All-Specialist Bases

[Mongoose]

Interesting...and all this time I thought Soil Enrichers weren't available until Advanced Ecological Engineering.

[MariOne]

Hmmm... and where above or in the FAQ did we write something that let you intend the contrary????

The "them" in my point 2 above refers to the *nearest* item (like in nested if...else), that is to Condensers, non Enrichers...

(be damned if I can get whether your post above is sarcastic or serious... )

[MariOne]

Anyway, back to the topic, the table above should help you to get an idea of how many Nutrient-specialised tiles you need to crawler to sustain an All-specialist Base.

Remember:
you can use one Nut from a Sat for each of your citizens.
The second Nut he needs to eat must come from the ground.

If you have a NutSat for each of the Nuts you collect from the ground, that will also be the # of citizens you can support.

With Tanks a (normal) basetile yields 3 Nuts.
Too bad that a sized-3 base doen's allow the use of specialists (apart Empaths and later Transcendii).

Getting other 6 Nuts from a normal Cond+Enr tile, with 3+6=9 NutSats in orbit, will allow you to support a 9-specialists base. With Engineers this means 27ec and 18labs, boosted by facilities but immune to inefficiency.

Getting 6 Nuts from TWO of the above tiles, with 3+6+6=15 NutSats in orbit, will allow you to support a 15-specialists base...

The problem is, with an all-specialist base you don't *work* BoreHoles!
For me this is all just theory, but there are many who actually put it in practice in their (especially SinglePlayer) games.
How do they approach this issue?
Do you:
- just don't use BHs, and content of mines/forests for the minerals
- use BHs to crawler 6 minerals and waste the 6(+) energy
- actually dodn't use a strictly *all*-specialist base, but use one Citizen to work a single BH per base

The latter case should be one worth better investigating with respect to the topic.
If you have a single working citizens in an otherwise all-specialist base, how much pacifism can you afford?
You know that pacifist drones are created AFTER the pacifying effects of Facilities and Psych (?).
Is there any effect you can put in place to quell it, or to be able to avoid the pacifist (or the captured-base) drones you need a strictly all-specialist approach?

Just wondering.
Maybe for a single pacifist unit you might be better-off by using *4* workers and some psych-specialist, so that you'll balance the inevitable 2 drones with 2 talents...?

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by Adalbertus (in his FAQ article)
Only one number is valid after restriction lifting -Soil Enrichers require Gene Splicing.

From my unmodded alphax.txt:

Soil Enricher, EcoEng2, Soil Enricher, Disable, 8, Construct $STR0, f, F

(emphasis added in both places)


Additionally, I can confirm that Jungle squares by themselves do not lift nut restrictions.

[MariOne]

Ah, that...

strictly speaking, Adalbertus was quoting a necessary but NOT sufficient condition
in other words, you must have discovered GeneSplicing before (amongst other far prerequisites) to have Enrichers, but having GeneSplicing is not yet enough to have them.

In my posts above, I had indeed mentioned the rare occurrence that you get AEE from another player before you get GS yourself.

The meaning of it all is:
as the WP does not grant Enrichers, barring miracles, when you get to build one you'll have for sure already lifted your Nuts Restrictions and it's not worth bothering to list the exceptional case in which you don't.

___

more interesting: don't you have any insight about the singleworkerbase/pacifism/dronecontrol question?

[Adalbertus]

Sorry, I posted around 1AM and had to go to bed already two hours earlier ...
What I meant was that Gene Splicing is in the research path of Advanced Ecological Engineering, and given one is a level 3 and the other a level 7 tech, you could probably won't get Soil Enrichers before restriction lifting, even not from artifacts. The only chance I see is that someone else has EcoEng2 while you don't have Gene Splicing. In this case the game is probably pretty much lost. I'll correct it, thanks for the suggestions:

About the *all*-specialist bases:
I'd use it in two situations:
- Instead of a base with Punishment Sphere to re-home all (clean) military units. Specialists don't revolt.
- If you have a base far away from your HQ, the energy production gets so much wasted that you don't lose ~6 but only one or two energy when you crawl the tile. Then crawler+specialist is better.

Lately, I've adopted the 2-in-diagonal base spacing, crawling 4 or 5 tiles for nuts, and having 1-2 boreholes per base, worked. In that setup, I'm not so really interested in an empire spreading over the whole world
In my HQ (=SSC), I work as many tiles as possible to get a high commerce. (Commerce seems to be calculated only from worked tiles, not from crawled energy nor specialists).

P.S: This is post prince-2

[Mongoose]

In my experience, workers get made into pacifism drones first. So, no, a single worker situation won't work to circumvent pacifism drones. I think you'll require four workers to do as you suggest...two to be made into talents through Psych or SP and two to be Drones. And this for one unit at -5 POLICE or two at -4 POLICE. Better to use all specialists in most cases. An exception is if you have the Genome or are playing the PK...PSYCH allocation to get 2 psych in the base will create the second talent needed to offset the two pacifism drones mentioned above. A size four base can then support two pacifism drones, as long as you have sufficient base facilities to have no drones before pacifism...hope that's clear enough to follow. The size four threshold is critical for Morgan, of course, as that's the largest base possible before Hab complexes or the Virtues. It's also the point at which the extra drone control from Transit disappears. For Morgan to fight an early war in Market, he needs a bunch of size four bases, a healthy PSYCH allocation and the Genome. (if no Genome, then an obscene PSYCH allocation)

In most cases, it's better to either set up an all-specialist base with crawled mins for support or to drop free market.

PKs, Drones or Spartans are better than Morgan at fighting in Market.

[Mongoose]

Crawled energy does count toward COMMERCE calculation. Energy from satellites does as well. Specialists do not.

[MariOne]

Another comment to Mr.President initial post:

You'd have realised by now that an All-Specialist base has a double purpose:
- drone control (in general, not specifically from pacifism)
- bypassing inefficiency on collected energy

with the ultimate underlying catch that in optimal conditions the ec/labs yield from an Engineer is usually higher in any case than the yield you'd obtain from the energy you'd collect from a tile (+ related eventual commerce) making that Engineer a simple worker.

That is, a (high-level) specialist is more convenient and efficient than a worker, regardless of the two above points, period.

I would say anyway that the inefficiency-bypassing purpose is paramount on the dronecontrol/pacifism one.

If your main pourpose is to control *pacifism* drones, you should be informed that there is an alternate tactic, although not necessarily a better one.

Army Laundering (sp?).

Instead of eliminating pacifism drones by turning all the bases suffering from it into all-specialist bases, you pick a base capable of supporting many units (= lots of minerals production) and not yielding much labs.
You *home* there all the units causing pacifism drones.
You build a Punishment Sphere there.
Optionally, you make all those units Clean, to help tackle the support issue in that base.
It can be cumbersome, but it lets you free of managing your workers/specialists in the other bases, and you don't need to rely on crawlering nuts for that base.

A mix of the two:
you use strictly Clean units (a pretty heavy restriction: the Clean investment is not really worth it if the unit is going to live less than 10 turns, which can easily happen for attacking units), you home them in a 1-sized base. Making its single citizen a doctor that base will self-support using its basetile yield.

And interesting niche tactic:
if your target is in range, use cheap expendable kamikaze - if a unit (e.g a chopper) will probably die on the same turn you produce it, you won't have to bother about the pacifism drones it would cause

[vitamin j]

I could've sworn crawled energy didn't count towards commerce... I'll have to check it out for myself. It's been a while since I fired up the SMAC.

By the way, in the last MP game I was in, I used the (almost) all-specialist approach extensively as the Gaians with size 5-7 bases. This was based almost entirely on crawled farm/condensor/nutrient bonus combos. Running paradigm economy and having a base full of librarians or technicians as needed can be very effective.

[Adalbertus]

Mongoose, I tested it. Crawled energy does not count towards commerce. In my present game (I'm Domai) I had a headquarter with ~320 energy, both crawled and worked. 13 commerce with the best PK base. The second best of my bases got 58 energy, 11 commerce.
I put crawlers for ~140 energy for the HQ out of service and had still commerce 13. I removed one worker from tile with 4 energy, commerce immediately dropped to 12.I use SMAX V2.0.

P.S. this is post Prince-1
Edit: There is a bug in the database or a mistake in the FAQ. This is my 300th ont-topic post and I should be prince with the 301st.

[MariOne]

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant, forgive my English.


I said that with a worker you collect energy and generate a related commerce.
With an Engineer you don't collect nor energy nor thus any commerce.

Yet, the direct yield of an Engineer in terms of direct labs and ec should be more convenient than the net final yield from the raw energy and the related commerce he'd collect/generate as a worker instead.

And this even before taking in consideration the ineficiency immunity benefits for a specialist.


As vitj reports, he even perceived an effectiveness using more primitive Librarians and Technicians, and leaving Satellites alone.

___

PS: sorry, this post is rather moot, I didn't realise we cross-posted, and didn't look again above my 19:34 post before posting this

Thanks Mong for the considerations about the singleworker/allspecialist comparison.

[Mr. President]

Thanks everyone for your comments. I'm going to give this trick a serious shot, as it seems quite good all around.

[Mongoose]

Adalbertus, Thanks for the correction. Funny how you can still learn new things about this game after playing it for so long!

Mark Twain was right! "It's not what you don't know that hurts you...it's what you know that just ain't so."