Random map with less than seven factions?

[The Rusty Gamer]

Is it or will it be possible to create a random-map game playing with less than seven factions? It could be done in the Civ games, why not SMAC? Choosing the option "None" for some of the factions would be good, or even if you choose "Random" for some factions that one of the random factions chosen could be "None" effectively allowing for a random number of factions in a game.
Without a patch to do this, perhaps a faction called "None" could be created that is so absolutely useless that it eliminates itself early in the game. Has anyone created such a faction? How could we go about this?

[Ned]

I don't have a clue on how to start with fewer factions than seven. However, there have been many a game that one or more factions are eliminated early and never reappear. I suspect Worms. So, my suggestion in the short term is start on a custom world with Native Life at max.

[Clear Skies]

There is a faction which is so utterly useless that they always get eliminated early in the game.
They're called the Lord's Believers.
I never got my head around their philosophy. OK, so let's go kick everyone's heads in for not being exactly the same as us and for having about fourteen times the number of techs...
Whenever I played original SMAC I was astounded at their complete lack of empathy and their amazing capacity for stupidity. Oh, we've got three bases and our neighbours have fifteen...what the heck, let's go kick the doo-doo out of them anyway.
They're always the faction I eliminate first.

[Solver]

Well, could you eliminate Believers under my guideness, if you were, say, Morgan?

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Solver the "Running Beer" - http://www.aok.20m.com

[knowhow2]

Well I seen Miriam kick major *ss (although back then I wasn't that good a player) mine included!

,,,,,,,

A different but similiar question would be:

Can you have more than 1 from each faction? Can you have 3 miriam and 3 yang for example?
that would be kinda cool to face 6 alien faction or 6 spartans.

[gwillybj]

The answer here is YES!

Just LOAD the factions you want into the slots, then pick your slot and click OK.

Keep in mind that if you load The Hive in all seven slots you will see (obviously) Chairman Yang as leader in every category, but it is probably two or three (or even four) different Yangs. Watch the dominance graph and chart closely.

[Net Maverick]

I'm with Ned on this one...Miriam can be a formidable opponent when played correctly. After all, why research technology when you can simply steal it from someone like say, Zakharov? Once you probe your way to tech parity, you can simply smash through the opposition with your attack bonus, higher morale, and larger army...deadly indeed. I've fallen to a Miriam player before, due to my underestimating him......imagine my surprise when I saw mirror images of my own advance units controlled by a research poor faction like the Believers...learned quite alot from that game

[This message has been edited by Net Maverick (edited May 13, 2001).]

[Aredhran]

To answer the original question, the only way to do this is to use the scenario editor, to manually eliminate the factions you don't want in the game.

Aredhran

[The Rusty Gamer]

Aredhran, thanks, the only problem is that then the map is temporarily revealed while I eliminate the factions. It would be nice to not see it.

The Believers was the first faction I ever played I think, and I enjoyed playing them. The second faction I played was The Hive. Odd, but there you go. I like playing factions that you can build up to 4 units without support. It makes a big difference to early developement.
[This message has been edited by Russell (edited May 13, 2001).]

[Ned]

After a while, you begin to appreciate Miriam as an opponent. From a "good game" point of view, I only which she were not locked into that crazy SE setting of Fundy, FM, Power. This gives her -4 research. That said, there have been games where Miriam has kept up using artifacts. She is the only faction I have seen to effectively use that strategy. ned