Base location and special resources

[Adam_Smith]

quote: Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe on 04-10-2000 09:35 AM Vel, A couple of comments [This message has been edited by Ogie Oglethorpe (edited April 10, 2000).]

LOL

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Adam,

If brevity is the soul of wit, mark me as a doddering idiot.

Being concise was never one of my virutes, as is my clarity of thought, grammar, punctuation etc.

Passion about SMAC though therein lies my virtue (although my wife might say otherwise )

[YT]

Vel: regarding crawling in from outside a base radius, if find the simplest solution is borehole if possible, and cond/farm/soil enricher if not. The only exception I would use to this would be if I were specifically creating a energy park. Once my continent is filled to my satisfaction with bases any uncovered squares outside of radii (usually created by terraforming up at the center of base radii) are terraformed completely with this pattern. What this usually means is I have a large number of nutrient areas, and lots if scattered areas that I can convert between energy and minerals as I see fit. Since I usually have sea bases surrounding the continent with air and naval defenses, these crawlers are not completely vulnerable to attack. Thus I have more than enough nutrients (most squares cannot be boreholes) to get my bases to size 40+ by endgame. Since I use a 'every base is perfect' style of play, this suits me just fine .

------------------
Yours Truly

[Enigma]

YT-

If your goal is a great late game then just build the food trawlers later. I really like food trawlers personally but they cost so darn much before fusion that they are just completely bait if an enemy has ships.

Sea squares are incredibly productive in SMAX my favorite base layout is a coastal base with 3 or more boreholes. If I want to increase my mineral output I just build a genejack factory or a robo assembly plant. It is easier to increase mineral production than to get high energy.


As far as city squares being useless in the late game I would like to make a point: to me it matters not HOW good my late game is but how fast I get there. Now I am refering to Morgan here, not Zack, but in the early game if you bag the HGP you have a license to expand!! There is simply no way you can match the raw energy produced by a base square. 6-7-8 energy fuels economic growth. Once I plop down enough of these crappy cities I can focus on developing infrastructure. All the overused land does not bother me since I am Morgan and Hab Domes come late.. I see exponential growth as soon as I hit tree farms because I plopped down enough cities to get an economy to pay for the tree farms. An energy bank comes with an upkeep cost. If it means only getting to exponential growth 10 years earlier to ICS a little then it is worth it.

[This message has been edited by Enigma (edited April 11, 2000).]

[Velociryx]

Enigma: Good point about Morgan and the big energy crunch he can get from bases, but, sadly, he's in something of a catch-22 there, in the sense that, in order to get a lot out of that setup, he's either gotta run Green or Dem to get his efficiency up enough so that the energy gained is not largely bled off, and both of those tend to work against the ISC approach (significant growth penalty, and the loss of energy from switching away from FM, and loss of free minerals for founding a base). You could offset the growth penalty by running both dem and green during the expansion, which would enable you to keep almost every joule of energy, but of course, in doing that, you're out of Market, and thus your gains aren't as large anyway, and you'd still have to contend with the loss of those ten free minerals....multiplied out over the number of bases you found, that would be a crushing blow.

I think that there is no good way to do it during the *course* of the expansion, but if you run Market - Wealth (post HGP) during the expansion, you get decent cash and free mins, which will enable you to rush the first thing at each base (and if you're rolling, you could rush a Net. Node (not during the initial expansion wave, but after you had a good income base), effectively making yourself a Zak Clone, with more money and fewer drones, all for the price of an upkeep of 1 per turn, per node), and once you'd filled up the readily available land, then switch to dem and thrash out ungodly amounts of research (remember, in exhaustive tests, Morgan running Dem/FM/Wealth can crank out more lab points at 70% than Deirdre running Dem/Green with labs at 100%, and the fact that he makes more money under those conditions goes without saying).

Just getting to work, and trying to jumpstart my brain....::grin::
-=Vel=-

[Enigma]

Vel-

I suppose I should elaborate on what I mean by ICS. When I say ICS I mean I use ICS spacing not ICS strategy. I usually build only 25 bases but I build them as fast as possible. On huge maps I almost never lose more than 25-40% of the energy I get from a base and even then a new base is a lot more productive than a facility. I really can not remember a time when I did not get the HGP in recent history, so I will only experience the size 1 drone crap near the end of my expansion. I go demo after year 70 or so- growth is not really essential to my strategy I use recycling tanks hurried in quickly to make up for lost growth- and I have enough cash to deal with the drones with rec commons. I almost never use a psych allotment cause it is inefficient, either to little energy at frontier bases where it is needed or far too much at developed bases which do not need the psych energy.

I virtually never run green. Once I actually NEED the energy (to buy treefarms) I switch to demo and my expansion is almost always done by then. Generally a new base near the end of my expansion build commons tanks formers crawler and or creche.

I will develop bases with abnormal distributation of bonus resources or something special about them more but before treefarms size 3 forest cities do not warrent infrastructure. Once the treefarms come in though infrastructure pays off.

You are absolutely right about high tech with high Morganite energy allotment!! I usually run somewhere between 60-80% labs between demo and treefarms. Once I get that tech I develop, and then maybe later (MUCH later) I will go to a higher labs allotment. There are many good things about Morgan with high labs allotment- first of all you can increase your labs cheaply and easily by building nodes and those nodes drastically increase your tech flow. Other than a very expensive research hospital Zack has no way of increasing his labs output other than a higher labs allotment. Secondly with a high labs allotment you can really use your net nodes to get maximum bonuses. And, of course, it is very easy to switch gears once you feel a need for cash.

[Velociryx]

Enigma: ::Nodding:: Gotcha....I misunderstood what you meant then, when you referred to ISC, however, I would like to toss an idea at you regarding Morgan and Green to see what you think of it....personally, I think there's a specific point in the game where Morgan can get a lot out of running Green....it's an intermediate step in my Morgan game, but I've found that it serves me well.

First, I totally agree that, infrastructure does little to help small bases, and, with Morgan, all your bases WILL be small til you toss up a Hab-Complex, but those are generally lower on my list of priorities to build, so, after I've finished expanding throughout the continent, and while the formers are terraforming around bases and generally playing a bit of catchup, I'll drift into heavy build mode to get ready for part two of my expansion. Generally, this means a TON of infrastructural builds, after cranking out a few supply crawlers per base to bulk up their mineral outputs. At that point, my main interest is in getting ready for further growth, but I don't want to keep bumping into the upper limits of my base sizes til I'm ready to boom, so at the point that I finish my continental expansion, I take the -2 growth hit, generally run dem/green/wealth, still get the +1 energy per square, jack the lab allotment up to 70% and rake in techs while building up my infrastructure. Generally, I hit the cash-enhancers first, and in the SMACX world, that means constructing the PEG and then building tree-farms....even with a 30% econ. allocation, given the efficiency I'm running under, they pay maintenance on themselves, and I've generally already got a tanks and a net. node in place (which means no drone problem, assuming the HGP and VW are safely under my belt), and the growth penalty from green will enable me to finish the research hosp. before the bases grow again, enabling me to eek out a few turns of additional research bonus before rushing hab-complexes everywhere to finish them just when I would be bumping against my size limit problem. 'Bout the time I finish the hab-complexes everywhere, I'll switch back to market and generally either run 50/50 or 40/60, weighted toward labs, but more often than not, I'm comfortably in the lead, tech-wise, and am content to stockpile some coin for a while (with an eye toward rushing those damnably expensive Hybrid Forests that seem to tie up the build queues forever). Morgan doesn't really NEED Hybrids to achieve max base size, and in truth, nobody but Lal with the Ascetic Virtures *really* needs them, but, the additional cash they bring in, the psych addative, and the ability to mitigate eco damage makes them worthy builds, IMHO, and at that point in the game, cost isn't really even a factor, 'cos you're making more money than all the other factions combined at that point, AND keeping the research lead. The other reason I like 'em is that it virtually guarantees GA's in all bases that have them, giving you that much sought after +5 Econ, at which point, they more than pay for themselves.

It should also be noted that, for the sake of realism, I generally play with random events ON, which tends to force you to build most facilities in most bases....'bout the first time you lose half your pop at a key base or all the forests from 15-18 squares cos you failed to build a bio-lab....::shiver:: well, it didn't take me long to learn THAT lesson....lol. I also personally believe that Random Events "ON" would go far in levelling the playing field re: Builders vs. Momentum players, even on a standard map (which is still really too small, considering that a chopper (esp. one owned by whomever gets the Cloudbase Academy) can nearly circumnavigate the globe on a standard map before it's forced to land someplace, but I wrote more extensively 'bout that in the SMAC discussion board on my site.....

-=Vel=-

[Sikander]

Ogie,

Thanks for your analysis of the ICS specialist city. I have been doing this for the last three games, and I like it very much. One of the biggest advantages (as you point out) is a more advantageous production per square at an earlier point in time. By speading your population quickly (as Vel does, though more spread out) you keep your growth rate high while maximizing early production with numerous base squares. Yes the base square is weak later, but in the early game it is usually the best square, especially with the cheap recycling tanks.

The increase in former usage is mitigated by the fact that you have more cities, and thus more formers to do the work. This scheme allows powerful military potential very early in the game (if you are so inclined, or have no choice)

I've been using a hollow approach, where I build cities along the coast, every other square. Between them I place boreholes. I mine any rocky squares, and farm / condensor the other squares. In the center of the continent I place my Energy / Mineral park. Each city thus consists of approx. four sea squares, a borehole and the center square, and four land squares, one of which is usually a mine. Resources are then added as available from the park. Sea Colony pods surround my continent to protect the inner cities and all those crawlers.

I build quite a few facilities. All cities get tanks, commons, creches, tree farms. I try to build all of the free facility projects, if not all of the projects but one or two. One potential downside is that using this strategy I get to be very powerful on the graph quite early. This means few techs in trade, and early warfare.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Sik,

I read one of your posts earlier regarding the hollow center continent before. Very intrigueing (sp?) approach. Certainly this allows you a number of benefits. The ring of cities on the outside of the continent are ensured to have at least one borehole, Food is plentiful especially considering you avoid the nutrient restriction early on by going with the condensor route and plenty of unworked bonanza square in the middle to put to your use long term access to the sea for nuts and/or energy once restrictions are gone etc.

On a different tact, one thing that occurs to me is just how important nutrients can be. All this while I have been prioritizing the weighting each of the resources somewhat differently. Not so with specialists. Assuming you have room to grow 2 nutrients is worth 5 energy (engineers) as it will support that engineer or it might mean 6 minerals/6 energy if a worker is on a borehole.

Historically I may have felt that food was the least important resource available behind #1 energy then behind #2 minerals (minerals I weighted close to energy and in actuality I felt was more important than energy in the early game) then #3 food, after all food was readily available to keep up with my expansion via traditional pop booms using tree farm/hybrid farm expansions and by that time I was ready to expand w/o drone issue b/c I had the facilites to go ahead. In those days too much food was bad pre-tree farm. I would expand and have to worry about drones before I could manage the population growth. Now I find I want to make those bases as large as possible as early as possible (facilities or not) just so I can get to 5 population points per base so I can really do meaningful specialization. The facilites can come later give me the growth ASAP both in number of cities (ugg I still hate managing all of them) as well as base size. I'll take the benefits of specialists as soon as possible.

In the very late game once transcends are available and hab domes are in place food again is king. Crawler in a sea square for 4 nutrients and that supports 2 transcends for 12 effective energy. You'll not get that return anywhere else on any other square. Build hydro sats not energy sats if you want effective energy production. Do make sure you are pop booming though to keep up.

[Enigma]

Vel-

I agree! Your points are very valid, however I consider hybrid forests more important than tree farms since they are an additional +1 energy- that is quite significant. The extra food is a nice touch but not essential. Hybrid forests also allow me to pop boom without any psych allotment. This means there is a very abrupt point where a base transitions from an infrastructure phase to a boom phase. It hurts a lot not having the VW hologram theatres are horribly expensive but I manage to get in the necessary infrastructure so that I can boom.

Having only 30% econ would really hurt expansion though...

By the way in the instruction manual and the game info etc. everything that the game says about econ seems to be false. +3 econ seems to give the effect that is listed under +4 econ, +4 seems to be +5. So in that case what does +5 econ do? At that point I assume you would be getting a ton of energy from trade while your allies are getting nothing and you would get a lot of energy in a base square. Too bad +5 is not 2 extra energy per square .

[Vi Vicdi]

A borehole / coastal terraform lets you skip the Tree Farm / Hybrid Forest build.

Consider very carefully if you're into boreholes the opportunity cost of pouring money into forests that will only be worked by one or two workers.

Low-altitude landlocked bases gain most benefit from the forest enhancements. The condenser / farm is just too expensive for me to consider as a standard procedure. Condenser / farm only works for me if it's on a nutrient special or Monsoon Jungle. (An MJ condenser park is almost cheating!) So barring something extraordinary like an MJ to milk these landlocked lowlands are the first to seriously need the forest upgrades.

Ultimately every base needs the tree stuff, but I have found it prudent to delay as long as possible, opting for other builds -- and terrain -- instead.

[Enigma]

Vi Vidci-

I consider the most important aspect of tree farms and hybrids over all to be the big boost to econ. The two of these facilities will double the econ production of a base- so even if the extra food isn't important you can never have enough energy. Once you get enough of these you can buy and buy and buy..

[Sikander]

Ogie,

I agree with you about nutrients. My analysis of the relative value of the various resources followed a course like yours. First I played a perfectionist city style. Then ICS, and now ICS (hollow) with specialist cities. Food is critical, because population is your energy source. Food and Minerals are hauled by crawler when desired. I love the Sky Farm. Even when I have horrible inefficiency I can build endless numbers of sea colony pods, which can form workerless bases, free from any effect due to inefficiency.

I'm with Vi Vicdi on tree farms. They can wait a bit in my scheme. I don't need the pollution protection, and they are pricey early on. I build a lot of crawlers and small facilities before I build a tree farm. This is of course a matter of individual style. I build more smaller cities, so that the efficiency of large facilities is more limited. Like Vi, I eventually build the tree stuff in almost every city, but my production has to be pretty strong before I can spare the effort to build them.

[Vi Vicdi]

It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me if you're going to invest big in boreholes to dilute that investment with the forest stuff.

If 90% of a bases' workers are hitting the boreholes & kelp farms, the impact of the forest stuff is negligible.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Nigma, Vel et al.

I think what Vi and Sik are indicating here is that yes the tree enhancers do come but at a later time. (Pardon me gentlemen if I am putting words in your mouths here but), if one specializes most citizens and others are set to the really productive boreholes and sea squares then the real benefit of forest improvements are lost.

Since most drone reduction is accomplished through specialization, psych enhancement of the facilties is of little value. Obviously the + resource/square of forest is also of little value if you aren't foresting. That leaves the aforementioned value of increase to econ. While valuable it tends to be more expensive then alternative facilties to enhance econ and/or labs. E-banks (assuming you didn't nab planetary grid), fusion labs, net nodes, research hospitals all to my mind are worth consideration before going down the tree enhancement route if you decide to go a specialist route as the benefit/cost ratio is better for this specific mode of play.