Noob question thanks (Energy Reserves)

[Elixirred]

Not too far into a game of SMAC I get a message telling me to "Increase Energy Reserves", then base facilities start to blow up due to power overload. I tried building Fusion Labs but they blew up too! How do increase my energy reserves? Thanks.

[Kirnwaffen]

Your facilities are blowing up because you're not making enough energy to pay for them. The best way to avoid this is to not get into this situation by pacing your building to match your terraforming. To fix the problem, all you can do is build more solar collectors. You can also build an echelon mirror or two. You might even be able to construct an energy park, but you'd have to ask someone else for advice about that.

[big_canuk]

I don't make many solar collectors. Forests are great making 1 energy, more with tree farms and Hybrid forests. In smac and especially smax, tidal harnesses are great, making 3 and 4 energy with the thermocline transducer. A good way to get ecs quick is to change one or more of your workers to technicians, or if you have fusion labs, then engineers. before you build fusion labs, make sure you have your energy banks, and prolly tree farms and possibly hybrid forests in place. You can crawl energy, but generally first crawl nuts, and make specialists.

Check you social engineering settings(menu, HQ, SE). Normally you want to run 50%ecs, 0 psych, and 50% labs (50/0/50). If you have social engeneering settings which give you +4 efficiency or more, then you can change these sliders without any losses to "allocation inefficiency". Even if you are in the range 0-3, you can in a pinch, allocate a bit more to energy or labs as nescessary, say 60/0/40 in the case of not having enough ecs.

Each facility uses up some of the ecs you make. More costly facilities take more of this "upkeep". You can see this in the HQ - energy banks menu (F5?). A temporary fix might be found by borrowing a few ecs from another faction. Good luck.

bc

[RedFred]

Wow! How the heck did you get clear up to fusion labs without anything blowing up?

Other ways of generating some energy credits (ecs): trade with other factions by treatying or pacting with them, hit up another faction for a loan or ecs gift or even sell off a tech advance or base improvement (better to do it first and have some control rather than having a random one blow up).

I think that when you first play the game the "tutorial" is worth the slight extra time. That way you a grasp of basic SMAC economics and some warnings when things aren't going right and how to fix them.

[Adalbertus]

Sorry, I'm a bit confused by this thread ... I played SMAC on nearly all levels (certainly librarian ... transcend) and never managed to run out of energy, except that I liked to spend another million on rush-buying. I usually play builder or hybrid if ennerved by other factions, and therefore I am so eager to get energy (even as Yang, who makes an excellent builder ...), that I never was close to a facility blow-up.

What is your style of playing? Momentum? Then I could imagine running out of energy.

[Yxklyx]

Seems very hard to me to make any money without Free Market. I was playing the Hive using Police/Planned and had to have most of my cities stockpiling energy until I was able to build Fusion Labs.

[Clear Skies]

Might be due to the fact that the Hive starts off with a -1 Economy rating. Yang finds it pretty difficult to make any cash for ages.

[Elixirred]

How did I get all the way up to Fusion Labs before everything started blowing up? I didn't. When stuff started to blow up I just kept building more and more stuff trying to figure out what ficility was holding me back. Stuff was blowing up all along. Stuff continued to blow up every game I played, I just got used to it. Until recently I didnt' even know what crawlers were for. I jsut keep building and try to ignore the energy reserves thing because I didnt' understand wtf they where talking about
I'm starting to understand a bit more now. I've been playing off and on for the past 2 or 3 months, and typically that is how I played (facilities exploding). I worked my way up to the third difficulty level, can usually win even with no crawlers and losing facilities. I'd just keep building facilities randomly until I get attacked then I start making nerve gas choppers and drop guys, or something to that effect. Sometimes I get lucky and get a Secret Project too. It's so expensive to rush SP's I dont' usually do it, and when I do it takes all my energy. But I'm going to try crawlers now, and maybe build one base for Labs n that sort, and maybe another base for something else and keep my eye on the base nutrient/energy/mineral production to see what I'm low on so I know what to build. I've been reading the boards alot the past 2 days and have learned some new stuff, thanks.

[Yxklyx]

Buildings blow up only when your reserves are close to 0 and your income is negative or only slightly positive. Check out your maintenance costs - maybe you can sell off some of your expensive Aerospace Complexes. For the Hive some facilities aren't terribly important, like Creche's - disband them. Also, Hologram Theaters are a huge drain on your income. Try to get the tech that allows you to create police units and use those instead. To rush build the police, disband obsolete units in the city - their minerals will add to the production. I think one of the main goals in the game should be to plan on not building any Hologram Theaters.

[Yxklyx]

Crawlers are O.K. when you start playing the game but I refuse to build them anymore because they make the game too easy once you're more familiar with it.

[johndmuller]

Elixirred, welcome.

Perhaps you are cutting your cash reserves a little too close to the edge. From the sound of it, you have at least a moderate income, so maybe you are just not carrying enough over between turns to cover the operating costs at its lowest point.

As I understand it, the game goes through the bases, oldest to newest, charging for upkeep, producing resources and crediting income (doing each for the 1st base before moving on to the next). I presume that if you go negative (or too much negative if there is a grace period) during this phase, you are subject to industrial mishaps due to lack of maintenance. So even if your overall energy balance is OK, if you go negative somewhere in this sequence you can get nailed.

One of the displays, I believe the F3/Energy display, shows a list of all your bases and their inidividual economic +/- situations. This can point out the bases that are especially bad for your balance sheet - if they come early in the base sequence, it can cause problems there or in one of the following bases.

I don't know whether it wants you to have enough cash in hand to cover each base before crediting its income (I don't think it is that nasty, but maybe), but that would be the worst case - to cover the first base's costs before crediting its income, then the 2nd base's costs before its income, etc.

As your early bases are likely to have the most facilities, you should try to make sure that they are covering their own costs or at least not grossly out of balance. Unless you move your HQ, it will be the first base; it should also be a big energy operation so as to take advantage of the free ride it gets on the efficiency penalty. So if you make sure you produce and/or crawl lots of energy into your HQ, you will likely not have any involuntary liquidations so long as you are running a profit.

So much for the micro-economics.

Overall, I find that my production emphasis changes as the game goes on (I am speaking of an individual game, although my theories of this also evolve with time). In the beginning, minerals seem to be the limiting factor - unless you have a nut special, more than 1 forest = no growth and farming gets you no more than 1 min/tile. By the time you get minerals going through a combination of (nutrient & mineral) restriction lifting, crawling of
(nuts and mins) resources and planting forests, you may start to feel the pinch on energy. At this point, you can suffer serious stagnation if you are overbuilt; it is important to stay ahead of the curve or else you may find yourself without the income to build the energy facilities you need to start growing again. Just to make it fun, this is the point in the game where ecodamage starts to appear and you may have to de-emphasize some of your min production, which further hinders your ability to build the energy facilities. It is possible to get really messed up at this point of the game with ecodamage, population drones, energy shortages, population stagnation. Assuming you survive this stage, the mid part of the game is largely about maximizing energy output through SE selections, facilities, crawlers and specialists, leading gradually to an emphasis on nutrients - to support the specialists who are supplying the rest of the economy.

So much for the big picture.

In the early game, I try to take advantage of rivers and energy specials as much as possible. If you play a few games as Yang, you will see how much of a difference this can make. Solar is so expensive in former-turns that it is hard to justify when you need to do other things, but a river gets you 1 energy with no terraforming required and an solared energy special is not subject to the energy production restriction so you can get a decent return. If Yang steels himself to this policy, he can produce at least a poor amount of energy instead of a pitiful amount. Needless to say, monoliths should not be ignored either. Once you get the restrictions lifted, offshore tiles are good energy/food producers too.

Energy banks are tough to rationalize early in the game, but the sooner you build them, the sooner they will pay for themselves and you will be building them eventually, so . . .

Specialists are well worth their nuts and once you can crawl enough food (and probably some minerals as well), they can take care of the rest.

[Yxklyx]

Also, being elected Governor can make for a big boost in income. You get a +1 or something like that on your Commerce rating. If you aren't governor now figure out a way to get elected.

[big_canuk]

Thanks, johndmuller. Great reply.

The sequence thing is important. The specific thing that makes a facility blow up, is running out of energy reserves. (The facility "blowup" is a random facility being recycled for you.) I'm pretty sure it credits energy first, from a base, before deducting that bases upkeep, but I may be wrong. I *know* you can carry 0 ecs forward, as long as your first base has a surplus, and subsequent bases maintain that surplus.

Just a small nitpick, though. I am also sure that changing your HQ has no effect on this order. The base order that energy is credited and deducted, is the same as that for which labs are credited, ie the build order. This is the order of bases in the "base operations status" (F4?) screen of the HQ menu. Be careful when you capture bases, especially alien ones. Often you keep some facilities, but the population and therefore production goes way down. If it is an early built base (or bases), they can get you in trouble if you don't carry forward a few extra ecs to tide you over the temporary valley.

[Elixirred]

wow I'm learning alot! Thanks everyone for the input, it's not falling on deaf ears hehe

[vitamin j]

I would add that I would never scrap a children's creche! The benefits it provides far outweighs its very cheap 1 ec per turn. Granted, they're not that hard to replace, but you should almost never be that broke... (I only scrap facilities if I have desperate cash requirements - for example, rush-buying a secret project, an emergency probe operation, or something similar... ) I may be in the minority, but I do build a fair amount of solar collectors in the early game. Figure that until tree farms a forest only gives 1-2-1 resources. A farm/solar on a rolling, moist square over 1000m gives 2-1-2, double the nuts and energy. This will definitely help keep you out of economic trouble until you get your "real" economy going - crawled nuts and specialists, tidal harnesses, etc. Forests are almost always the first thing I terraform, but not too many since they will grow on their own. Farms and solars, unfortunately, will not.
I don't think anyone mentioned trying to distribute specialty facilities (comm center, aero complex, etc.) around your bases so you don't end up building them in every base. You generally don't need them everywhere, and the maintenance costs can really add up. You just need to plan what units need to get built where a little more carefully. HTH.