Trancendence Players

[Haon]

How many people her eplay at the level of Trancendence and actually won?

[Archaic]

*Watches the dozens of hands raise*
Trancend Level? Meh. After you've gone through MP a few times (Or read Vel's guides, etc religiously), Trancend doesn't seem so hard afterall.

[Maniac]

What do you think?

[Method]

most everyone here plays on transcend (though i'm still on thinker )

[Adalbertus]

I usually play Transcend. But sometimes I cannot resist cheating, when the AI does all the day . Doesn't decide the game, though.

[Zakharov VII]

I play on Transcend, except for every once in a while when I want to do something silly and I play at Citizen .

Z

[Blake]

I play on Transcend difficulty, I think I have lost once in not-so-recent history, that was to being rushed by spartans or aliens or some such...

I usually play "super-transcend" difficulty, scenerios where all the AI's start in a pre-forested jungle with extra boreholes, and other such boosts.

[Bearcat]

Usually I play on Citizen or Specialist.
*shuffles feet*

[MariOne]

Well, you maybe notice how all the players complain that the AI is not enough of a match for a human, and take all possible efforts to invent tweaks and involuted rules and challenges to make single playing interesting.

They wouldn't be making such comments if they weren't alredy playing at the highest difficulty level, don't you think so? They would just increase the difficulty, won't they?

I think this should definitely go in the FAQ!

With the caveat, that if you play SMAC (not SMAX) Firaxis never bothered to apply to the old executable the fixes they DID find for SMAX.
Thus, the Maintenance Bug was never fixed for plain SMAC and never will be. This means that at the two hardest SMAC levels, maintenace costs are reduced, and this makes the game easier for those who build a lot infrastructure.

[Straybow]

Pardon my foolishness… Maintenance Bug? It has been so long since I paid attention to SMAC forums I can't remember exactly what that is.

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by Straybow
Pardon my foolishness… Maintenance Bug? It has been so long since I paid attention to SMAC forums I can't remember exactly what that is.

In SMAC (fixed in SMAX) at Thinker level, only 2/3 of the maintenence expense for facilities shown on F3 is actually deducted from your treasury. At Transcend, only 1/3 of the indicated expense is actually paid.

I think Firaxis got the coding backwards and intended the AI to have those benefits. Human player gets them.

[Skanderbeg]

I usually play a random faction on Transcendent level on huge random maps with blind research and random AI factions and win around 75% of my games.

[Tommara]

Transcendence for Dummies

No, this isn't a dig at folks who haven't played transcendence yet. This is just some of the stuff that this dummy did or didn't do, which might help other rookies.

1. RTFM! Sure, I read it when I first started playing, but there's a lot of stuff in there that I either missed, or didn't quite realize the significance of when I first started playing. Silly little things like interceptors having a penalty when fighting land units. Ohhh, that explains something odd I'd noticed about my Deathspheres...

2. Free Market and Wealth are good! But only if you spend the money! Sheesh, that was silly sitting there admiring how wealthy I was while getting my clock cleaned. Maybe I'd do better if I bought something....

I found that if I started the game with no one trying to pick a fight with me immediately, I could rush build base facilities and secret projects so fast, that I'd run out of things to build. Oh well, nothing else to do but build military units (and supply crawlers and formers to support them or maybe new colonies, making my own land if necessary) until somebody showed up to play...



And if I was lucky enough to get attacked immediately -probe units + lotsa money => instant army! Then go back to rush building while your army swells as you convert the invasion force (in my current game, I've got bases that are low on minerals because of this, so be careful - either transfer to another base or keep up mineral supply with crawlers).

3. Don't dispair if your faction rating lags behind initially. The AI is really dumb about building (take a peek at what your pact brothers are building sometime), and the strength of your infrastructure doesn't seem to affect the score as much as military units, population, number of cities, etc.

4. Expect some surprises from the military AI. If you see some little pitiful enemy unit lingering around one of your bases , expect a volley of missile strikes soon. Send out a unit to kill or intercept the land unit. That will also give you something to defend the base with after the missiles wipe out your garrison.

Well, all I can think of for now and better get back to work. Hope this helps. I'm sure that the vets here know this stuff like the back of their hand, never dreaming there might be dummies like me who didn't know this stuff.

Edited note: And if you already know this stuff, and aren't playing Transcendence, what are you waiting for? I play it and win.

[Earwicker]

Re: Transcendence for Dummies

Originally posted by Tommara
Don't dispair if your faction rating lags behind initially. The AI is really dumb about building (take a peek at what your pact brothers are building sometime), and the strength of your infrastructure doesn't seem to affect the score as much as military units, population, number of cities, etc.

And remember that the AI tends to be particularly poor at terraforming. Somehow a pathetic faction-wide food/ energy/ mineral production doesn't play into the power rating calculations either. Recently the graphs had me neck-and-neck with the Spartans for over 100 years. When I finally found their home island at the bottom of a huge map I was stunned that they had done NO terraforming.

So definitely give Transcend a try - the AI's silliness makes up for all it is given in cheats.

[Nowhere Man]

Once you get the hang of it, the AI - even on transcend -ceases to be a real challenge unless you soup it up through modifications or give it serious advantage in a prepared scenario.