Owerwhelming faction

[Alinestra Covelia]

I strenuously believe that the Cybernetic Consciousness needs a morale deficit of some sort. If you read the manual, it even states quite clearly that they have a deficiency in reproduction and in war. Why Firaxis then forgot to include this deficiency in-game is beyond me.

As far as I can tell, their inability to pop boom is insufficient drawback on its own to make CyC a fair faction. The Hive and the Morganite factions cannot pop boom either, and they have further hefty penalties on top of that (Economy for the Hive, and Support/Police/Habitation limit for the Morganites). The CyC's increased tech means that they will have a better-equipped army than most, and thus can use it to conquer. This in turn will give them whatever extra techs the enemy has, and further cement their technological lead.

A -1 to Morale and perhaps even a -1 to Support would be enough, combined with the -1 Growth, to rebalance the faction. After all, aren't they supposed to be far more rational than humans? And isn't war generally held to be a symptom of human irrationality?

[Cybergod]

[commenting on Alnestra's post]

If you wanna go by those lines, they should get both less drones and a higher industry rating since they are highly evolved and efficient. I do think that the -support rating would be too much since they don't have to draw humans from their military resource pool - they could program robots instead!

[death_head]

Giving them an industry bonus would be completely unbalancing. Factions with an industry bonus are devastating in the late game if they turtle.

[Cybergod]

Originally posted by death_head
Giving them an industry bonus would be completely unbalancing. Factions with an industry bonus are devastating in the late game if they turtle.

**cough** **cough** YANG!!! **cough** **cough**

Also I don't see anyone complaining about

**cough** **cough** DOMAI!!! **cough** **cough**

PS. Don't take my comments too seriously but I do not consider CyC an overwhelming faction and I do find it a hard time expanding with them in the early game, when it's most crutial.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Cybergod, my observations of the Cybernetic Consciousness' intended weakness wasn't based on personal opinion.

(Oh, hang on. Just re-read my post. Okay, maybe a little bit, concerning the -1 to Support )

But the big point I was trying to make was that Firaxis themselves had said that the Cybernetics found war difficult, and thus receive a military penalty (presumably in morale). However, no such penalty is evident.

All my other observations were indeed personally fabricated theory, so feel free to shoot down or support at your own discretion, but I strongly felt that they had missed out a major rebalancing factor in the wartime penalty for the CyC. The fact thus indicates that the manual doesn't hold true with the game - something I don't normally associate with Firaxis (especially given its superb SMAC manual, which could be a politics/sci-fi/sociology handbook on its own).

SMASH THE EVIL DEERTICK CONFEDERATION!!!

[death_head]

I didn't mean to suggest that Domai and yang are unbalanced. -2 research is a serious liability, as is -2 econ.