Paradigm midgame city

[Tikhon]

What is considered a "good", if not paradigm, mineral/energy production for a city around 2300? Right now I average about 40-50 minerals, 30-50 energy at my "main" cities by this time in the game, at Librarian level. I'm not using oodles of crawlers (around 5 a base), but imagine you could terraform large rocky centers and build large "mine farms", or if you really have too many formers and lots of space, boreholes, where the crawlers could perhaps alternate between energy and minerals (though perhaps not: the one time I tried this in any number I was swamped by every planet lifeform in existence; in one turn Mir Institute went from a sive 15 city to 6). Ecological damage now gives me nightmares.

Considering I tend to stick to coasts, I limit my base resources to mostly sea energy and nutrients as well as few strategic mines and farms. At the moment I completely neglect forests, which is probably a mistake.

[WhiteElephants]

Minerals are far more important in the early game, but as time goes on I think you should be looking to net more energy. That being said, 50 minerals and 50 energy sounds pretty nice, though I've seen bases with over 150 energy 75 to 100 years earlier in the game.

As an aside I thought I should note that 2300 isn't what I'd typically call mid-game. I would be thinking more along the lines of end-game at that point. I wanna say mid-game, for me, begins once I discover Doctrine: Air Power or Mind Machine Interface, though I'm sure others will disagree. I suppose it depends on what size map your playing as well.

[EtheMind]

For a forester like me mid-game is Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests. That's just about the same level. I think mid-game is usually between 4-6 level technologies. And includes a lot of key technology, it gets the game going. Techs like Planetary Economics, Doctrine: Air Power and Orbital Spaceflight.

It's not bad energy production in case you're not using any crawling...but since just about everyone here seems to be crawling...

I didn't used forests at all when I started playing. And I did won the game at Trancend. I think them as a safe middle way, they're very nice at the beginning and you can reap a lot of benefits from them when you get The Facilities. But harvesting nutrients and energy mainly from sea and using few Boreholes for mineral production could make a sophisticated system. Although vulnerable ...

[cbn]

Not bad numbers but I would tend to focus more on energy. Minerals can cause painful ecodamage as you have experienced. I tend to forest a lot of land and crawler minerals early in the game but generally energy later on. Food is crawlered as needed but generally most often to maintain pop booms.

Also search for Ned's work on the ecodamage formula. With treefarms and hybrid forests planned correctly you can actually manipulate the number of minerals you can produce before the ecodamage starts.

[johndmuller]

Once you have a Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest in a base, there will be no terraforming-based ecodamage created if you develop your base tiles with boreholes and enricher/condensers. This is a more efficient use of boreholes in particular since you would be getting only approximately 1/2 their resources if using crawlers. If you had allowed a >pop< to take place before you started the HF/TF projects, you will have satisfied the main prerequisite to Ned's innoculation allowing high min production without major ecodamage consequences (other stuff, especially Centauri Preserves, are also worthwhile in this context).

In addition to, or in parallel to increasing energy production, nuts become important as a means of feeding specialists, who then produce the labs and econ, but perhaps that is too far into the end game for this thread.

[Method]

well if you need resources try TRAWLING them. kelp gives you 3 nuts(4 if aquafarm), min platforms after advanced eco engineering give you 3(4 if trunkline) and tidal harnesses give you 3 energy (4 if thermo transducer even though for some reason i can get 5 )

even though the trawlers are vulnerable earlier, once you get money and mins (from all the stuff you're trawling) you can build/upgrade your trawlers to 8res to protect against IODs from pops (i swear on time i had IODs attacking my base for 5 minutes from 1 pop! ouch!) and enemies who would like to pick off a few.

[Avenoct]

As others have pointed out, the year, 2300 isn't as great reference point as tech-level. This is because some players or in some games, things go very fast, and in others, slowly. Also, the map size and difficulty level of the game, whether 'tech-stagnation' or any of the other options is turned on, among other factors will affect where a player is in 200 years.

Often, for me, it's minerals production that makes a good reference point, at least untill the midgame. Once most of my cities are producing slight ecodamage, or one is producing enough for a pop with others close behind, I feel I'm in my midgame.

40-50 minerals, especially at Librarian level, should be plenty to always stay ahead of the AI in anything. It's enough to build the Ascent to Transcendence without using crawlers, if you don't want to. Some players swear they get 150 'clean' minerals per base every game, if they can. Others focus on energy or nutrients to the extent that they simply rush-buy what they need and only have 'decent' minerals.

Thankfully, there isn't a 'paradigm' number of minerals for any particular base at any particular time. I do think an aim of most players working on perfecting their strategy is to win as quickly as possible (though that doesn't always mean more fun!). To this end, you might think about finding a few watermarks to measure your own games against your past experience. For instance, what year do you gain a key technology to your strategy? For a lot of us, that might be 'How many years did it take me to get Industrial Automation?' Maybe it's how many SP's you've bagged in 100 years. Who knows. I think what's important though is to measure your progress against itself, rather than against some great 'average' of all Smac players. Thankfully there are many roads to victory in Smac.

-Happy Crawlering,

Smack

[Paul]

Originally posted by TKG
well if you need resources try TRAWLING them. kelp gives you 3 nuts(4 if aquafarm), min platforms after advanced eco engineering give you 3(4 if trunkline) and tidal harnesses give you 3 energy (4 if thermo transducer even though for some reason i can get 5 )

That fifth energy must be either from having +2 econ or having the Merchant Exchange.

[Tikhon]

Or by satellites.

[Vlad Antlerkov]

Tikhon:

As I recall, the satellites only do +1 of whatever resource to each city. This is on top of what it's already producing, and has no effect on how many resources are produced in any particular square.

Now, it's been confirmed that a city with the Merchant Exchange gets +1 energy from all energy convoys connected to that city. I'm not so sure about +2 Econ, though...

[Paul]

The extra energy from +2 econ also applies to crawlers. At least, in DT9 (plain SMAC, so no thermo transducer) I get 5 energy from my tidal harness crawlers with ME and +2 econ.

[cbn]

and you can get 6 trawled energy in SMAX with the ME, +2 econ and the ocean increasing thingy (transcline tranducer ??). Given the respective terraforming rates it makes trawled tidal harnesses the energy park of choice.

I did this in a SMAX OCC win and the base radii gave 4 food and 6 energy while trawlers on other tidal harnesses gave 6 energy.

Oh and satellites give 1 energy per base (imagine what you could do if it were one per square LOL)