A Yang Question

[Blake]

Actually I'm not convinced it is easier to boom with Aki, police state has the support and police bonus over demo, allowing for a bit of extra drone control which can just allow you to pull the GA off, especially in larger bases.

Btw, with yang you really can't consider a case of pop-booming a size 3 base, you need a lot of infrastructure in order to execute the pop-boom, I would say a holo theatre and treefarm at minimum, and your bases will probably be size 5+ to take advantage of specialists. The HGP does make it a lot easier, especially to boom smaller bases more distant from the HQ, but I also find the HGP is not an easy SP to get, compared to the WP. Also if you intend to pop-boom you need to spread your bases out more than usual Yang style, I tend to favour "distant" infrantry spacing favoring 3 tiles vertical or horizontal rather than "close" infrantry spacing, 2 tiles vertical or horizontal. Also I plan my city layout in advance so I can fit a maximum number of boreholes per city.

Another advantage of pulling off a pop-boom is when running police power you get basesize units supported per base, a well executed pop-boom would mean you could pretty much forget about ever needing clean reactors, when you have 14 units supported per base..., lets just say you don't want to be yang's neighbour after he pulls of a pop-boom.

[Viriato]

I don't have SMACX so I my comments are based on plain SMAC only.

Yang cannot pop-boom in a Golden Age due to a bug in the game. There is one way to do it though, building a Secret Project (I don't remember it's name). Unfortunately this SP comes relatively late in the game, and Yang is not a good research faction as you know.

There is also a technique I've heard of. If you build the SP that makes your bases start at size 3 you can build a base, assign a few crawlers to it and start producing colony pods. With proper work you can get a CP every turn, or every 2 turns. When the last citizen is converted into a CP and the base is lost you simply build it again.
This is obviously not the same as a pop-boom but it's the best we can manage with Yang.