Hate Roads - What are They Good For?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Jamski
It can help if your scouts find a mineral or nut bonus just outside of the base radius... or even both. You may "waste" a tun moving the pod, but the turn is "saved" by the speeded production of the vital early pods.



Owch, but that's a long game. I can't help but blame the lack of roads...

-Jam

I agree with the look first option-- Let choosing a base site be the first decision a player makes. If on a river, its no problem to plant the base after moving the scout to get a better sense of whats out there

2402 ouch-- I would have no patience to play that long. I can't recall the last time I went beyond 2250

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Mead


It was frustrating watching how long it took for those crawlers to get to their solar cells, particularly after I had to replace a few that Yang shot up. Even now there are some solar cells that are not being worked.

Mead

If you have no roads in an area, thats ok . .. all you need to have is a good crawlable resource on each tile en route to your park. Its called the crawler crawl and takes a lot of patience to go back to each crawler after moving it and directing it to collect resources. next turn you have to remembeer to wake it up and continue to move it. So if you want to better a no-roads strat, make a line of good tiles leading to your crawler park. let the crawlers gather and move. In this case, all you are losing is the difference in resource production between the en route tiles and the destination tiles. If a base is producing a crawler a turn, it gets pretty systematic.

Note I do the crawler crawl on roads as well-- its just faster and easier

I do this a lot with sea trawlers. They patrol to look for invaders or simply move outward before ending at a resource square to collect stuff. IT has a major PIA factor since you have to manually go to each trawler and wake it up . . Perhaps there is an easier way but I don't know it

[Googlie]

Yeah - it'd be nice to have a "go to" command with a caveat "harvest resources at end of turn", with a pop-upm window asking which resource to harvest.

I guess that'd make for some involved programming though, and not worth the designers' investment of time. I mean, some people actually like to micromanage those games so would never automate even if the choices made eminent sense

G.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Hey, blockhead left his email address...


...now I'm sure somebody somewhere could find entertaining ways of using this information...

[BustaMike]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Hey, blockhead left his email address...


...now I'm sure somebody somewhere could find entertaining ways of using this information...

Already did... see the words of wisdom thread

[Lazerus]

If you have no roads in an area, thats ok . .. all you need to have is a good crawlable resource on each tile en route to your park. Its called the crawler crawl and takes a lot of patience to go back to each crawler after moving it and directing it to collect resources. next turn you have to remembeer to wake it up and continue to move it. So if you want to better a no-roads strat, make a line of good tiles leading to your crawler park. let the crawlers gather and move. In this case, all you are losing is the difference in resource production between the en route tiles and the destination tiles. If a base is producing a crawler a turn, it gets pretty systematic.

Means every crawler would need to be a rover with no roads, rather expensive until fusion power.

[Kody]

You can set the crawler to crawl a resource even if it has 0 moves left.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Lazerus


Means every crawler would need to be a rover with no roads, rather expensive until fusion power.

not correct-- see Kody's response. Even with roads I try to plan my route to my ultimate tile to be crawled so there are intermediate good tiles to crawl along the way. With planning, an interior base can continue to be a source of crawlers with no loss of gathering time.

Again the major problem is the PIA factor since the screen will jump to some other active unit. One trick is to make a scout or something active near where your crawlers stop so that the screen will jump back to that area as you go through your units. I activate garrisons in areas all the time for a number of reasons so I remember to deal with things. Sometimes I even make a landmark temporarily such as " worms here" or "crawler transit" but thats rarer.

[Lazerus]

Realised that later 2day, i don't belong in mornings

[Mead]

Originally posted by Fazdaar

***

However, you said yourself that if you used roads to speed your game up, you would have won by now. So, if you are in a PBEM with good players and you need to grow fast to compete, wouldn't using roads make more sense than not using them? I just don't see how fear of their use as invasion routes outweighs the extreme benefit of speeding up your development. If you are that worried about being invaded, it shouldn't be too hard to destroy them if you do happen to be invaded. The extra movement they offer helps you get reinforcements more quickly, giving you a much greater benefit than your opponent, since the garrisons in nearby bases that could be brought up in a turn or 2 should be more than the invasion force can handle. If you have roads way outside your bases and are afraid of a sneak attack using them, simply lay down some sensors out there. If you spot them with your sensors 1 turn before they can attack, bring up extra defenders and the attacker is toast. Trust me, it is worth the tremendous boost to your growth.

Game Over 2424
Transcend victory (I could have won by conquest in 2420 but since I just about had the tech to build Voice of Planet I let Yang keep his single sea base so I could transcend). For those who keep track it was a 382% AC score. I know people have higher scores but I was not taking any actions to either inflate or minimize it.

If I knew how to count my own votes properly, I could have ended the game in about 2410 through diplomatic victory but I assumed I had the votes and unsuccessfully tried for a diplomatic victory in 2406 (just after I got Clinical Immortality).


I agree it was a game that was too long.

I set out to not make any roads except for those on mines, and I ensured that none of my formers were set on full auto or auto improve home base so that they would not make non-mine roads (I normally do not put them on auto improve home base or worse full auto, because I like to micro manage them and I get tired of watching them take their time-consuming scenic trips around the world).

I concede that roads are extremely useful for development unless you want to play a long game against the computer. I agree with Flubber in that a road builder will leave a non-builder in the dust because of quicker development.

Based upon the game that I played I still found that from a pure military point of view, as opposed to whole game concept, militarily it was easier to defend my home turf if I did not have roads. I also found it was much easier and quicker to attack my enemies using their own road and mag tube systems against them. Once I got a foothold on Yang's homeland and had ~30 mind worms there I was able to explode and take the whole continent in 4 turns because of the mag tubes. He started to build artillery and empathic, but because of he did not have enough turns to get them built I overwhelmed him.

Because of the mag tube network Santiago built I was able to take her whole mainland in two turns. I will use roads but will remain cautious of their use.

Concession:

Roads are essential for development. If I had built them the game would not have lasted nearly so long.


Mead

[gwillybj]

Flubber wrote: 2402 ouch-- I would have no patience to play that long. I can't recall the last time I went beyond 2250

Try solo-play on one of my giant maps (256w/208h) with techstag on and change this item in alpha.txt to 50:

100, ; Technology discovery rate as a percentage of standard

I had to change this item to 3000 to avoid forced retirement:

2500 ; Normal ending year for highest 3 difficulty levels

I've had games go into the 2800's I play screwy anyway, but it's all good
Oh, in keeping with the thread title: On these maps, roads are a must, with magtubes ASAP.

[Chaos Theory]

You can play on even larger worlds. If you try to make a custom-sized map from within the game, it caps each dimension at 256, but if you edit alphax.txt, at #WORLDSIZE, you can add new entries with potentially much larger sizes. I found that a map with nine times the area of huge was about as large as the game could handle before the map took too long to generate.

Here is the added line:
Humongous planet, 192, 384

Also, remember to change the number just under #WORLDSIZE to accurately reflect the number of entries.

[Lazerus]

2800's ? i didnt even think it allowed you to play that long... theres the forced retirement isn't there ?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by gwillybj

Try solo-play on one of my giant maps (256w/208h) with techstag on and change this item in alpha.txt to 50:I had to change this item to 3000 to avoid forced retirement:I've had games go into the 2800's I play screwy anyway, but it's all good
Oh, in keeping with the thread title: On these maps, roads are a must, with magtubes ASAP.

I'm not saying the game is over by 2250, its just that I find that always by around that time, against an AI, there is no doubt as to my victory and I can't be bothered to continue ( I have limited time to play)

Your ideas are fine but they just make the game longer . . .

[gwillybj]

Lazerus: Normally, yes, forced retirement is at 2500. I changed that line in alpha.txt to 3000 (near the bottom of the #RULES section).

Flubber: Due to a serious medical condition, I cannot work, so my "play time" is not as limited. Of course, SMAC is not all I do when I am not asleep or otherwise unconscious, but I do play every game completely through. That is also why I hesitate to join the PBEM ranks.
My gaming experience goes back to the days of tabletop wargames (Avalon Hill, Victory Games, etc.) that could take 3 hours, 3 nights, or 3 weeks to play (and in which roads were a major factor both offensively and defensively; also tactically, strategically, and to a degree operationally). When it became necessary to "go Solo," games took even longer. My first computer wargames were for the Commodore64 computer (on which it sometimes took 3 months to play a single scenario).
So I grew accustomed to long games, and I prefer it that way.
That is one of the great things about SMAC: It can be fast and short or slow and long, whichever the player wants it to be.