Starting conditions

[Ned]

Has anyone ever tried a game with virtually all all the starting options selected? I just did, and the game was a literal nightmare.

The combination of accelerated start, tech stagnation, no pods, random faction personalities and interests found me as LAL next to Aki, Yang and Domai on a large, mega-continent, all having both impact weapons and plasma shields while I was at level 1 for both. All the factions were in that permanently hostile mode one gets if one commits atrocities against the faction. I also did not have the tech for probe teams. I was therefor in situation where I could not steal tech from any of these two; nor could I conquer their bases.

Ugly.

[Lazerus]

What happened next ?

[Ned]

I cheated, of course.

[Earwicker]

Intriguing idea, though. I have often found that the intense rivalry actually works in my favor because they hate each other as much as they hate me - hence trading and sharing less frequently with other rival factions.

Accelerated start always irritates me because of wacko base placement, poor (or nonexistent terraforming), bases oversupporting unneeded units, and seeing all the SP's you want into the hands of the enemy (it's tough to choose of having only one/ of ME, WP, CN, HGP, VW, CDF, and PTS, and not even getting to choose).

[Ned]

Earwicker, to say the least, accelerated start plus tech stagnation is a real challenge to begin with. Add no pods, and an extremely hostile environment where noone will trade with you and you have no or very few allies, techs have to be earned the hard way - by stealing them. I am now playing my second such game. In both games I had chronic cash problems - the game ended before Tree Farms. The only way I was able to keep my head above "water" financially was to go green, induce a lot of ecodamage, and kill the worms from fungal blooms. Needless to say, the world was a mess due to rising water levels.

Turning all the options on makes for a real challenging game.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Ned,

Agreed. I never used all the options turned on before and have tried it. My first attempt I thought breeze as I was Santi in the jungle. (SP was Citizen's Defense). About 20 turns in Aki gets Hunter Seeker 1 turn after I got planetary nets for probes. Shortly thereafter she get Marine and is crusing theocean. I am by myself and effectively no means to probe my way back to parity.

All in all a very entertaining game. Although I refuse to play Ironman as I still have issues with terran.exe faults.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
All in all a very entertaining game. Although I refuse to play Ironman as I still have issues with terran.exe faults.

Woah. I:m having similar problems. Could you elaborate and maybe provide me with some insights as to why I suffer so?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Allie,

Don't know why, I used to run SMAC and SMAX on a slower older machine with nary a problem. Now since I've upgraded my machine I seem to have issues. Go figure.

Og

[Ned]

Well, I am playing the next game, three alien factions (Bree is the extra alien faction) and four human.

Well, when we got to orbital spaceflight, my did the planetbusters start to fly. The aliens hit each other with abandon. I got hit twice by Miriam and once by the Bree. The first hit on me took out The Cloudbase Academy and the HSA! Another took out 20 Superclean Sea Formers.

I also noticed the AI hitting bases with large numbers of missles.

One has real helpless feeling with so many nukes flying around during tech stagnation when ODPs are a long way off. It had been a long time since the AI used PB's on me. Since I play most games with the AI set to pacifist, I now suspect this setting has something to do with the use of PB's. When the AI settings are set to lunatic aggressor, they will use PB's as soon as they can.