Possibly a really dumb challenge...

[Helium Pond]

How about a challenge wherein you can't control base production at all; you have to use the governors ONLY. You can control the units that your bases build, and you can manipulate the Governor settings, but that's it. You can't tell your bases what to build, and you can't turn workers into talents or control what squares your workers are using.

Is that a really dumb idea, or would it be fun? Would it be best to restrict control of the Governor to the four basic settings (Explore, Discover, Build, Conquer), or to allow manipulation of the Advanced settings?

What would be good game settings? To be easiest, I think:
Large map
Non-blind research
All Victories allowed (because conquest is probably easiest)
Rare life forms

I think I would call this the Lazy Manager Challenge, and the Ultimate Lazy Manager Challenge would be:
Tiny Map
Can't control building, workers, OR terraformers
Have to win by transcendence

I think Lal would be the obvious choice for such a thing.

What do y'alls think?

[RedFred]

Could be fun. I like the idea of just being able to play with the four basic governor modes.

I think you would have to allow a person to manually build the Ascent and Voice SPs manually though. Otherwise you might never win!

To make this even more of a challenge you could stipulate that only automated formers could be used.

[RedFred]

Whoops! You already thought of the formers thing. No moving city workers around either? Yikes!

[Helium Pond]

Well, for Ultimate Lazy Manager, maybe, no moving workers around. In normal Lazy Manager, where you can control your terraformers, of course you'll want to make sure your bases use the cool stuff you build. But in ULM, you'd have to leave all that to the AI.

I think it should be part of the stipulations that you can't even tell your bases to build the Ascent or the Voice. You have to figure out how to get the AI to do it for you.

[Enigma]

Then what DO you control? With all your means of production being controlled by the CPU you will have 50 garrisions in a total of 10 cities- 10 cities if you are lucky. Of course this would be easy on citizen difficulty because of the AI's huge penalties, but on transcend that is like asking an abacus to beat big blue on steiroids. It just can't be done.

[Helium Pond]

Well, that's why it's a "challenge", innit? AS I recall, both the Nomad Challenge and the ZFOCC were met with cries of "it can't be done..."

Although, y'know, you may be right, I'll just have to try it and find out!

[RedFred]

Helium Pond - It would be great if you could flesh out the specs for both versions of your challenge a bit more. For instance:

You say no turning workers into talents. I assume you mean specialists. Whew! That will be tough. The drones are always a big problem at transcend level. I'd like to be able to do something to address them without doing any cheat around the placement of city workers.

I think the key to winning will be good fighting skills. Can I take AI factions' cities over? This could make things easier, especially if I can't get the city governor to build colony pods. If I can take over AI cities, I suspect tiny map would actually be easier than large. How about standard world for both versions of the challenge?

What about the design workshop? Am I allowed to prototype units (assuming the city guv will build them)and add and delete from the queue or do I have to accept the defaults? If I have control over the workshop I can at least make sure that I am not getting crappy units.

Allow use of cash for unit upgrades?

[Jasonian]

How does one build the Accent when you can't control base production?

[Helium Pond]

Yeah, I was just thinking about the workshop today. I think it's fair to use the workshop. The intention of the Lazy Manager Challenge is to see how successfully the game can be played if you remove the opportunity for micromanagement (perhaps it should be called the MacroManagement Challenge). Therefore, anything you normally spend a lot of time fine-tuning is verboten. Worker placement? Out. Changing or hurrying production? Out. But upgrades to units, and building new units, is okay, seeing as it doesn't take much time, and is therefore within the abilities of a Lazy Manager.

The Governor can be given the ability to authorize Special Projects, so I'm assuming that, under some circumstances, the AI will build the Ascent. Part of the challenge will be figuring out how to get the AI to do it, though, seeing as few people have ever seen it happen.

So, okay, let's get specific:

Lazy Manager Challenge -- Basic:
-The spirit of the challenge: you are the laziest faction leader ever. You can't be bothered with little details, so the name of the game is Delegate Authority. If you can't figure out if a given action would be cheating, err on the lazy side.
-All bases MUST be set on Governor, from turn 1. The Governor's Advanced Settings may be modified, and the Governor's priority (Build, Explore, Discover, or Conquer) can be changed.
-The player may not manipulate a city's build orders. The player may, however, hurry production. The Governor may also be given the power to hurry production.
-The player may not manipulate a city's workers in any way, either by changing the square they're working, or changing workers into specialists. The Governor may be given the power to manage specialists and drones (I think there's an option for that).
-It's perfectly fair to take over an enemy's cities, but they must immediately be turned over to the Governor.
-Social Engineering is allowed.
-Nerve Stapling is allowed; what's lazier than that?
-The player may design units in the Workshop, and may upgrade units at any time.
-The player can freely control all units, including terraformers.
-Any way you can win is hunky-dory.
-The game must be played on Librarian or higher.
-Any combination of factions is allowed, although only SMAC/X factions, and only "as is"--no homemade factions, or modified SMAC/X factions.
-All other settings--spoils of war, amount of alien life, map size, etc--are up to the player. Accelerated Start is allowed.
-Rights not specifically given to the Federal Government are the domain of the individual States.
-Ignore that.

Looking it over, I think Basic is do-able. Being able to control your formers helps a lot; sure, the AI will make dunderheaded worker placements, but if you improve the land well enough, you won't lose out much. I don't actually think this would be that hard, given the right settings and enough time without war.

Now, for Ultimate!

Lazy Manager Challenge -- Ultimate:
Same as basic, except:
-The player may not manipulate a city's production in any way, either by changing build orders OR hurrying, although the Governor may be given the power to hurry production.
-The player may NOT control terraformers. Terraformers, once built, must be set on either "auto-improve home base" or "fully automate former"--before they even move off the base! They may be switched between these two settings, although the player should not use the ability to switch these settings as a tool for manipulating the former's terraforming choices: no changing the settings from turn-to-turn, trying to get the former to do what you want.
-The player may only use the units that the game auto-designs. The player may not, in other words, design new types of units. The player is free to upgrade units at any time.
-Factions in the game must be either SMAC or SMAX "basic set"; no mixing and matching factions to your advantage. The player can play any faction within a set, except for the aliens.
-No time warp, no Unity survey, no Unity scattering, intense rivalry, blind research, no tech stagnation, look first off, no spoils of war, random events on, and of course...IRON MAN!
-Must play on Transcend.
-Must play on a tiny map, with low cloud cover and 30-50% ocean.
-Abundant alien life UNLESS playing as Gaians or the Cult, in which case sparse alien life.
-Must win by Transcendence.

Wow. I don't know, that'd be really, really hard. I didn't think Ultimate would be much different, until I got to specifying the game settings, and realized, to really be 'Ultimate', intense rivalry would have to be on. But writing all this up has got me revved, I want to try it! I have to wait a week before I'll have time, but I'll post my results. And anyone else who wants to take a whack at it, feel free! It should make for a really *fast* game, if nothing else.

And, oh yeah:
Lazy Manager Challenge -- Excruciatingly Ultimate:
-Must play as Gaia or Cha Dawn, on a tiny, low cloud cover, sparse alien life world, against: the Progenitors, the Spartans, the Believers, the Pirates, and the Hive.

Whew. If anyone feels I've miscalculated any of this--ie, if some of the 'Ultimate' settings seem easier rather than harder, please let me know.

[This message has been edited by Helium Pond (edited March 17, 2000).]

[MichaeltheGreat]

In the scenario editor, you can create a seven player game, not set a human player, and watch the computer play with itself, while you don't have to manage anything.

Micromanagers R Us

[lemur866]

Wait, I've actually played a similar game we discussed a month ago, except we called it the governor's challenge.

The idea was that every city had always be controlled by the governor. I decided also that since every faction had an agenda, the governors should always match that agenda...so the Gaian governors should always be set to Explore, Morgan governors always on Build, etc. No messing around with workers, all governor options always enabled, blind research, no designing new units (although you could upgrade to new AI designed units) and of course no changing build queues.

Well, I was worried about military units, so I decided to play the Gaians so I could round up my military in the fungus without having to wait for the governors to give me any. But this wasn't really a problem. If you've ever set isolated cities to governor you know that they always produce lots of units, sometimes bizarre choices.

One trick...if you want a garrison unit built, all you have to do is move all units out of the city. The governor panics and starts building a garrison immeadiately. This wastes resources unless you do it at the start of a production round. Also, the AI likes transports a lot. I usually only build transports if I know I need them for a specific purpose, but the AI builds seems to build a couple for every sea base, and at least one for every coastal base. I don't know why, since the computer factions can't ever seem to use them correctly...

The other thing I was worried about was getting the secret projects. But that's not really an issue, since the AI tries to build SPs whenever you have the available tech. And it always seems to pick reasonable cities...2 or 3 pop cities always stick to units and improvements if you have some nice big cities waiting.

The biggest problem was in the mid-game. The cities produced a nice balance of units, improvements, formers, and colony pods at first. But when I got to about 12 cities they decided that I'd grown enough and cut off my colony pod production. Verrrry frustrating for a builder like myself, especially since I had a huge resource-rich unpopulated back country just waiting to be colonized. No pods means that you have to go out and take any new bases you need, or have your drop probe teams ready to grab any colony pods the other factions let wander around.

Due to the lack of pods, I decided I had to take over the world. This wasn't that much harder than in a regular game, the only trouble was that I didn't get any of my favorite custom units. But the AI knows how to crank out garrison units, shard rovers, shard choppers and shard needlejets just fine. Add in your force of worms, and you can do fine.

If I'd have known about the pod limitations (I bet they won't build more pods if it would cause inefficiency), I would have been more aggressive from the start and switched to momentum style as soon as I reached to break point.

It went a little faster than most games, but it took more years to conquer the world, for a net break-even on time. It was fun...not as much fun as the single-city challenge was, but fun.

[Googlie]

^

[Helium Pond]

Wow, I never thought I'd see this thread again. I admit that I got the wind taken out of my sails at hearing that this kind of thing had been done before. But maybe I should take a stab at my version anyway. Arrrg, I'm having a hard time finding time for SMAC right now, though. Anyone else want to try?