Playing Dee you get that extra nutrient in the fungus, which is actually a huge advantage. I can't argue with your success. Probably the best thing about SMAX is that there are so many ways to skin the same cat.

[Velociryx]

Hiya Red!

Hmmm....yep....as far as increasing your overall speed, crawlers. All the way, and in every tile on your continent, and several score of them in the sea.

Use those crawlers to make specialists everywhere.

Granted, your empire won't look pretty (at all!), but your game will speed up hugely.

As far as some of the other stuff:

Commerce - don't know exactly how the rules work for it, but I've found my income raised by as much as 20+% by developing the empires of submissives (keeping them in line with the number of bases I've got, gifting when needed).

Satellites: I generally build them infinitely....setting some core bases to do that when there's nothing left to build....more is better, especially if you've got "alphabet" bases...

I never use the queue cheat either, but if you use it consistently then over the course of a game, it's bound to have a wampum big impact....



-=Vel=-

[RedFred]

On the ongoing specialists vs. commerce debate I have a few more thoughts. Wars and subjugation of the AI factions is key to a huge commerce income. So the Dem Green Wealth SE setting with Morgan was almost a must. Because I had all victory conditions enabled, I couldn't subjugate the final faction or I wouldn't be able to transcend. Another faction refused to submit and their final two cities had two helpful SPs. "Faction eradicated"! So that left me with four submissive pactmates when five is optimal.

I am not a "specialist" specialist but my experience has been that commerce can be big fairly early in the game on but the specialist approach becomes more effective further up the tech tree when more specialists are available. But I may try combining the two approaches. I mentioned that I was forced to increase my specialists in my non-science cities. No reason that I couldn't do that again only with more planning for it. That would mean areas of my empire would have to be primarily maximizing one of the inputs (nuts, energy or mins) rather than the commerce approach of maximizing all three (as in forests or late game fungus). I already mine rocky areas and have the occasional energy park. As well I could get away with denser packing of the specialist city zones.

The comments regarding pop-booming are well taken. It really is a PIA with Morgan and then you hit the hab restrictions so quickly anyhow. My current game is with Lal. I can pack more pop into the cities. As well, the faction is marvelously easy to switch from high energy FM to Green strategy to Planned pop booming on account of those extra PK talents. Easier still when combined with the Human Genome. This particular game isn't conducive to early game conquests as sadly I am stuck in an smallish continent by myself.

[RedFred]

...and thanks for your tips as well, Vel.
Perhaps it is time for me to try a pure specialist approach as well as the commerce/specialist mix approach to see what works best for me.

Edit to an earlier post --> I had AV SP with Morgan for size 13 cities. So the game was over 6 turns later if my biggest cities were size nineteen. In actual fact it might have been seven turns as I recall maximizing research when I discovered hab domes. So I had no money to rush build domes until the following turn.

[Velociryx]

Hiya Fred! And you're welcome! Oh, I'd definately say that the mixed approach is the way to go!

Even with 100% specialists, your base square is still cranking out at least a smidgeon of energy, and when that gets run through all your energy-enhancing stuff, the number can be halfway respectable, thus rendering commerce income a viable part of your overall plan.

A 100% specialist approach is actually an enormous PIA, and in truth, I'm convinced it's not absolutely optimal, either.

For one thing, a 100% Specialist approach precludes the use of boreholes....or, if you DO use them, then you automatically halve their value, as you'll be forced to use them by crawling either minerals or energy.

Second, you lose the use of your talents.

IMO, a much better, much more balanced approach is to attempt to have nothing but specialists and talents, letting talents work x number of boreholes (where X is the number of talents at a given base). This, coupled with attention to commerce, should see you with a better overall result and a LOT less PIA....

-=Vel=-

[Sikander]

Even I don't use 100% specialists, at least not until very late. I use workers on boreholes and shelf squares, and some specials. It takes time to get up and running obviously, even if you use a large number of specialists and crawlers.

Even with a 20% boost in energy production with commerce specialists produce more benefits (possible exception: your capital / SSC). One thing they allow is running whatever SE choices you want, without wasting a joule on psych. Efficiency is not too important if a vast majority of your production is free from inefficiency. Nor are bureacracy drones a big worry, as so little of your population is capable of 'going red'. You can choose to build psych facilities to take care of these few malcontents, or simpy turn a few of your specialists into psych types. I can run planned (for the growth and industry) for most of the game. I tend to run perpetual pop booms this way, at least until I can build the CV.

One pod booming technique I forgot to mention above is to build clean colony pods during a pop boom. Store them up until you have enough to max your population. Each time you build one your pop grows back up to it's hab limit. When you have enough colony pods, activate them and keep hitting the 'B' key. Viola! An instant large base.