whats your best starting position?

[D4everman]

I guess this is nly natural...I asked for the worst start, but what was your best?

I started a game once as the Peacekeepers (SMAC) and found my position was average. But lo and behold, who started a few tiles away? YANG! I was pissed! I hate being near Yang at the beginning. Miriam, too, but I can usually beat her if I can hold her at bay long enough to overcome her morale advantage. (play defensively) But Yang? His cities start with a perimeter defense which is nearly impossible to beat in the early game. But I discovered something...Yang was bottlenecked in on a peninsula! So when he contacted me I played nice. (meaning I gave him energy he demanded and even a tech...can't remember which one, but it was very early in the game.) I bided my time, knowing Yang would never fit more than three or four cities in his space. Whenever he tried to send a colony pod through my territory I asked him to withdraw. I was hoping...praying...he'd say "We shall soon see whose territory it is!", because I had been building a rover anti-Yang attack force. Finally he snapped and declared vendetta. I unleashed my hellish...um peacekeeping hordes and destryoed him. That really made my day. (payback for all the other games that he pestered me in.

But one of my best starts was as the UoP on a random map. I had the entire monsoon jungle to myself. Yeah, the accelerated growth made it hard to quell the drone problems for awhile, but I expanded so fast that by mid game I was so far ahead of everyone else I just quit. The few AI's that gave me any trouble were easily smashed. Miriam was on my continent, but she only had about ten cities and I had double that when she declared vendetta. Also its not like her puny impact weapons scared away my Chaos armed soldiers.

Hmmm....after typing this I guess a good start ain't all its cracked up to be. Too easy. (like CTP2)

D4

[Skanderbeg]

This is easy to answer:
Not with a warmonger like Yang or Miriam or (even worse) Marr next to Your door and

the monsoon jungle if You are one of the Green (Deirdre or Cha Down) or a negative planet rating faction (Morgan)

or the Manifold nexus if You play one faction with planet rating of Zero. That little difference of a planet rating of 0 or +1 is the difference of being able to catch mindworms or not.

For my opinion, the Manifold Nexus ist the MOST IMPORTANT landmark for most factions!

[Sprayber]

Well, once while playing the pirates on a custom map of mine I landed in an inland sea. Yang on one shore and the PKs on the other. Santigo was somewhere on the continent, cause she was at war with the PKs. So much for building a huge navy and taking over planet.

[Sindai]

This is an easy one...

large mostly-land map. I was pirates in the only major body of water....

I started on the tip of a good-sized peninsula....

That contained the Monsoon Jungle.

Nutrient output was so disgustingly fast that that became definetly the easiest game I've played, ever.

[Lord Maxwell]

I think everyone agrees that the "best" start is in the monsoon jungle. It is by far the easiest start possible...

But I must say that my best start for a builder game was as UoP on a tiny planet, made tech slaves out of 5 fractions (everyone but yang, he was on a separate island) before 2150. Everyone started on the same nice continent, and monoliths were handy right after key conquests. (After 2135 or so it was real easy as I had rush built the Command Nexus with the help of masses of alien artifacts, too bad these babies are so much rarer in smac-x than in the original.)

[Solver]

As most of my games are on water-based maps, for me a bad start is if I have 2 on my continent, or, of course, Yang. Nothing less than the Missile Launchers have a chance on his Perimeters. That's why I think you must have some probes sabotaging bases, till the perimeter falls, then attack with Impacts or Gatlers, easily.

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Solver - http://www.aok.20m.com

[Purple]

One of my favorite starting positions is on an isthmus between two largish landmasses. This provides the obvious benefit of not having to go around if a ship finds itself on the wrong side of the continent. Of course it helps to be on favorable terrain with resources within reach, too.

[Lefty Scaevola]

On the smax (or patched wersion of the smac) map of Planet the best position is the monsson jungle, which give you relativley easy acees to the hydrothermal flats as well.
With the original map of planet (before the unity crash site) my favorite was the north & NW of the freshwater sea, with its food bonus and thoses 2 or 3 mineral bonus squares, the pholus ridge, and a good supply of rainy/moist rolling squares.

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Gaius Mucius Scaevola Sinistra
Pontificator Pendanticus
older richer & wiser than you